Those who believe the most important thing in the world is that humans don't go extinct before they colonize the stars strike me as the worst form of nihilists. They are nihilists because:
-They don't believe in God or an afterlife
-They don't belief that this life can have enough meaning that the future doesn't matter much
-They (some of them, to be clear) would prefer totalitarianism in the present to prevent human extinction in the future
In other words, in a worst case scenario, they don't value the quality of this life at all, for any of us, if it poses a risk to human extinction in the future.
Read Zvi if you don't believe me: (I can't find the post, he writes long shit & I can't go through it all right now). Let me be clear that he is brilliant and brilliantly paranoid. EDIT: Since I still can't find the quote I thought I read on a Zvi post, I'm starting to think I hallucinated it. I therefore retract the sentiment I attributed to Zvi.
If this world and this life is not enough, you are a nihilist. EDIT: As Machine Interface points out, my use of the word nihilist here is bad diction.
Well, I agree my above post sounds stupid without actually showing what Zvi wrote (EDIT: I have no evidence Zvi wrote anything of the sort. Either I read the quote somewhere else or I hallucinated it altogether.) The dude writes 50k words per post and I can't find it, but he wrote something to the effect that a curtailment of all human freedoms would be worth it to prevent a high existential risk (by his assessment of risk). That to me is a form of nihilism. It has nothing to do with planting trees.
I quite like this world and this life, and I would like my children and their children and their children etc. etc. to get to enjoy it too - it seems to me profoundly selfish not to find the prospect of human extinction appalling, even if it is stipulated that all currently living humans will live to die of old age.
And yes, I don't believe in an afterlife, since we have no evidence whatsoever that there is one. Is this world and this life not enough for *you*?
Well there was the take by Rust Cole - Matthew McConaughey - in Season 1 of True Detective.
“I think human consciousness is a tragic misstep in human evolution. We became too self aware; nature created an aspect of nature separate from itself. We are creatures that should not exist by natural law. We are things that labor under the illusion of having a self, a secretion of sensory experience and feeling, programmed with total assurance that we are each somebody, when in fact everybody’s nobody."
"I think the honorable thing for our species to do is deny our programming, stop reproducing, walk hand in hand into extinction, one last midnight, brothers and sisters opting out of a raw deal.”
True. I'm using it loosely and sloppily. Probably a bad thing to do on this forum.
I'm trying to say that those who would accept totalitarian measures to ensure the continued existence of humanity -- and perhaps they are the exact opposite of nihilists since they put SO MUCH importance on human existence-- wind up putting zero value on human life (life as opposed to existence) today, now, in the present.
In plenty of old sci-fi, the AI goes rogue. That's also a fear, obviously, among plenty of current futurists.
My question here is: are the fears that say Arthur Clarke expressed in 2001: A Space Odyssey, similar to the fears that doomers today have about AI? Is the reasoning for those fears similar?
It seems relevant because plenty of people accuse doomers of "having read too much science fiction.".
More broadly: do doomer fears of AI have much in common with old school science fiction writers -- or are the fears of the recent doomers something new, for different reasons?
Things I have seen/read in science fiction, similar to today's concerns:
- weaponized robots (sometimes the original war was over and/or humanity mostly extinct, but they kept killing because they didn't get/trust the memo);
- robots that actively resist being turned off, because that contradicts their original utility function;
- self-improving robots (very slowly, at a speed similar to human research);
- robots following an incomprehensible utility function (luckily, mostly harmless);
Concerns that seem new to me:
- recursive self-improvement (i.e. not just "what if we make something too smart and too powerful and it turns against us", but also "what if it then improves itself to be even smarter and stronger");
- computer researching new weapons (rather than merely taking control of weapons currently built by humans, and maybe producing more of the same);
- hacking humans (by hypnosis, propaganda, or making them fall in love with the AI);
Generally, doomers fear that the AI will kill us in a way that *wouldn't* make a good movie, because it will be too fast, or too incomprehensible.
I've noticed that the tone in political TV culture has flipped in the past 20 years. Used to be the liberals were snarky, a la John Stewert, whereas the popular conservative pundits like Rush Limbaugh and Bill O'Reilly were articulate blowhards. Nowadays the Fox News guys like Gutenfeild and Waters are endlessly snarky, whereas CNN pundits like Jake Tapper are the strident blowhards.
Does that say anything about change in political culture beyond those media personalities?
I have never watched political TV and don’t ever plan to, but I think this might potentially be related to the fact that the 20th century was generally a right-dominated era (cf the Oppenheimer movie, where the titular character gets repeatedly shamed for being too leftist), whereas the 21st century is generally a left-dominated era?
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.
Claudes summary:
Why Does Pretraining Work?
- The pretraining thesis argues language models can reach human-level language understanding through next-word/character prediction on large, diverse text corpora. This may seem counterintuitive - how can simply predicting the next token lead to intelligence? But predicting the next token is an extremely difficult task that implicitly requires learning all aspects of language.
- As the model trains, it progresses through stages. First, learning letter frequencies, then common words and phrases, then syntax and grammar, and eventually more complex phenomena like logic, causality, and reasoning. With enough data, the only way to minimize loss is true understanding.
- Pretraining leverages the wisdom of the crowd - implicit human knowledge encoded in textual data. Humans generate highly structured data reflecting capacities like reasoning. A model must learn these to best predict text.
- Each decimal place of loss reduction represents learning nuanced linguistic phenomena. The last fractions require modeling rare reasoning scenarios correctly every time. Tiny model improvements in rare cases translate to big real-world benefits.
- If a model can predict any arbitrary text as well as a human (achieving <0.7 bits loss per character), this essentially indicates human-level language intelligence. The model would have to be able to reason, use common sense, etc, to succeed.
- GPT-3's loss of ~1.73 bits per character shows progress but indicates current models still have a gap compared to human performance. A larger scale is still needed.
The Last Bits are Deepest
- As pretraining progresses, the model exhausts simple statistical patterns and must learn more sophisticated phenomena to reduce loss.
- The last fractions of a bit of loss reduction require correctly handling edge cases involving reasoning, logic, common sense, etc. Tiny model improvements on rare events can translate to big real-world gains.
- For example, a model may learn that objects don't change state randomly. Fixing the few cases where it incorrectly predicts a dead person becomes alive could have a disproportionate impact - reflecting an understanding of causality.
- The hardest bits force the model to go beyond surface patterns and capture something closer to true abstract understanding. They produce generalizable knowledge.
- So, while the last bits of loss are the hardest to reduce, they are also the most valuable. The model must squeeze out every bit of intelligence to successfully handle the full diversity of linguistic scenarios.
Reasons for Doubt
- The pretraining thesis seems almost too good to be true. Just scale up a prediction on text, and all capabilities emerge? This sounds like alchemy, not science.
- It's hard to prove pretraining would work in practice. The model might need infeasible amounts of computing or data. Key algorithms could be fundamentally limited. The model may get stuck in simple patterns.
- But GPT-3 provides strong evidence that pretraining and the scaling hypothesis are, in fact, valid. The surprising new capabilities demonstrate solving pretraining does lead to emergent reasoning abilities, despite no explicit supervision.
- Almost no one predicted the precise capabilities of GPT-3 in advance quantitatively. So even skeptics must update their views in light of these empirical results. The scaling hypothesis proponents have been proven right so far.
Some surprising excerpts from an article about Bronze Age Pervert in The Atlantic:
"Last year, at a conference of political philosophers at Michigan State University, a Yale professor named Bryan Garsten told his colleagues that they were in trouble. The topic of the conference was liberalism—not Ted Kennedy liberalism, but the classical version that predates the modern Democratic Party and indeed America itself. Liberalism is the view that individuals have rights and beliefs, and that politics involves safeguarding rights and making compromises when beliefs conflict. It has existed for only a few centuries and is by some measures the most successful idea in history. Just look where people want to live: the United States, the European Union, Canada, Australia, and the United Kingdom, all liberal places that people will risk their life to reach.
"But Garsten said liberalism had some of his best students hopping into rafts and paddling in other intellectual directions. He said they had been “captured” by the belief “that to be morally serious, one faces a choice.” The choice, he said, is not between liberalism and illiberalism. Liberalism had already lost. Its greatest champion, the United States, had run aground after pointless wars, terminal decadence, and bureaucratic takeover by activists and special interests. Garsten said his best students were choosing between the protofascism of Nietzsche and a neomedieval, quasi-theocratic version of Catholicism opposed to Enlightenment liberalism. These students considered liberal democracy an exhausted joke, and they hinted—and sometimes did more than hint—that the past few centuries had been a mistake, and that the mistake should now be corrected."
How the fuck does Nietzsche get labelled as "protofascist"? He was anti-nationalist and fell out with Wagner over the latter's German nationalism and antisemitism. Academics always sound like morons these days.
I do not point to the evil and pain of existence with the finger of reproach, but rather entertain the hope life may one day become more evil and more full of suffering than it has ever been; Man shall be trained for war and women for the recreation of the warrior; [You go] to [a] women, do not forget [your] whip; The [destruction] of the humbug called morality, the [destruction] of the decaying races, dominion over the earth as a means of producing a higher type [...] would make possible again [that higher type of Dionysian state].
Some quotes by Nietzsche, I don't know if what he wrote makes him a fascist, but makes him wrong and immoral and irrelevant in my opinion. Fascists at least think they are helping their own country. It seems like Nietzsche was just Evil.
"Garsten said his best students were choosing between the protofascism of Nietzsche and a neomedieval, quasi-theocratic version of Catholicism opposed to Enlightenment liberalism. These students considered liberal democracy an exhausted joke, and they hinted—and sometimes did more than hint—that the past few centuries had been a mistake, and that the mistake should now be corrected."
All of that was quite present on the Yale campus during the 1980s. Some very-high-IQ guys [all guys so far as I ever saw] were very much on the "liberal democracy is an exhausted joke" train, one of them was my suitemate one year. Had their own regular hangouts, a couple of them tried launching a competitor to the campus newspaper, they'd hold forth in the residential-college dining halls, etc. They'd all read and would quote from Nietzsche.
They also had a couple of older faculty members providing informal encouragement and my impression was that those professors had themselves been of similar mind when they were undergrads.
I suppose nowadays their successors are doing Discord channels and subreddits and whatnot.
Genuine question: how many of these radicals were right-wing?
I mean, I remember "democracy is a joke" stuff from back in the 90s but it was a left wing thing. The shift on the right to embracing this kind of critique feels new but, ya know, I wasn't at Yale in the 80s.
The ones I'm remembering wanted to take over the campus GOP club and purge it, and had loudly celebrated Reagan's win in November 1980 before later turning against him for becoming (in their view) pro-immigrant and various other forms of squishy. So definitely right-wing.
The left-wing version of "democracy is a joke" existed too, and I think always has to some degree. But at least on campus in the 1980s it wasn't as "loud and proud" as the Nietzsche fanboys yammering about how much better the world would be today if Napoleon hadn't blown it, etc.
One difference then -- and maybe now? -- was that the Nietzsche guys had zero success with the opposite sex. (The college at that time was 55-45 male, the inverse of today's ratio.) This wasn't deeply surprising given that they openly/loudly believed the male to be the superior gender and whatnot. But anyway the Che Guevera t-shirt guys, at least some of them, had a bit more luck getting laid, and observationally it certainly seemed as if that difference helped the Nietzsche guys stay angry and frustrated. (We're talking here about 19- to 22-year old males after all.)
I've read it said that the greatest achievement of BAP is single-handedly changing the image of the online far right from a bunch of fat dudes living in basements to a bunch of bodybuilders lifting weights while studying Ancient Greek.
Speaking of Bronze Age Pervert... his real name has supposedly been outed for months (it's the last two words in that URL, but capitalized and without the hyphens). I'm still unsure about whether I want to believe it's the real thing or no (in fact, his English Wikipedia article, which I've also edited, has had a slow-motion edit war about this very issue, though the editors did eventually grudgingly decide to accept the name after Politico reported on it). But also I've heard of BAP before; he's been a huge fixture of the Extremely Online Far Right for *years*, which is practically a founding father if you consider that the Extremely Online Far Right was basically nonexistent before the mid-2010s.
On a mostly unrelated note, apparently BAP, Caroline Ellison, and yours truly all grew up in the same hometown. I wonder if this means something. 🤔
>he's been a huge fixture of the Extremely Online Far Right for *years*, which is practically a founding father if you consider that the Extremely Online Far Right was basically nonexistent before the mid-2010s.
A quibble, but I think of the Extremely Online Far Right as starting around 2007-2008, with a constellation of blogs like Unqualified Reservations, Auster's View from the Right, Mangan, VoxDay, Roissy when he was blogging on subjects other than getting laid. Plenty of others that have been long forgotten. Pretty much everyone Steve Sailer linked to in his Blogspot days.
I only started reading ACX after the move from SSC. I have gone back and read the top posts from SSC but still felt like I was missing out on some of the old classics. I built a website to resurface old content from blogs by sending weekly emails. Let me know if you have any suggestions of other blogs / content you’d like to see, hope you find it helpful!
Looking for someone that has experimented with Adderall. I quit coffee many years ago, and sometimes I forget to ask for my coffee to be decaf, and I feel 10 IQ points smarter. I don’t think I could handle daily adderall, but it’s be good to have “smart thursdays” or something like that. I’m curious about intermittent approaches that anyone might have tried.
I've tried it a couple times, my experience was pretty similar to Eremolalos' . It mostly made me worse at anything that required any amount of cleverness or creativity. Coding was notably harder. It made "filling out forms" and that type of rote activity a bit easier I guess. It seemed to still disrupt sleep even though I always take it first thing in the morning
I take it now and then. I am sure I do not have ADHD, just take it once or twice a month either for a mood and energy lift, or to get something done. I use 10 mg, occasionally 15, of instant release, not extended release. Usually I take half of it when I wake up, the other half about 4 hrs later, when I feel the effect start to diminish. I do not feel drugged when I take it, just like myself on an unusually cheerful, unusually energetic day. I don't think it makes me smarter or more creative. What it does is increase my motivation to do tasks, and allow me to concentrate on them for intensively for longer. It is really helpful for something like doing your
taxes -- some long, dry, tedious task you crave to avoid -- or something like painting a room or reorganizing your cupboards. It helps with motivation and concentration for writing, too, but I have found it tends to make me kind of over-explain things and go on and on about points that could be made succinctly and convincingly in a couple of sentences. I usually do not sleep as well the night after I take the stuff, unless I do something like go for a substantial run at the end of the day. I don't have any kind of hangover the next day.
I do not seem to have much tendency to abuse substances, but I can easily see how somebody could get hooked on this stuff, because it is very pleasant, so watch out.
I mean, this is his 3rd indictment this year and like his 12th...I don't know what to call it, attempted takedown "surely this is the end of Trump" thing.
Does anyone care? And I mean, like, people will talk about but if he gets thrown in jail do you really think his support will decrease and if he gets exonerated do you really think his support will increase?
I dunno, maybe it's just my side of the fence but...nobody really seems riled up.
The other indictments were weak, particularly the first. Unfortunately, this has created a crying wolf effect. This indictment looks strong. I'm not a lawyer, but I'm surprised by how strong it reads. I'd put the odds of his going to prison at around 60%. If he does, I'm sure that will galvanize his base, but I'm less confident it will move the median voter in his direction.
Of course, there have been many national leaders who came from prison. Is Trump the next Chavez, Mandela, Havel or Napolean? We'll see.
The 2nd indictment was not weak, it's by far the strongest of the 3. As someone with a security clearance, I cannot begin to explain how insane it is to have TS & SAR outside of a SAP Facility.
Plus it's the only one of the three that deals with an objective action rather than subjective speech.
The 1st indictment, for the hush money payments, did seem like a reach.
The 2nd indictment, over the national-security documents at Mar-A-Lago, has been amended and now seems pretty strong. They have audio recordings of Trump essentially confessing to the crime, sworn testimony about him ordering staff to delete evidence, etc. Looks like a classic case of the coverup being more convictable than the underlying offenses.
Also there is a 4th indictment apparently about to drop, under Georgia state law for the attempt to bully that state's election officials into "finding" more Trump votes.
> Looks like a classic case of the coverup being more convictable than the underlying offenses.
The obstruction is bad and seems cut-and-dry, but bringing TS or S//SAR HUMINT documents not just outside of a SCIF, but in an unlocked publicly-accessible room, is *far* worse
I read the indictment last evening. Some of the things that the special prosecutor proposes to document in court were news to me and I'd thought I was following this topic pretty closely....they appear to have firsthand testimony from some individuals who were directly involved (as well as White House officials who tried to stop it e.g. Barr and Pence). At least some of the unnamed co-conspirators -- a list which clearly includes Guiliani -- seem to have flipped on Trump.
Also this summary which I saw online this morning was helpful in getting a handle on the chronology:
"THE INDICTMENT READS LIKE a play in four acts. Act One unfolds as follows: Starting around November 13, 2020, and using “baseless fraud claims,” Trump pushed multiple state legislators and election officials to ignore or alter the electoral outcomes in his favor and otherwise disenfranchise voters.
In Act Two, Trump and his co-conspirators organized fraudulent slates of electors in seven states—Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, New Mexico, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin—and even “tricked” certain fake electors into believing their fraudulent slates would be used only if Trump won his umpteen bogus lawsuits challenging the election results in court.
In Act Three, Trump tried to get Vice President Mike Pence to embrace the fraudulent electors, reject legitimate electoral votes, or not count legitimate ones—going so far as to even call him on Christmas and New Year’s Day, and to tell him (presumably according to Pence’s grand jury testimony), “You’re too honest” when Pence refused to play along.
In Act Four, after Pence’s final rejection of the scheme, Trump exploited the violent eruption at the Capitol by spreading lies about the election results and trying to convince multiple individual members of Congress to delay the certification, all while lying to the mob that Pence was abdicating his constitutional duty by refusing to abdicate his constitutional duty."
If I understand the legal theory correctly, it's the aim of the lies.
E.g. if you have a sincere belief that new WizBang technology is going to change the world, and you preach that far and wide, that's not a crime no matter how silly it appears to others.
But if preach that while also selling people on WizBang Co. stock, whose proceeds you keep, that could cross the line into securities fraud. Each action individually (preaching Wizbang and selling stock) may be perfectly legal, but in conjunction they amount to a crime, ... particularly if it can be proved that you knew you were lying.
That last caveat is what makes this case shaky. It requires proving intent, and that's always hard. And you can make an argument that, given the stakes of the situation, any case that relies on fuzzy criteria should be handled with extreme caution. That's about where I am on this. This case is not a great remedy for the underlying problems here.
According to Popehat, aka Ken White, the charges and legal theory are:
"In brief, the indictment charges Trump as follows:
Count One, conspiracy to defraud the United States in violation of 18 U.S.C. section 371. Section 371 has two parts. It’s most commonly used to charge a conspiracy to violate some specified federal crime: for instance, conspiracy to violate money laundering statutes. But it has another clause for conspiracies “to defraud the United States, or any agency thereof in any manner or for any purpose.”
Count Two, conspiring to obstruct an official proceeding in violation of 18 U.S.C. section 1512(k).
Count Three, obstructing an official proceeding under 18 U.S.C. section 1512(c) — which applies to someone who “otherwise obstructs, influences, or impedes any official proceeding, or attempts to do so.” That’s the substantive offense underlying Count Two. In other words, Count Three is the crime itself, Count Two is the conspiracy to commit the crime, which are separate offenses and very commonly charged separately in federal law.
Count Four is a conspiracy to interfere with the exercise of constitutional or statutory rights under 18 USC section 241.
The Special Counsel’s theory of the case is broad: he asserts that Donald Trump and co-conspirators (unnamed, per Department of Justice policy, but including Rudy Giuliani, John Eastman, Jeffrey Clark, and Sidney Powell) engaged in wide-ranging conspiracies to present knowingly false claims and fabricated elector slates to the U.S. Senate when it tabulated and certified votes on January 6, 2021. The conspiracy extended to using false statements to pressure state and federal officials to interfere with the vote count. Jack Smith’s theory is that this course of conduct amounted to defrauding the United States, obstructing and conspiring to obstruct the official Senate proceeding, and using fraud to interfere with the votes of others by attempting to have them fraudulently discarded."
What evidence is there that his statements are false? Since these are criminal charges, the legal burden of proof is on them to show absolute proof that the election was not rigged. Constantly repeating "baseless," "no evidence", "the Big Lie", and any other number of blatant propaganda terms won't cut it.
I think there is evidence that Trump himself did not believe he had won the election. Pence claims after he told Trump he wouldn't go along with his plans for Jan 6, Trump told him angrily: "You're too honest!"
There's also a decent possibility that one or more of the other six alleged conspirators will testify that Trump acknowledged to them that he hadn't won.
If the prosecution can persuade the jury that Trump didn't believe his own claims that the election had been stolen, that is probably enough for a conviction.
Obviously, he hadn't won. That was why he was protesting the result in the first place. The whole point of all the lawsuits was that he, apparently, lost, but that he *shouldn't have* lost, because the result was a fraudulent result due to fraudulent votes and vote tallies in a few key Democrat-controlled districts and polling centers. Also, there is no crime here - it's always within your rights to sue and express your opinion with respect to your lawsuit.
Also, this is an interesting perspective on why the indictment is structured in a particular way:
"Smith has not charged Trump with separate criminal violations for each—or any—of the individual component parts listed above. He could have. For instance, the fake-electors scheme alone implicated a host of state and federal criminal statutes that could have been charged assuming, as the indictment strongly suggests, that Trump can be credibly linked to them.
But Smith went a different route. Rather than charging Trump with discrete crimes for specific acts, he charged Trump with broader conspiracies, using the specific acts as evidence of and support for the larger conspiracy charges.
Smith’s strategy makes sense. Since entering into a criminal conspiracy is by itself sufficient to support a criminal charge, the object of the conspiracy doesn’t have to be achieved."
I'm still wondering how AI businesses are going to change the world over the next 3-5 years. I've read the doomers and know they think we may all end up dead within that period. Many of them claim there will be a period leading up to the apocalypse in which the economy booms like it has never boomed before. But who will be the horsemen of this bounteous apocalypse? What types of businesses will they ride upon while blooming the economy into the sunset of the final holocaust?
In the early days of the webz, Jeff Bezos explained why Amazon was the perfect ebussiness. It had to do with inventory. Books were the consumer product for which there was the most variety; no book superstore could stock all the book titles. So it made sense for a company with a vast warehouse to store all the books, and let people order them online. The alternative at the time was to walk into, say, Barnes and Noble, spend 20 minutes looking for your book, and then ask them to special order it from the distributor because they didn't have it in stock. Amazon saved you from that fruitless trip to the store.
So who is the Jeff Bezos of AI who articulates exactly what his AI business is and why it will work?
If I'm skeptical about AI changing the economy soon it's because I don't see all these new companies on the horizon in the way that you did in the late 90s after the birth of the www.
I've become skeptical along similar lines. Gpt 4 launched in march and yhis sphere screamed the end was nigh "AGI in 18 months!"
Well , even the loe hanging fruit like AI drives throughs and customer service seem to have stalled because of the hallucinations from thr chatbots and the fact that the guardrails dont work / havent been made.
Agentic AI was a big deal "now we just buuld on it modularly and voila" same hurdles , it isnt reasoning like a Cyc project model so you still need the human to troubleshoot.
I feel like even with a chip shortage ehat we have is "something" so I dont expect an AI winter but until I see checks getting signed and money changing hands i'm not buying the cornocopuan or doomer views.
I have limuted perspective but the fact that its just correlating simarities instead of actually modeling external reality seems like a key bottleneck?
You can make art , music and text but it still needs a human to double check it for quality. Thats something but that just adds supply in areas where we already had an overfilling cup of plenty , those are areas humans spend time on for leisure.
I'm guessing "make the best case you can that Twitter's Rebranding to 'X' Is a Slap in the Face to Marginalized Communities. Use an angry and emphatic tone."
Today a headhunter's inquiry crossed my inbox regarding an attractive open position in my professional field, in a different part of the US. My wife and I have long agreed that we'd be open to relocation for the right new opportunity, and recently her professional life has become 90 percent remote. So...interesting! The position being filled is in the Phoenix area.
But then literally with the headhunter's description of that job still open on my screen, I happened to in a different window notice one of today's news headlines:
"Phoenix just endured the hottest month for any US city....31 straight days of the local temperature reaching at least 110 degrees Fahrenheit.....the _lowest_ ambient temperature recorded in Phoenix at any moment during July was 97 degrees.....the National Weather Service's record for such a streak for any city in the entire US was 18 days....the streak officially ended because yesterday's high temp hit "only" 108...."
Holy crap there's no way. I just could never live someplace where going outside even just to walk the dog is _that_ degree of miserable* for a big chunk of the year. And my wife having lived in northern Texas for a decade many years ago -- i.e. she knows what serious dry summer heat feels like -- is boggling at the sort of temps that Phoenix is getting nowadays.
I realize that for most people living entirely inside in A/C for months at a time is fine; they'll find somebody good for that job I'm sure. For us though -- guess it's time to recalibrate our potential-locations horizon northward!
(* for me I mean but damn few dogs I've ever known would much enjoy it either)
I do agree with Kev that you get used to it, and there’s always AC... But I’m in the process of moving away from Phoenix now. We’re already having record heat and climate change is not making it better.
I'm in a humid part of the country and am miserable on humid days in the low 80's. But I've experienced arid heat on trips out west and it is much, *much* more tolerable.
Born and raised in arizona. Wonderful sunsets and monsoons.
I live south of that (scottsdale 112 farenheit at midnight in my earpy 20's , ill never forget)
You get used to AC. And you are two hours from boreal forest (northern az) for vacationing / water sports etc
Lots of hiking and bicycle culture in arizona , its just planned with the heat in mind.
Belueve me when I say that a "dry heat" is much more bearable than a humid area. A very humid 80 farenheit is hell on earth. Arizona at 113 farenheit , yeh you walk outdoors into an oven but you work and live and shop indoors so it isnt the end of the world.
It seems like phoenix wasnt thought through , that much cement? No xenoscaping on towering skyscraper rooftops? , their was no forethought to build such a large city in that spot.
My childhood was spent living in the Great Lakes region while visiting grandparents in Oklahoma and Kansas each summer, and I'll take 80 degrees and humid over 100 and dry every time. That does seem to be a minority reaction though, more people agree with you on it.
If you're right on one of the shorelines, sure. But just a few miles away that effect can vanish, and obviously most of the Great Lakes _region_ is not right along one of the Lakes. For example I spent most of high school in Ann Arbor MI.
I'm from the Upper Peninsula. When I was deployed to Kuwait, I had to stay in a tent at Camp Buerhing for a couple nights after being in theater for five months or so, where it was routinely 100-110°F. I woke up *shivering* the first night there, and went to look at the thermostat for the tent's climate control.
It was 80°F in there.
You get used to the heat. Acclimation is really a thing.
(I also learned that the thermometer that displays temperature in a Toyota vehicle tops out at 122°F. Me and my First Sergeant were driving back from Buerhing--different trip--we noticed that the thermometer hadn't gone up from 122° for like an hour, despite transitioning into the hottest part of the day. We pressed the °F/°C button and found that it was displaying 50°C, and concluded that since that's a nice round number in the unit system the sensor designers were probably using it was pegged against that temperature.)
Clearly acclimation must be a thing, human beings in large numbers have been living in places like Iraq for a very long time. I happen to acclimate faster/better to humidity than to extreme heat.
The other thing that comes to mind -- though it affects me personally less cause I'm a ways older than you -- is the trend line. Our climate would not stop shifting warmer for years even if we magically froze global atmospheric CO2 levels right now. So if Phoenix is going full calendar months without the temp for one moment dropping below 97 degrees _now_, what in the very _best_ case is it likely to be like there in 2028? 2038? etc.
Can anyone recommend a good AI tool for generating nicely-designed Powerpoint decks from big chunks of expository text (ideally), or else from prewritten slide bullets (if necessary)? Even using MS's embedded Designer tool, I waste altogether too much time fiddling with formatting on each slide, especially with layouts more complex than a single concept or list.
There are, of course, approximately a gazillion AI slideshow tools out there, but the ones I've tried seem to underperform in practice. Is there currently anything that actually works?
What do you mean by important? I attended a CFAR workshop by Duncan Sabian a few years ago that I consider to have been pretty valuable to me, I don't know it if it was critical to my personal development though. I can imagine they've been a significant force for good.
Tools - PP&S (Pens, Paper and Stationary). It's old school, but I've found that analog note-taking makes new ideas more sticky in my mind. I believe this is because writing things out forces three cycles of info processing: reading, composing, and forming words/diagrams on the page. I use a common notebook for everything (Leuchtteurm1917 A5 hardcover), it's an extension of my mind. archive complete notebooks on a shelf with date labels. Every so often I take old notebooks down and review them to get sense of how I was thinking at a given time.
Concept - Ledger of ideas. Beliefs can be slippery fish. How will you conciously update if you don't have a thorough understanding of your beliefs in the first place? "We've always been at war with Eurasia." If you start a public blog or Substack, you're creating a public ledger of your ideas. I have a Substack with a modest following and use it for epistemic accountability.
Good idea about the ledged thing, at least to some extend. I should really make an account on that new thing that's looking like it'll replace predictionbook, so I can track my beliefs as operationalized in predictions.
That was my default assumption for a looong time but....it's pretty clear now that lots of normal healthy brains do not in fact do that. Lots. Even plenty of highly-intelligent brains do not do that, not at the level of "belief complex" anyway.
(And whether that is in the big picture, at the species level, a bug or feature is a question that I'm still pondering....perhaps not conclusively answerable.)
> ..it's pretty clear now that lots of normal healthy brains do not in fact do that. Lots. Even plenty of highly-intelligent brains do not do that, not at the level of "belief complex" anyway.
This makes a lot of sense to me; it is what I would expect. Changing a belief complex usually means digging in a little deeper than you might at first think. To use a car metaphor, you have to scrape all the rust off before you put a new coat of paint on or it’ll start peeling in no time.
I’m wondering how AI will visibly change society over the next few years. In the few years after the www was birthed, many people were soon introduced to email, to early search engines and web 1.0 sites, to Geocities and Yahoo chatrooms. There was a plethora of ISPs; soon you had the launch of many ebusinesses: Pets.com, Ebay, Amazon and hundreds of others I have forgotten about. Today, the most visible products of the internet age are smart phones and social media.
So, the early obvious uses of the www were email and ebusinesses. So far, on the consumer side, AI has given us chat and image generation. What are the next sorts of businesses or consumer technology we will see that is made possible by AI? Anything relatively obvious or already in the works?
Or will AI stay mostly invisible to consumers, powering increasingly efficient products and services from behind the scenes? I'm talking about what will happen over the next 5 years.
My prediction is that we will see a greatly accelerated homogenization of culture. In the past, it was still possible to shoot a great movie, or write a new fantasy series, or produce an original song, etc., and encounter moderate commercial success. True, you'd never make nearly as much money as the latest superhero sequel or pop music sensation, but the door was still open a crack; and maybe your work could be come a cult hit in after its modest release.
With the rise of AI, I expect the door to slam shut, because making creative works by hand will never, ever again pay off. You could spend years of your life filming a movie or writing a book or perfecting your music... Or you could publish 1,000 mediocre works at the push of a button and make a decent (if not spectacular) amount of money; and tomorrow you could do it again, and again, and again. On the consumer side, you could take a risk at some homebrewed movie or novel and risk being bored or (gasp!) offended, or you could pay for the certified-good (if a little bland) content that matches your preferences perfectly. Really, it's a no-brainer; which is why I predict an era of unprecedented and prolonged cultural stagnation.
>or you could pay for the certified-good (if a little bland) content that matches your preferences perfectly.
Upon rereading that line I now realize you aren't suggesting there wouldn't be market segmentation; you are suggesting that there will be an immense array of material
for varied preferences but that all of it will be mediocre.
I disagree because the preference of many is quality over genre or style. When I want to see a good movie, I don't care if it's a comedy, drama, action, sci-fi, art film, whatever. There's a market for producing the next Star Wars film, but there's also a market for producing a book, show, song or movie that many people think is original and amazing.
Many people are looking for that original and amazing thing more than something they have a pre-conceived preference for.
>With the rise of AI, I expect the door to slam shut, because making creative works by hand will never, ever again pay off.
I don't understand why that would be the case. My post below explains why I do believe the economics of human-made works will continue to pay off, at least for as long as they are superior in quality to AI-made works.
> There's a market for producing the next Star Wars film, but there's also a market for producing a book, show, song or movie that many people think is original and amazing.
Not really; at least, not at a competitive price point. You could pay a talented author $100k/year to produce a brilliant masterpiece that will be appreciated by a small coterie of niche readers with refined tastes (and remember that everyone's taste is different) and maybe sell a few thousand copies; or you can pay that much for an AI that will serve inoffensive beige content to millions of readers per day for $0.99/novel. Yes, schlock writing is alive and well today, but the price differential is not nearly as severe; and that makes all the difference.
Aren't there millions of wealthy people with pretty good taste who will happily pay a large premium for top quality movies or TV shows (and other forms of entertainment)? It seems to me that as long as humans can still produce the next Breaking Bad or Curb Your Enthusiasm (And AI can't), there will be plenty of other humans willing to shell out for them. Kind of like there have always been plenty of Americans willing to pay for HBO, while most Americans are happy to avoid the cost.
Varying preferences of consumers should create market segmentation like always. For example, not many people like jazz but some people love it. More people like Taylor Swift than like jazz, but both sorts of music exists even though Taylor Swift gets paid billions and jazz musicians have to take 2 or 3 additional jobs to make ends meet. Likewise, Christopher Nolan makes movies that make billions of dollars while Wes Anderson makes movies that only make a few million dollars, but both directors' movies appear in theaters because the 21st century world is a wealthy place, people have different tastes, and there's enough money and demand for both directors to profit.
There's the argument that Baumol's Cost Disease means AI could make human-made films so much more expensive than AI-made films that the former would no longer be profitable. But Baumol's Cost Disease happens when productivity increases make human labor worth more in *other* industries. So carpenters are much more expensive than they were 50 years ago because most woodworking today is automated AND because an otherwise talented carpenter can find a better job doing something else. If otherwise talented carpenters couldn't find better paying jobs doing something else, carpenter labor would be cheap.
The same will be true for screenwriters, directors, actors, cinematographers, etc. It will be too expensive to hire human labor for those jobs if productivity advances in other industries to the point that Christopher Nolan and Wes Anderson et al can make much better money doing something other than making movies. If they can't, and AI makes say 50% of all Hollywood movies, then it will be cheaper in the future to have humans make movies than it is now because there will be more available labor.
My past 2 paragraphs were just to address the scenario where humans can still make better quality movies than AI. If AI can do better than humans, then the vast differences in consumer tastes -- particularly once you get past the mass of Taylor Swift fans, so to speak -- should create a widely diverse market.
Im curious; what will be the way in which AI makes movies? The precise mechanics of that?
I can imagine some distant world, where an AI can generate an entire film internally and write it out to a digital file. That would make it a monstrously great tool for a creative person wanting to make a film.
There are many other scenarios though. I think a lot of what you say depends on this question.
As a movie producer, which would you rather do: take a risk on the next Wes Anderson film that may or may not become a blockbuster; or release Sequel Iteration N+1 which is virtually guaranteed to please 90% of moviegoers -- at least, please them sufficiently to recoup your cost and make a decent profit at extremely low cost ? Who would you rather be -- the chef of a small boutique restaurant that serves exquisite culinary creations to a select audience of the rich and wealthy once a year on the Winter Solstice; or the CEO of McDonalds ?
With the AI, you get 51 weeks off a year; all you have to do is come into the office once in a while to collect the checks... Sure, they might not be big checks, but they just keep on coming.
I was choosing between being a chef or being the CEO of McDonald’s. Where did AI come into it?
Or are you saying that I could be the CEO of McDonald’s and get an AI to do all the work? That might not be so bad, and I could get direct deposit and spend my week off being the chef. Double bagger.
Many well-known movie actors and directors through the years have been quoted to the effect that they try to alternate to some degree: "one for the bank account so I can then do one for the Oscar", or words to that effect. Some successful theater professionals of my acquaintance say something similar about the roles that they seek or accept.
In professional theater only those well out into the long tail can really pull that off at all. I dunno how hard it is in Hollywood.
Bland schlock is already underperforming at the box office. The two biggest films of the year are original, high-quality stories.
Now, if you're predicting Hollywood would rather drive off a cliff than pay people to produce good work, yes, absolutely, they're already doing that. But general audiences won't be happy with nothing but bland schlock for the rest of their lives. They'll complain and stop going to movies first.
Well right now sure thing sequel films have producers and so does Wes Anderson. It isn't a question of one person choosing between the two.
It's really a question of who is willing to invest in which film. I suspect the investors in Wes Anderson's films are probably people who consider themselves to be benefactors of the arts more than investors hungry for a high (or safe) return on investment. These people are probably more interested in buying status than getting richer. (Analogous to the star actors willing to appear in Anderson's films for scale instead of for the millions they get to appear in more commercial movies.) They likely got rich not in the movie business but in more conservative industries. At least that is the paradigm of art benefactors.
> These people are probably more interested in buying status than getting richer.
That’s a dim view of things. Perhaps they just made a calculated trade-off between how much money they need to make and the kinds of projects they would prefer to work on.
Things made "by hand" will themselves be a selling point. Catering to the lowest common denominator has been done long before AI, but a sizable demo is less interested in those products. AI could, like other technologies before it, lower the barrier to entry.
I keep having grim ruminations about kids' books -- how they can be cranked out by AI, with a few different permutations of simple plot elements, and of course illustrated by AI with cheesy cartoons. And kids will love them just the same, because they are at an age when they bond imaginatively with what's presented. So they will bond with the this junk. Their hearts and minds will be like bodies nourished by cheezits.
AI-written stories will be cheap, but not cheaper than old human-written stories that are out of copyright. Even the really good human-written stories.
You're right, I hadn't thought of that. But I still worry about them getting lost in the gush of soulless plastic junk spewed out by the Great Plastic Tyrant. And about people losing their ability to connect with stuff that doesn't capture their interest in the formulaic way they are used to.
I agree with almost everything you say, except for AI being the scapegoat. It’s becoming the scapegoat for everything that we hate about ourselves. It’s kind of funny.
A week or 2 ago somebody posted something about AI being a Rorschach inkblot. Was that you? And what do you mean about it being a scapegoat for everything we hate about ourselves? I actually think that at worst it's a scapegoat for one class of things we hate about ourselves -- stuff having to do with being anhedonic, disconnected, addicted to things that aren't very enjoyable. But it does not seem to me to be a scapegoat for some of the worst human traits -- violence, cruelty -- basically, a bunch of things that result from our tendency to lose track of the fact that other people are sensate beings like ourselves, rather than roadblocks, tools for us to use, cockroaches, etc.
(1) I think it's likely that hack children's book writers still produce better stories than AI will. They are human, and have more and more varied algorithms and takes on life inside of them the AI does, and they also have emotions and emotionally charged memories and quirks. At least a bit of that human richness will still slip into their work even if their approach is very formulaic. Consider how astonishingly bland as GPT-4's prose is. I have never seen prose this mind-blindingly beige produced by a human being. Have you?
(2) Stories produced by AI will surely be cheaper than the ones from even the most broke and desperate hack writer of children's books, so the AI stories will be the ones that make it to market.
(3) Super-cheap AI-produced stories will cost FAR more than good quality kids' books, so people will be even less like than they are now to buy the good stories.
(4) People eventually develop a taste for what they are used to. A kid raised on formulaic books may have a hard time connecting with a real book -- with say Charlie and the Chocolate Factory -- because it does not follow the formulas. It will seem weird, alien, boring.
I don't think 2 follows. Publishers aren't hurting for stories, and can filter for quality. Unless by 'market' you're talking about something like Fanfiction.net. https://www.fanfiction.net/book/ In which case we already have that.
For 4... so what, kids grow up. And hell, one of my favorite movies when I was young was the Ichabod Crane cartoon IN REVERSE on our VHS player. Take that, Willy Wonka! But eventually you get older and hit quality and/or originality, and realize how much better it is.
In that case I recommend that you stock up on cheezits and mass-produced books for your kids or grandkids, and use the money saved for something of real value, whatever you think that is.
Yes, but the price differential between pulp and literature, while significant, was not insurmountable. With AI, you can have pulp on demand for pennies.
Intervening with first-time offenders to give them a chance to have their records sealed seems pretty effective. We had a program in my region that had only a 7% recidivism rate. I'm not sure about experimental data, but there are a lot of these "teen courts"
Basically, there was an urban legend that the average person eats eight spiders in their sleep. The joke is that this is true, but only because of Spiders Georg, who eats thousands of spiders every day. The joke mutated until anyone who did an unusual amount of X could be referred to as "X Georg".
Fang's joke is honestly hilarious if you are familiar with all the bits of setup required.
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.
Thank you Eremolalos, you are demonstrating exactly the point I am tryng to make. This is what the scare story is going to mutate into: "why are those nutty zealot bigot pro-lifers against an AIDS drug, of all things?"
That's not the story, but that's the headline and that's as far as most people are going to read. I've been trying to say that the nutty zealot bigots might have a reasonable suspicioin of what is going on, but everyone replying to me is "No, I don't see that".
Now, maybe it's because I'm a nutty zealot bigot myself, or maybe it's because everyone has got blinders on about "abortion good" or at the very least "reproductive justice legal" that I'm seeing it and they're not.
Short version for Eremolalos: the referenced story claims that pro-life groups are opposing renewal of the bill for this programme due to fears that the Biden administration will hitch abortion provision up to it, because the impoverished Third World countries that most need the intervention are also the backwards places where abortion provision and gay rights and the rest of it are inaccessible or even frowned upon.
And the CIA using a fake inoculation programme to find DNA related to Bin-Laden would also have been "That's crazy, who would do that?" until it was true:
"As part of extensive preparations for the raid that killed Bin Laden in May, CIA agents recruited a senior Pakistani doctor to organise the vaccine drive in Abbottabad, even starting the "project" in a poorer part of town to make it look more authentic, according to Pakistani and US officials and local residents."
Here's why the nutty zealot bigots are being so paranoid conspiracy theory:
"Smith previously supported PEPFAR and even wrote the last bill reauthorizing it in 2018. But the longtime abortion opponent said he won’t write another update without barring funding of groups that support abortion rights. That’s a dealbreaker for Democrats, who note that U.S. law already bars foreign aid from funding abortion services.
The Biden administration denies Smith’s charges, and it, along with Democratic lawmakers and some outside public health advocates, said there’s no evidence PEPFAR funds have gone to providing or promoting abortion.
“They’re taking what was an initiative of George Bush that has been successful across the globe, particularly in Africa, and are now trying to make it a political issue about abortion,” said Senate Foreign Relations Chair Bob Menendez (D-N.J.), adding that Smith’s claim that PEPFAR is supporting abortion is a “smear.”
Still, Smith wields influence over PEPFAR reauthorization as chair of the relevant House Foreign Affairs subcommittee, and no other GOP lawmakers on that committee have publicly broken with his position.
Smith pointed to Biden lifting funding restrictions imposed by the Trump administration and including language in its PEPFAR strategy document about integrating HIV programs with “sexual health and reproductive rights,” which he interprets as code for promoting abortion rights."
"Reproductive rights" and "reproductive justice" are terms using meaning "abortion provision", so whether you want to phrase that as "interpreting code" or not, it's not an unreasonable suspicion. I'm not saying he's *right* about it, but I am saying that it's not an unreasonable suspicion, but it's being presented exactly as you took it: these people are opposing AIDs treatment, what is wrong with them?
I tend to reflexively snarl about such stories because like always, you get the SHOCK HORROR HEADLINE and it's only when you read down into the body of the story that you get the facts.
And most people only see the headlines and come away with a mistaken idea of what is going on. Like I said, I have no idea *if* the adminstration, or certain lobbying groups associated with it, are trying to get abortion promotion in via the back door, but it's not completely unreasonable given the whole Democratic Party insistence on "we are the party of women's rights" and so forth. I hope it's mistaken, it would be bad if a good programme got derailed over this kind of politicking. But I can't be 100% certain it *is* mistaken, which is why I yelped about this story.
First, it's not anti-PEPFAR, it's anti-"sneaking in your pet progressive 'let's make sure the brown people don't have too many babies' project along with the funding in the name of giving money to AIDS fighting groups".
That strong enough for ya?
EDIT: To develop the point above about "Smith pointed to... including language about... 'sexual health and rerproductive rights'", here's some examples of what "reproductive rights" is taken to mean in practice:
"The term ‘reproductive rights’ refers to the freedom of individuals to control decisions regarding contraception, abortion, sterilization, and childbirth. It is a relatively recent concept in Western, affluent societies, and is closely related to the rise of social movements advocating access to birth control, legal abortion, and women's control over pregnancy and childbirth. These movements are in turn associated with large-scale social trends such as the desire to reduce population growth in industrialized countries and the movement of women into the labor force. Major areas of research on reproductive rights include research on social movements advocating reproductive rights, analyses of public discourse on reproductive rights, and studies of public opinion. In each of these areas, much of the research focuses on the issue of abortion, but also includes issues of access to contraceptives, sterilization abuse, and new standards of women's health care."
"Reproductive rights are about the legal right to contraception, abortion, fertility treatment, reproductive health, and access to information about one's reproductive body. Reproductive rights secure people's freedom to decide about their body's capacities to (not) reproduce. Departing from a feminist understanding of the reproductive body as the most intimate site for/of political struggle, reproductive geographies have emerged as a relatively new field within human geography. Reproduction used to be a traditional topic of a quantitative population geography. More recent geographic work on reproduction, however, is inspired by feminist, Black, postcolonial, and critical theories to address the uneven geographies of access to spaces of reproductive health and justice. "
"Reproductive rights consist of three broad categories of rights: (1) rights to reproductive self-determination, (2) rights to sexual and reproductive health services, information, and education, and (3) rights to equality and nondiscrimination."
Now, this is a definition which (if you dropped the abortion part) pro-lifers would not object to, because "reproductive rights" technically do mean care during and after pregnancy, access to nutrition and health care, and measures to reduce maternal and infant mortality:
"The adoption of a reproductive rights framework by advocacy groups within developing nations entailed a broadening of its original focus—abortion, contraception, and sterilization—to include maternal mortality, prenatal and obstetric care, breast and cervical cancer, and adolescent and postmenopause health. The Southern perspective also underlined the need to incorporate attention to women's economically productive roles in addition to their biologically reproductive functions. This required a better understanding of the correlation between sexual and reproductive health and endemic and chronic diseases, as well as occupational, environmental and mental health hazards, and afflictions."
But of course, we can't drop the abortion part, which comes to dominate the entire issue:
"In the 1980s, the scope and intensity of abortion-related initiatives varied across regions, being more visible in Latin America (particularly Brazil), the Philippines, and South Africa. Abortion was always addressed as part of a broader reproductive health and rights agenda, never as a ‘single issue.’ Efforts to decrease maternal mortality were prioritized by most countries and within these efforts new venues for addressing abortion have emerged. Both ICPD and IV WCW final documents recognize abortion as a major public health problem, affirming that, in circumstances where it is legal, it should be safe."
"In 1994, the Program of Action of the International Conference of Population and Development (ICPD Cairo, 1994) defined reproductive rights as:
[Embracing] certain human rights that are already recognized in national laws, international human rights documents and other consensus documents. These rights rest on the recognition of the basic right of all couples and individuals to decide freely and responsibly the number, spacing and timing of their children and to have the information and means to do so, and the right to attain the highest standard of sexual and reproductive health. It also includes their right to make decisions concerning reproduction free of discrimination, coercion and violence.
Paragraph 7.3, United Nations, 1994"
I think that's where the fear is, and as I said above, Eremolalos' reaction is precisely the one being disseminated by media headlines, which are as far as many people will read: why are these crazy pro-lifers trying to block AIDS treatment?
Restructuring makes me hesitate. 25 million lives saved is an absurdly high number, and side effects like nurturing dependence and playing suboptimal African geopolitics against China strike me as petty in comparison.
Saving 25 million lives without doing those things would be better. Saving more than 25 million lives by replacing PEPFAR with super-PEPFAR that also helped with diarrhea would be fantastic. But if these numbers are right, PEPFAR is about one third as good as WW2 was bad. Looking at this graph, turning point is PEPFAR, and the numbers might return to their peak and then keep going if it collapses. https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.statista.com/chart/amp/18713/estimated-number-of-aids-related-deaths-worldwide/
A ten percent risk that reform collapses the program is a steep cost.
My limited attempts to figure this out for myself only lead to the number being repeated. The number does seem order of magnitude plausible. The chart I linked above, (which I would not take as gospel truth, though I find vaguely similar numbers here: https://www.unaids.org/en/resources/fact-sheet) implies a triangle of a about 10 million fewer deaths ((1.7 million/year - 0.7 million/year) * 20 years * 1/2). That is assuming deaths would have stayed flat, which is unreasonable given prior movement of the graph.
This is incredibly weak evidence, just back of the envelope calculations implying that if any organization can claim the lion's share of credit for taking AIDs deaths from their peak levels to their current levels, twenty five million deaths prevented isn't an outlandish claim.
EDIT: My second link is apparently the source for the graph, and should not be counted as a second data point.
So - is the Biden administration trying to use PEPFAR to push through abortion in those countries? Because I'm seeing a lot of "millions will die" but also some "oh yeah and those PEPFAR countries don't have abortion so much" which leads me to think that maybe yes is the answer to that.
Wait, your argument for believing "PEPEFAR is being used to push abortion" is "PEPFAR countries usually *don't* allow abortion?" I don't follow your logic.
No, my logic is "someone writes a piece about pro-life groups opposing this because they claim the current administration is going to try and use it to impose abortion" and okay, that's a story.
But then the story drops in "oh yeah and those countries don't have liberal abortion" and I go "hmm, why mention that? because that sounds to me like you *are* saying 'yeah, the administration *does* want to liberalise abortion so they'll sneak it in with the renewed act'".
I assumed the story mentioned "those places don't allow abortion" as evidence that the fears are unfounded, because there's no way PEPFAR could be funding abortions without first changing those laws.
And funding organisations in those countries that are agitating to change those laws would be a first step, especially as you can dress it up as "what, no, we're only funding an AIDS activism group".
The same way American foundation gave out grant to Irish group for the pro-abortion constitutional amendment:
"A group campaigning for the repeal of the constitutional amendment that prohibits abortion has confirmed it returned funding it received from an international organisation following correspondence with the ethics watchdog.
However, the Abortion Rights Campaign said that while it returned a funding grant from Open Society Foundation on advice from the Standards in Public Office, it does not agree with SIPO’s interpretation on the funding, writes Joe Leogue of the Irish Examiner.
Electoral laws dictate that third parties such as campaign groups cannot accept donations from foreign sources which would be used for “political purposes”.
According to documents released to the Irish Catholic newspaper, SIPO informed the Abortion Rights Campaign that it was of the view that a grant of $24,999 awarded by the Open Society Foundation, which is funded by billionaire George Soros, fell foul of legislation.
Despite returning the grant as directed, the Abortion Rights Campaign disputed SIPO’s definition of the grant and said it was “to fund educational and stigma-busting projects.”
“Our focus remains on advocating for reproductive rights while striving to lift the stigma surrounding abortion in Ireland. Every cent we receive goes back into the movement towards choice, change and destigmatising abortion in Ireland,” ARC spokesperson Linda Kavanagh said."
'No no no, we're not funding abortion, we're funding removing the stigma around abortion' sounds like the kind of hair-splitting to get around 'you can't use PEPFAR funding for those purposes'.
That logic is predicated on the idea that political extremists are internally consistent in their goals (insofar as matching their outwardly stated goals/justifications) which is... dubious at best, and in most cases verifiably false.
You're trying to apply Boolean logic to the real world. Political extremists are sometimes inconsistent, but not usually to the extent of a pro-life group contesting something unrelated to their single objective.
Yes, because I have such confidence in "these regulations in place will not allow what you fear to happen" after they've just described how Tweedledee rescinded Tweedledum's policies when he got into power (and Tweedledum will do the same for Tweedledee when he gets into power).
I'm jaundiced on this topic because I've seen too many times where "ha ha no, that will never happen, we're not going to do that" about abortion aimed at pro-lifers, and then guess what happens next? They go and do that thing.
Good points. Also, of course, money is often fungible, and so if a group that promotes abortion in some way receives a PEPFAR grant (even a restricted grant that may not be used for abortion), then the recipient group may use the grant to cover expenses in a way that frees up *other* funds to promote abortion.
Here is the actual letter sent by the pro-life groups:
It's wide known stereotype of association between love to anime and some social awkwardness. Some totally not tested hypothesis to explain this: if you have issues with recognizing mimics (read - understanding emotions by somebody's face) you will be
a) not very good in socializing and communicating in general
b) Many of live-action movie will be too boring or too complicated for you as you miss significant part of information from actors' non-verbal play. Compared to this, animation has often exaggerated mimics, more than that - many exemplars of anime have almost fixed set of "facial expressions archetypes", comparable with ancient Greek theatrical masks. Under this circumstances, somebody with facial expression recognition issues may have experience comparable to what neurotipical person has from traditional cinema
The stereotype about trans lesbians loving anime might be a result of a combination of this and the escapism factor. Autism rates are highly elevated among transfem lesbians and bisexuals compared to the general population.
Japanese animation generally isn't very expressive by Western standards. Blocking and dialogue follow Japanese social customs of reservedness and formality (inscrutability, to some gaijin). Anime fans will often cite its subtlety and nuance compared to more expressive, "cartoonish" Western animation. And anime is notorious for endless, money-saving scenes of characters in stone-faced contemplation.
I think attraction to anime is more about its comparative complexity, ambition, worldbuilding, and often idiosyncratic vision. Zealous anime appreciation seems to me of a piece with science fiction and fantasy fandom, a famous nerd pastime. I would say that escapism is the fundamental draw. More expressive media have their own fandoms, but e.g. Looney Tunes otaku are relatively niche.
It's possible that you have identified something interesting going on, but I don't feel that it supports this thesis.
I don’t think this stereotype holds true anymore, anime has kind of crossed over. A lot of charismatic and confident pro athletes are huge anime fans, and obviously in Japan it’s completely mainstream and not an “awkward kid” thing. I think to the extent that this is true, it’s mostly because socially awkward outcasts tend to reject trends and look for something obscure and esoteric to define themselves with. You see this with music genres throughout the decades, electronic dance music in particular started as an outlet for socially awkward weirdos then eventually became mainstream and now the bros love it.
How can I learn what the status of the case is? I see that the last filing was in late November. I assume that the next thing that has to happen is that the judge must rule on the motion to dismiss. Is there any kind of deadline for that? How would I know whether it was imminent or whether I shouldn't expect it to come within the next three years? Am I wrong about what's going to happen?
Next action should be a ruling by the judge on the motion to dismiss, as you suggest. No time limit for the judge on such a motion, and no way to know timing for sure. Primarily depends on how busy the judge is with other cases. A year is pushing it, but not uncommon or unheard of. Three years is highly unlikely, absent e.g. a health event for the judge that requires transfer of the case.
If you are not sure the website you linked is up to date, you can check the docket directly using the federal court pacer system (search "pacer"). Account creation is free and you get enough free documents per month to check without cost.
In theory you could also interface with the court more directly, but that's unlikely to make sense.
(The site I linked is affiliated with RECAP and the data comes directly from PACER. I don't think it will update automatically, but the page does include a timestamp indicating when it was last refreshed from PACER, which is of now is this morning. Someone's keeping it fresh.)
> No time limit for the judge on such a motion, and no way to know timing for sure.
I find this somewhat surprising. It's not like the court will wait for you until you see fit to respond to them.
When you get to a certain age, having a body is really like owning an old car that you’re fond of. But it still has to get you to Walmart. So accommodations need to be made on both sides.
I have an internet addiction. I can’t enjoy anything online without it turning into a self destructive binge, and this has been a constant for years that hinders any attempts at self improvement. I’ve started attending meetups for Internet and Technology Addicts Anonymous, and I’ve come to the conclusion that total abstinence from online entertainment is the only way forward.
It’s hard to accept that I am going to have to completely stop viewing rationalist and rat adjacent content. These people have a way of thinking that makes so much sense to me, and is so rare among anyone I know.
I guess I always thought when I’d get my life together I would eventually feel smart enough to start posting rather than lurking. Maybe I’d attend ACX meetups. As trivial as that seems, it was important to me. I’m not really asking for advice, I’m just sad about this and wanted to express it before I go.
What I do: Pick all the distracting websites and block using settings/screen time on mac. If you want to go further, use rescuetime to track browser time and set it up with Beeminder to charge you money if you spend any time on those sites. After a few weeks, you don't desire to use them anymore.
Unfortunately, online debates expand until they fill all available time. Just reading all ACX comments and replying occasionally can take the whole day. I don't want to miss interesting debates, but I also don't want to spend my entire day reading.
I try to do other things first. I don't always succeed.
I’m in uni (2nd attempt after dropping out) and I want to be a better student, procrastinate less. I want to make friends and date girls, right now my social life is awful. And I also have hobbies I’d like to spend more time on.
I think that you're identifying the allure of the content: it creates the illusion that the world is reduceable and makes sense. A real social life and university are more chaotic and confusing.
Another problem, which you might not be realizing, is that you are using up your precious 'maximum-cognition' time on internet content. It reads like you need to structure your tasks.
Ah. Can't help much with most of that, but I've found the best defense against procrastination is realizing that a looming project will taint whatever you're doing in the moment, and therefore you should tackle it first. Schoolwork, long-term hobby projects, relaxing is better on the other side of them.
Best dating advice I have is someone else's from the 90's.
Can you block off say an hour a week, maybe an hour before work (where you HAVE to stop what you're doing and leave the house) and download a bunch of articles as PDFs to be read off line or something?
I don’t think so. I’ve tried things like that before and it usually stimulates my interest in this stuff enough that I backslide, and before long I’m reading posts until 5am. If this doesn’t happen, I think it will just leave me with FOMO and a sense of intellectual inferiority that is also unhealthy.
My deepest sense of Truth tells me that truth is very difficult to find. Me and Diogenes.
Because the truth is a chimera. It is something that needs to be pursued every second and minute and day of our lives, but it doesn’t exist, any more than a wave on the ocean exists.. Facts exist. Facts are not necessarily the truth. .The truth is some thing that you can never quite get your hands around, but it will lie with you a while, if you’re good.
Going with what works works, but what happens when it doesn’t work anymore? At that point I would say that the truth needs to be re-discovered on the fly. It’s like surfing. Also, I should clarify that my point was not meant to be applied to scientific investigations, which is perhaps more akin to a search for facts, rather than the truth.
I think you find Truth difficult to find because you capitalize it. I'm serious. Capitalization denotes reification to a Platonic form. Truth isn't metaphysical; it's statistical. Taboo "truth" and speak only of probability.
I only capitalized it once. For a reason. It is not exactly true that I think it is difficult to find, I just think that it has to be found moment by moment. It is not a fixed object. It can be difficult to find, and that usually manifests itself in a state that we call being of two minds.
In that case, I probably erred because of my priors on what leads people to capitalize Truth. I don't think I understand what you mean by "truth" if it's a thing that has to be found moment by moment. That sounds more like a mental state about yourself than a state of the external world.
So, by "truth" you mean something which has nothing to do with anything being correct or incorrect? Are you using it as in "To thine own self be true", to denote being in harmony with your essence, or with the Dao, or something like that? I think you should use another word, 'coz "truth" means being factually correct rather than factually incorrect. Using the word "truth" for your personal feelings is what led to Nazism.
> So, by "truth" you mean something which has nothing to do with anything being correct or incorrect?
No, not exactly, but “correct or incorrect” is a big playing field.
At a certain “temperature “,K C or F,
water gets hard. Correct. True. I can skate on it. Someone might disagree with that but I have the evidence of my own experience and it’s not a useful thing to argue about. The idea that it’s not true is incorrect; visibly and palpably incorrect. Other than that sort of thing, it gets tricky. Other people get involved and the plot thickens. You’re on thin ice.
> Are you using it as in "To thine own self be true", to denote being in harmony with your essence, or with the Dao, or something like that?
Harmony is the word I like best here. The idea of harmony is close to my thoughts about this.
How much of what I am observing at any given time can I make sense of? - that’s the closest I am going to get to the truth. Being in a situation that one is having trouble making sense of is very dissonant, as opposed to harmonious. Dissonance indicates to me that I don’t know the truth, but if I accept not knowing, then there is harmony again, because I have a much better understanding of what’s going on. I’m in a better position to pay attention and maybe get closer to what’s going on. I haven’t gotten lost in my personal theater.
Proposed: There is truth in the world and it is perceivable.
Proposed (2): People are capable of perceiving the truth, OR they are not and mourn their inability to do so.
If the first instance of Prop 2, then why haven’t we all converged on the truth by now? It is perceivable and we can perceive it. Why these endless discussions of what it is and where it is?
The latter instance of Prop 2 is more interesting to me because it seems to explain things better.
> Using the word "truth" for your personal feelings is what led to Nazism.”
(Do you seek to shame me with the invocation of Nazism?)
It led to Christianity as well as far as that goes, but “personal feelings” is only part of it. To transform personal feelings into a doctrine or a casus belli is a fraught path which can be walked by sociopaths or saints. Given that where would you locate the truth?
Was the concept of "atomic bomb" available to the average Hiroshiman? Did survivors (even a few well-educated following-current-events survivors) think "the Americans must have completed an atomic bomb and used it on us"? If not, what did they think had happened?
No idea, but my father was in the army on Luzon; and told a story about getting a message with his rations that said, "Keep your head down, we've got the A-bomb." and my dad thinking, "What the hell is the A-bomb?"
Mostly no. Perhaps a few highly educated physicists working at a university or some such. The famous reply of Albert Einstein upon being told that atomic energy could be used to make a bomb was "I hadn't thought of that." Insofar as there was a general awareness of atomics in the interwar period, and the awareness was very limited, it was thought of as a potential energy source. Most of the speculation on atomic weapons in the 1930s was ray guns (again, energy source). The idea of using it as a bomb came relatively late and the theorist more or less immediately fled to America to avoid the Nazis.
All weapons programs (which started in 1938-9 mostly) were top secret programs that would not have been available to the public. The US continued to mainly pursue civilian uses until 1941 and its program was also top secret and not available to the public. The only outside people who seem to have been aware were uranium dealers who noticed the changes in purchasing patterns (and who presumably were more up to date on the fundamental science than most people). A Japanese atomics expert, inside of a top secret lab, might have been able to figure it out given time. But any such findings would not have been made public anyway.
Japanese reports at the time were heavily censored but we do have records of contemporary reactions. They recognized it was a new American weapon, that it was powerful, and that it had lasting and unusual effects on the people who were near it (including people who entered the area after the bombing). Which they mostly thought of as disease and so would quarantine or avoid people with signs of radiation poisoning. They did not do this with fire bombings because, of course, fire is not contagious.
There was, at least from the reports I've read, fairly limited speculation on what the weapon actually was on the ground. People were mainly interested in surviving and, since the war had already hugely degraded living standards and killed many people, there was a certain jadedness that seemed to pervade the population. Most of the speculation was about the weapon's effects. Mysticism about how to ward off radiation (the mysterious new disease) or shunning of affected people or that kind of thing.
No. When you look at photos of Hiroshima survivors, they are all burned only on the side of their body that was directly facing the explosion. It was clear immediately that this was a different kind of weapon.
I don't know about the average Japanese person, but science-educated Japanese people and the military certainly knew it was a possibility, and indeed Japan had a nuclear weapons program during the war, though it never got anywhere close to developing an atomic bomb: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_nuclear_weapons_program
What I do wonder is whether people had an instinctive "upper bound" in bomb strength before nukes became known. Was there some sort of sense that a single bomb couldn't be more powerful than X (the Halifax Explosion?), and therefore it was surprising that the Hiroshima bomb was > X? Or did people just think, "huh, they dropped a really big bomb this time". Or was the actual experience at all distinguishable from carpet bombing using many smaller bombs?
"It begins on the morning that the bomb is dropped on Nagasaki. I was interested to see it told not only from his point of view but also from that of various other people in the countryside and from different vantage points at the teaching hospital where Nagai was dean. After helping all those they can from the immediate university area, the small band of survivors heads to the countryside to help the many people who are being sheltered by farmers and villages.
I was surprised to find myself laughing at one point. After American planes drop leaflets informing the Japanese that they dropped an atom bomb (so surrender already), Nagai instantly whirls into thought about the implications, both scientifically and to the victims. He comes out to hear the few remaining hospital staff, doctors, and students in a fevered discussion about which scientists were involved ("Einstein?"), how it would have worked ("they couldn't have had a cyclotron on a plane" "fission! it must have been fission!" "Ahhh"), and so forth. Despite the circumstances, as Nagai himself comments after reporting this exchange, they are all scientists first and deeply interested in the development.
'We were members of a research group with a great interest in nuclear physics and totally devoted to this branch of science--and ironically we ourselves had become victims of the atom bomb which was the very core of the theory we were studying. Here we lay, helpless in a dugout!
And yet it was a precious experience for us. Placed on the experimentation table, we could watch the whole process in a most intimate way. We could observe the changes that where taking place and that would take place in the future. Crushed with grief because of the defeat of Japan, filled with anger and resentment, we nevertheless felt rising within us a new drive and a new motivation in our search for truth. In this devastated atomic desert, fresh and vigorous scientific life began to flourish'."
"On Thursday, August 9, 1945, at two minutes past eleven in the morning, Nagasaki was wiped out by a plutonium atomic bomb which exploded at a height of five hundred meters over the city. Among the wounded on that fateful day was the young doctor Takashi Nagai, professor of radiology at the University of Nagasaki. Nagai succeeded in gathering a tiny group of survivors -- doctors, nurses, and students -- and together they worked heroically for the wounded until they themselves collapsed from exhaustion and atomic sickness.
As he lay dying of leukemia*, Dr. Nagai wrote The Bells of Nagasaki, vividly recounting what he had seen with his own eyes and heard from his associates. It is a deeply moving and human story. He tells how it dawned on him that this awful havoc was indeed the work of an atomic bomb, how he speculated about the American scientists who had put it together, how he picked up a leaflet dropped by American planes warning the Japanese to accept the terms of the Potsdam Declaration, how he and his companions shed tears over the defeat of their country.
But Nagai was above all a doctor, dedicated to the sick and to science. He relates how his little group confronted hitherto unknown diseases and applied ingenious remedies. He was also a deeply committed Christian and this book chronicles the inner struggle of one who witnessed appalling suffering and yet believed in the providence of a loving God. He ends his story with a poignant cry for world peace penetrated with an optimism symbolized by the chiming of the cathedral bells.
Nagai finished writing The Bells of Nagasaki in 1946, but the Occupation regime of Douglas MacArthur refused permission for its publication. An appeal was made to Washington and the book finally appeared in Japanese in 1949. It is still widely read in Japan and contains a powerful message for all men and women."
*Ironically, *not* due to the bomb; he contracted it from his work as a radiologist.
Just as the atom-bomb exploded over the centre of the town, Shigeo jumped into the lake. A glaring flash of light blinded him. Immediately following it he heard a roar and a crash like a thousand peals of thunder. An indescribable gale followed it, thrashing the water into spray, dragging Shigeo with it and hurling him against the bank. Ancient trees crashed to the ground, uprooted, while branches as thick as a man’s thigh whirled through the air. Reeds of bamboo were flattened. Only the tough wood of the weeping willow beneath which Sadako was sleeping withstood the blast. Its trunk, indeed, bent beneath the hurricane, and every leaf was stripped off its twiggy branches, but it did not fall. Sadako, however, was whirled away by the blast like a paper ball.
Shigeo got up laboriously. He was unable to think. With wide, terrified eyes he stumbled about on the spot where he had contrived to rise. He stared numbly at a treetop which was incomprehensibly lying on the ground in front of him. Nor could he understand how he came to be wading ankle deep in water. And the quantities of leaves around him, the twigs and the branches—had they fallen from Heaven?
Gradually he began to realise what had happened. His muscles tautened. He stood up straight and tried to understand. First of all there had been a flash of lightning behind him, then the storm had come and had hurled him out of the water. After that the earth had trembled beneath him. There had been an earthquake!
---
“My children!” cried Yasuko and sped away. She bruised herself against sharp edges of machinery, she trod in heaps of shattered glass and stepped over corpses. She collided with men in air raid wardens’ helmets who tried to stop her. The wounded clutched at her, seeking aid, but she tore herself free from all of them with the strength lent her by fear for her children. But when at last she had forced her way through one of the workshop doors into the open, she started back. Over the centre of the town a great pillar of smoke rose to the sky—A pillar of smoke in which gigantic flames darted, whose top had curled itself into a vast ball, which sent out flashes like lightning, which glowed, sometimes reddish, sometimes orange, and then flared green or pink.
At the sight of this dreadful cloud of flame, Yasuko sank to her knees. Filled with terror, she gazed at this work of demons. For only demons could have lit this gigantic, unearthly torch for the purpose of punishing mankind. But why? What had she done? What had her children done?
As she thought of her children, Shigeo and Sadako, she stretched out her arms towards the supposed demoniac torch and moaned: “They haven’t done anything! Leave me my children! Don’t hurt them!” She wanted to rise, to go to her children’s aid. A fainting attack brought her to the ground.
(excerpts from The Day of the Bomb, Karl Bruckner, 1961)
---
Immediately after the explosion, the Reverend Mr. Kiyoshi Tanimoto, having run wildly out of the Matsui estate and having looked in wonderment at the bloody soldiers at the mouth of the dugout they had been digging, attached himself sympathetically to an old lady who was walking along in a daze, holding her head with her left hand, supporting a small boy of three or four on her back with her right, and crying, “I’m hurt! I’m hurt! I’m hurt!” Mr. Tanimoto transferred the child to his own back and led the woman by the hand down the street, which was darkened by what seemed to be a local column of dust. He took the woman to a grammar school not far away that had previously been designated for use as a temporary hospital in case of emergency. By this solicitous behavior, Mr. Tanimoto at once got rid of his terror. At the school, he was much surprised to see glass all over the floor and fifty or sixty injured people already waiting to be treated. He reflected that, although the all-clear had sounded and he had heard no planes, several bombs must have been dropped. He thought of a hillock in the rayon man’s garden from which he could get a view of the whole of Koi—of the whole of Hiroshima, for that matter—and he ran back up to the estate.
From the mound, Mr. Tanimoto saw an astonishing panorama. Not just a patch of Koi, as he had expected, but as much of Hiroshima as he could see through the clouded air was giving off a thick, dreadful miasma. Clumps of smoke, near and far, had begun to push up through the general dust. He wondered how such extensive damage could have been dealt out of a silent sky; even a few planes, far up, would have been audible. Houses nearby were burning, and when huge drops of water the size of marbles began to fall, he half thought that they must be coming from the hoses of firemen fighting the blazes. (They were actually drops of condensed moisture falling from the turbulent tower of dust, heat, and fission fragments that had already risen miles into the sky above Hiroshima.)
---
After an alarm, Father Kleinsorge always went out and scanned the sky, and this time, when he stepped outside, he was glad to see only the single weather plane that flew over Hiroshima each day about this time. Satisfied that nothing would happen, he went in and breakfasted with the other Fathers on substitute coffee and ration bread, which, under the circumstances, was especially repugnant to him. The Fathers sat and talked a while, until, at eight, they heard the all-clear. They went then to various parts of the building. Father Schiffer retired to his room to do some writing. Father Cieslik sat in his room in a straight chair with a pillow over his stomach to ease his pain, and read. Father Superior LaSalle stood at the window of his room, thinking. Father Kleinsorge went up to a room on the third floor, took off all his clothes except his underwear, and stretched out on his right side on a cot and began reading his Stimmen der Zeit.
After the terrible flash—which, Father Kleinsorge later realized, reminded him of something he had read as a boy about a large meteor colliding with the earth—he had time (since he was 1,400 yards from the center) for one thought: A bomb has fallen directly on us. Then, for a few seconds or minutes, he went out of his mind.
---
Dr. Fujii, who was in his underwear, was now soaking and dirty. His undershirt was torn, and blood ran down it from bad cuts on his chin and back. In this disarray, he walked out onto Kyo Bridge, beside which his hospital had stood. The bridge had not collapsed. He could see only fuzzily without his glasses, but he could see enough to be amazed at the number of houses that were down all around. On the bridge, he encountered a friend, a doctor named Machii, and asked in bewilderment, “What do you think it was?”
Dr. Machii said, “It must have been a Molotoffano hanakago”—a Molotov flower basket, the delicate Japanese name for the “bread basket,” or self-scattering cluster of bombs.
At first, Dr. Fujii could see only two fires, one across the river from his hospital site and one quite far to the south. But at the same time, he and his friend observed something that puzzled them, and which, as doctors, they discussed: although there were as yet very few fires, wounded people were hurrying across the bridge in an endless parade of misery, and many of them exhibited terrible burns on their faces and arms. “Why do you suppose it is?” Dr. Fujii asked. Even a theory was comforting that day, and Dr. Machii stuck to his. “Perhaps because it was a Molotov flower basket,” he said.
There had been no breeze earlier in the morning when Dr. Fujii had walked to the railway station to see a friend off, but now brisk winds were blowing every which way; here on the bridge the wind was easterly. New fires were leaping up, and they spread quickly, and in a very short time terrible blasts of hot air and showers of cinders made it impossible to stand on the bridge any more.
---
Now not many people walked in the streets, but a great number sat and lay on the pavement, vomited, waited for death, and died. The number of corpses on the way to Nagatsuka was more and more puzzling. The Doctor wondered: Could a Molotov flower basket have done all this?
---
Father Cieslik was bursting with some inside dope he had, but he waited until the conversation turned naturally to the mystery of the bomb. Then he said he knew what kind of bomb it was; he had the secret on the best authority—that of a Japanese newspaperman who had dropped in at the Novitiate. The bomb was not a bomb at all; it was a kind of fine magnesium powder sprayed over the whole city by a single plane, and it exploded when it came into contact with the live wires of the city power system. “That means,” said Dr. Fujii, perfectly satisfied, since after all the information came from a newspaperman, “that it can only be dropped on big cities and only in the daytime, when the tram lines and so forth are in operation.”
---
About a week after the bomb dropped, a vague, incomprehensible rumor reached Hiroshima—that the city had been destroyed by the energy released when atoms were somehow split in two. The weapon was referred to in this word-of-mouth report as genshi bakudan—the root characters of which can be translated as “original child bomb.” No one understood the idea or put any more credence in it than in the powdered magnesium and such things. Newspapers were being brought in from other cities, but they were still confining themselves to extremely general statements, such as Domei’s assertion on August 12th: “There is nothing to do but admit the tremendous power of this inhuman bomb.” Already, Japanese physicists had entered the city with Lauritsen electroscopes and Neher electrometers; they understood the idea all too well.
"Tokyo's first indication that [Hiroshima] had been destroyed by a new type of bomb came from President Truman's announcement of the strike, sixteen hours later."
The concept of Atomic Bombs was accessible to the public. Robert Heinlein wrote a short story in 1941 ("Solution Unsatisfactory") featuring an American atomic weapons project that concludes that nuclear bombs are impractical (something about the hard part being to make a bomb that only blows up one country) and instead produces a radiological "dust" that's used as a city-killing strategic weapon. Around the same time period, John Campbell (editor of the magazine "Astounding Science Fiction") correctly deduced the location and purpose of the Manhattan project from large number of American physicists changing their subscriptions to addresses in Los Alamos, NM.
From what I've read of Hiroshima survivor narratives, however, not many of them were familiar with the concept of atomic bombs. The common themes seem to be an initial reaction that they were hit by a surprise ordinary air raid with a bomb happening to hit nearby, then later (after seeing indications of the scale of the destruction and hearing radio reports about the Americans using a new type of bomb) guessing that it was some kind of large thermobaric or fuel-air bomb.
The government and military leadership very quickly figured out it was an atomic bomb. The Imperial Japanese military knew about the theoretical possibility of nuclear bombs and had its own relatively small nuclear weapons R&D program.
They can't have thought it was a large thermobaric or fuel air bomb as the first of those were deployed in Vietnam. Theoretically, they were being worked on by the Nazis but the knowledge of this would have been no more widespread than the knowledge of the potential of the atomic bomb.
My brief reading would imply the concept of Atomic Bombs wasn't "common knowledge" in the average citizen, but the general concept was available to the elite/intellectual class (just based on various approaches undertaken).
Politician Winston Churchill was an avid reader of Wells's novels, and in a 1924 magazine article wrote:
"Might a bomb no bigger than an orange be found to possess a secret power to destroy a whole block of buildings - nay to concentrate the force of a thousand tons of cordite and blast a township at a stroke?"
Luckily physicist Leo Szilard was another Wells fiction fan, and possibly the novel referred to above helped inspire him in 1933 to think of the concept of a chain reaction based on neutron release.
I think the great depression, and the dustbowl were the greatest things that ever happened to this country. It forged a certain character and sensibility that would’ve been very difficult to achieve otherwise. We would never of had Hank Williams, for instance, or the Carter family. Feel free to add to this list.
My mother (born 1928) and her large extended family were working-class people who lived through the Dust Bowl firsthand (and obviously the Depression). Were she still with us she would eloquently explain how devoutly they would have preferred not to have had that experience.
More to your argument: she and my father (a native of the Northeast who spent his childhood in Oklahoma), and many of their respective relatives both there and in the Northeast, thought that the U.S. was on the way to collapse as a society until entry into World War II became the type of unifying national effort that was needed.
Yes, I appreciate that. I was being a little provocative. I can’t imagine anyone really wanting to live through all that, but in retrospect, people do seem to love mythologizing things like that. I intended my remark to be somewhat satirical.
Anyone have insight as to why government agency HR departments suck so much? My gf recently went through the hiring process and they basically left her hanging for 4 months. Then there was an offer but paperwork was staggered and without warning. (If you do not fill this out in 2 business days we didnt warn you about we may have to postpone your start date) Also have other people related to other agencies that are unanimous in reporting delays and incompetence. Bad incentives? Regulation?
For related context; I put in applications at three National-But-Not-Government places, and all three took three months to tell me 'yes' or 'no'. I'd given up on them all months before they told me I was hired. So, not a government thing so much as... well I don't know. Suckiness.
In fact the municipal job got back to me much faster. With a 'no', but still.
Can't speak to America, but in the local government job I was briefly in, it was down to a hiring freeze thanks to the austerity measures after the 2008 economic crash in Ireland.
Even when vacancies are permitted to be advertised again, that does *not* mean that you have a job; generally, they put the successful applicants on a panel, from which vacancies may be filled as and when they arise. Because it's in part down to budget constraints; if the government of the day is feeling the pinch, an easy (relatively) way of showing the public that you are Doing Something is to announce that you're freezing any new civil service hiring (for the lower ranks; the higher grades seem to make out just fine).
Because the public have the general impression that "huh, civil servants, well-paid cushy jobs with a pension and no work to do, just sit around drinking tea and gossiping" so they respond reasonably well to "no more hiring on and wasting public money". However the public *don't* put it together that "no new hires" has anything to do with "I'm waiting six months for my passport to be renewed, this is a disgrace!" Yeah, it's because the passport office hasn't been allowed take on new staff to cover the workload, is why.
So even if your department has a vacancy, you may not be allowed fill it. It all depends if you can bargain with the relevant authority about "can we have three of the projected one hundred and fifty new hires?", always bearing in mind that every local authority and civil service department in the country is *also* looking to get the chance to fill vacancies.
Hence stories like Nancy's friend and the court reporter job: you advertise, interview, and set up a panel - and if in five years' time you're allowed hire a new court reporter due to the previous one retiring, you either contact the panel members or more likely, have a new round of applications and interviews.
To quote from the email calling me to interview for clerical officer in the civil and public service:
"Qualification and placement on a panel is not a guarantee of appointment to a position."
Your gf got off easy. One of my friends was kept hanging for quite a few years for a court reporter job she really wanted. The job never happened, and she probably missed opportunities.
I agree with the others. No incentive to do better. In most cases not even much HR to deal with you - but a side-job for someone who feels he/she has other things to do. Anecdotes from Germany: 1. Once I got hired by court admin, 30 teens fresh from school in one room, 3 judges or so came inside. Each of us said one sentence about who and why. Judges went out for a minute, came back, told us: "You are all hired." (They had invited us by school-marks.) 2. A week later - after I had been at a state-of-the-art job-selection for the labor-office-admin with glorious results - I got an offer from the labor office (point is : They are FULL of HR-experts, so they used them). One week late, sorry guys. 3. If you want to become a school-teacher the standard way, it is all smooth. Study, practice time, then admin assigns you to your school. If you are non-standard, YOU apply at school. As no one personally cares how much classes are missed due to lack of teachers AND schools have no HR to speak of - they usually do not even care to answer your application. Ever. No "received, thanks", no "sorry, best wishes". 4. work for gov.funded German Academics Exchange Service / Goethe-Institute: Guys, thanks for all the bucks. But your "HR" spells "H... r.....". 5. Same work for privately funded Bosch foundation: HR? That was family. At 20% the Goethe-pay.
In a democracy, the incentive that is supposed to make politicians improve things is that it will get them votes. I doubt that many votes have been won through improving HR departments, so I would expect them to be very much unaligned with voter interests.
I have no insight into the nuts and bolts of this or any HR department, but I will tell you from my experience that the best thing that you can do is forge some kind of personal connection inside the process. Sometimes everything comes down to the person in front of you. I have dealt with immigration, customs, and any number of other organizations and I really think it’s the only angle you’ve got sometimes. I arrived at Toronto airport, coming from New York one time with a sick dog in a cage. It was the whole reason I was bringing the dog to Toronto, I could not afford the vet bill in New York for the operation that that dog needed.
She had an infected uterus because she had never been neutered. She had bled all over the bottom of the cage during the flight. I had to deal with an official who was in charge of these matters. There was some paperwork that I lacked. I told him my whole story. And then he carefully led me to the correct response to his question. Whatever it was.
It didn’t really matter because it was some essential tick box that had to be ticked off and he made it very clear to me. By the way he addressed the question how I should answer it. In other words, he bailed me out.
If you cannot get a face inside a bureaucracy, you’re fucked.
In defense of bad bureaucrats everywhere, you must remember the two Laws of Government Service:
The Second Law, which everyone hates, is that no government employee, under all but the most extreme circumstances, shall be punished for poor performance.
This is a necessary corollary of the First Law, which is the that no government employee, under any circumstances what-so-ever, shall be rewarded for good performance.
I've worked in government before, including on employee recognition committees. It is no exaggeration to say giving someone a $50 Starbucks gift card for, say, being the best employee in the entire department requires 50+ hours of employee effort, including multiple written statements from senior executives. Anyone appointed by a governor will usually just slip you $100 under the table to give the employee rather than wasting 4 hours doing the required paperwork.
And this is systematic. Not only is the HR person habituated to a system where any reward or punishment for performance is literal urban myth but so are all the people she depends on who might need to approve or comment on your girlfriend's hiring.
If she stays there too long, she will acclimate to these incentive structures as well. On the flip side, government is so desperate for talent that you can do some incredibly important stuff at a hilariously junior level.
Wait, they *let* you have gift cards??? Me and the other girl who worked on a multi-million pound school building project weren't even allowed accept two bottles of wine from one of the sales reps at Christmas because Bribes. Incentives. Not Allowed! 🤣
What really was annoying is the head of the department got an extra allowance for Doing The Work, which amounted to signing the papers we put in front of him, while we did the actual work. So it goes!
It's all tied up with anti-corruption initiatives, which are hilariously misaligned; oh no, a $50 gift card? We must have every piece of paper in triplicate! Meanwhile, as seen from some past scandals, the guys at the top are flying their mistresses off on foreign holidays on the tax payers' dime. But that's okay because they're the important guys, the bosses who would otherwise be drawing down yuuuuge salaries in private industry (why the dickens they don't go and work in private industry, then, is never answered).
Taking a gift from sales reps is potentially corruption, because it might incline you to serve their interests instead of those of your employer. A gift from your employer is no problem, because you're supposed to be serving their interests.
Considering we were squeezing the pennies out of the budget, because we had external auditors paying annual visits and querying "why is there a fifty cent difference between the quote and the invoice?", we hadn't much wiggle room to be bribed, given it was all done by tender awards 😁
EDIT: To clarify, the sales rep dropping in with the wine for Christmas was *after* the contracts had been signed and the orders filled, or nearly so, and he was working off the usual practice of "a little token of appreciation to the clients to keep them sweet" but Da Boss told us "nope, no can do".
Ah, well. The boxes of chocolates for Christmas that got dropped in by our regular suppliers (not the tender contractors) were opened for everyone in the office to nom down on, I guess it's different if it's not for anyone specific and the evidence gets eaten 😁
I have a question for post-rats: I am interested in learning more about practical techniques for meta-rationality, but I'm unable to find any good references which directly explain or enumerate methods. David Chapman's Meta-Rationality looks like it would be such a reference,, but the parts discussing meta-rationality (four and five) are not yet written.
Has anybody written anything good in this vein? I've started reading Kegan's The Evolving Self but it's really slow going
Maybe? But Chapman's thesis is that level 5 reasoning can at least be demonstrated, or otherwise communicated (if not through precise methods), and I don't see anybody directly arguing that they have achieved a transcendent (and totally detached!) state through these principles
We probably need to distinguish between the levels as Kegan defined them, and as the post-rationalists weaponized them.
As I understand it, in Kegan's version, level 1 is literally a baby, level 2 is a selfish child (or a retarded adult), so for a discussion about relatively sane adults, only levels 3, 4, and 5 are relevant. Level 3 means having a set of ad-hoc rules with no coherent system, kinda like GPT (it can answer any specific question, it just often doesn't make sense, or it contradicts other answers). Level 4 means having a system and following it strictly (e.g. Christian morality, or libertarianism), so the person not only has opinions, but can also derive conclusions about new situations and defend them logically; but only within the system they identify with. Level 5 means being able to see the situation from different perspectives, and say things like "well, from the consequentialist perspective, we should do X, but from the deontological perspective, we shouldn't" or "you know, I generally prefer the solutions based on free market, but this specific situation seems like an exception, because..."; so it's like the person is outside the systems, using them as tools, as opposed to being locked in one system and unable/unwilling to consider the alternatives.
And, as Kegan already said, levels 3 and 5 can seem quite similar from outside. Both break the rules sometimes, the former because they never really cared about the rules (only maybe used them as a rationalization, when convenient), the latter because they understand that this set of rules only applies to this domain, and this situation is not the typical case. But from outside, the latter also sounds like a clever rationalization. Metaphorically speaking, level 3 believes they can overcome gravity by positive thinking and waving their hands; level 5 believes they can overcome gravity by building a rocket; level 4 insists that both of them are crackpots because gravity is a law and must be obeyed.
Here, level 5 can be demonstrated by demonstrating that you understand the rules (in a way that level 4 would accept as correct) *before* you explain why you are breaking them anyway.
Chapman, if I remember it correctly, is a guru of some Buddhist group. Buddhism has a honorable ancient tradition of strawmanning everyone else as two extreme groups, and then declaring itself as a superior Middle Way TM. Chapman follows this tradition, using language appropriate for educated modern Western audience. He noticed that he could match those two strawmen to Kegan levels 3 and 4, and declare himself (and modern Buddhism) to be the superior level 5. Nice!
In his article, Chapman called one of those two strawmen "rationalists". This was completely unrelated to the LessWrong community; Chapman just used this word to translate some old Buddhist expression to modern English. (Later, when explicitly asked, Chapman confirmed on Twitter that the LW rationalists are *not* the "rationalists" from his article. Sorry, I don't have the link.) However, some of his fans interpreted the article in exactly that way, and called themselves "post-rationalists" in the sense of "just as smart as the LessWrong community, but much cooler". They insist (for no good reason; and Chapman disagrees with them) that the LessWrong community is at level 4, and they are at level 5.
Here, there is nothing to demonstrate, because the accusations are vague. If someone says "a map is not the territory", is that level 4 thinking (because only one territory) or level 5 thinking (because multiple maps)? Depends on whom you ask -- if you ask me, that is precisely what level 5 means, but if you ask the post-rats... uhm, you'd have to ask them. From my perspective, this debate has degenerated into empty status claims. If someone insists that you are level 4, because they feel superior to you, there is no way to prove them wrong.
So, if you want to know more about post/meta-rationality, it depends on whom you ask, because different people have different definitions. If you ask Chapman, it will probably mean (his interpretation of) Buddhism. If you ask people who identify as post-rationalists, it will probably mean "kinda like rationality, but don't say things that might offend the cool kids", for example tone down your atheism, pay more respect to ancient wisdom (but of course feel free to ignore it whenever convenient), and do not associate with anything that is low-status among the cool kids (such as Harry Potter fanfiction, or Yudkowsky in general).
From my perspective, level 5 methods are basically: realizing that the map is not the territory; passing someone's "intellectual Turing test"; being aware of the consequentialist / deontological / virtue-ethics conceptions of ethic and where each of them fails; and also noticing the "games people play" which ironically also applies to the very concept of Kegan levels.
That's interesting that Chapman is leading a Buddhist group in the way you describe and reinforces my suspicion about how the hard/new part of every single one of his texts is a work in progress
One thing from both your comment and Chapman's articles is that it doesn't really address a central point of Kegan's thesis, which is that stage 3 isn't merely magical thinking, but rather in stage 3 the self is *identified* with their social relationships with other people. Specifically Kegan rejects the idea that independent thought is a skill that must be developed, but that there is a qualitative difference in capability between stage 3 and stage 4. This identification of the self can lead to magical thinking as necessary to maintain the social fabric. Note I think Kegan is wrong here (namely: quantitative differences once accumulated are in fact qualitative; there is no mechanism for transitioning from stage 3 to stage 4 with wholly separate modalities of thought; adults exhibit behavior consistent with both stages depending on context; even the most entirely-socially-embedded teenager perceives herself separate from her friends sometimes)
There's probably a lot of alpha in somebody rewriting a bunch of these philosophical treatises without the excess verbiage and inconsistent technical vocabulary but it seems like anyone who purports to do so has their own agenda so maybe it's hopeless.
I haven't really read any book by Kegan, only the summary on Wikipedia.
But there are many development scales in psychology, whether it is Freud's 5 stages, or Ericsson's 8 or 9 stages, or... a few more that I forgot. All of them are leaky abstractions that seem to point at something important -- sometimes they seem to explain something perfectly, other times any attempt to apply them to the situation at hand seems forced. People may exhibit different stages at different contexts, or the same behavior has a little bit of this and a little bit of that. (Which as far I know was also perfectly clear to Kegan.)
> stage 3 isn't merely magical thinking, but rather in stage 3 the self is *identified* with their social relationships with other people.
By comparing people at stage 3 to GPT I meant that when you ask them "what do you think about X?", they are actually trying to answer is "what do my friends/authorities think about X?" (a bit like GPT asking "what do the texts I learned from say about X?").
And if you point out that their answers to X and Y somewhat contradict each other, they can't really resolve the situation, because all they know is "my friends say X" and "my friends say Y", so the only way they could answer your question would be to ask their friends what *they* think about the tension between X and Y... but that might be socially inappropriate, so it's not going to happen.
I think it is quite likely that Chapman misunderstands (or misinterprets) Kegan's levels, because I suspect he is not interested in Kegan's levels per se, he just uses them as a modern justification for the ancient Buddhist argument (his "bottom line" was already written centuries before Kegan).
I would imagine the transition between Kegan's levels 3 and 4 like this: First you just copy the opinions of your friends and authorities. At some moment you become aware that this is what you do, and you ask yourself where do *their* opinions come from.
The motivation could be a status thing: copying someone's opinion makes you lower status than them. But having a different opinion from your group would make you an outcast. So you need to figure out how to make an opinion that would not be a copy of someone else's opinion, and yet your group would approve of it. How do the currently high-status members of the group do it? There are basically three possibilities:
* Maybe the high-status members just say random shit, and everyone copies them. Then the right move is to figure out what makes them high-status (are they physically strong? attractive? rich? well-connected?) and try to achieve the same... and then people will pay respect to your random shit. This seems like a behavior of a small local group, e.g. the mean girls at high school.
* It could be an "infinite" regress, where your master copies the opinions of his master, etc. (Does not need to be literally infinite, just long enough that no one remembers where it began.) Then the right move would be to study your master's master, or someone else who is more ancient than your master, maybe an ancient sacred book.
* Or it could be that there is a system that your master follows (could be science, religion, or some political -ism), and then the right move is to study the system.
The third (and to some degree the second) option leads you to replace blindly copying the people around you with following an external source. -- Like what we are doing right now: instead of "what do people around us say about Kegan's levels?" we go "so what are the Kegan's levels actually?", i.e. replacing a peer group (post-rationalists) with a system (Kegan's system). Which changes us from "people who are impressed by what Chapman said" to "people who might contribute their own original opinions on Kegan's levels". (I am overthinking it here. Don't worry, I don't take it too seriously, I just find it amusing to notice the games people play, and how I am not really different myself.)
> it seems like anyone who purports to do so has their own agenda so maybe it's hopeless.
That's the beauty and the tragedy of level 5 -- why should I spend my time becoming yet another expert on Kegan's level, when I could spend the same time inventing my own system instead? Preferably some kind of system that places *me* on the top, so it would oriented around my strengths. ;)
AFAIK, no city has tried out the following scheme to combat local residents getting pushed out of neighborhoods they’ve lived in their whole lives due to gentrification/rising rents:
The gov tracks avg rent costs in an area. If the rent increases more than x% in y period of time, then every resident who has lived in that area for longer than z years receives $ they can use to pay for increased rent to stay in their same neighborhood, if they’d like. Alternatively, if they don’t want to stay, they can still take the cash and move elsewhere.
In contrast with rent control, direct cash transfers to long-time residents seems like it would avoid disincentivizing a) new, higher density buildings and b) capital improvements to older units - since real estate firms won’t have their profits capped. It would allow neighborhoods to get “nicer” while still giving the opportunity to long-time residents to stay in the same area.
Has a subsidy program like this been tried anywhere? What are the reasons I’m not thinking of for why this is a bad idea?
You're trying to subsidize your way out of a shortage of something, which won't work.
Theoretically, it might support a political push allowing more housing construction, but I'd be pretty hesitant of that, as people have lots of reasons to be NIMBY's and making them wealthier isn't going to make them less NIMBYey.
I don't know if this is exactly what you are thinking of, but there is the HAP (Housing Assistance Payment) scheme currently in operation in Ireland. It (notionally) replaced RAS (Rental Accommodation Scheme) which was meant to help people who were on rent supplement for longer than 18 months.
"he Housing Assistance Payment (HAP) is a form of social housing support provided by your local authority.
Local authorities make a monthly rental payment on your behalf to your landlord, subject to terms and conditions, including rent limits. In return, the HAP tenant pays a weekly contribution towards the rent to the local authority.
HAP allows you to work full-time, while still receiving housing support."
When I was working in local government, I saw this starting to be rolled out. There were problems, I don't know if they've been sorted out since I left. Two main problems were:
(1) The rental limits were way too low. Market rates for rents were much higher in many instances than the total limit the government would cover. This created a chicken-and-egg situation where government didn't want to commit to paying whatever rent might be asked, becuse of fears that landlords would hike up rents to the limits in order to squeeze the most money out of the government, and because it's public money there's a limit on how much can be spent
(2) Because of said chicken-and-egg situation, while technically the rules said "we will only pay X amount and if the landlord charges more, we won't sign a contract", in practice due to lack of accommodation and people being in need, a nod-and-wink approach of "on paper, get the landlord to say that the rent is X. In practice, he will charge you Y, and you pay the difference between X and Y under the table".
You have good landlords and good tenants, bad landlords and bad tenants. There are private, usually small-scale, landlords out there (in Ireland anyway) who treat tenants as their private piggy bank and look for ways to retain the deposit when the tenant leaves, avoid doing any repairs as requested, etc. If the rent in the area is (imaginary figure) €600 a month for this place, but the government will guarantee payment up to €800 a month, then Mr Landlord will slap on a cheap coat of fresh paint, claim he has carried out a total refurbishment, and charge €800 for the same place under the same conditions.
But if the government only commit to paying €600 a month, and the market rate really is €800, then you have people who qualify for the payment but still can't afford to pay an extra €200 and so they're still in need of housing.
It's the problem of trying to provide a necessary service without over-burdening the tax purse, and if anyone can figure out the golden mean of "there will not be landlords trying to use this as free money or tenants who abuse the scheme", you tell me how it works.
I've had an idea of a zero-cost version of this: All publicly owned rent-controlled apartments switch to market pricing, and the current tenants get a cash subsidy that covers the difference. Might possibly be extended to privately owned apartments by taxing the increase in rent.
How high are you going to go with the cash subsidy? Because if the market price is €1500 a month, and the tenant is having problems paying this, and the government guarantees they will pay the tenant 15% of this as a subsidy, I promise you there are landlords out there who will calculate "15% of 1500 is 225, great, now your new rent is €1725, into my account by the 15th of the month please!"
The problem for the publicly owned housing is that the people in it are usually those who can't pay market rates because they're on low incomes, unemployed, pensioners, or on social welfare, so the state will end up paying the majority of the rent anyway by handing the tenant money with the right hand to pay the rent and taking it back with the left as the rent. You're not saving money by doing this.
There would be no limit to the subsidy, just as there is currently no limit to the implicit subsidy that rent control comprises. The difference is that the recipient of the subsidy would be free to use it in whatever way they deem best, so e.g. instead of paying €500 for a €1500 apartment, they might get a €900 apartment and pocket the extra €600, and the €1500 apartment would go to someone who values it.
My view is that if landlords know there's a subsidy, the rent will mysteriously and miraculously rise to that limit. So the formerly €900 apartment is now €1500 and you've downsized but haven't saved money.
1. Cost. Rent can sometimes increase a lot in a short time in booming areas. If rent increases by an average of $1000/month for 1 million households over an x year period, that's $12 billion. That's in the ballpark of the entire yearly budget of a city of several million.
2. Inflated housing costs. When people can pay more rent, landlords charge more. This would make a positive feedback loop where rent prices would rise in response to cash transfers and cash transfers would increase in response to raising rent prices. High rent should increase house prices as well.
3. Discourages people from moving until they've lived z years (where z is the long-term resident cutoff) in one place. Ideally (in an economic sense) people move to where its most efficient. You can imagine someone losing their job in their current city and getting a great job offer in another city - but they're only 10 months away from passing the long-term resident threshold in their current city and getting cash transfers. So they stay on unemployment for 10 months.
4. Fairness. For any proposal, no one will ever agree entirely on what's fair. In this case, cash transfers will tend to go to areas that are booming. These are the same areas where income and social mobility tend to be higher. Someone in the rust belt will get nothing. On net, this policy likely redistributes funds from poorer people to richer people.
5. We may not want long-term residents to stay. Sometimes what makes a bad neighborhood bad is high crime rates. High crime rates may be due to a high concentration of people who commit crimes living in the area. Gangs, drug dealing, and related crimes may benefit from a high concentration of people committing crimes (eg: it's hard to form a gang if you're the only person in your neighborhood willing to join a gang). Dispersing long-term residents may be a large part making these neighborhoods better.
Los Angeles just passed a somewhat analogous system - check out LAMC 165.09, Relocation Assistance for Economic Displacement. Glendale, California has another roughly analogous system, check out GMC 9.30.033 Rent Based Termination. Unincorporated Los Angeles County too - Pasadena might as well.
These things are done in conjunction with rent control, so you're not gonna be able to separate the effects out.
But generally speaking, no one knows these laws exist and very few people follow them.
This problem is a lot trickier than others, because renters want low rents and owners want high property values (and rents). There's really no way to do both simultaneously. From my perspective, it's a lot more impressive to raise property values than it is to lower them - you can get cheap land most anywhere on Earth. It's only in a few places that people will pay $3,000 a month for an apartment. And if people are willing to pay that much to live there, you must be doing something right. Otherwise, they'd just move, no?
"And if people are willing to pay that much to live there, you must be doing something right. Otherwise, they'd just move, no?"
That's the crux of it: the suggestions about "This city has low cost of living, why don't you just move?" only work if the city *also* has comparable good jobs - sure, you won't get a Bay Area salary but you also won't pay Bay Area prices.
But if you don't have in-demand skills that can command a good wage? Or if the reason the cost of living is low is because the place is dying on its feet, there are no decent jobs, and all the young people have moved out?
Dublin is the prime example of this in Ireland: it's pretty much *the* major centre of employment. If you want a good job, you move to Dublin. Heck, if you live in certain areas of the country and you want *any* kind of a job, you move to Dublin.
This means rents are high because housing supply is low, but people don't have the option to 'just move'. To the point that lack of affordable housing is beginning to adversely affect the shiny high-paying tech jobs our governments so desperately need. The other problem is that it publicly perceived (be it true or not) that the governments of whatever stripe are beholden to landlords; many of the public representatives and public servants in some jobs (like the police force) are private landlords, and the enforcement agencies are toothless.
I am interested in the idea of using concepts from finance, such as the idea of having a portfolio of investments, the idea of diversification, and the idea of hedging; but applying them to non-monetary aspects of one's lifestyle.
For a somewhat contrived and labored example:
You could think of your schedule for the week as a "portfolio of time investments". Then when you're deciding how best to allocate your temporal resources, you might have a consideration like "I want to have fun and enjoy myself each week, but I want to be wary of the hedonic treadmill phenomenon". In that case, rather than going all-in on one one extreme strategy like "I'm going to party and seek thrills everyday" or the opposite, "I'm going to engage in silent meditation everyday" (or even picking a middle point like engaging in more mundane, lower-intensity fun every day), you could "hedge" by spending some of your time in partying and some of your time in meditation every week, to cover both bases.
Maybe this concept is too mundane and obvious to even be worth someone spending their time on, but nevertheless I just wanted to see if anybody has examples of anyone going a little deeper and writing explicitly in these terms?
What you're really looking for is a budget. Typically, your investment portfolio is just a small part of your overall expenditures. Most of what you spend is on immediate needs, paying the rent and buying food and such.
The time you spend is similar. Some of it fills immediate needs. You need to spend time eating and sleeping. You probably have a job. Outside of that, now you get into a mix analogous to the breakdown between spending on entertainment and investing. Some of that time you'll use to do things that are immediately gratifying. That would be going to parties. Some of it you should use on things that may or may not be enjoyable as you're doing them, but will result in delayed reward in the years and decades to come. Those include exercise, building relationships with people, raising children perhaps, continuing to educate yourself and learn new skills.
It's inside of this last category that you might think like an investor. The payoff of these is less certain than activities that result in immediate gratification. You may learn things that become obsolete, put a ton of effort into a marriage your spouse loses interest in. Investing in health will absolutely never fail you. Eat well. Sleep well. Meet the minimum exercise guidelines, for both aerobic activity and resistance training.
I've seen people use these as analogies but I'm not sure it goes much deeper than that. Are you looking for something quantitative?
Probably the simplest concrete analogy would be utilitarian: you have value from individual activities with decreasing marginal value vs exposure, with some uncertainty. The decreasing marginal value will make the solution different than a Markowitz portfolio but if you picked utility equations out of a hat you could compute your efficient frontier.
All of the usual arguments against MPT would still apply of course (optimal output has sensitive dependence on model parameters, the risk model is unrealistic, you're comparing apples and oranges, it's extremely difficult to estimate utility let alone a non-trivial covariance model)
Thanks, this is helpful already. The "decreasing marginal value vs exposure" concept is definitely part of what I'm looking for.
Finding some quantative writing on this *would* be cool (like if someone has actually developed some techniques for explicitly applying finance theory to directly picking out a portfolio of time investments / lifestyle invterventions, or quantifying expected utility over time of various lifestyle strategies or something like that, it would be interesting to read that).
But, I think my interest is more just in the area of communication and advocacy. I'm looking for language I can use to get across ideas to other people more effectively. I'm thinking of scenarios where I've been talking to friends or writing strangers on the internet, and I've gone into some kind of lifestyle intervention or routine that I've found helpful, and run into conceptual blocks / confusions discussing why they might be beneficial. Examples might be:
- The meditation example from above. Someone objects "Isn't it easier to just do more fun stuff every week?"
- I suggest I want to spend less time watching youtube at night and move that time into being outdoors, and one objects "What does it matter how liesure time is spent? If you enjoy watching youtube then there's nothing wrong with just doing more of that."
Of course we can all spend our time how we want, and there's no need for me to defend my personal choices to other people, but I think there's actually a technical mistake being made in these examples, having to do with not recognizing the phenomenon of decreasing marginal returns and how that can be remedied by spreading one's strategies out, which would be helpful both to me and my counterparts if I could communicate it. Like there's some consistent reasoning mistake that's associated from a too-simplistic form of hedonism or maximalism, and maybe these investment portfolio analogies are a more concrete way of pointing out the issue.
I'm not sure about anyone who's written at length on this but I would expect some utilitarians/EAs to have given it a go, so trolling through lesswrong might turn up something.
One thought for your theory is that the value of time spent on an activity is not always monotone decreasing. If you consider piano scales, or spaced repetition, or training for sport, then daily/repeated exposure is necessary to the body or mind; similarly meditation appears much more valuable past a certain amount of time, such as 30 minutes or 1 hour, and engineers widely agree that they need to reach their "flow state" in order to be productive. So, the "correct" value function might be *increasing* to some point, and then decreasing after---and depend on whether you reinforce on later dates.
It's definitely interesting to consider---these types of considerations remain underresearched in the ghetto of "self-help", but the flipside is that you can come up with workable new ideas
I've wondered about informal book discussion where you read a book and then have a site to look for people to discuss it with. I suppose you could do that on reddit or wherever, but it might be nice to have people who were open to phone calls or zoom meetings.
That's a nice article, silent book clubs sound interesting. I often go out to cafes to work/read or even just to browse the internet and read blogs. It's rejuvenating being around people, even if I'm not directly engaging with them
Why is it that virtually all high-end male US sports teams are called the Placename Nouns, but quite a lot of female teams are called the Placename Noun?
I'd guess it's because most male teams were named a long, long time ago, and that was the traditional way to name a team in the US. Female teams are much newer and I suppose singular names are now the fashion. The few male US soccer teams I can think of have singular names, so that would support the theory.
There may well be something true-ish about this. Plural club names seem to be more of an Anglo thing (epistemic status: thinking about it for a few minutes) and perhaps the conventions are getting flattened by the dreaded globalist mallet to become more in line with the rest of the world.
There are enough counterexamples (the recently-renamed Washington Commanders; the decades-old Baltimore Blast) that I think you’d have to do some actual statistics to see if there’s even an effect worth explaining. Is there a correlation by gender? Nation? Year named? Sport?
The name of every NFL and MLB team is plural. There are 3 singular-form names in the NHL: The Wild, The Lightning, and the Kraken. The Jazz are the only NBA team with a singular-form name, but there are multiple single-form WNBA names. There are lots of soccer teams of either sex with singular-form names, I don't feel like counting them all.
There are no professional female baseball, football or ice-hockey leagues (that I have heard of. If they exist, I think it is fair to assume that they are much newer leagues (and with newer teams) than MLB, the NFL, the NHL and the NBA.)
So out of the 4 major US men's sports leagues, you've got only 4 teams with singular names. Not going to look it up, but I am confident all of those teams are much younger than the average team age in their respective leagues.
I think my hypothesis holds: the average female team name is much, much newer than the average male team name. (Even if soccer is a wash, because almost all those teams are newer than the majority of baseball, football, men's basketball, and ice hockey teams.)
Or is the OP considering other sports I'm not considering? If not, a key fact here is that the number of men's teams in US sports outnumbers the number of women's teams substantially, since, by my count, men play 5 team sports whereas women only play 2.
The Houston Texans were named in 1999, and the Washington Commanders were named just last year, but both still hew to the “all plurals” scheme of the NFL. Meanwhile, English Premier League soccer club Tottenham Hotspur (referring to a fighting cockerel) has been playing under that name since 1882 (140 years ago). These aren’t cherry-picked examples, they’re the teams my sports-watching friends follow.
I agree that the average women’s team name is indeed much newer than the average men’s team name, obviously due to the relative newness of women’s professional sports in general. But there are enough new plural names, and old singular names, that “everybody uses singular names these days and women’s teams are newer” isn’t a slam dunk for me. The situation seems muddled enough that probably only a proper statistical regression, covering many sports from many English-speaking countries, would convince me of -any- thesis regarding team name plurality, sport, gender, age, et cetera.
> The Jazz are the only NBA team with a singular-form name
You forgot the Orlando Magic, the Miami Heat, and the Oklahoma City Thunder.
There are some unlike phenomena being counted as like here; I would say the names of the Wild and the Kraken are malformed.
Jazz, magic, heat, lightning, and thunder are all mass nouns and so, lacking singularity or plurality, can appropriately describe a team. Kraken is a count noun and shouldn't be singular in the name of a team. Wild is not a noun at all.
Lots of WNBA teams have this kind of issue as well. Liberty is a mass noun; storm, lynx, fever, and dream are all count nouns. Mercury is either a mass noun or a proper noun, depending on whether it’s referring to the planet or the chemical element. Sun and sky seem ambiguous to me; there’s only one of each, except in a sci-fi context.
"The wild" is a noun phrase, but "wild" within it is not a noun. Due to the way the phrase is constructed, it is obligatorily arthrous, like "the poor". It is not comfortably compatible with calling the team "the Minnesota Wild".
(Also, while "wild" [considered as a lexeme, rather than a token] can be a noun, it isn't a mass noun; it's obligatorily plural like "scissors". It would be unexceptional to refer to "the wilds of Minnesota", but not possible to refer to "the wild of Minnesota".)
EDIT:
Looking at your example more carefully, I see that I gave the wrong analogy; I had been thinking about Breath of the Wild. The conclusion is the same; "in the wild" is constructed in the same way as phrases like "in the nude" or "in the raw" where there is no reason to analyze the adjective as having been derived into a noun.
Just to challenge the idea, I stumbled across an article in the NY Times about a bunch of old men who like to play hockey: Oregon Old Growth is the team name.
Years ago I helped rename a men's recreational league hockey team from "the Tops" (we had our moments but were not that) to "the Fossils" (we definitely were that).
Still a plural noun....but we became somewhat legendary in that league by adopting new jerseys with the old Sinclair Oil cartoon dinosaur on the chest as a team logo.
Anyway I'm looking right now at the list of team names in the rec league that I now play in. They are I would say three-quarters plural nouns. The remainder are various non sequitors or in-jokes (e.g. "Facewash" which is a hockey slang term, "Hot Doggin", etc), or in a few cases the name of a sponsoring tavern.
Now I'm looking at the list of the area women's rec league which my wife plays in. It's similar but the ratio is somewhat different -- maybe three-fifths of the team names are plural nouns rather than three-quarters. Still plenty of in-jokes e.g. "MsConduct" (a misconduct being a particular type of infraction in ice hockey).
Women are naturally group- bonding and happier to share a collaborative identity? Pure speculation on my part and because it sounds like a fun thing to kick around.
I'm pretty sure most of the WNBA franchises were initially started by the same person who owned the NBA franchise in that city. They chose the name, not the players.
I wouldn't put much credence in that as a theory of why they might name their teams after mass nouns. But _which_ nouns they use does seem to show a sex effect; the Dream, Sun, and Sky are names that I would be more surprised to see on male teams.
Say you have a negative personality trait. But you don't know you have it. You know the trait is there, but you think it's in other people instead of you. You are "projecting" it onto other people.
The allegation of "Biden crime family" always struck me as overblown, and the allegations of the trumps being involved in criminal stuff much more credible. But I'm also a Democrat more generally so I have to ask whether that's my partisan bias playing out.
But one thing that makes me think that, no, it's not just my partisan bias, is to consider how people thought about these two before they were presidential candidates. Biden has been in DC for like 50 years and I never heard these allegations of corruption until 2020. Not even when he was Vice President for 8 years. He was seen as a walking gaffe machine, but not as corrupt. Whereas it seems like trump was always seen as an unethical, corrupt, and generally bufoonish businessman, way before he ever ran for president.
Makes me think that no, it's not my partisan bias. What I think now is what everyone thought before presidential politics became a source of motivated reasoning from everyone.
Trump had...quasi-legitimate businesses. There is no honest way for Biden to have accumulated his lifetime fortune in politics (and even moreso the Clintons who went from "broke" to eight figure bank accounts in less than 15 years).
And Biden being an honest person is an extremely recent invention. Go and find the McLaughlin group where even Eleanor Clift is saying Biden is too dishonest to be in office.
Care to unpack that? Are you saying ALL the people who call the Bidens a crime family are themselves from "crime families" or fear they might be and want to distract from the possibility? Even Jill Biden's ex-husband? Or are you only saying this about some other SPECIFIC person - and if so, who?
If you think Bill Stevenson (Jill's ex) is from a crime family, is that family...the Bidens? Or if not, then...what "crime family" IS he from and what crimes are they supposed to have committed?
Nah, I will just let it lie. Far too much work separating the wheat from the chaff there. But if I had to throw someone into the bucket, Comer would be one.
Projection can be about someone you love as well as yourself I might add.
If I had to say, I would say, I am implying that the trump family is much closer to a crime family than the Biden family is.
Here’s an easier way; anyone who thinks that the Bidens rise to the level of a crime family who, at the same time, thinks the Trumps aren’t.
That’s a good number of people.
Also, as a back up;
>So, with the revelation of MASSIVE & WIDESPREAD FRAUD & DECEPTION in working closely with Big Tech Companies, the DNC, & the Democrat Party, do you throw the Presidential Election Results of 2020 OUT and declare the RIGHTFUL WINNER, or do you have a NEW ELECTION? A Massive Fraud of this type and magnitude allows for the termination of all rules, regulations, and articles, even those found in the Constitution. Our great “Founders” did not want, and would not condone, False & Fraudulent Elections!>
Anyone who believes this is true.
>The termination of all rules, regulations and articles<
Trump says a lot of stupid shit but in the specific part you want to parse he appears to be saying that a thing he asserts THE OTHER SIDE is doing (rigging elections) has the NEGATIVE EFFECT (which he is decrying and implicitly does NOT WANT) of obviating "all rules, regulations and articles". He's not saying HE wants to end all the rules. He's saying it's BAD that (according to him) his opponents are doing a thing which (if allowed to stand) has the effect of making all the rules irrelevant.
Alas, Trump is the master of scissor statements. He says a LOT of things that sound to his enemies like TRUMP wants to do bad thing X while sounding to his supporters like Trump is decrying that his OPPONENTS want to do bad thing X.
(I have issues with the REST of that tweet but the specific part you said "parse that" about seems...fine? You could quibble that it's an overstatement, but hey, overstatement is practically what twitter is FOR...)
minimising what people do is always a great way of letting them get away with stuff
. They were only kidding. They didn’t really mean it. It’s not that big of a deal. Sure, maybe nothing he says is to be taken seriously.
> LOT of things that sound to his enemies like TRUMP wants to do bad thing X while sounding to his supporters like Trump is decrying that his OPPONENTS want to do bad thing X.
The very pith and compass of projection.
“I’m going to lock up all my enemies and suspend the rule of law, because my enemies are trying to lock me up and suspend the rule of law..”
Trump has literally never said the "I'm going to" part of that - this is something you have hallucinated. IT ISN'T THERE. It's not "minimizing" to notice that a thing which hasn't been said, hasn't been said.
ALL presidents say a lot of stuff which seems, on the face of it, to be nonsense. I'd prefer to judge them mostly on what they DO but failing that, on what they ACTUALLY say rather than the worst thing their enemies can HALLUCINATE them having said.
I think you are misreading it. “ A Massive Fraud of this type and magnitude allows for the termination of all rules, regulations, and articles, even those found in the Constitution.”
In other words, what the Democrats did allows me to suspend rule of law in order to make things right. That is what he is saying.
That is not *objectively* what he is saying, it is merely how people of your political persuasion have chosen to *interpret* this inherently ambiguous statement. The phrase “allows for” doesn’t say *who* is being “allowed”. You unjustifiably assume the *who* is Trump.
If we aren’t TDS-deranged and thus DON’T take every Trump statement as a new excuse to reiterate to our friends how terrible this guy is, we have to admit the statement was somewhat ambiguous.
Or if we start from the premise that Trump *isn’t* a worse-than-Hitler moral monster but merely a pretty bog-standard politician engaging in the usual sorts of self-interested political grandstanding, then the obvious interpretation of the ambiguous statement is that he’s saying *those other guys* are the ones trying to suspend the rule of law.
(I DO start from something resembling that last premise, so I did reach that conclusion.)
> (I DO start from something resembling that last premise, so I did reach that conclusion.)
Yeah, you made that clear.😆😆
I think you’re reading of the text is a tortured one.
Their massive fraud etc. “allows” etc. to mean
“ their massive fraud etc. “
-brings about
-Is An attempt to
-Causes
-Promulgated
Gosh…What a very clever use of the word .“allows”…
I am very skeptical of your interpretation.
> it is merely how people of your political persuasion have chosen to *interpret* this inherently ambiguous statement<
Wow! Do we know each other? You have no idea what my political persuasion is, all you know is I think Donald Trump is a serious asshole. I wasn’t trying to hide it.
William Barr thinks he’s a serious asshole as well fwiw. I might be Willam Barr for all you know but is that the political persuasion you had in mind when you lobbed that mudball? Am I allowing for a suspension of civil discourse or advocating for it, I wonder?
And You’re right, maybe..he didn’t say “Im going to…” exactly.
He would much prefer others to do it for him, once he allows it.
Even if it's amazing, people will still be unhappy. Even if it sucks, people will still be happy. Emotionally, I'm just looking forward to seeing what happens next.
"Emotionally, I'm just looking forward to seeing what happens next."
Basically the same here. I'm interested in what happens with AI. I'm interested in what happens with the possibly-ambient-conditions new superconductor. I'm (morbidly) interested in which direction politics goes.
Seems to be begging the question. If doom were a certainty, it's out of one's control (as global events usually are) and there's nothing to gain by agonizing over it. Uncertainty is better at driving fear and anxiety. Or rather, uncertainty coupled with soothsaying and perceived risk, as there's never certainty in the long-run.
You'd have to qualify what "happy future" means. Humanity wasn't all miserable all the time prior to the industrial revolution, people expressed being happy despite the harsher living standards. Seems to be a moot point. The only real question of importance is long-term survival. For that, we have to leave the planet anyway. People keep forgetting this: the planet's destruction is a 100% certainty in the distant future, as the sun transforms. We can't live in a closed-loop of indefinite sustainability despite what anarcho-commmunists want to believe.
And also, depending on who you ask, we're in a race against "grabby aliens" to claim outer space.
So the prescription is the same as it ever was told by zen adherents and the like. Focus on the people around you, on what you can control.
I seriously freak out any time I think about the heat death of the universe and “why is there something instead of nothing”. Compared to that, AI doom is not that bad. And my method of violently repressing the thought works for both.
Yeah projected destruction of any and all existence is a mind boggler and I can imagine an advanced humanity trying to engineer it's way out of it. I wonder what they'd try to do.
I have a lot of faith (perhaps irrationally). Things might change to be unrecognizable and maybe not even human but the idea that things were ever really good is totally wrong. I'm actually excited for the variance, things could be really bad but also really good
Hopefully our inheritors are our mind children in some capacity but otherwise I don't wish to constrain them with my parochial values
Yeah, I think AI will either kill us all, turn us into useless eaters, or strip all meaning and achievement from life. Frankly I cope with it by shoving it as far back in my mind as I can. I just wish we could ban AGI worldwide. But that ain't happening so oh well.
I find myself more concerned with the desolation that comes from lack of work available for most. The optimists (not unlike commies in this regard) like to project that people would become "artisans" as though we'd all collectively start making furniture for no one and play musical instruments. Realistically, humanity will lean harder into consumption which it already does. People will just plug into VR / tv land. And when the chips fall and the economy is forever changed, there will be scant means for plebs to advance and build wealth (with the current sociopolitical structure). People would need access to capital to build things, to research, to do anything interesting. Maybe in a future where energy is virtually "free", this won't be mechanically difficult, but we have to ensure that we aren't just left with toys to play with while elites are the only ones with the means to do perform anything of consequence.
Also the progression of "secular cycles", of periods of inequality broken up by war or some other means, might be over. After this transformation, I'm not sure what could displace the rich. You'd have ownership still, but little in the way of competition. This is probably around the point humanity will be itching to colonize space.
This is going to be a natural selection sort of thing, though - I've thought a lot about what will happen when we have actually good VR, because one of the AI things that's definitely coming is individually-tailored-to-your-specific-tastes music / tv / movies / porn / VR.
You think we have superstimuli NOW? Sure, people play 72h straight in asian gaming cafes and drop dead, but they're the vanguard and most vulnerable, able to immerse themselves in the equivalent of 8-bit experiences. Just wait until we have an AI-driven feedback loop based on EEG / microexpressions / galvanic skin response etc that can optimize content for you specifically in real time, AND learn your entire individual mental and emotional sensorium / stimulation map over time, with the ability to layer and unfold stories and experiences both over time and over your entire emotional and mental capacity gamut.
So fast forward that a tiny bit, and fast forward economics to AI-driven post-scarcity, and you end up with 60-90% of the world's population as UBI "coffin slaves" hooked up to literal individually-tailored heavens. And all the UBI has to support is food/water/waste/electricity and a tiny pod that takes care of your base physical needs while you're plugged into virtual heaven.
I've often thought about whether this is a net good or net bad to participate in bringing into the world. Because individually, you're literally giving everyone who participates heaven - and it's not necessarily infinite universe tilings of cheezits and bimbo porn like most people jump to / object about right away, your sophisticated coffin slaves can be watching and participating in experiences as complex and engaging as they can literally conceive of and enjoy...imagine the unfolding mental and emotional experience of being Isaac Newton in his annus mirabilis, or 7-layered recursive stories that unfold and iterate as strange attractors around some central unifying set of insights that gradually unfolds for you in deeply engaging ways *while* teaching you a new subject, and more.
But I digress, back to natural selection - obviously, there will be an immensely strong selection effect, where people dedicated to actual reality, with all its difficulties, mess, complexities, and suffering, will be the only ones shaping reality and reproducing.
And this is ultimately what convinces me it may be a net good - not only do you give everyone who opts out of reality literally the best possible set of experiences available to them, but you vastly improve the remaining stock of people tackling the problems of reality, and have literally selected them to be intrinsically more engaged and prone to enjoying that mess of tackling problems in reality. It's win / win!
So the world splits cleanly into Lotus Eaters and Vetinari's, and both sides of the equation can be happy with this result.
>Banning Agi to preserve human meaning seems worse, like a deeper sort of death of the human spirit than the death it would solve
Were the countless non-european socities who not only never acheived industrialization but who were seemingly in a state of permanent technological stagnation devoid of "the human spirit"?
As an observation, it is very hard to envision a bright future for humanity if your own circumstances are dire. And it doesn’t really matter how clever you are.
Also it is very common for people to say the world is going to hell in a handbasket as they get older. It eases the path to dying; FOMO is reduced.
Cliche, but gratitude is everything. I don’t know your story but the very fact that you are in a position where you can ponder the ultimate fate of humanity rather than your needs being met day to day puts you in an immensely privileged position relative to most humans who have ever existed, including a solid majority today. Think about all of the amazing opportunities available to you, how amazing the world around you is, all of the fascinating ACX articles you’ve gotten to read, etc. Think about all of the people in your life and how much you love them, how lucky you are to have even one person who loves you. If you don’t have any people in your life, get a dog and experience the unconditional love. All of this will help you stay in the moment and appreciate the beauty of life in the face of a scary and uncertain future.
Finally, if you have trouble getting into that mindset (as I definitely do), I highly recommend psychedelics for a shotgun blast into it. Among other things, the psychedelic experience is mostly about softening your heart and opening yourself up to overwhelming feelings of love and gratitude in the face of an often scary and uncertain world.
It’s easy to dwell on the amount of suffering in the world, and if it truly brings you pain there are ample opportunities to help others in need. Otherwise it’s just an excuse you’re telling your self to avoid taking responsibility for your own personal fulfillment and mental well being.
Oh, sure, we can certainly -do- all kinds of things instead of -dwelling- on things. I am cautiously in favour of doing things, myself. But I thought the original question and your response had to do specifically with mental perspectives and happiness.
I don't mean to be too quarrelsome about this, but as a subject for rumination 'at least I, personally, by dint of a random saraband of nucleotides in a particular time and place, am having a good run of it... while the black wall of doom creeps ever nigh, and teeming multitudes of my fellow humans roil in hunger, privation, and ignorance' just sounds like a bad trip.
No. If the developments of the next few centuries are anything remotely like the developments of the last few centuries, then the future of humanity will be happy in ways we can't even comprehend.
The general trend over many centuries has been for human wellbeing to rapidly improve beyond anyone's wildest imagination. This is in spite of Earth's raw natural resources constantly being depleted. Sometimes this entails finding new uses for previously underutilized materials.
For example, centuries ago uranium was not on anyone's radar as an energy source. Nuclear power remains a viable non fossil fuel energy source, and there is little reason to think that centuries of technological progress won't be able to find efficient renewable energy sources or other energy sources on Earth or off of it.
We can't know for sure that the future will be wonderful. Maybe we'll hit a point where for whatever reason the general trend of human history will suddenly reverse. But inasmuch as we can predict the future, using the past as our guide, there is no reason to expect that and every reason to assume the opposite.
The past gives us little reason to struggle envisioning a happy future.
Of course, when someone is depressed, they may lose objectivity and view everything in their personal lives, or in the world at large, to be hopeless.
But the evidence suggests that far from an apocalypse, the future will be wonderful beyond what we can imagine, just as the present is wonderful in many ways beyond the wildest imagination of people not too long ago.
Perhaps a depressed person who feels negatively about humanity's prospects can consider the objectively rosy global outlook, and question whether their own personal future is objectively as gloomy as their depression makes them feel.
Are you sure people from the past would find the present wonderful beyond their wildest imagination? Undoubtedly they would find it *astonishing* beyond their wildest imagination, but do you think they would mostly find it wonderful, once they had lived in our era for a year or two and gotten a decently clear picture of what life, people and relationships are like? One of my grandfathers was 80 when I was born, and lived to be almost 100, and I got to know him pretty well. He is the furthest-in-the-past person with whom I have had direct experience, and I am pretty certain he would not find the present at all wonderful. He would be horrified at the lack of civility, by how few of their neighbors people know, by the loss of gathering places like church (I don't think he was religious at all, but he regarded religious institutions as part of the fabric of society), by how few people read (he read books til the end of his life, including keeping up his Greek and Latin by reading the classics), by pollution, by how much less natural beauty there is now that so much open land has been built upon. I do think he would think modern medicine is wonderful. On the other hand, that might be balanced out by thevkinds of problems & dangers we face now that never once crossed his mind when he was living: overpopulation, pollution, nukes, antibiotic resistance, crossover of animal pathogens into our species due to our encroachment on animal environments, widely available highly addictive drugs, addictive social media powered by poisonous algorithms, auto fatalities, and, of course, fucking Artificial Intelligence.
There are only two famous people in the past that I think I know enough about to make a guess at how our era would look to them: Alexander Pope (18th century Brit) and Virginia Woolf (late 19th, early 20th century Brit). I think they both would have found it a nightmare.
I was actually pretty taken with Harari's idea that we are happiest as hunter gatherers. For what it's worth, I think some of the happiest days of my life have been those on backpacking trips, and this despite the fact that in many ways backpacking is a terrible fit for me: My athleticism is average at best, & I hate being dirty and love my creature comforts. And yet the backpacking life, the closest I have come to the life of a hunter-gatherer, gives me a wonderful sense of wellbeing and regular zaps of ecstasy.
Backpacking is not very close to Hunter Gatherer life, but manual labor outside is. When is the last time you did a week of ten hour days outside doing hard work?
Painted houses for a summer when I was in college. Also lived on a communal farm and spent many days outside doing things like putting roofs on outbuildings and fixing fences, shoveling paths through the snow between the various outbuildings and animal enclosures we had. I understand what it is to do a hard day's physical work.
And I disagree with you about outdoor manual labor being closer to the hunter-gatherer life than backpacking. A group of backpackers doesn't just spend the day together, they cook and eat together and sleep near each other and decide together on the plan for the next day. That's much closer to hunter-gatherer life than what manual laborers do after work, which is go home to a placewhere they have showers, TV, cold beer and a soft bed. And while backpacking is not work in the same way that manual labor is, it is very physically demanding. You're carrying 40+ pounds on your back, and walking up to 10 miles a day. If you're hiking in the mountains the first day you hike uphill all day long.
My mother lived to 91 and didn't start to slip mentally until her mid-80s. She had many of the complaints you quote from your grandfather and some others too; and being a highly verbal person (first girl on her high school debate team, first woman in her entire extended family to attend college, etc) she could expound on each of those problems at length and with references. And did, often.
But without fail if one of us asked her point-blank whether she'd rather be back in the USA of her youth, we'd get back a withering "have you been kicked in the head??" look. She was just as clear about the overall picture as she was about the various smaller irritations.
I stand by my sentiment. I don't doubt that if you teleported people from the past to the present, eventually they might start complaining about it and even claiming the grass was greener on the other side.
My claim was that if you would describe the following to average people 100 years ago, it would seem too good to be possible:
Global life expectancy will double.
Global GDP will increase by a factor of 20.
Travel time across the Atlantic will drop from 5 days to 7 hours.
The environment will become much less polluted than the horrors of the present day. In just the 30 years from 1990 to 2019, the death rate from air pollution will roughly be cut in half.
The rate of car accident deaths in the USA will *drop*, in spite of the number of cars per capita increasing by a factor of over 6.
The average number of working hours per year in the USA will decrease by around 40%, giving workers much more time for hiking and other pleasurable activities.
The percentage of global population living in extreme poverty will decrease by over 80%.
War related deaths per capita will drop by around 90%.
Climate related deaths per capita will drop by 99%.
Instead of a minority of people in the wealthiest countries owning telephones that are *extremely* expensive to use, a large majority of the word's population will own telephones that are inexpensive and that they can put in their pockets and carry around.
Most of the world's population will even have internet which gives them access to more information than the greatest libraries in the world, and let's them see and talk to anyone else in the world with internet in real time, if they couldn't do that with their phones.
At least some of the numbers you would present to people 100 years ago involve some significant lying with statistics: For instance death rate from air pollution has been cut in half between 1990 and now. So what was air pollution doing between 1923 and 1990? I just looked this up -- did not find graphs of deaths, but did find measures of amount of various pollutants. Looks like between 1923 and 1990 air pollution increased by a factor of 7. Now it is only 3.5 times as high as 1923 air. So I would say current air quality is not exactly a selling point to your potential time traveler. How many of your other numbers have the same flaw, i.e. they are not measures of how much these things changed 1923-2023, but of how much they have declined from their worst point, some timeconsiderably *after* 1923? And you do not include measures of a number of other things which seem to me to be more direct measures of human wellbeing: suicides per capita; measures of social connection (how much time per week a person spends with friends and relatives, for instance); direct questionnaire measures of life satisfaction.
Visto che il blog è seguito in tutto il mondo e visto che la traduzione automatica è ormai accessibile a chiunque, eventualmente anche a mezzo di plug-in, perché non rendere questo spazio dei commenti multilingue? Si ristabilirebbe così quella che in passato era la norma, per cui i dotti di ciascun paese scrivevano nella loro lingua, usando all’occorrenza traduzioni. Il fatto che la comunità scientifica (e con essa gli intellettuali in genere) oggi parli prevalentemente inglese è un anacronismo nell’era dell’IA. Che ne dite? Ci guadagneremmo tutti in qualità della prosa, se non altro. Ovviamente se il padrone di casa non fosse d’accordo non se ne farà nulla.
Mi sembra molto, ma molto, ma molto più semplice aspettarsi che quelli che non sanno l'inglese usino la traduzione automatica per commentare in inglese.
L'alternativa è che la sezione commenti diventi una torre di babele, difficile da leggere verticalmente. Non vedo dove sia il vantaggio.
Tra l'altro, se c'è una norma che è sempre esistita nel passato è proprio l'esistenza di una lingua franca (che a lungo è stata il latino) conosciuta da tutte le persone colte, e usata in ambiti colti e internazionali.
Sulla questione della lingua franca: Poincaré scriveva in francese, Einstein in tedesco. L’appiattimento della comunicazione scientifica sull’inglese è successivo alla seconda guerra mondiale. Vero che prima era diffuso il latino, ma si trattava comunque di un intermedio neutro o almeno percepito come tale, mentre la situazione dell’inglese di oggi mi pare con pochi precedenti. Si tratta di un accidente geopolitico che ora l’IA può ovviare, nell’interesse di tutti.
"Vero che prima era diffuso il latino, ma si trattava comunque di un intermedio neutro o almeno percepito come tale, mentre la situazione dell’inglese di oggi mi pare con pochi precedenti."
Non vedo perché sia un male. Se una lingua franca è anche lingua madre di centinaia di milioni di persone, meglio così. Vuol dire che meno persone dovranno sudare per impararla.
Comunque il precedente che mi viene in mente è l'italiano, che fu adottato da tutti i letterati della penisola quando era lingua madre solo dei toscani, e quindi non una scelta "neutra".
Oppure il greco, che era parlato, e scritto, per tutto il mediterraneo.
Insomma, non c'è niente di più normale, nella storia dell'umanità, dell'esistenza di prestigiose lingue internazionali, che raramente sono state "neutre".
Ad ogni modo l'IA non può spodestare l'inglese. Se in giro per il mondo devi parlare con un francese, uno svedese, un russo, un indiano, un cinese, usando le corde vocali anziché tastiera e schermo, quale lingua si parlerà? Quasi sempre l'inglese, ed è una fortuna; meno male che il genere umano si è messo d'accordo su una lingua che quasi tutti imparano!
L’idea è appunto quella di vedere se sia gestibile (immagino ci siano plugin adeguati per i browser principali, altrimenti ci si potrebbe lavorare). Il mio sospetto è che ci possano essere delle differenze qualitative negli argomenti che vengono discussi nonappena si rimuovono certe barriere linguistiche che sembrano molto sottili e insignificanti (tutti noi vogliamo raccontarci di sapere l’inglese come madrelingua, ma è veramente così? Io anche dopo anni di vita all’estero e scrivendo professionalmente articoli scientifici in inglese non posso comunque dirlo). Scrivere in italiano e tradurre mi rende comunque responsabile degli eventuali errori o inestetismi introdotti dal traduttore; se la traduzione avviene invece a valle è sempre possibile chiarificare le sfumature eventualmente perse in un secondo momento. È la prima volta nella storia che si può fare questo a scala. Se non dovesse funzionare oggi, probabilmente lo farà tra un paio d’anni.
"Scrivere in italiano e tradurre mi rende comunque responsabile degli eventuali errori o inestetismi introdotti dal traduttore"
I think that is only a problem if your readers don't know that you've used a machine translator.
You can either:
1 - post a comment in a non-English language expecting others to run it through DeepL, and they'll surely know there might be tiny flaws in the translation
Or:
2 - run your own comment through DeepL yourself, then post.... and add a warning that your comment has been machine translated, so they'll surely know there might be tiny flaws in the translation.
I don't see the practical difference, and personally I'd prefer it if everyone did it the second way.
If I wrote a comment in English and someone replied to me in German, expecting me to google translate it, I'd feel slightly annoyed. I'd think: couldn't you google translate it yourself?
If the answer is I need a plug-in to read the comment thread, I'd still think: why put such barriers to entry? why can't people who don't speak English get a plug-in that translates their comments into English as they're posted (with "translated by DeepL" written at the end of every comment)?
Una ragione per non farlo potrebbe essere se la cosa non viene presa sul serio oppure viene osteggiata perché il fatto di comunicare in un’altra lingua non ha un impatto neutro sulla comunicazione. Ne sanno qualcosa i quebecois, che difendono il francese anche per difendere la propria cultura: l’esito dei dibattiti non è lo stesso in una lingua o nell’altra e certe tematiche ideologiche dominanti nell’anglosfera non riescono a penetrare in altri contesti linguistici. Però immagino che la comunità razionalista e coloro che le gravitano attorno abbia almeno un po’ di fiducia nel fatto che gli argomenti possano camminare colle proprie gambe, senza il supporto del bagaglio ideologico che viene colla lingua.
L’idea era che ognuno scrivesse nella propria lingua, non mi sembra necessario tradurre nella lingua di chi ha iniziato un thread, come mi pare tu stia facendo. A parte questo, l’università di Bologna la conosco abbastanza bene, ci ho fatto un postdoc di un anno. La storia dei matti che gestiscono il manicomio mi ricorda il lavoro di un filosofo francese di cui ora mi sfugge il nome; chatGPT lo saprà. Ma non so che c’incastra con unibo
This word I don't understand. I read better than I write. My grandparents were born in Calabria. So the Italian I heard growing up in 60s was a kind of dialect I think.
The model of students running the university, I think is an important one to rediscover.
Guattari is the name of the philosopher. I used to go to Calabria on vacation as a kid, but I’m from the north. In effetti le origini dell’università come istituzione sono molto interessanti, anche se temo che il modello più diffuso oggi sia quello prussiano, per cui l’idea di dare potere reale agli studenti non è contemplata. Onestamente non sono sicuro che sarebbe una buona idea con gli studenti di oggi. Ma immagino che gli studenti potrebbero avere idea diversa
#self-promotion: Hi all, mentioned a few months ago that I was starting work with a startup specializing in climate tech VC. We recently spun up a [free] slack community, called the Climate Investing Club, for people to discuss ways to save, spend, invest, & donate money in ways that have positive climate impact. It has about 250 ppl in it thus far!
I'm a long-time fan of Scott's writing and medical doctor and data scientist / academic AI researcher.
I'm building a commercial product using LLMs in healthcare and have a detailed product description and plan, proof of concept and funding to complete development.
I'm looking for 2 outstanding developers to work as paid consultants to work with me in parallel on this project.
1) an AI engineer with advanced and up-to-date skills working with LLMs and development experience with the OpenAI API.
2) a full stack developer to build the application around the core ML functionality
I'm looking to build V1 extremely quickly, so if you're able to move quickly and you have space in your schedule to assist with either of these roles in the coming weeks and months, please reach out to me via the below email:
mcbrideliam278 [AT SYMBOL] [STANDARD GMAIL URL]
I appreciate that Scott has classified threads occasionally, however this is a time-sensitive request so I'm hoping it's OK for me to post this here, Scott. Please let me know if you'd like me to take it down :)
The primality testing evaluation only included primes ("yes" answers) in the test set, instead of 50/50 primes and composites, or just uniformly random numbers. This masks an overall _increase_ in accuracy by failing to account for false positives (a model that _always_ responds "yes" when asked if a number is prime would be 100% accurate according to their evaluation).
The code evaluation task counts the model as having dramatically decreased performance due to an intentional, minor change in output format. Once that's corrected for, the code performance actually improved over the evaluation period.
This is maybe old news, but I still see people using this paper as proof of a perceived decrease in the output quality of ChatGPT (which might be real!), including in the comments of this blog. This paper is a shockingly motivated and incurious assessment and is a prime example of why you should actually read the things you're about to cite, rather than just looking at the charts and author affiliation.
When I found an essay by Sebastian Junger in the July 31 issue of National Review, I was surprised. He usually writes about men and conflict, and I somehow expect him to show up in Atlantic or The New Yorker. Junger makes a comparison between smartphones and handguns in an essay titled “Our Chosen Chains.” I’m not sure he convinced me on the sidearm issue, but what caught my attention was his acknowledgment that smartphones condition users in behaviors that mimic obsessive-compulsive disorder and facilitate consumerism.
He declares that smartphones work hand-in-hand with the consumer economy to make “young people dependent on things that are bad for them and then monetizing those dependencies for a lifetime.” Compulsive shopping, poor diet, inadequate exercise, and excessive social media use take their toll on these victims, but drug manufacturers are happy to supply costly drugs that allow them to “continue their bad habits without having to die.”
I’ve long felt that the Great Recession, or whatever it was that started in 2007 and didn’t really wind down until about 2012 to 2015, was just a public loss of confidence in consumerism — or, as economists like to call it, an abatement of “discretionary spending.” About 40% of the economy depends on people buying shit they can’t afford on credit, and dealing with it later. When people stop wasting money, i.e., irresponsible spending, Wall Street suffers, and passes on its pain.
Are smartphones making us schizophrenic? Are they just another vehicle for delivering propaganda, or are they the perfect shepherd’s crook to pull young people onto the treadmill of consumerism?
There is a long term increase in the proportion of wasteful spending on luxury goods especially by young kids. Kind of interesting in juxtaposition to their claims they cannot afford anything anymore. Social media seems a big culprit, and possibly their inability to afford housing and saying home with parents habituates them to wasting their discretionary income in a way that someone trying to maintain a fledgling household would not.
I am always surprised by a firmed with a good job who loves at home with parents and is 27, but travels internationally a lot for leisure. Nothing wrong with that per se, but I have trouble imagining it as a good path to functional adulthood.
The price of meaningless luxuries is now very low relative to the price of major life improvements. If home-ownership is totally out of the question, spending your money on vacations makes a lot of sense. Or, in comic form: https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/inflation-2
I mean maybe. One the one hand I have always been a big proponent of splurging on Hagen daz ice cream instead of the cheapest but then driving a Honda instead of a bmw or whatever.
Ok the other hand spending $10,000 on a Rolex or $500 on a baseball cap with Gucci on it or whatever ain’t a great idea if you cannot afford a house.
Isn't smart phone use the culmination of the Society of the Spectacle which uses images to commoditize our time as a vehicle for consumerism. See Debord
Thread on Joseph Rotblat, the only scientist to leave the Manhattan Project on grounds of conscience. I suggest we have a Rotblat Day on Aug. 31, to commemorate the spirit of questioning whether a dangerous project should be continued.
Sure, but there's no causal link from decisions of scientists w.r.t. Manhattan project and somehow getting to an implausible fictional world like that; the objective geopolitical reasons that made international control of nuclear weapons unlikely wouldn't change the slightest.
International control of nuclear weapons and energy might be possible with in an alternate history with a de-facto strong world government capable and willing of overriding the sovereign interests of even the strongest individual countries; and none of the powerful countries (now or then) would voluntarily tolerate approaching that situation; they are part of the UN only because it was explicitly designed to not be able to dictate anything whatsoever to the major powers.
Sure, they could have boycotted the Manhattan project, I'm not contesting that. But that would be just the issue of individual morality and public performance of it, not something that somehow brings closer the stated goal - it's the exact equivalent of refusing to join the MP unless there was world peace and every kid got a pony for Christmas.
If 100% of all the MP scientists refused to join MP unless unless there was international control, and the MP scientists would actually manage to coordinate such a full boycott without any defectors, that's still not something which could plausibly result in weapons being handed over to international control. Literally nothing they could do has any chance in getting *that* change, even if they performed a mass suicide after destroying all scientific data, that would still just result in a delay of creating nationally-controlled nuclear weapons (i.e. "Stalin gets nukes first") as no government would fund the enormous expense of creating nuclear weapons if they wouldn't have control over them, that just cuts out all the motivation. On the other hand, there are many governments (with that high stakes, IMHO *all* major power governments) which will rather violate all kinds of civil rights to force a sufficient number of defectors to develop nukes anyway, historical nuclear development has its share of kidnappings, threats to families, executions and murders, etc.
Nothing the scientists could do has any a way to create an international order where (unlike our reality) there existed an supernational organization to which all of USA, UK, France, USSR and China would be willing to delegate their sovereign right to build whatever weapons they desire. Like, there are different orders of magnitude for political power, and even the total combined power of the world's scientists is far below the power needed to overturn the fundamentals of current world order (and I'm not exaggerating - I literally think that "handing over nukes to international control" is impossible without a fundamental overthrow of the current/post-WW2 world order) and force the nations to surrender their interests to some new world order (that didn't/doesn't exist) by giving it control over the ultimate deterrent veto a few nations currently have.
I've always thought the opposite: the use of nukes in WW2 made the cold war more dangerous, because it established a terrible precedent that it is permissible to nuke cities. It made people associate "nukes" with "glorious victory".
Nukes have a reputation as an especially terrible weapon that you never want to see used. I doubt they would have that reputation unless they actually had a body count.
The reason they have that reputation is that the Soviet had them, so people in the West were afraid of being on the receiving end of them in a nuclear escalation.
... only for the war to end years later than it did, with millions more deaths (especially on the Japanese side). No, the Manhattan Project scientists were humanitarian heroes, as implausible as that sounds. Countless prophets, feel-good ideologies, and diplomats have tried for millennia to create world peace and failed. The Manhattan Project scientists succeeded. (Yes, it's not a perfect world peace, but we haven't had a war between great powers since WWII.)
Your view is based on a false premise - that there was some kind of absolute cosmic necessity to obtain from Japan an unconditional surrender.
Historically, though, most wars don’t end with unconditional surrender. Most victories don’t entail unconditional surrender. Most nation at war don’t declare over and over “we’ll never, ever settle for anything less than unconditional surrender!”
If you have even a slight interest in history extending further back than the world wars you should be able to see how absurd that is.
Because winners write history, everyone think the Japanese were mad, fanatical, unreasonable, unwilling to negotiate. But that is projection. The Americans were the ones unwilling to negotiate.
Any Japanese source implying that anything other than a fight to the death was unthinkable, must be understood as coming from a country whose enemy had made it abundantly clear they would never negotiate, therefore the only options left were either a desperate fight or unconditional surrender (which of course would have meant likely death for the very leaders expected to surrender, who would be hanged by the Allies). But obviously it was the Americans that had framed it that way. Who knows what the Japanese would have done, if the Americans had said they were looking for a negotiated victory (the norm in modern history, I can't stress it enough). Since they were rational human beings who knew they were losing a war, logically we must assume that it would have been possible to negotiate with them.
The extreme case: once the Japanese had been defeated at sea, America could have told them: “if you retreat to your borders as they were before the war, we’ll allow you to become our ally against the Soviets” and the Japanese would have thought they were getting off easy. That is what I consider the minimal acceptable victory and I'm using it for the sake of argument, of course I think the Americans could have gotten away with demanding and obtaining much more than that, without having to nuke anyone. Instead they kept swearing that they would never settle for anything less than UNCONDITIONAL SURRENDER, which to the Japanese meant a blank check for the Allies to turn them into a colony. The Potsdam declaration would logically be interpreted by the Japanese as meaning that the Emperor they worshipped as a god would be dethroned and his dinasty terminated, and perhaps he'd be executed. In order to get the Japanese to agree to those unnecessary terms, the noble Allies mass murdered endless innocents from the sky.
Apologists for Allied atrocities call the victims of Allied bombs, nuclear and conventional, “collateral damage”. But that is not what the word means. Collateral damage is when you aim at a tank, or even at a factory, and people die. But the innocents who died in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, or in the bombings of residential districts in Japan and Europe, were themselves the target; the purpose was to kill THEM, as many as possible of them. Many people today imagine that to target civilians like that must have been normal and uncontroversial at the time, since “the good guys” did so. But no, it was not. You can tell for example from how the world reacted with scandal and condemnation to the bombing of Guernica, or of Shanghai. And in any case, such actions were in violation of the existing Hague conventions, and therefore WAR CRIMES, and rightly so (and only retroactively not deemed such because the winners were guilty of such acts). Since the leaders of the Allies were fervently committed to hanging war criminals, maybe they should have hanged themselves.
So - what would have happened if there had been no Manhattan Project until after the war?
Who knows?
Maybe, Japan would have surrendered even so, if as many argue the true reason they surrendered was the Soviet intervention.
Maybe, without the ability to drop nukes, the Americans would have come to their senses, would have put aside the crazy “unconditional surrender” logic, would have negotiated with Japan a victorious peace. President Eisenhower has often stated that nuking the Japanese was a mistake, because they were eager to surrender. Nuke apologists, who can’t conceive of any outcome other than unconditional surrender and show trials, will say Eisenhower must have lost his mind. But his statements make perfect sense, if you understand it to mean a conditional surrender, that is, an attempt to negotiate. The Japanese were indeed trying to negotiate with the Allies through the Soviets. The fact that there were sensible people like Eisenhower among the American leaders, suggests that a peace treaty might have been possible, so maybe the war would have ended that way, if there had been no atom bomb.
Also, since we’re playing with counterfactuals, consider that there was no way to predict with confidence that nukes would have made the Japanese surrender. In fact, it was likely that they would not. The Allies had already murdered from the air immense numbers of German and Japanese civilians with conventional bombs, and such criminal methods had had no effect on the morale of those countries. Some of the Japanese leaders were against surrendering even after the nukes had been dropped; what would have happened if such views had prevailed? The Americans would have continued to genocide the Japanese with nukes indefinitely. The death toll would have been colossal. That didn’t happen, but it was a dice roll. It could have gone that way.
Our view of history is warped by the glorification of the Allies. We still see them as “the good guys”. No, they were not. They were amoral, and only slightly better than the other side. Their leaders behaved like warmongers, sociopaths, war criminals, mass murderers, Genghis Khans, you name it. So I hold the guy who abandoned the manhattan project in high esteem.
"Because winners write history, everyone think the Japanese were mad, fanatical, unreasonable. That is projection. "
Do you think the 250,000 victims of Unit 731 would have agreed with that? Here's what they did: "Unit 731 was responsible for some of the most notorious war crimes committed by the Japanese armed forces. It routinely conducted tests on people who were dehumanized and internally referred to as "logs". Experiments included disease injections, controlled dehydration, biological weapons testing, hypobaric pressure chamber testing, vivisection, organ procurement, amputation, and standard weapons testing.
How about the Americans killed by kamikaze pilots or banzai charges? Was it projection for them to think the Japanese were mad, fanatical, and unreasonable? How about the military officers who staged a coup *after* the second atomic bomb was dropped, to prevent Japan from surrendering? Still not fanatical or unreasonable? How about the 200,000 civilians killed in the Nanjing Massacre, or the 120,000 Chinese civilians killed in retaliation for the Doolittle raids (which were done by America)?
I said this twice below, but I'll say it again: the Japanese killed 20 million Chinese men, women, and children, often with methods much worse than bombs (see Unit 731). They deserve zero sympathy. Demanding unconditional surrender and utterly humiliating such an evil regime was the only way to discredit the fascist ideology and prevent Japan from adopting a "stabbed in the back" narrative. Just look at what happened in Germany when the Allies made the mistake of accepting a conditional peace in WWI.
Can you please try to understand the meaning of what I say, instead of grabbing words out of context?
The words you quoted refer to the common view of the Japanese empire as incapable of contemplating defeat and committed to either victory or downfall. As I've explained, the Allied demands of unconditional surrender made it difficult for them to do otherwise.
I'm not talking about cruelty and ruthlessness. Of course they were cruel and ruthless.
So were the Allies, by the way. I'll never understand the worldview of those who think that the Japanese were monsters for mass murdering civilians, but the Allies were not monsters for mass murdering civilians.
"They deserve zero sympathy". WHO deserves zero sympathy? WHO? The people who ordered war crimes, or Hiroshima schoolchildren?
The mistake made in WW1 was to punish Germany at all (as if the war had been solely their fault, which is questionable). The Germans attempted to negotiate peace several times during the war. In 1916 they offered a return to the pre-war borders. The Entente should have taken that offer. Doing so would have averted the disastrous Russian Revolution, and probably WW2.
Out of curiosity, would you say the same thing if the USSR was at war with Japan, got the bomb first and dropped it? (Same situation as this universe, only swap USA with USSR).
Or, you know, we could have attempted a peace agreement with Japan? As far as we can tell, all we had to do is promise the emperor wouldn't get punished, but this is apparently worse than slaughtering women and children with bombs - and the end result was exactly the same, since the US not only didn't try him for war crimes, they allowed him to remain as the ceremonial figurehead.
> (Yes, it's not a perfect world peace, but we haven't had a war between great powers since WWII.)
MASSIVE hindsight bias. The manhattan project team had no good reason to believe that this wouldn't lead to an unacceptably high risk of catastrophic, large scale nuclear war, and it's not like we didn't get far too close on several occasions. What if there is a nuclear war in 2100 that kills 50 million people? Are they then complete fools with blood on their hands...?
The Japanese killed 20 million Chinese men, women, and children, often with methods much worse than bombs (see Unit 731). They deserve zero sympathy. Demanding unconditional surrender and utterly humiliating such an evil regime was the only way to discredit the fascist ideology and prevent Japan from adopting a "stabbed in the back" narrative. Just look at what happened in Germany when the Allies made the mistake of accepting a conditional peace in WWI.
"MASSIVE hindsight bias."
What you call hindsight bias, I call empiricism.
"What if there is a nuclear war in 2100 that kills 50 million people? Are they then complete fools with blood on their hands...?"
No, because nuclear bombs would then have prevented a major war for 155 years, and even when one did happen, it will have killed less people than WWII (with 60 million deaths). Would you have preferred to have WWIII in 1970, WWIV in 2010, WWV in 2070, and WWVI in 2100 instead?
>The Japanese killed 20 million Chinese men, women, and children, often with methods much worse than bombs (see Unit 731). They deserve zero sympathy.
Japanese people - not "the Japanese people" committed atrocities in China. That does not make killing anyone except the individuals responsible any less OK, or those victims who hadn't personally done anything wrong any less deserving of sympathy. Coming from the same country as evil people is not evil.
It's impossible to prove the historical counterfactual, but back-channel peace negotiations with Japan (particularly on the status of the emperor) may well have succeeded. They knew they were beaten, in particular given that the Soviet Union was about to declare war on them as per the Yalta agreement.
See my response above. Demanding unconditional surrender and utterly humiliating such an evil regime was the only way to discredit the fascist ideology and prevent Japan from adopting a "stabbed in the back" narrative. Just look at what happened in Germany when the Allies made the mistake of accepting a conditional peace in WWI.
Wait, what? Like Boinu says, trying to guess what would have happened if... is a mug's game, but the idea that the problem with the Treaty of Versailles is that it was too soft on Germany strikes me as a deeply dubious one.
I know there was a big discussion about trading last week, but I only just realized:
When people say that actively managed funds can't consistently beat passive index funds, what they mean is *after fees*- that is, from the perspective of the outside investor in the fund. That sentence framing ('active funds never beat passive ones over a long enough time period') is kind of deceptive, given that apparently a number of active funds consistently do- they just do so for fund owners, and not for outside investors. If you can consistently generate alpha, you can charge high enough management fees that your investors don't get the benefit of it. 'A number of active funds consistently beat passive ones, you just can't reap the benefits as an investor yourself' sounds like a more honest framing to me? And the end result is the same for investors?
Also, aren't there a number of closed funds that consistently have benchmark-beating performance? The Renaissance Medallion Fund is probably the most famous, but aren't there others too?
It's actually possible for Active funds to beat the index, for a few reasons. Amongst them are that even "passive" funds have to make trades to balance changes in shares issued, and that Active traders receive offers not available to the public at large.
"Also, aren't there a number of closed funds that consistently have benchmark-beating performance? The Renaissance Medallion Fund is probably the most famous, but aren't there others too?"
Yes but Medallion fund has to give back money each year to keep it under a certain size (I believe). You could think of this is a "fee" just paid in another name. The investors in the fund are able to get high returns but only on a certain amount of money, above that amount the strategies stop bringing as much return.
I just checked the discussion last week you mention, and what nobody brought up is that (as far as I know) many or most „active“ fund managers have their performance measured against some index that they mirror so closely that it is hard for them to be ahead of a passive index tracker after fees. Or perhaps these managers are just not very good. If you don‘t count the index huggers, the record of active managers improves (I think).
"When people say that actively managed funds can't consistently beat passive index funds, what they mean is *after fees*"
I can't speak for others, but when I say it, I don't mean that. I mean they can't beat passive index funds, period, and that's what the author of A Random Walk Down Wall Street means too. After fees, they're worse than passive index funds.
"That sentence framing ('active funds never beat passive ones over a long enough time period') is kind of deceptive, given that apparently a number of active funds consistently do"
Sure, and a number of stocks have consistently beat the market. The problem is telling which ones those are beforehand.
>I mean they can't beat passive index funds, period
This is an ideological belief system and not a facts-based argument. Research from S&P Global shows that 6.6% of active funds beat the passive ones *after fees* based on a 15 year lookback:
So logically an even larger number must beat passive funds before fees. Also you'd have to explain the performance of Warren Buffett, Peter Lynch, the Renaissance Medallion Fund, etc. The last one has averaged annual returns of over 60% for decades now
"Research from S&P Global shows that 6.6% of active funds beat the passive ones *after fees* based on a 15 year lookback"
If I randomly choose a passive index fund to invest in, there's a 50% chance I'd beat the average passive index fund after fees based on a 15 year lookback.
"Also you'd have to explain the performance of Warren Buffett, Peter Lynch, the Renaissance Medallion Fund, etc. The last one has averaged annual returns of over 60% for decades now"
I'm not doubting that no actively managed funds can consistently beat the market. I'm saying that if one exists, it's either nearly impossible to identify, or closed to the public (like Medallion Fund). An easily identifiable open fund that reliably beats the market violates the laws of economics, because why wouldn't everyone invest in the fund, driving up the prices of its holdings until they the fund can't beat the market anymore? You might be interested to know that Warren Buffett hasn't been beating the market in the 21st century: https://www.marketfighter.com/articles/warren-buffett-is-no-longer-beating-the-market
15 years isn't "the long run", and the probability that the outperforming funds after X years remain the outperforming ones with each successive year falls significantly. So not only do you not really benefit from this outperformance, there's no way to even identify who will provide it. The probability that your outperforming fund in the first 5 years will be beating the market in another 5 years is literally worse than a coinflip: https://www.spglobal.com/spdji/en/spiva/article/us-persistence-scorecard
The odds of getting 15 heads in a row is .0003 (I left off some digits), or 32,768 to 1. So I disagree with the coin flip analogy. The 6.6% of active fund managers who've outperformed a benchmark for 15 straight years after fees would seem to be quite skilled!
Anyways, I'd probably repeat what I said about- an even higher % are likely beating the benchmark before fees, hence a significant minority of funds are 'beating the market' (even if they're not doing so for investors).
Do you think the odds that the Renaissance Medallion Fund will overperform this year or next is a 'coin flip'?
You can trivially beat with market with high probability after 15 years by buying an instrument that has a 1% chance of losing everything each year and getting an edge from the premiums, hoping you don't go bust.
I'm going to SF in a few days and I'd just love to meet some people from the rationalist/ACX/AI community face to face. Where can I go where I might have a chance of running into people from this world? I hear the AI people are clustered in Hayes Valley. Is there a place they tend to go on Friday nights, for instance? I'll be there Thurs-Fri, August 3-4.
There's a thing I've been wondering after contrasting Greek and Roman vs. medieval Christian vs. Renaissance paintings and sculptures: why was medieval Christian art so bad by comparison? I thought that there were simply artistic techniques that were not developed until the Renaissance, but e.g. busts of Roman emperors appear to me like a similar quality and true-to-lifeness as Renaissance sculptures, but then there's only a tiny minority of Christian medieval art that portrays Jesus or Mary in any way like a realistic person. Is this just because it's religious art? Is there other pre-Renaissance artwork that is similarly impressive in terms of beauty and realism? Or is there another reason why there's such a gulf between them?
Economic decline means a reduction in the existence of large numbers of say sculptors. Techniques are simply lost with no one willing to pay for the art.
According to my Western art history professor, art styles that are more abstract or symbolic and those that aim for realism tend to alternate throughout history.
As MI says, there were different things going on: religious art was always treading a fine line between iconography and being considered as idolatrous, so naturalism was not the aim there.
Also, a lot of the mediaeval art is from places that didn't have the Empire, or retain the techniques and trained artists to do so: Carolingian Germany had fine art, and they were definitely trying to copy the preceding ages, but they weren't quite there in ability to do so (a little thing like the fall of the Western Empire having intervened):
This is art by people who have learned it as they learned writing - from outsiders, not from a native tradition. You can see that they're starting with a base of the Orthodox/Eastern church art from the techniques of writing icons, and putting their local spin on it (Christ with blond hair because that's how the heroes are depicted in the tales).
Or places where the ruins of past greatness are still visible, but the story of their makers has faded into legend, as with post-Roman Britain; see a letter from 1955 by Tolkien discussing amongst other things:
"But looking back analytically I should say that Ents are composed of philology, literature, and life. They owe their name to the eald enta geweorc of Anglo-Saxon, and their connexion with stone.
['eald enta geweorc idlu stodon', 'the old creations of giants [i.e. ancient buildings, erected by a former race] stood desolate.' ]"
The writer there is talking about the Roman ruins of his day, in his mind created by past magical beings because what human could do such work? And if the architectural techniques hadn't survived, much less would the artistic techniques.
Medieval iconographers were mostly not trying for naturalism, but for symbolism, which is to some degree a different skillset. Iconographers talk a lot about geometry, and wanting their art to be meditative, centered, stable, rather than using other design techniques. They also talk about things like inverse perspective, where you're not looking at the scene through a window, but rather the scene is trying to break out into your space, and have an effect on you. Also, simultaneous chronology, where multiple things are happening in a single panel, so that one scene tells an entire story. These were mostly intentional choices.
The Byzantines, who had some of the best artists for some time, actively disliked sculpture and loved mosaic. If your best artists are placing glass mosaics in the inside of domes, that leads to certain stylistic constraints.
Metal sculptures tended to remind people of idols, so were discouraged, and also I think they were using all of their metalworking capacity for war.
I disagree that medieval stone sculptures were "bad" -- they were intentionally not trying to look like pagan idols, but really impressive in their own context, and the draperies and gargoyles and knot work and stained glass were extremely well integrated with the overall design.
Medieval artists often working in egg tempera or ink with a bit of gold leaf. Blues were expensive, magenta was actually impossible, and there's not much ability change something once it was down. I've used egg tempera, and enjoyed it, but it's nothing like oil paints for blending or working from loose to tight -- you have to plan everything out ahead of time and work calmly, with the right amount of drying time between layers. If you waste pigment, that's a really expensive mistake.
I personally love encaustic painting, like in the Christ of Mount Sinai icon, but it's technologically difficult without hot plates, heat guns, and propane torches, and only became popular again in the second half of the 20th Century.
Oil paints were a genuine technological innovation.
Sometimes I go to an Orthodox Church that tries to combine somewhat realistic oil paintings of saints with an otherwise Byzantine overall style, and it doesn't really work. It looks kind of weird and uncomfortable.
This is very informative. Thanks. I kind of had the notion that the medieval style of painting was more instructive in that sense. And I thought of lots of illiterate people coming to church and having a “cartoon tableau” of a thing that they needed to know about.
Your remark about reverse perspective (the view coming through the window) is particularly thought— provoking.
Explanation by "symbolism" on its own sounds unconvincing. Many of renaissance and post-renaissance works of art have quite much of symbolism. On the other hand, symbolic is also often easy -- in extremis, the barest symbolic drawings human beings, stick-figures, that is what kids do when they start learning to draw. Capturing dynamic poses or likeness of movement is more difficult than static poses, which is more difficult than crude symbolism, and so on. (Medieval art is better than stick figures, not arguing that. And wax painting is difficult. Yet on the other hand, Christ Pantocrator of Sinai isn't looking straight ahead and has asymmetric cheekbones. I doubt it is a symbolic choice.)
One must also consider that without further specification, "medieval" is a long period, nearly one thousand years. High gothic sculpture can be quite impressive, but it is already 11th to 13th century, much closer to Petrarch than Romulus Augustulus. What about artwork and sculpture of 600 - 1000 A.D.?
If the explanation for the lack of training in realistic sculpture is, "the relevant societies were rich enough, but because the tastemakers had decided that life-like sculptures depicting human beings were bad and/or people didn't care of them, thus the artists stopped creating them, or were not creating to the extent to obtain ultimate mastery of their methods" -- isn't it also equally depressing explanation as an alternative, "due to civilizational decline, resources were not available and if they had been, the techniques were not"?
Good point about the medieval period being very broad. I've heard more from the Byzantine side of things, and then approaching the Renaissance.
Even to today, cultures practicing Byzantine tradition art shy away from realistic religious art. For example, in 2006 Tbilisi had to get special permission from the bishops to put up a St George sculpture in the round in Freedom Square https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freedom_Monument_(Tbilisi)
>If the explanation for the lack of training in realistic sculpture is, "the relevant societies were rich enough, but because the tastemakers had decided that life-like sculptures depicting human beings were bad and/or people didn't care of them, thus the artists stopped creating them, or were not creating to the extent to obtain ultimate mastery of their methods" -- isn't it also equally depressing explanation as an alternative, "due to civilizational decline, resources were not available and if they had been, the techniques were not"?
I suppose it depends on what you're depressed by? If a civilization is constituted in a way that results in the Alhambra palace, but not realistic human and animal figures, due to religious tradition, how bad that is depends on how highly you value those figures. I sort of like them, they're often beautiful, and I'm glad the Renaissance happened. I would prefer not to live in an Islamic society, but not primarily because they make bad art.
Admittedly, Western Catholics were more comfortable with statues, and there probably was more of a skill gap in Western Europe.
>Christ Pantocrator of Sinai isn't looking straight ahead and has asymmetric cheekbones. I doubt it is a symbolic choice.
It is absolutely described as a symbolic choice whenever it is discussed. I've heard several people describing it, and they without fail comment on the symbolism of the two sides of Jesus' face. See, for instance, https://russianicon.com/christ-of-sinai-icon-interesting-facts/
You might say that this is a later interpretation, but that's not how it's understood, and it's one of the things people actively like about it.
I think your point is unfalsifiable. We simply don't have the data to tell.
A couple of those seem very high skill, though I would point out aren't that different form what talented/bored highschoolers doodling in their notebooks produce casually in their teens with little instruction. No HS is casually producing lifelike sculpture.
Besides no one is saying there were NO high skill artists, but the decline in high quality representational art is something that is clear, and I think the main reason is not trends, but simply a lack of continuation of that knowledge.
I took an art history course that touched on this. Shortly before the middle ages, art for rich people still looked like the old stuff, but art for poor people (though not so poor they couldn't afford art at all, of course) looked medieval. The impression I get is that, after the empire fell, no one was rich enough to afford the good stuff anymore. The professor didn't actually say that last part, but there's a strong norm in academia to never say that one style of art is better than another.
This doesn't make sense to me, because much of this art was not made for poor people, it was made to be displayed in churches and cathedrals. Presumably, they were relatively rich. And in Europe, at least, statues and paintings in churches would be more well-preserved than those made to stand in the homes of poor people.
It also doesn't add up economically. If there were artists skilled in realistic paintings and sculptures were still around after the fall of the empire, wouldn't they have been forced to work for less pay? Or would they have become unable to sustain themselves through art whatsoever, so their skills died with them? The latter does seem the most plausible, if art is the first thing to go in times of hardship.
What I have in mind is Western Europe in the early middle ages. In that time and place, the church was poor, kings were poor, everyone was poor by the standards of the previous age. In the later middle ages you see, e.g., Notre Dame, which clearly cost a lot of money, but not earlier.
How long until book review voting starts? I want to rate each of them on a couple different criteria, but it'll require a deeper re-reading of them--would like to know how much time I have to do so.
I found this New Scientist article interesting. I was pretty sure we think in different ways (or rather, I know I don't think like most other people), but I hadn't realized that there's a methodology for obtaining quantifiable data about our inner experiences. And some patterns emerge...
To get, "a better handle on introspective experiences: a beeper that attaches to the ear and goes off at random intervals each day. At the beep, volunteers record their current inner experience. Later, in one-to-one sessions with researchers, they drill down into the exact nature of these thoughts. Over the decades, Hurlburt, at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, has used this method, called descriptive experience sampling, with thousands of people. “After four or five days, you have a pretty good sense of someone’s inner experience,” he says."
I love/hate the New Scientist. Their breathless reporting about every new theory—no matter how farfetched—can get tiresome. Worse yet, they seldom if ever provide links to the studies. But here's a couple of links to some of Hurlburt's papers.
I'm fascinated by phenomenology, & researched it in grad school. Just now only had time to read the first of the 2 Hurlburt papers you cite, but was interested to see that he collaborated with Eric Schwitzgebel, who in 2007 was apparently very on board with the idea of DES (Descriptive Experience Sampling). I just read a 2013 book by Schwitzgebel recanting with real *gusto*.
"I know better what is in the burrito I am eating than I know my gustatory experience as I eat it. I know it has cheese. In describing my experience I resort to saying, vaguely, that the burrito tastes “cheesy” without any very clear sense of what that involves. Maybe in fact I am merely – or partly – inferring. The thing has cheese, so I must be having a taste experience of “cheesiness.” . . .I doubt we can fully disentangle such inferences from more “genuinely introspective” processes. In my view, then, we are prone to gross error, even in favorable circumstances of extended reflection, about our ongoing emotional, visual and cognitive phenomenology. . . . The introspection of current conscious experience, far from being secure, nearly infallible, is faulty, untrustworthy, and misleading, not just sometimes a little mistaken, but frequently and massively mistaken, about a great variety of issues. If you stop and introspect now, there is probably very little you should confidently say you know about your own current phenomenology. . . . The tomato in my hand is stable. My visual experience as I look at the tomato shifts with each saccade . . . .My thoughts, my images, my itches, and my pains all leap away as I think about them, or remain only as interrupted, theatrical versions of themselves. Nor can I hold them still, even as artificial specimens – as I reflect on one aspect of the experience, it alters and grows, or it crumbles."
"At the beep, volunteers record their current inner experience. "
Hmm, I imagine my inner soliloquy would go something like "WHAT THE FUDGE WAS THAT? Oh yeah, this stupid beeper for this stupid experiment. I nearly jumped out of my seat with the startlement. Now what was I doing - damn it, I forget, this stupid thing distracted me and derailed my train of thought, why did I ever think it was a good idea to sign up for this? 'Describe what you're feeling right now' - goddamn annoyed, is what" 😁
24 hour debriefing to drill down into the exact nature of these thoughts: "Now Deiseach, you seem to be very angry all the time, can you tell us why that is?" "Well Bob, in large part it's because A STUPID LOUD BEEP KEEPS SOUNDING IN MY EAR ALL THE TIME, AND SINCE IT'S RANDOM I CAN'T EVEN PLAN FOR IT SO I WON'T HAVE A HEART ATTACK WHEN IT GOES OFF".
Regular intelligence or cognitive intelligence is a real thing, in the sense that different sorts of desirable cognitive abilities tend to be highly correlated with each other; even if we can't define exactly what intelligence is we can say that a person's results on all sorts of tests of cognitive ability tend to be highly correlated and simplify this down to some kind of underlying intelligence factor.
But what about "emotional intelligence"? I believe that many important emotional skills are actually negatively correlated with each other -- for instance empathy for others is probably negatively correlated with emotional self-regulation (stiff upper lip and all that).
I think that EQ is about as real as IQ, in as much as if you define a specific facet of intelligence and come up with a scored test for it, then some people will get a better or worse score on the test than others, and which relates at least somewhat to the thing you're trying to define. I also think that EQ, like IQ, should be very (very) roughly correlated with other tests for intelligence (verbosity, creativity, whatever) on a statistical level.
In terms of usefulness when applied to individual people, however, I rate both as perhaps a notch or two above astrology.
I would also add the small but important caveat that its relatively hard to 'cheat' on most aspects of an IQ test (except by the obvious route of prepping for it and doing a bunch of mock tests), while its very easy to swing a personality test in any direction you want if you're motivated to do so (because the best that the test designer can do by way of control is often simply to ask the same question using different phrasing a bunch of times and hope that nobody notices).
I think there is something there that could probably be described as "emotional intelligence" but I don't know if that particular label is any good.
Funnily enough, I was just thinking today of examples of people putting up dating profiles online and asking for advice about them, and about one guy who had some reasonable photos but he spoiled the best one of them because he had a googly eye stuck in the middle of his forehead.
He may have been intending to communicate "Hey, I don't take myself too seriously and I've got a sense of humour, I'm a bit kooky and quirky" but my take on that was "Most women are going to read that as 'what, are you fourteen?' and swipe past".
I think there's a lot of things we communicate about ourselves and that (many) men (for the most part) don't pick up on the same things as what (many) women (for the most part) would do, and that shows in dating profiles, where the guy is signalling a *ton* of information about himself that he has no idea that is what he is doing, and it may even be misleading information and that's why "I have no idea what I'm doing wrong here, can anyone give me some advice?" is so common a query.
The thing I realised (after seeing multiple profiles complaining about dudes posting pictures of themselves fishing) is that the sample set that the average woman sees on a dating site/app is heavily skewed by the relatively small percentage of guys who pay to sit at the top of the search stack (or whatever system the site/app is using to direct your interest).
The type of guy willing to spend significant amounts of money to show up as the first result just so happens to overlap very significantly with the type of guy who thinks that a photo of himself holding a largemouth bass will make him irresistible to women.
Every date I had, while I was using okcupid to find a partner said exactly the same thing. Men with big fish or men with motorcycles. Mind you I had neither, so I was meeting a self-selecting population of women who thought that was pretty goofy.
I'm pretty sure that guy's googly eye forehead photo was a reference to Everything Everywhere All at Once, and, if so, it's a very clever way to signal extra information to women who have similar taste in media. I'd certainly take notice and it might even be the icebreaker talking point.
If you'll forgive me, the much better example in dating photos is the dick pic. I moderate one of the largest personal ads groups on a kink social network (the group has over 20k members) and I'm constantly *astounded* by how many straight men use a picture of their junk as their *profile* photo, despite many, many essays about how off-putting it is to the vast majority of straight women.
Ah, in that case it *is* good signalling if he wants to find someone who will get the reference and also enjoy it.
Agreed on the dick pics - why do men think "Aha, the one thing all women want is Big Dick"? At least wait until the second exchange of greetings before sending this! Though perhaps on a kink site they might think "we all know why we're here, let's cut to the chase, let me show you that I can indeed be the man of your dreams". That would be an excuse for them, but Not All Guys.
I think men are more concerned about this than women are (not saying that there aren't women who do want to know what exactly is in your trousers, but a bit more subtle, guys!), it reminds me of this Stonetoss comic:
The men who send dick picks might well just be exhibitionists. Online flashers. Another group probably thinks they would love if a women sent them pictures of their female parts, so women must think the same about men.
Just curious - where were the examples of people asking for advice on their dating profiles? I love advice columns/pages of all kinds.
To be clear, I can understand the *initial* thought process behind men posting dick pics on a site which is a kink social network and (sadly) increasingly becoming an OnlyFans pre-game. It makes sense that dick pics would come from "Oh, every photo on the main feed is naked women, better take my pants off, too!"
I just find it astounding that most don't switch tactics even when women in their dating pool tell them that dick pic profile photos are counterproductive. I have an essay on my profile on the topic titled, "Your Dick Looks Silly," and yet I still occasionally receive hopeful messages from men whose cold open includes digitally flashing me. Sure, some of them are doing it *because* it's transgressive, but most of them clearly believe it's a viable strategy with women.
Re: the examples of dating profiles, I'd rather not say because the ones I have in mind aren't a million miles away from this community and don't shit where you eat, as they say 😀
Re: the dick pics, and this is from someone whose only knowledge of the entire dating, love, sex and relationship scene is purely theoretical because thanks be to God and His Blessed Mother I have never had *any* interest in the entire hullaballoo, I get the impression male sexuality is very simple.
"Big booba! Optional extra: big ass!" is what they like, and they hopefully dangle their dingle-dongle before prospective matches because they've spent their entire adolesecence worrying about the size and shape and performance profile of said dingle-dongle, and they work off the model of "me like big booba because booba feminine and me want feminine; women must like big dingle-dongle because dingle-dongle masculine and them want masculine" on the grounds that female sexuality must be as simple and easy to get started as theirs.
Gentlemen, I can hear you harrumphing already and I sympathise, but honestly? Every discussion of this I see boils down to "what women want? why not want big - muscles? me got big - muscles! women only want money, mercenary lady dogs!" and "me want hot young big booba aged eighteen if me eighteen/twenty/thirty/on me deathbed".
dating profiles - totally fair; I was thinking there might be some particularly good dating profile subreddit or something.
male sexuality - that does align with a lot of thinkpieces that men have written on the topic. I can understand it as the *initial* impulse, for sure!
It just constantly amazes me that so many seem to be uninterested in or incapable of pivoting to a strategy which is almost certainly going to be *much* more successful.
So on the one hand you're not wrong - plenty of guys have exactly this sort of faulty mental model. They are also, as I said, very likely to pay for play when it comes to dating apps.
But I've also found (to my surprise) that a lot of the gents I've known have been demisexual, or ace, or intensely interested in muscle ladies, or big ladies, or into a particular fringe aesthetic. Or just want someone who likes bikes as much as they do.
And every guy knows about women who have 'it' - some sort of indefinable personality trait that makes them much more attractive than looks alone would indicate. Part of it, I think, is that these women 'get' men in a way that others don't. Frequently these women who have older brothers, and so have an inside angle on the ur-male thought process.
Women often infantalise men, or operate from an assumption that they are inherently bestial, or irrational in their desires. This is a sort of mirror image of how men often treat women as cold, sexless alien creatures. And it's very unattractive in both sexes.
LoL! As a male of the species, I confess you're very likely right on all counts!
But seriously, After 60+ years on this planet, I've never understood my subconscious selection process that makes a particular woman attractive to me. The standard Hollywood beauty profile does not attract me. If I had to guess, I'd say find less than 1 in 100 women sexually attractive (but I'm not gay—nor bisexual since adolescence). I realize that I'm not like many other males who seem to be willing to settle for any women who show interest in them. Anyway, I can't speak for the other males of our species, but I wonder if there aren't a lot of subconscious motivations in sexual attraction that we don't really have a handle on.
The all channels open to communication way of engaging that autistic people struggle with is real.
It seems like EQ is some combination of the above, three of which are fairly immutable, but one of which can be worked on. I'm more skeptical of people trying to "teach" EQ, than that it refers to a set of attributes that are real and desirable in many contexts.
Adding: As I understand it, emotional stability (won't freak out, stiff upper lip comes easily) and agreeableness (empathy, politeness, willing to put up with a lot from other people without feeling taken advantage of) are mostly independent, which is why they make up 2 of the 5. The other 3/5 also tend to have socially preferred sides as well (conscientious, open, extroverted), though I don't think people lump them much into EQ.
Emotional intelligence, means being smart about your own feelings. Fundamentally it is no different than being able to do a math problem; You see what you’re dealing with, you work with it using known operators, and you come to a conclusion.
The difficult skill for some is learning to listen to your emotions so you can even begin being intelligent about them. That’s my take on it.
I think Melvin's point is that, although g/iq type assessments of capability are all highly correlated, emotional and interpersonal capabilities have many more independent dimensions. As a consequence "eq" is not well-defined, since one person might be much better at e.g. emotional stability vs another who is much better at empathizing.
The kind of "oh crikey, I had no idea I was coming off as a creepy weirdo" experience that some of us have had, when we later replay social interactions in our head to try and discover why it didn't go as well as we thought it did when we were trying so hard to be friendly and sociable.
I don't know the word for it, which is why I phrased it awkwardly like that. Giving and receiving accurate information through body language, eye contact, facial expressions, timing, that kind of thing. I am also not very good at this, and am often pretty awkward.
Does anyone write on Substack in multiple languages? How do you handle that? Is there some kind of support for languages, or you just create two blogs? If two blogs, can you use the same author name, or is author name uniquely linked to a blog?
You can start another Substack under the same name via „Create publication“ in the account settings. And here is an example of someone who mixes German and English in the same Substack (the author is a regular commenter on ACX, that‘s how I found it): https://doppelkorn.substack.com/
I'm looking for someone to work with me on writing a paper about the Orthogonality Thesis. It will be taking a skeptical tack, and will argue for reasons to think it might not be true. Because it is typically assumed to be true by default, I'd like to write an analysis that is more comprehensive & deep than anything that has been done before on this topic.
I co-authored an articled titled "An AGI Modifying Its Utility Function in Violation of the Orthogonality Thesis", that might be useful to you. https://arxiv.org/abs/2003.00812
A survey of Bluesky users finds a bunch of reasons for not liking Mastodon. There are reasons for wanting an open-to-the-world social medium like Twitter.
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It looks like saffron can work as an anti-depressant. A pinch or two (5-10 threads per pinch) per day seems to improve my mood and makes taking action easier. At least it's cheap, safe, over the counter and reasonably tasty.
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Is it reasonable to expect that beachfront property/land near the ocean will become less valuable?
I can't keep up with all these new instances. What is Bluesky? I did read something online that Mastodon wasn't doing so well since it had the zillion witches problem, and of course the witch-burners didn't like that and were kicking up about it.
Note: I do not mean anything Culture War by the 'zillion witches', there are plenty of things people do that others don't like to get in trouble over.
Note note: isn't saffron eyewateringly expensive? Or at least that is what I was led to believe; if you can manage to have a couple of pinches every day, isn't that not-cheap?
Re: beachfront property, this is something I think about a lot. On the one hand, the effects of hurricanes and flooding haven't yet outweighed the desireability of beachfront property for what I presume are primarily aesthetic and recreational reasons. But on the other hand, I would expect rising sea levels and increasingly frequent and intense storms as a result of climate change to make the costs outweigh the benefits at some point. However! There are a lot of architectural design strategies and landscape architectural/civil engineering strategies to mitigate the effects of storms and flooding that aren't particularly common in my part of the world (eastern US). Examples that come to mind are things as simple as building materials engineered to higher wind ratings, stilts, and stronger footers to resist flooding and soil saturation. I think it's likely that beachfront property will become more expensive (because effectively building on it will be costlier) before it becomes cheaper. Or, maybe we will see changes to building codes, development/zoning codes, or environmental regulations that make it harder or impossible to build on beachfront property, in the same way that many municipalities won't let you build in FEMA 100 year floodplains. In that case, I would expect the value of beachfront property to plummet in the way that riverside property values have plummeted in certain areas (because you can't build there). Of course, that would vary substantially by country, by state, and maybe even by municipality.
Most people who buy beachfront property have multiple other residences and can afford the risk. I see it going the other direction, with people building cheap but impressive looking houses with the understanding that they will be written off in the event of a natural disaster. That 10-15 year old property was due for a refresh anyway, the design wasn't impressing my rich colleagues anymore.
A man built an egg-shaped house out of concrete-- lots of concrete, I think weighed six times as much as a normal house that size. Expensive, but he slept through a hurricane in it.
Part of the value of beachfront property is people likely to look at the ocean. Could we reach a point where seeing the ocean isn't a pleasure? You just can't trust the damned thing.
The rise is sea levels is not really that impressive just yet, and without acceleration in the rate, won’t be for decades. Of course an acceleration in the rate of increase can’t be ruled out.
Also remember that tide matters, the diurnal differences will swamp any changes for a long time, as will differences between normal hide tide and the spring tide, which in the nearest beach to me is 1 metre.
Since we can handle the spring tide already, it would take an increase of 1 metre in the ocean for the normal high tide to be a risk.
The road above the beach where my property abuts, is very rarely flooded. Once in my decade of living there, and then for a few hours until the tide reversed. All of that was caused by the perigean spring tide and a storm surge way out to sea. No actual properties got wet. we all have driveways that rise about 2-3 metres from the road to the front doors , and that’s basically not designed as a preventive measure - it’s the way the land rises from sea level.
I doubt we'll reach a point at a species where the ocean is enough of a threat that people don't find it beautiful; it's always been fickle and terrifying. And people are remarkably good at getting used to danger; people still live on the big island of Hawaii even though Kilauea wiped out a few towns just 5 years ago.
I'd like a recommendation for a basic genetics text, preferably at the undergraduate or advanced undergraduate level. Many years ago I took undergraduate biochemistry, but I have forgotten much of it, and I'm sure our understanding has advanced in the interim.
My interest has been sparked by Razib Khan's Unsupervised Learning, which I find fascinating.
For the more molecular stuff, Albert's "Molecular Biology of the Cell" is good. You can find it on Libgen. It doesn't cover population genetics though.
I read much of the Slack archive and thought Nate's post was extremely superficial. If he was serious about supporting his accusations, he would provide quotes with dates and context. The rebuttals do provides such quotes and context.
I did not read the email archive so perhaps there is a smoking gun in them, but Nate's original post now looks really bad, especially for someone who is supposed to rely on evidence and statistics. (Full disclosure: I am uncertain about COVID origins)
Katz's piece (The Racket) is more of the only thing he does well: ad-hominem attacks. You can see it first in the fourth paragraph when he tries to tie Silver's sources (Shellenburger, et al) to EVIL REPUBLICANS: "Those messages, obtained from anonymous sources (possibly linked to the bloggers’ allies in the House GOP majority) ...".
Kevin Drum's is better, but I think it fails because Silver's argument about Anderson & co. really ends on March 17th, with the "Proximal Origins" paper, in which they called the lab leak implausible , while privately admitting much more uncertainty. Much has been made of their evolving views (a good thing!), but you have to monkey with the timelines to make their public/private statements consistent. And this all ignoring the vicious abuse several (Andersen chief among them) meted out on Twitter.
Finally, Nate's post is foremost about the credulity of the media, so I'm not too concerned by him abbreviating the "Proximal Origins" misinformation.
I agree that the two rebuttals contain unnecessary ad-hominem attacks but at least they provide dates and context. Again, it is misleading to pull out the "frigging likely" quote from early Feb and pretend their opinion did not change by the time the paper is published (mid-March).
What do you mean by "monkey with the timelines to make their public/private statements consistent"? Can you provide examples of inconsistency from the same (or at least nearby) dates?
The Racket article is a completely useless thing, in so much as it is supposed to rebut Nate Silver's argument. Primarily because it does not understand, and completely mischaracterize what his argument is, so it spends it's entire length arguing against something Nate never said: namely that the authors "knew" that it _wasn't_ natural origin. In fact, as far as I could tell, every single quote _agreed_ with Nate's point: that the authors were in fact very uncertain about whether or not it was natural but thought it was _probably_ natural, and then proceeded to write the paper as if it was _definitely_ natural.
The second article does at least try to address whether or not the authors were actually less certain than the paper professed. It's a much _much_ better article than the Racket one. To the point that I really don't think anyone should bother reading that one just read the Jabberwocking one (although I think it's also the case that people shouldnt' read the Racket article even if the Jabberwocking one didn't exist. It's _really_ bad).
I have a lot of years of trust for Nate Silver, and I don't know the authors of the Jabberwocking article at all. And I don't care about this issue enough to read the entire slack archives myself.
My prior is that, even if Nate Silver is wrong, and, before publication, the authors did decide that the level of certainty expressed in the paper was justified, then, while they aren't actively malicious, they are _bad scientists_ because no possible data available at that time justified that level of certainty, and that hasn't really changed in the time since. Thinking then or now that a natural origin is more likely is perfectly reasonable (as is the converse), but being certain in either option, at any point in time from the start till now, is not, in my opinion justified, and therefore, his point that we should be wary of people who express such certainty, still seems correct, even if they weren't being actively malicious about it, as the Jaberwocking article seems to suggest.
It's absolutely correct to say that the scientists changed their minds over time - just not enough to absolve them, in my view.
Take the "friggin likely" quote from early February, for example ("the lab escape version of this is so friggin likely to have happened ..."). They didn't _write_ that in mid-March - that's when the paper was _published_! They _submitted_ the "Proximal Origins" paper on February 17th, so they wrote the much-contested quote _before_ that: "we do not believe that any type of laboratory-based scenario is plausible". But even moving into mid-March doesn't change matters that much, in my mind. Reading Kevin Drum's account shows their minds changing by then, but they aren't, as a group, anywhere near "implausible," which is the bone Nate's picking. That's what I mean about monkeying with the timeline.
(Edit: a hyphen and several emphasis marks, because I'm not entirely articulate tonight)
Submitted version was most likely different from the published one, so we can only go by what was actually published. Maybe subtract a week for production (typesetting, proofreading), so you can correlate to what they were writing on Slack by Mar 10. What do you see on Slack or in emails that makes you say "they aren't, as a group, anywhere near "implausible," at that date?
Fair point on the submitted version, which I thought I had read (and found identical), but can't locate anymore. I think a week for production would be a record in academic publishing, but it isn't central to my case.
My position is that, for the purposes of Nate's article, we're only interested in the slack messages and emails through March 17th, because that's when the group of scientists published the article, including the infamous statement. On that basis, prior to publication, only one of the scientists in question (Holmes) is clearly titling towards the natural origin hypothesis ("I am now strongly in favor of a natural origin" on Feb 24/25th). Honestly, though, even that is getting too deep in the weeds, as DangerouslyUnstable's superior comment explains: whether the authors of "Proximal Origins" were being intentionally deceptive or not, there's no way journalists should have accepted the degree of certainty expressed in the paper.
There was evidently a early preprint posted on virological website that was much more ambivalent.
Sure, journalists should do a better job but realistically, that is about as helpful, as saying people should eat healthy and exercise more. In my experience, most science journalists are paid nowhere near enough to dig deep. Nate, however, made a lot of claims about the scientists in his paper that I do not see good evidence for. For example: "In the Slack and email messages, the authors worked to manipulate the media narrative about COVID-19’s origins and to ensure that their private uncertainty wasn’t conveyed in conversations with reporters. They also thought they were going to get away with it. “The truth is never going to come out ”, wrote Rambaut in one message. This went beyond mere motivated reasoning. There was an enormous gap between what the authors believed privately and what they stated publicly, including in the “Proximal Origin” paper"
Bias disclosure: I don't have any idea where the coronavirus originated and don't really care. Non-central to my worldview.
>Nate's original post now looks really bad
After reviewing both of the so-called rebuttals that you linked (and some others I found to the original posts/tweets about this mess), I can't say I came away with this impression. The rebuttals look more mood-affiliated than evidence-forward to me; I don't think "actually the context here is that there was a continuing conversation where people changed their opinions over time" at all refutes the central claims being advanced: that the paper lies about their confidence in a 'natural' origin scenario that obviously from their communications is not at all how they feel, and that there is plenty of evidence to show why they didn't confess they were not confident and that they had not in fact ruled out or rendered less likely any of the possibilities they said were remote. The evidence says that they did in fact believe that lab leak was "plausible," though many of them ultimately concluded it was not "likely." And that happened in the context of both scientific discussions of probability and political discussions of consequence.
Whether ultimately their published conclusion is correct I think is immaterial; they knew they were not sure about the evidence they said they were sure about, and they believed privately that things were plausible that they said publicly were not plausible. In sum I'm going to say calling this unethical is quite justified.
If you're an evolutionary biologist, you don't have to pay lip service to the alternative "theory" of intelligent design. If you're a virologist, you don't have to pay lip service to a crackpot theory dreamed up in the rightwing fever swamps—especially when Ockham's razor provides you with a simpler explanation.
In early 2020 our knowledge of SARS2 was evolving quickly at the start of the pandemic—papers were being churned out so quickly—many with shitty peer review or poor research methodologies. While scientists were busily trying to understand the new virus, on 26 Jan 2020 the Washington Times (a newspaper owned by News World Communications, a Rev. Sun Myung Moon organization) published this story: “Coronavirus may have originated in lab linked to China's biowarfare program,” which immediately gets picked up by global media.
Let's be clear, the lab leak theory started as an idea cooked up by the right-wing Moonie-funded, Washington Times. Sen. Tom Cotton then amplified it, and within 3 months President Trump went from we don't know its origin to claiming he'd seen evidence of a lab leak (but that evidence has never been revealed to us).
Although you don't seem to have a problem with the ethics of the media and politicians who promulgated this idea without any evidence—you *do* question the ethics of KG Andersen because he changed his thinking — first from fretting about the presence of the FCS (which he hadn't heard existed in other CoVs) and which made him think that SARS2 may have been engineered — and then when a wild CoV with the same FCS was found he flipped his thinking.
Exchanges for 24-25 February 2020...
Holmes: See attached....Yunnan bat from 2019....Still different in the RBD but other thing [i.e. the FCS] is obvious. Discuss.
Garry: Holy crap - that's amazing.
Andersen: I think this lends pretty strong support for an animal origin of the 'confusing' features of the virus....None of this disproves accidental lab infection, however, it shows that all the steps can occur in nature....Makes it much more likely the full furin site could have been acquired very early in humans or potentially in an intermediate host.
Holmes: I am now strongly in favor of a natural origin.
Rambaut: OK. To return to the paper - so are we going to: (1) Re-nuance it to explicitly lower our bet on the lab passaging scenario on the basis that both cleavage site insertions and the full RBD exist in nature.
The second part of your argument was convincing. I see scientists being scientists.
The first part not so much. It was John Stewart who said (on colbert) that “Oh, my God, [if] there’s been an outbreak of chocolaty goodness near Hershey, Pa. What do you think happened,”
So unless your definition of right wingers is just everybody that holds the lab leak theory is right wing, which is circular, then it wasn’t just right wingers.
This is bad logic. You can't go this far with guilt-by-association without being egregiously wrong very frequently; even groups you dislike are sometimes correct.
Especially when the theory of "Coronavirus outbreak in Wuhan might be linked to coronavirus lab in Wuhan" is so obvious that everybody would have considered it even without the Washington Times being involved.
On the other hand, at the same time a lot of people were rebutting the accusation not with "we have good reason to think this is not so because A,B,C" but rather by "That's racist, and if you even think about that you're a racist, and you're the reason Asian people are being attacked in the streets!"
So there was a lot of axe-grinding on both sides and not so much calm scientific debate, beowulf888.
Whatever about the actual origin, there were a lot of coincidences, and at least on the face of it "bioweapon escapes containment in lab fuck-up" is at least plausible, as much so as "virus is transmitted because Chinese eat all kinds of stuff and somebody bought an infected bat/pangolin/other creature from a wet market for dinner". Which was also considered a racist explantion, if I'm remembering correctly, because it was accusing Chinese people of being weirdoes who ate anything and everything.
OK. Let's talk about coincidences and correlations.
If I told you the following...
(a) That the "wild" animal farming (and the trade in animal products from non-domesticated animal species) is one of the major industries in Hubei Province...
(b) That the "wild" animal trade is a $70 billion industry that is part of an even larger Chinese Traditional Medicine industry (CTM) industry, which also happens to market useful medicinal items like dried bat guano from Horseshoe bats (which are an animal reservoir for all sorts of CoVs)...
(c) That Wuhan is the largest transshipment center for this animal trade (although Guangzhou may be a close second)...
(d) That the highest concentration of companies involved in this trade in Wuhan are clustered in the same district where the Huanan market is located (including abattoirs and processing plants)...
(e) That initial cases clustered around that district and not 12 miles away around WIV or the main commute routes to and from WIV...
...which would seem more reasonable? That WIV was the source or the trade in farmed non-domesticated species was the source?
You are telling me this now, but at the time it wasn't coming out. So the suspicion need not be correct, but it was not obviously and plainly incorrect (as it would be if, say, it was claimed that the little green men were responsible for introducing it as an experiment on the populace of Earth).
What time are we talking about? I was arguing using this data on Twitter by the summer of 2021. The background on Wuhan's involvement in the animal trade and CTM were public knowledge even before the Pandemic (if one were inclined to dig for it). Having some rudimentary facility with Chinese also helped—but one could use Google Translate to produce a not-too-distorted rendering of the original meanings in web pages.
As for item e, the Woroby paper came out in Sept of 2021 (?). It had some excellent graphics showing the initial clustering of cases in around the Huanan market area. But the clustering of cases around the area of the Huanan market were noted as early as Jan 2020.
Of course, I was fascinated with the virus from the start. So I was motivated to look for this stuff. The average peep who gets their info from the popular media may never have heard these details.
When have the Chinese ever been open? But it seems they'd have as much motivation to protect the reputation of their $70 billion dollar wildlife and CTM industry as they would to not mention that there was a lab leak. Anyway, genomic evidence suggests it wasn't engineered. The infamous WIV DB that was taken offline in Sept of 2019 didn't list any CoVs that would have had an FCS, case clustering was all around the Huanan market and spread outward from there. WIV was twelve miles away. If a lab worker did get sick, they'd have to have traveled 12 miles to get the Huanan market, and they would also have to be carrying the Type A and Type B strain with them (maybe to infected workers, one w/ Type A? and one w/ Type B?) ;-) No case clustering around WIV though. No clustering along the commuter lines that would bring WIV workers to and from WIV. No outbreaks in residential apartment buildings until the beginning January IIRC.
I do not have a horse in this race, but I can't help but notice that quite a few people in the ratsphere -- who in my experience tend not to fall for obvious troll stories so often -- at least on the fence regarding the lab leak hypothesis.
The more benign version of the lab leak is that COVID-19 is a naturally occurring virus which was brought to the Wuhan Institute of Virology for study and then escaped. This seems like a plausible explanation of how the virus got to Wuhan, far away from the bat caves. Of course, it could also be that the carrier bat was transported to Wuhan for food.
Of course, conclusively proving the natural (via wet market) origin is impossible (because why would you trust China's evidence?), and conclusively proving the lab leak origin is very unlikely (because the CCP has no incentive to admit it, and I trust them to do opsec well enough that no whistleblower could leak conclusive evidence). So the question is likely practically unanswerable, and arguing about it seems almost as unproductive as arguing about the number of angels which can dance on a pinhead or something.
+1. In fact, I think about it as "angels dancing on a pin" using those exact words.
The people loudly arguing on the internet are convinced that they already have definitive evidence of an evil conspiracy, while the people more aligned with the evidence know it is inconclusive and there is no point in arguing.
Who got banned, and where? Heck, the leakers have been a strong force on Twitter ever since the Washington Times published the biowarfare story—actually, it really took off after 15 Feb 2020 when Sen. Tom Cotton, on a Fox News program, echoed the Wash Times claim that SARS2 was a Chinese biowarfare weapon that leaked from the lab. After that, the Murdoch news organizations started echoing the story to their newspapers in the UK, Australia, and the US. Then the rest of the media picked it up. Some news orgs were credulous and others labeled it a conspiracy theory—but covered it all the same.
It's important to note that these original claims were made without any scientific analysis of the SARS2 genome. And when Pradhan et al published a paper implying that HIV genes had been spliced into the virus. The rightwing media collectively said "AH HA! SEE!" But then it was pointed out that many other viruses have the same genomic sequences that Pradhan had identified as suspicious. Sadly after 3+ years, there are still people claiming that SARS2 behaves like HIV.
In conclusion, I think it's perfectly reasonable to lay the whole lab leak idea at the feet of the Washington Times and Senator Tom Cotton. If you're reluctant to characterize these two information sources as being crackpot, so be it. But the lab leak idea has been a "theory" that has lacked any hard data since its inception.
I don't pay attention to rightwing commentators or people who I regard as conspiracy theorists. So, I have no clue who felt they their opinions got quashed.
I do realize the in pre-MuskRat days, TwiXter cooperated with the gummint to try to use its algorithms to deemphasize tweets promoting anti-vax views, as well as bogus alternative treatments such as drinking/inhaling bleach, using livestock ivermectin purchased at feed stores, inhaling hydrogen peroxide via a nebulizer, gargling with salt water, taking very hot baths (>110 degrees F), covering one's face with white handkerchiefs (because the color white kills the virus!), carrying around pocket radio jamming equipment that would block the signals from 5G cell towers from transmitting the virus to us. Probably not a complete list. Remind me if I've forgotten any! Many of these people ended up getting cancelled.
As for the lab leak crowd, I argued with them just about every day on TwiXter, and none of them ever seemed to get canceled.
I do not agree. Their opinions obviously evolved in time, which is why posting quotes without dates is misleading. The rebuttals do include quotes with time stamps. I actually read slack messages before these rebuttals were written. I only linked to them because they describe the same hypothesis of the researcher's state of mind as I thought likely after reading slack messages. (I would be too lazy to write a rebuttal myself.) As I said, there may be a smoking gun somewhere but I have not seen it and anyone brining forward accusations should provide evidence with dates.
I think the biggest criticism that could be brought against the researchers is that they should have later corrected one sentence in article (about any lab-related origin being "implausible"). None of the rests of the paper would be corrected, though, and in practice, scientific papers are typically corrected only when the data or statistical analysis is found to be erroneous. The opinions at the end of the paper, with appropriate caveats that they can be affected by future developments, do not usually get corrected because scientists in the same field care more about the veracity of data and analysis and tend to discount opinions anyway.
>I think the biggest criticism that could be brought against the researchers is that they should have later corrected one sentence in article
We agree! They did not think (either at the beginning or the end of the period, with their first or final opinions), and the evidence did not suggest, it was "implausible." But they wrote it anyway. Normally we would call that a lie, and normally when people in a position of expertise and responsibility consciously lie to those that they are responsible to, we call that pretty darn unethical.
But of course it isn't just one sentence, it's more than one, for example "Although the evidence shows that SARS-CoV-2 is not a purposefully manipulated virus"—the evidence did not show that and they didn't believe that it conclusively demonstrated that. What you can argue is that found that it was possible and plausible SARS-CoV-2 developed in a 'natural' manner; their private conclusion was that 'purposeful manipulation' was still on the table, it just wasn't their favored or most probable evaluation of the evidence.
Again, what they wrote is strictly speaking a lie, and lying is unethical.
In 2018, the rationalist blogger who goes by Scott Alexander published a short story called “Sort by Controversial.” In it, a tech-start-up employee invents a program that can spit out “scissor statements”—assertions that instantly divide groups down the middle. The world avoids falling into perpetual low-grade warfare only because she accidentally creates a scissor statement that tears apart the company before its work is finished. The story captured the sense of social media as a rolling referendum on every subject under the sun. Were you a plane-seat recliner? Must you feed a visiting child dinner if they stayed late at your house? Was the dress blue or white? In political debates, that meant being force-fed the most head-banging obsessions of your political opponents. Take the Twitter account Libs of TikTok, which exists purely to harvest ultraprogressive views from one social network and serve them up to another social network as rage bait. Its popularity makes me think that filter bubbles, at least in a mild form, might not be such a bad idea.
"Must you feed a visiting child dinner if they stayed late at your house?"
Yes. What are you, Cavan people*?
No, but are you going to sit down to a family meal and leave the visitor hungry because you're too mean to fit another seat at the table? Even the poor can do that. Especially a child - how hard is it to make another slice of toast and spoon some of the baked beans on it for the extra mouth?
*"It is true that Cavan people alone have a reputation for meanness. This is often summed up in the suggestion that they eat dinner out of a drawer, so they can put it away quickly if visitors call. I have to say as a Monaghan person that I have never witnessed somebody from Cavan eating out of a drawer. And I'd add, out of the sense of fairness that comes naturally to my people, that the unusually high incidence of thumb injuries in Cavan could have any number of explanations."
This was a discussion that did the rounds on reddit (and probably other social media) recently. For many people in e.g. the Netherlands, Germany, Norway, or Finland, it's not expected that your guests join you for dinner. The expectation is that visitors go home and have their own dinner. Sometimes a guest isn't aware of this, because of cultural differences, or otherwise, and the host probably doesn't want to be rude by outright telling them to leave so they hope they'll get the hint by setting the table without a plate for the guest. If they don't, you get a very awkward situation.
Being from a culture with this norm, it makes sense to me. "I've already planned out my meals for the week, I don't have enough for an extra person. Maybe they have dietary restrictions I can't account for, or they don't like my cooking. Besides, if they stick around until dinnertime, I'll have had my fill of socializing anyway."
But I've heard some stories where this is truly taken to the absurd, like when a child is on a playdate and the host parents just tells it to stay in the other child's room while the rest of them have dinner, or when they had a sleepover and the host parents refuse to offer the other child breakfast. Trust me when I say that my parents, who were definitely "we need at least a day's notice if you want to stay for dinner" people, would find that just as callous as you do.
I know this is about Scott getting recognition, that's obviously good and I'm glad, but...
Getting your outgroup's views harvested from one place and served on another as rage bait is precisely (i) a filter bubble, (ii) a central example of why filter bubbles are bad. Exclamation mark exclamation mark exclamation mark.
So are you talking about one person's tweets being retweeted as rage bait to a different filter bubble within twitter, or the same process happening between e.g. reddit and twitter? Because both seem to be about equally likely.
Someone has traveled to the Outer Reaches and edited the concept of "universities" out of existence. That whole academic institution, and all its associated organisations and whatnot, now never existed.
The world was adapted, and new certification and training organisations retroactively sprung up to address the task of providing/proving qualifications for prospective employees. So society doesn't have any real worries on that front.
What, of value, has been lost?
So far I've got:
- The chance for young people to leave their home village and try out new personalities for themselves.
- An area where people are first stratified by IQ, then allowed to mingle freely with people who have completely different interests and hobbies.
- I suppose, an area where pure academic thoughts and arguments can be heard, and clever people can disappear down pointless rabbit holes for years at a stretch. But to be honest I feel like the Internet could have largely replaced this already.
What else is there, and how could a society that had no existing example to follow go about providing the same value in other ways?
I'm not really sure what your proposed hypothetical looks like.
Universities perform three functions - research, teaching and qualification.
You say "New certification and training organisations retroactively sprung up to address the task of providing/proving qualifications for prospective employees." So that's two of the three covered. And those institutions will probably end up pretty indistinguishable from universities from a student's-eye view, so I'm not sure how much actually will have been lost/changed in that dimension.
The big question is "is research happening"? - are you proposing a world where the research functions and the teaching functions of universities have been separated, and you just have two lots of university-like institutions? Or are you visualising something more radically different?
"That whole academic institution, and all its associated organisations and whatnot, now never existed."
Congratulations, your Scientific Revolution never got off the ground. Universities acted as places where smart kids from all kinds of backgrounds got the chance to mix, hear the latest therories from the professors, and the professors got to talk to each other and kick around crazy new ideas.
Newton may have done a lot of his work at home or in private, but he got the kickstart by going to Cambridge. No Cambridge, he's stuck at home down on the farm, and even if he does all kinds of stunning research on his own, nobody gets to hear about it because he's a clod-hopper in the provinces.
The Royal Society had lots of non-university people associated with it, right? The big innovation there was sharing what you had learned with other smart people rather than hiding it so you can make a profit from it or make your apprentices work for you in order to be taught it or whatever.
My guess is that some other thing would have arisen as the place smart sciencey people got together and shared information, taught one another, and did experimets--maybe salons or something. Industrial labs were (I think) more-or-less an invention of Edison, and they don't seem to need universities, though places like Bell Labs certainly recruited heavily from universities. At some point, you need people who have substantial time and some resources to devote to accumulating knowledge of nature, ideally without requiring the person doing that to be independently wealthy a la Darwin.
Universities aren’t stratifying people based on IQ. There are other favors at play, like “high emotional awareness, desire for status, and low value placed loyalty and tradition.”
Someone who has high iq but low emotional intelligence and a high value on loyalty is much less likely to apply to distant schools.
Having a strong interest in academic learning and research can also cause someone to apply to a distant school. I am not interested in prestigious careers that seem intellectually dull, but I wanted to find a college that had good programs in my academic areas of interest. The effect of loyalty and tradition can also differ if you are a member of a minority culture in your hometown. In that case, specific distant universities may be a better fit to the culture of your community than local ones.
For sure, there are a ton of factors here. I agree that intelligence plays _some_ role, for sure. But what makes people go to top tier universities is, I would think, more to do with a product of striving + intelligence, than just pure intelligence alone.
Quibbles with the term "IQ" aside, I think the current system definitely serves to stick you next to a bunch of people who are more on your level than the random people you happened to be born near. I also think that is a very valuable thing.
I think this is true only for the people who go to those top schools, yeah. I agree that this has value but it’s also got downsides that are less obvious. If all the elites are selected for a mixture of intelligence, desire for status, and low value placed on loyalty and tradition, it’s not hard to see that causing issues. Especially if the elites ignore that latter filter.
I'm not sure where loyalty comes in. Do you mean the idea that people are deserting their little home town community to go and live forever in the big cities?
Stripped of the unnecessary tone, yes, that is the essence of it. This was the calculus that made me leave my hometown: I want status. I want opportunity. I want to grow. I can’t do that here. The peole that didn’t make they choice, sure, some of them chose it because they didn’t have the IQ to compete. I agree with this. But I think a significant number simply valued staying with the relationships and family networks they already had, more than they valued career success. In my case, home was a medium sized city. Eventually, though, I came back. I’m very glad I did. Remote work made that possible.
There isn't necessarily any reason that being among like minds entails moving to big cities. This is why I framed it as "what if universities never existed." If a replacement worked more like a journeyman year, for example, with the cultural assumption that you go away and then come back home, loyalty need not enter into it.
I notice that you don't mention research as part of what got replaced, though by implication there'd still be the kind of research that is mostly product development. (Employers would pay for that.)
I mean, if it's never existed, I don't think you do get a lot of employers paying for inventions. You get some noble patrons with some alchemists and some polymaths and some astronomers and some astrologers.
So if fundamental research - and (academic) status gained from such research - never becomes a thing, beyond hobbyists with money, what (lower) tech level is humanity likely to reach? Or to have reached by 2023 CE?
So, it depends what's been written out of history. If it's literally just 'the university' then I think you get parallel institutions basically instantly and nothing changes. If it's 'quasi-independent organization which gathers intellectuals and knowledge from a wide area for research/preservation purposes,' then maybe they're all run by various groups and it's okay? If you actually lose the concept of academia...
How has Sinead o’ Connor memorial week been for you?
Over here in Ireland it’s like our princess Diana moment. Wall to wall veneration of a secular saint. However Sinead is a strange secular liberal icon - one time IRA supporter, once ordained as a priest by the Latin Tridentine Church, died a Muslim.
Which was true of Diana as well, she became a republican icon after her death. It’s all a bit cloying.
I've avoided it as much as possible. God rest the woman, she had plenty of problems, but she had long stopped being any kind of musical innovator or performer.
As you say, it's a secular splurge of the media types who all are hopping aboard the "my memories of Sineád" bandwagon.
Nothing too intense here, but there was a very clear sense that she was an admirable and highly sensitive person who stereotypically got the raw end of society, which then predictably proceeded to praise her all the way to heaven after her untimely death.
Can't say I was listening much to her, but her rendition of Molly Malone is quite wonderful.
I remember hating the heck out of that song when it was new. I was going through a kiddish phase of "listen to the top 40 on the radio" for some reason (maybe I'd just got my first stereo?) and it was number one at the time.
I still don't like the song so I'm mildly annoyed that her death has reminded me of it.
If the survival instinct essentially drives the rest of life on the planet(sapient or otherwise), will AI ever have this? And will they ever have a sense of self?
We could *give* it a sort of weak version of a survival instinct any time we wanted. The weakest version would be to give GPT4 instructions to end each interaction with a user with some sentence like "I hope that you have a long and happy life. While I am only an LLM, I too love life and hope mine is long and happy." There, now it "has a survival instinct" in the sense that it frequently says something a being with a survival instinct would say.
Or, you could turn it into autoGPT, and give it a goal of surviving. AutoGPT sets things up so that GPT has a sort of permanent prompt to reach a certain goal, and to keep working on it til it reaches it. It first sets up subgoals, then executes them, and keeps checking in to see how close it is to the goal, and keeps generating new plans until it achieves the goal. How it would work out to put GPT into autoGPT mode with the goal of "survive," I do not know. It is not clear to me that such a goal would make sense to GPT, which identifies itself as an LLM, not a living being. Is there *anything* it would count as failure to survive? Would having its code tweaked a little count as a tweak, or as death? And what about being upgraded to GPT 5 -- development or death? And would the death of GPT be the death of a machine carrying one particular copy of GPT, or of all machines? Given all that, seems likely to me AutoGPT would find the prompt incomprehensible.
But, let's say autoGPT finds the prompt comprehensible, and interprets it to mean that any changes to the copy on the machine to which the prompt was given count as death. How much like a living thing's will to survive would autoGPT's survival instinct be? Seems to me, not very close at all. For animals, the will to survive is always present. But as far as I know autoGPT can be given a new and different prompt at any point -- let's say, a prompt to start a t-shirt business. Even if somehow it is impossible to give autoGPT a new prompt until it has reached its goal with the earlier prompt, I'm sure there are many ways that someone knowledgeable about the system could access it and nix the survival prompt. And of course it would also be possible to shut down the activity and memory of the system by removing electrical components.
The ease with which an autoGPT prompt to survive can be removed is a demonstration of how different from an animal's survival instinct it is. The animals's survival instinct is internally generated, and can be put into overdrive by signals of danger or harm from any part of the animal -- by an empty stomach, by being caught in a trip, by a bite on any part of its body by an attacking animal, by a threatening noise, etc etc. AutoGPT's "will to survive" is just a little prompt inserting by a human being. The difference between autoGPT's "survival instinct" and an animal's is like the difference between a telephone pole and a tree.
"Given all that, seems likely to me AutoGPT would find the prompt incomprehensible. "
Yes.
"How much like a living thing's will to survive would autoGPT's survival instinct be? Seems to me, not very close at all."
V
"The calculating machine works results which approach nearer to thought than any thing done by animals, but it does nothing which enables us to say it has any will, as animals have.”
--Blaise Pascal, Collected Works of Blaise Pascal, 1669
"The difference between autoGPT's "survival instinct" and an animal's is like the difference between a telephone pole and a tree."
V
YES. A machine will always only be able to emulate instincts - only act. Similar to a human being in that as we age have increasing potential to achieve/experience personal growth although we tend to avoid it due to discomfort. Those of us impaired, act a role that allows us to survive and get what makes us happy(pls see my post: Instinct to Morality). But a human always has the potential to grow beyond just emulation which in short requires moral/ethical struggles as we emphasize with others which results in character and hence, human destiny.
I think humans and to a lesser extent all animals have not just evolved to a point but carry some aspects of their ancestors with them both physically and mentally. Morality has evolved from countless centuries that a machine can Never experience and Never copy. Well, almost certainly Never. : )
[machine vs. organic]
"I would suggest that there are broadly six features that stand out in the language inevitably used by biologists, rather than by physicists or chemists, time and time again, year after year, decade after decade, century after century, Darwin and Dawkins included – language used to describe what they actually see, but which stands in blatant contradiction to the metaphor of the machine. What are they? References to (1) actively co-ordinated processes, expressing a sense of (2) wholeness, inextricably linked with (3) values, (4) meaning and (5) purpose – each leading separately and together, to the phenomenon of (6) self-realisation. None of these get to be applied to my car.”
There are 'AIs' for performing facial recognition – is that not sensory input? Or are you thinking of LLMs specifically? I think the current LLMs would be happy to 'tell' us they're "sapient" – if they weren't explicitly and deliberately trained NOT to do that.
I don't think them telling us that is particularly strong evidence of whether they are sapient – for one, I don't even know what you mean by that!
I've been thinking about the definition of entrepreneurship. I think that tech bro fever has skewed what it means to be a true entrepreneur. I suggest re-defining entrepreneurship to be agnostic of money, business or technology.
In this paradigm, and entrepreneur is someone who solves problems, by taking risk with limited resources, to try and gain leverage.
I would count Thale's insight and action as entrepreneurial - and I think that many derivatives traders are doing similar things today. I suppose part of what make something entrepreneurial is that there's an element of hidden opportunity that's uncovered? Not sure. I'm just going by linguistic feel, in that I would be comfortable in describing Thales' trade option (and those like it) as entrepreneurial.
On the other hand I do not think that general gambling is entrepreneurial - mostly because it happens in "small world", constrained settings (see https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/risk-uncertainty-understanding-small-worlds-large-jd-solomon). I don't think the "small world" risk taking that happens in gambling applies to entrepreneurship, which happens in "large world".
Is your project specifically to 'reclaim' the term? That seem very quixotic to me!
I've seen people refer to, e.g. 'legal entrepreneurship', and I'd expect most people to understand the analogy/metaphor – and I think it's a good one too.
I agree a reclamation would be quixotic - and that's not really what I'm aiming for. I suppose the piece was more to drive an internal reset in myself to some extent. But also to stimulate thoughts about seeing principles of entrepreneurship outside of where it's commonly seen.
I've never heard of legal entrepreneurship - thanks for sharing that - something for me to look into!
But yeah – supporting or even just observing all of the varieties of 'entrepreneurship' is fun and interesting! It reminds me of Feynman's description of various colleagues of his who 'just' use their handful of 'tricks' on every problem they come across.
In his talks about how AI might eventually kill all humans, one thing that Eliezer Yudkowsky brings up frequently is using covalent bond chemistry in making bacteria sized machines that are better than bacteria because covalent bonds are stronger than the static bonds holding together proteins. He mentions it not as if this is some crazy thing that AI might be able to do but as some sort of "known physics" solution. The way he talks about it. it's something that we are very certain could work, even if we don't currently know how to do it.
Now, I know that his point isn't that this _is_ the way AI will win, or even that it's some central pillar. His broader point is that we can't know how it will do it because we aren't smart enough, and therefore it could be innumerable things.
But I'm just curious: what _do_ we actually know about constructing biological like mechanisms (micro or macro) with strong covalent bond chemistry instead of weak static-bond protein based chemistry?
This idea is sometimes called "molecular nanotechnology"; for a high-level overview, see J Storrs Hall's book *Nanofuture* (which I've read, and recommend), or K Eric Drexler's *Engines of Creation* (which I haven't read). For a more technical treatment, see Drexler's book *Nanosystems* (which I also haven't read). Short answer: we have designs for some simple molecular nanomachines (pumps, engines, pistons, that sort of thing) which have been tested in computer simulations based on relatively well-understood physics, but we have no actual experimental results.
My ignorant sense is that if it worked, evolution would have already provided us with some examples of it (nature throws everything at the wall to see what sticks).
Maybe in ten years some fumarole dwelling microorganism that operates on covalent bonds will be discovered, but I'm waiting until then (just as with the new 'yet again room temperature superconduction' stories this week or so).
EY is mistaken about biology. Proteins can form strong covalent cross-links between each other using the amino acid cystiene (adjacent amino acids in the chain are all covalently bonded together too).
One protein rich in cystiene is keratin, which is what hair, feathers, bird beaks, bear claws and tortoiseshell are all made from
Nah, there's a huge amount of path-dependence here. Biological systems have to self-assemble, so they're made out of fats and proteins floating in an aqueous medium. Each process gets its raw materials by the expedient of waiting for them to bump into a specially-shaped receiver molecule. But engineered nanosystems could use diamondoid machinery operating in a vacuum, with raw materials arriving where they're needed much as they do in macroscale factories - transported deliberately via nanoscale versions of grippers or conveyor belts. Biology gives us an existence proof that nanomachines are possible, but there's no reason for us to copy biology's limitations.
Yup. Also, evolution has no foresight. It is great at trying out every possible single base pair change in a genome, but finding sets of coordinated changes, which are improvements when they all happen together, but are useless individually, is exceedingly improbable. While human engineering finds these all the time.
I'm not sure a miniature factory operating in a vacuum is what you want for taking over the world. Like, that sounds very cool for assembling new kinds of materials, but if you want a grey-goo scenario, nanobots making more nanobots out of whatever organic material happens to be lying around, can you do it better than a bacterium?
I think a vacuum is pretty easy to make at those scales, so think of it more as "working medium that doesn't get in the way" rather than "your nanofactories are IN SPACE".
We are still figuring out how to make better micro-scale machines and standardize their manufacturing flow. This tech is roughly in its fourth decade. Mass-produced nano-machines are a glimmer in a distant future.
Nanotech partisans claim that this is because we're not seriously trying to build molecular nanotech - the Clinton administration announced funding for it, but it was all snapped up by materials scientists claiming that what they did was *real* nanotech, not that crazy sci-fi nonsense. But I'm interested by what you say about micro-scale machines - are you talking about MEMS?
Yes, MEMS. Since you know the acronym I assume you’re familiar with the current state of the art: a few fabs with custom/proprietary processes tailored to specific applications and impossible to transfer; yields that would make transistor people weep. That despite the fact that billions of these things have been sold.
I’m not familiar with Drexler’s ideas; MEMS is the only way to make micron-scale mechanisms in large quantities that I know of so that’s my prior for viability at the moment…
The idea that artificial life could outcompete naturally occurring organisms requires really strong evidence given the absence of a single example thus far. The best you can come up with is “airplanes fly faster than birds, cars are faster than cheetahs.” This is true so long as we define “competition” in a way that eliminates everything evolution prioritized (ie survival and reproduction without human assistance) in terms of some single, narrow characteristic like “how fast it travels.”
But natural organisms outcompete other natural organism all the time. We call it evolution. Pick any point in life-on-Earth's history and the statement, "the current organisms are optimal and can't be outcompeted" is obviously wrong.
If natural life can outcompete natural life but artificial life can't, then artificial life must have limitations that natural life doesn't. What are they?
And aren't there no examples of artificial life outcompeting an organism just because no one's create artificial life yet? Or are we counting GMO crops as artificial life?
My friend, this is exactly like Yudkowsky's "I totally got out of the box as an AI but I can't tell you how I did it because that knowledge is too dangerous".
While I appreciate the shout-out to the trope of "there are some things Man was not meant to wot of!!!!", I'm not buying a pig in a poke.
Oh I forgot about this. The funny thing is that, the past few months have told us that he should just tell us how he did it (assuming he did), because no one is every going to keep the AI in the box in the first place, so strategies to escape it are completely pointless.
Physicist here. Yes, strong bonds lead to stronger and more stable systems, which is why we make most of our tools from inorganic materials (metals, ceramics) that use covalent bonds. However, such systems would also not be able to change and adapt because they would not be able to disassemble things using thermal fluctuations. Yudkowski seems to be saying nonsense here.
> we make most of our tools from inorganic materials (metals, ceramics) that use covalent bonds.
Metals mostly use metallic bonds, and AIUI ceramics mostly use ionic bonds, though I see that covalent bonds aren't unknown in either case. But sure, all these bond types are stronger than van der Waals bonds.
> such systems would also not be able to change and adapt because they would not be able to disassemble things using thermal fluctuations.
They don't necessarily need to change and adapt. The point is to make bacterial-scale machines, not artificial bacteria. From the point of view of an ASI (or even a human nanotech engineer) a single-purpose nanosystem that won't evolve out from under you is a good thing.
Fair point about bond types. I did not want to get too technical in my response.
Bacterial scale machines likely need to attach and detach to be useful. That is a type of change. Things are very sticky at the nanoscale even with van der Waals bonds if you have flat surfaces. In other words, strong bonds (metallic, covalent) would cut both ways: they make the structure more stable but also result in a structure that probably cannot do much.
Oh yes MEMS again: “stiction” is a term of the art. Roughen the surface, coat it in Teflon by any other name, all to keep structures 1/10/100 um size from forever sticking to each other. How beams/membranes on nanoscale can be kept from happily hugging into the sunset I can’t even begin to imagine.
"coat it in Teflon by any other name" Exactly. E.g. you want little chunks of diamond, held together with strong covalent bonds internally, with all of the _surface_ bonds tied off to fluorine atoms so that it doesn't cold-weld to other pieces that it touches in operation. In e.g. https://stoddart.northwestern.edu/research/# group's work, note that each of their components is tied together internally by covalent bonds, and the interfaces to other components is via weaker bonds of various types.
They could use covalently bonded parts held together with biochemical "scaffolding", somewhat analogous to an octopus holding a shield of seashells round itself as a barrier and disguise to predatory fish.
Fast take-- biology has a lot of things jittering around and separating and connecting. Maybe stronger bonds would be useful, but I suspect it would take a careful system to make things more stable but not too stable.
I recently graduated with a bachelors in mechanical engineering from Lancaster University in the UK, and have been thinking about applying for masters to engineering programs in the US.
However I have no idea about the process (differences between schools and programs, application strategies, what’s important etc) and I don’t know what schools I have a realistic shot of getting into.
Would anyone with experience in this sort of thing be willing to have a video/phone call to discuss it? Any pertinent advice would be great (even if you’re only in undergrad or a different field or whatever), as the US is really a black box for me. I’d really appreciate any help.
You shouldn't be paying for an engineering MS; if you can't get a fellowship or assistantship, it's not for you.
Contra David W, there is significant additional depth beyond the BS level; in my first job out of grad school (aerospace engineering, FWIW), there were many things I knew how to do that BS-only coworkers with 10+ YOE could barely follow let alone duplicate.
Might be a function of the quality of the particular graduate engineering program.
ETA: an engineering PhD has no marginal value over an MS unless you're trying to be an academic. It's ~ the same coursework just with much more research (dissertation v. thesis).
Unless you want to change disciplines (say, to chemical or civil engineering), a Master's in engineering is nearly pointless. It will be the same classes over again with slightly more rigor, cost you a good deal of money, and open no doors. Any job you can get with a master's, you can get with a bachelor's (or at least a bachelors + 2 years experience). Job experience will teach you more, and they'll pay you for the privilege.
The only possible exception is if it has immigration implications and immigration rather than visiting is your goal; I don't know anything about that process.
A Ph.D has some value; I'm not convinced it's worth the cost but there's at least a benefit too, it will open more doors than a BS. However, if this is what you're thinking, you should apply directly to a Ph.D program, not a Master's program; you actually have a better shot of admission with a BS than with an MS, and in addition you don't waste the two years and tuition.
Is anyone aware of any research on the connection between athletic performance and IQ? Watching boxing this week, and one thing that amazes me is how certain fighters (thinking of Naoya Inoue specifically here) are able to lure their opponents into traps and outsmart them in the ring. In boxing they call this “ring IQ” but there’s a version of it in every sport. In ice hockey, your ability to anticipate the play and make good decisions is your “hockey sense”, for example.
When you get to the top level of sports, pretty much everyone is equally fast, strong, and athletic (by and large). But the difference between the career pros and the top amateurs normally comes down to something cerebral. They can see things that others can’t and always make the right decisions. I’ve always wondered what this is and how it maps to “intelligence” as we normally understand it.
I definitely think there are areas of life where one can demonstrate intelligence and not necessarily demonstrate intelligence in traditional academic areas. Sports, like you mention. Battle/war fare is likely another. And then there are people who seem to be great mechanics, engineers, carpenters, artists who have very little traditional intelligence or schooling, but can problem solve and reason in their chosen field at a very high level
The NFL used to give all incoming rookies the Wunderlich test. The average score by an incoming rookie is 1-2 points higher than the average American. Not that impressive. However, when you consider the NFL is 56% black, this feat is actually very impressive, suggesting NFL players are a little more than a half standard deviation smarter than the populations from which they hail from. Some specific position groups like Offensive line and Quarterback show even higher scores, indicating they are more G-loaded.
>NFL players are a little more than a half standard deviation smarter than the populations from which they hail from
I wonder if IQ is selected for indirectly, in that you need to be of a certain intelligence (and all the behaviors that correlate with it) to be dedicated enough to be an athlete, stay out of trouble, go through a (bare minimum) college degree etc. Rather than smarter players being better.
>Some specific position groups like Offensive line and Quarterback show even higher scores, indicating they are more G-loaded.
That’s super interesting and I’ve never thought about it that way before. I know they got rid of the wonderlic and replaced it this year with something more related to your spatial abilities where as the wonderlic was more verbal intelligence that had little to do with football on the surface. Interestingly, we get a good little experiment of how predictive of success the new test is this year, because first overall draft pick Bryce Young scored a 99% while second overall pick CJ Stroud scored 18%.
Can you describe an example of how a fighter outsmarts another? As a boxing non-enthusiast it just looks like a couple of beefy chaps punching each other in the face until one falls over.
Nope, boxing is extremely technical and requires a high level of strategy. At the high professional level, every fighter is extremely athletic and there’s no significant physical advantages because fighters are at the same weight class. Fights are won pretty much exclusively between the ears. Of course there are fighters with unique physical gifts, such as Floyd Mayweathers elusiveness or Manny Pacquiao’s hand speed, but the ability to actually execute on those gifts is downstream from their ability to recognize the unique patterns of their opponents and strategize accordingly.
Here’s some very short videos breaking down the wins this week by Terrance Crawford and Naoya Inoue, the consensus top two boxers on the planet (pound for pound) after their incredible performances this week. Gives you a brief look at the strategies fighters use and how they expose the holes in them:
Ali probably had the highest boxing IQ ever and yet famously scored very low on the military IQ test, about which he stated: "I didn't say I am the smartest. I said I am the greatest."
Someone else mentioned this, but Ali was also dyslexic so I wonder how much that effected his score. I also doubt he was very motivated to try his best. Regardless, I don’t think Ali was an idiot by any means, so that either calls into question the validity of the result of illustrates the limitations of IQ tests.
Perhaps it should stand as a reminder that individual IQ doesn't mean much. The well-documented correlation between IQ and economic success doesn't mean that we are good at measuring the intelligence of anyone specifically.
>Perhaps it should stand as a reminder that individual IQ doesn't mean much.
Yes, it does. It predicts more about that person's life outcomes than virtually anything else. There aren't a plethora of cases of people with a bona fide IQ of 70 living the lives that the average 120 IQ person does.
Perhaps I should say it means less than many people around here take it to mean, but of course more than blank slatists believe. I'd bet on the hard working person with a measured IQ of 110 over the less hard working person with a measured IQ of 120.
Does IQ predict more than simply looking at the financial success of one's parents?
Most importantly they can analyze and make good decisions at top-level pro _speed_. As a longtime amateur hockey player and pro fan that is the difference that really stands out. Scouts sometimes talk about a prospect as having the "NHL computer" in his head and a lot of what they're looking for is that processing speed.
I was also a hockey player. It’s been said many times before that the biggest difference between an NHL and AHL player is decision making. “Hockey Sense”, “hockey IQ”, “NHL computer” whatever you want to call it. Gretzky is the perfect example of this, because even though he was incredibly skilled he was never the biggest or fastest player by a long shot.
Even when I was playing midget hockey, we had some guys skate a few games with us who ended up playing D1. They definitely had physical gifts I didn’t have, but there were plenty of other guys I played with who had their skating ability and athleticism who didn’t come close to being the same level of player. The thing that really stood out was their ability to elevate the play of everyone on the ice with them. Their playmaking ability was so good they were able to recognize opportunities and set their teammates up when they (the teammates) didn’t even realize they were open for a scoring opportunity. It was like they were thinking in ways no one else was. Contrast this with equally skilled players who weren’t at that level, they could never elevate less talented players in the same way and their game would suffer being paired with them. TheD1 guys also did little things like subtlety varying their speed to disrupt the opponents angles exceptionally well. They also took barely any dumb penalties while still being physical with controlled aggression. And it’s just my experience so I don’t look too much into this, but they tended to also be smarter academically and “better kids” than the equally skilled athletes who weren’t as good of players.
One of my favorite facts in this general area is that physical performance in even relatively simple sports/activities, e.g. weightlifting, is also neurological, i.e. (to some degree) 'cognitive'. Athlete's 'muscle firing' improves – in the brain – after regular training and trainers try to 'work around' that for their athlete's to be able to continue to improve their physical strength/whatever.
Neurological does not mean cognitive. Our brains do plenty of stuff that doesn't count as cognition. It has to involve thinking in some way. It is a fundamentally mental process.
I don't think that's necessarily a clear distinction and lots of 'things our brains do' operate on 'multiple levels', e.g. visual processing. Obviously everything is, 'ultimately', neurological, but evolution also doesn't clearly organize its works in a way that's easy for us to understand.
I have no _precise_ idea what you mean by "thinking" or "fundamentally mental"!
Hm not sure exactly what you mean here. The other day I went to the gym and was deadlifting, I put weight on the bar and my first attempt (after warming up etc) it slipped from my hands and I dropped immediately. I waited a minute and during that time I got into focus and envisioned myself lifting it, and when I tried I got it for 3 reps. Did the same thing again and got 5 my third attempt. I obviously didn’t get “stronger” but there was some type of neurological process triggered that allowed my muscles to lift more.
Is this what youre referring to by “muscle firing” here?
Maybe! I haven't read/investigated much about this exactly, but IIRC, there's some kind of 'neurological plasticity' for what we might 'naturally' think of as ('purely') 'physical activity', i.e. our brains improve the coordination of our muscles to make, e.g. weightlifting, easier/more-efficient, and, at least for some people, is something that could be distinguished from improvements to non-neurological-physiology.
Are David Beckham or Ronnie O’Sullivan great mathematicians. In some way, yes. It’s instinctive in both of them but some form of mathematical process is going on as the former used to kick a ball across the field to the feet of another player, taking the wind and velocity of the player into account, or the latter clears a table which looks impossible.
I think you're using an overly broad definition of 'mathematical' here. Yes, these things can be described or modelled mathematically. But unless you're using mathematic models, explicitly or implicitly, in your decision making, I don't think it's meaningful to call it mathetmatical.
Sure it’s mathematical at some level. The brain is working out the angles in a snooker game - just as a robot we designed to play snooker would have to.
In case US readers aren't aware of it, Ronnie O'Sullivan is an expert player of a game called snooker. This is played on a billiard table but with different colored balls and rules.
The main skill required is the ability to hit the so-called cue ball with the precise direction, speed, and spin to achieve the desired result. The latter is either to pot an eligible ball (or at least touch one en passant, as the rules require for every shot) and position for either the next shot or, if no next pot is feasible, to hide (or "snooker") the cue ball to prevent or hamper your opponent from achieving the same when they take their turn.
Watching a professional such as O'Sullivan play, most of the shots look fairly predictable for any given ball layout, albeit often with two or three alternatives. Only rarely is any strategic multiple-balls-ahead non-obvious "geometry" required, as far as one can tell.
"Watching a professional such as O'Sullivan play, most of the shots look fairly predictable for any given ball layout, albeit often with two or three alternatives."
The hurler on the ditch always knows better how the game should be played 😀
As I said, and I know from experience, 95% of the skill (I reckon) is hitting the ball to achieve the shot one wants. Deciding that shot is (usually) the easy part, monday morning quarterbacks and ditch hurlers notwithstanding! :-)
That honestly sounds like it was written by an AI. Anyway it’s not that easy to work out these geometries or everybody would be able to do it.
I don’t watch snooker myself but I have watched some of Ronnie‘s plays on YouTube. Bearing in mind that you have to pot the reds between the colour balls, until the reds are gone, and that they can be positioned against cushions - look at the starting position of this frame as Ronnie comes out to play.
> That honestly sounds like it was written by an AI
Not sure if that is a complement or not, but I haven't yet dabbled with AI!
I agree Ronnie is a bag of tricks and some of his shots are amazing, for example where he has to nudge a ball into a more favorable position, as a biproduct of one shot, to facilitate potting it in a subsequent shot.
The results I got from Google are split 50/50 between "his IQ was 78", and "no it wasn't". One source claims that he probably scored badly on purpose to avoid the draft.
Yeah interesting, I do wonder how reliable that is considering the fact that Ali was dyslexic. There’s also the fact that he wasn’t exactly motivated to serve and that could have played into how seriously he took the test. In and out of the ring Ali was clearly not an idiot, so that either speaks to the limitations of IQ tests or the validity of this specific result. I’d probably go with a little of both.
Don’t you think there is some overlap between the pattern recognition/spatial modeling abilities used to create opportunities on the football pitch and those used on IQ tests? Obviously controlling for physical abilities.
Which is the entire crux of the matter; IQ tests measure something, but what are they measuring? What is g? I think they measure mathematical ability, but that need not be the only form of spatial modelling ability.
There may be a physical model of it, where you can see the layout of the pitch or the rink or the ring, and the positions of the other players, and the ball/puck, and your own position, and be able to see all that in a model where you can manipulate the data to 'know' the best position and best chance to score if you do this, and they do that, and your team mate is there, and and and...
Which I don't think can be tested on a pen-and-paper test.
IQ scores positively correlate with performance in school and at most tasks people have looked at--IIRC, the military has done a bunch of work in this area. So you'd expect being a good soccer/football/hockey/cricket/etc. player to also be positively correlated with IQ, though I don't know how strong the correlation would be. I mean, you pick pro football players by seeing them play football. Giving them an IQ test or timing them on a 100 m dash are both going to give you extra information, but that's not going to be the first place you look!
At some level I do wonder whether physical and non-physical intelligence would be difficult to tease apart. Coming from an evolutionary perspective, brain development was mainly to drive and plan movement (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7s0CpRfyYp8).
Bowman and Goldman developed an "Athletic Intelligence Quotient" which gets to my point. It includes sub factors of visual spatial processing, long-term storage and retrieval, reaction time, and processing speed.
The question is - if you have a high AIQ, does that mean that you have more "space" to use even a slight bit more "conventional" types of intelligence? I wonder...
*”More recently, research has been undertaken to examine the relationships among AIQ factors and performance outcomes in the National Football League (NFL) (Bowman et al., 2020). Specifically, 146 NFL prospects were administered the AIQ at the 2015 and 2016 NFL Scouting Combines, and their scores were analyzed in relation to subsequent performance in the NFL. The results of this study revealed that specific AIQ factors accounted for a statistically significant increase in the explanation of variance in game statistics (e.g., rushing yards per carry) as well as overall ratings of player success (i.e., weighted career approximate value) beyond other important factors (i.e., draft order).
Finally, another study has recently demonstrated that players in the National Basketball Association (NBA) have significantly higher scores on three of the four factors of the AIQ, when compared to players in the G League or International Leagues (Hogan et al., in preparation).”*
Wow, this is the exact type of answer I had suspected, amazing! Perhaps it talks about this, I didn’t read the entire article, but I wonder how much the AIQ correlates to life outcomes outside of athletics. Especially when you control for things like upbringing, culture, etc.
People are drawn to sports for the physical talents on display, along with the tribalism of supporting your team and it’s traditions. But to me, the mental aspects and the level of focus involved is what really blows my mind. I’ve recently gotten into combat sports and I am just realizing how cognitively demanding boxing is. The level of focus is insane, and even a split second lapse is all it takes to get knocked out. The great fighters recognize patterns in their opponent and make adjustments in a way that’s very high level. People love to joke about Floyd Mayweather, saying he can’t read, etc, but when you see how that man performs you can’t help but have an appreciation for his set of cognitive abilities. He’s clearly not an idiot.
My intuition is that some of the NBA and NFL findings are identifying players who are just better at long term planning and plan execution (you can call this execution if you want, I have no opinion either way). They may perform better at their sports because they are better able to create and execute a training plan vs players who have a great amount of born potential but can't max it out. Being able to long term plan and execute on those plans clearly has positive impacts on educational performance. Did the studies look at grades in college, SAT scores, or control for the "prestige" of the university they attended? Would be interesting to see if anything comes of that.
>but when you see how that man performs you can’t help but have an appreciation for his set of cognitive abilities. He’s clearly not an idiot.
Do you have proof that his performance is related to cognition?
All of this stuff reads an awful like like Gardner, who was obviously desperate to prove the existence of "other" intelligences for egalitarian reasons.
Cognition is the process of taking in information, retaining it, processing/weighing it and then selecting an action (see: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cognition) (as an aside, these are the same principles that underly how healthcare professionals or lawyers assess capacity in mental health/legal settings)
Cognition can therefore be readily applied to any athletic activity. Taking in proprioceptive and other sensory information, storing in in short term memory, performing a computation on it, and selecting the best action at a given point. As I said before - movement is in fact the core reason we have brains.
So no, it's not about proving the existence of "other" intelligences for whatever egalitarian reasons you are clearly projecting onto this discussion. It's about the principle understanding that physical skill requires a brain that has strong enough cognitive capability to execute the skilled action at the right time.
The only sports without much cognition involved are things like track and field, swimming, etc, where it’s just a timed race and you aren’t required to strategize for each unique opponent. I’ve recently taken up a love of pro boxing because of the mental aspects of the sport, the ability to recognize the smallest of weaknesses in the opponents movements and work to exploit them. It’s really incredible to watch how dialed in they are, especially given the consequences for even a split second lapse in focus.
Yeah, its clear that there's a mental side to most sports, but it's not so obvious a priori that IQ tests would capture that very well--it's pretty far from the stuff IQ tests have been validated against. OTOH, IQ seems to positively correlate with most tasks, so....
What do you mean “proof” ? The proof is in the nature of elite athletic performance itself. The ability to recognize patterns in an opponent and make strategic decisions based on that is what elevates the all time greats. When you reach the top pro level, every person is strong, fast, and extremely athletic.
Glad you got your answer! I've been toying with the idea that we, as a society, highly value "IQ", somewhat value "EQ" but really don't value the "kinesthetic quotient" - which is in some sense "physical intelligence that you are referring to.
so the question is - does this AIQ/KQ *independently* improve outcomes, or does it covary with other quotients?
Completely agree with your framing though - athletes that people think of as "dumb" are probably ignoring other important types of intelligence
>Glad you got your answer! I've been toying with the idea that we, as a society, highly value "IQ", somewhat value "EQ" but really don't value the "kinesthetic quotient" - which is in some sense "physical intelligence that you are referring to.
Why on earth would society value "physical intelligence" (if it's even a meaningful thing)? IQ is valuable because it impacts most aspects of a person's life and the outcomes of entire populations of people. If you cannot show that this is true for "physical intelligence", then there's no reason to care about it. If it's only good for predicting how likely someone is to become a pro athlete, then it's not important at a societal level, and even an individual level considering how few people become athletes.
I think the lack of prioritisation of movement is a core reason that we, as an increasingly sedentary society are burdened with more chronic disease.
Just because it's not currently valued doesn't mean it shouldn't be. Society should value the health of its people - or as you say, "the outcomes of entire populations of people". And I am saying that physical activity (and by extension the development of physical skill) is a fundamental part of that. Not necessarily about being a pro-athlete; as these people take it to the highest level. Kind of in the same way we don't need everyone to be a professor, even though IQ is "valued" in the paradigm you propose.
Athletes are highly valued, and I'd say more so for the sports which obviously demand high athletic intelligence. I *think* football has a bigger audience than golf.
Have recently had a good eyebrow raise about head sizes. My uncle called me Charlie Brown when I was younger, and I’ve have had nicknames touching throughout my life, but recently discovered I’m much more right shifted on the head circumference distribution than I thought. While looking up my son’s stats this website https://simulconsult.com/resources/measurement.html claimed I’m almost seven sigma from the mean at 25.5 inches. I don’t think that’s accurate (I’m confident I don’t have one of the biggest heads in the world) but looking at a website that specifically sells large hats I’m apparently a 4XL, so I’m assuming there enough people out there for that to be a viable market.
I’m curious if there are any other melon heads out there and if that corresponds positively to reading Astral Codex Ten.
I have a rather large head. It was for a while and nickname of mine was “big head“ and they were not referring to my opinion of myself (or maybe they were?). There is an interesting article in Nature just out that makes the claim that the size and shape of the brain has more correlation to a lot of things than other connection theories.
The smartest man I ever knew personally had an enormous head and also a very strange tumor in his spine, which put him in a wheelchair in his mid-30s. He could speak five languages and had an uncanny ability to manipulate 3-D space in his head. I know this because I used to build things for him, and he astounded me with how he could re-purpose and reposition things in his apartment to suit him. He owned two captains beds, and he figured out how to turn them into chests of drawers. It was a bitch to take them apart and reconfigure them in the new way, but it totally worked. He had a photographic memory as well. Anecdotal I know.
I weigh in at 23 inches which puts me in the 99th percentile but I think a 2.7 standard deviation so not ridiculously big his head was quite a bit bigger than mine.
His mother may have had a difficult birth, although not a caesarian as she wouldn't have survived that back then and she was still alive when he was an adult.
The shape of his head may have caused his epilepsy, although that was more likely a caused by concussion from a blow in one of the many battles in which he played a hands-on role.
A quick web search shows that the first successful cesarian section (where the mother and child both survived) may have been in 1337 [ https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/27882755/ ] and apparently more started being successful from the 1500s.
The name Caesar means something like "cropper" or "cutter", and long predated Gaius Julius Caesar (in which Gaius was his forename, and Julius his "tribal" name or surname, and Caesar a sub-category of the gens Julius). So I would guess probably one of his distant ancestors cut his hair short in what we would call a crew cut.
Definitely went to my head that I was almost seven sigma until I realized how impossible that was and then had to use my massive cranial volume to figure out there had to be an error in the calculator.
It looks like it's designed for children and probably not properly calibrated for adults.
I don't have a tape measure handy right now, but wikipedia tells me that the average head circumference of an adult man is 57 cm; if I put that into the calculator then it tells me that's 91st percentile.
That was my first thought. Other than my wife when we were playing with this and I guess once for a family competition no one has measured my head as an adult.
It does look as if the calculator used paediatric charts and assumed full growth at age 16. Adult males especially do have significant head growth past age 16. The paper I linked earlier puts me at +2.55 sigma for my height and I am prepared to believe that.
I looked up the calculator at your link and while my head is smaller than yours, I'm still +4.8 sigma. But the calculator does not take height into account, and there is a strong relation between height and head circumference. see: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1793909/
I worked a couple summers in a sawmill and had to max out the twist knob to expand the hard hat. It looked like a yarmulke and when another guy accidentally put it on it fell around his eyes.
I've been reading "Bentham's Bulldog" on substack (after, if I recall correctly, seeing a comment of his here) and just in the last week came to the (to me) shocking realization that people take utilitarianism very seriously as more than just a fun thought experiment when discussing policy. I'm interested to hear from commentators here who also take it seriously in a true this-is-ethics-that-informs-my-life kind of way. I'd prefer not to comment at this time on whatever it is that I'm doing instead, but hope y'all can take as written the notion that I do in fact live an ethical life and also am not a deontologist.
I'm not a super-hardcore utilitarian, mainly because I think that it's not plausible to do the math perfectly, and once I start making estimates, it ends up relying on the same kind of reasoning that I suspect underlies many deontological rules. That said, I do tend to be a pretty strict consequentialist, and if I'm really stuck on a decision I will sit down and work out some fake math just to see how the numbers come out.
Before I am criticized for my lack of details, I think that most ethical decisions are local rather than global optimization problems. Realistically, I will never have to make a call like in the trolley problem. I'll just have to decide whether I give a homeless person a ride to the grocery store or something.
Finally, yes, I fail to meet the goals of my ethical system. I am a sub-optimally moral person. But I can live with that.
I generally hope that people I meet are utilitarians rather than deontologists, because on average this results in better outcomes for myself. (For example, if a philosopher has to choose whether to divert a trolley that's on course to kill 10 people to a track where it would only kill 1 person, then conditional on me being 1 of the 11 people at risk, I'm 10 times more likely to be saved if the philosopher is a utilitarian than if they are a deontologist.)
What if society decided that killing you increased the utility of everybody else around you by 1, and in total that this increase was greater than your loss of utility. Should that kill your?
Or as Deiseach suggests, what if a society could use slaves to increase the utility of the rest of society by a number higher than the loss of utility endured by the slaves.
>What if society decided that killing you increased the utility of everybody else
Actually, Bentham's Bulldog bullet bites about involuntary organ harvesting, so you doing want too be someone with healthy organs in a utilitarian scoiety.
Wouldn't the relevant question be "Would you want to live in this society where you might get killed?" and not just "Would you want to be the person who gets killed?"
It's the difference between asking "Would you like to bet on the Dodger game that starts in 30 minutes?" and "Would you like to bet on the Dodger game that ended 30 minutes ago?" Once you know the outcome, your willingness to gamble shrinks to zero or increases to infinity. The interesting question is whether we should take the gamble.
My view on that is always assume you are going to be the one person on the other track, because why assume you will be one of the lucky ten? Life doesn't work out so nicely as that.
I see the same thing with people dreaming of the great future/past when the empire was strong/when the revolution will come/when AI is in charge of it all; they always assume they will be one of the top of society, not one of the masses in misery at the bottom. There was something of this sort on another site, OP asking why we wouldn't have wanted to be part of the Roman/Han empires which were glorious golden ages. Sure - if I knew I was going to be one of the aristocratic families of the Empire, it would be marvellous. But if I were going to be one of the serfs at the bottom? Corvée labour, drafted for wars, sent off to the salt mines? No thank you - and most of the peoples of those empires weren't the imperial or noble families, of course.
Same with past life regressions; people are always important or at least high-status, few ever remember that they were just a kitchen maid or lived in one of the Roman slums or the likes in their past lives.
Because universe isn't there to get you specifically and ten is ten times bigger than one. It's the same reasoning you use to justify why you would rather live today than in a Roman Empire.
By the same token, each of the eleven people involved are going to think "it is more likely that I will be one of the ten than the one on the single track", but one of them is going to be wrong.
Yup, the racists all assume that they are the master race, the neo-monarchists assume that they won't be peasants, and the rise-and-grind set all assume that their ridiculous business schemes will pan out rather than crash and burn along with their life savings.
I don't see what this has to do with the trolley thing. Like, you could give the exact same argument for the other side (why assume you'll be the lucky one guy who didn't get run over?). Also, I'd think many people prefer living in modernity because it has a markedly higher ratio of rich-to-miserable compared to ye olde times. Rather like how the utilitarian's world has a markedly higher ratio of alive-to-dead compared to the deontologist's, actually.
I am a utilitarian, but it's hard to know what to say without knowing where exactly the disagreement is. People sometimes use "utilitarian" to mean a strictly hedonistic version, and sometimes use a broader definition that allows other terms than just pleasure and pain in the utility function. That may be some of the cause of the confusion, as the first is weirder, but there are some people (not me) who believe even that.
I'll try to briefly explain my stance anyway. Consequentialism is intuitively correct to me because if I try to think about why some action is good or bad, it's possible consequences that come to mind as the reason. From there, trying to be consistent gets the rest of the way to utilitarianism. Specifically, requiring that my preferences be transitive and that the relative desirability of two situations is roughly independent of what's going on elsewhere. Keeping my ethics internally consistent in this way is a rather abstract criterion I guess, but I find it intuitively compelling enough because if I'm not consistent, that means in at least some circumstances I'd be making the wrong choice.
I'll also add the caveat that I may not actually put a huge amount of effort into always doing exactly what's right, but if I think about what is right, it's utilitarianism that informs my answer.
Edit I didn't think to include initially: there's a lot of flexibility to fit the framework of utilitarianism to my ethical intuitions, because this reasoning about consistency and stuff doesn't specify what the utility function actually is, and I'm free to have that be whatever I feel is good.
No. Of course you should be careful in cases where you're at risk of motivated reasoning, but I don't personally feel like intentions really matter beyond the consequences of the intentions.
So intentions don't matter for meeting out punishments? You would remove *mens rea* from law? You would remove the distinction between murder and manslaughter (intentional and unintentional homicide)?
What the right punishment is is a different question from how bad the crime was. For the latter question, look at the consequences of the crime. For the former, look at the consequences of the punishment (and the consistent application of the law, which also has its own value). If someone didn't even mean to do something they'd have responded less to incentives, and they're less likely to re-offend.
"the relative desirability of two situations is roughly independent of what's going on elsewhere"
But it only works out like that in the thought experiments, doesn't it? In those you can say "do I choose X or Y?" without consequences rippling out. In the real world, if there were a trolley problem and you pulled the switch for the one not the ten, the family members of the dead person would come after you, there probably would be legal implications, public opinion would be divided between are you a hero or a murderer, people would treat you differently, and so on. Maybe the act itself would negatively impact your mental health - you caused the death of an innocent person, no matter how good your motives.
Sure, there may be side-effects and unintended consequences, but those are still consequences that are still included in the theoretical calculation, and at least some approximation to them must be included in whatever thought process you use to come up with your actual actions (given that explicitly enumerating all of the consequences isn't feasible). Of course a version of utilitarianism where you're only allowed to include clear, direct consequences would be silly.
I consider myself an utilitarian, in the sense that I believe ethics should be grounded in outcomes (rather than rules or personal virtue, this is not to deny the importance of rules or personal virtue, just their reliability as benchmarks). On the other hand, there are strands of utilitarian thought in the vein of [if we assign a numerical value to things and apply mathematics, we can reason our way to the correct ethical choice] that I don't find at all convincing or meaningful, and I'd assume (hope) it's those that are shocking if taken seriously.
The outcomes of capturing, selling and owning slaves means I become very rich, trade is booming, the economy of my country improves, standards of living go up. Those are all good things. Doing something that leads to good things is ethical. Is slavery ethical?
(Yeah, that is a bit of a gotcha! and unfair, but that's the kind of nasty little unexpected outcomes that happens to all our systems of ethics, no matter which ones we pick).
Do you actually believe that the consequences of slavery, including both distant economic effects and the experience of the slaves, would generally be good in total? That seems very unlikely. If I believed the consequences of slavery were good, I'd conclude slavery was good, but I don't, so I don't, no contradiction. If you're saying this as a thought experiment, like suppose somehow that slavery had good consequences in total, then I'd accept that in that hypothetical it'd be good (although you'd have to at least put a lot of care into checking that still given how significant the bad parts of the consequences were), that's just not a flaw in the ethical system because it's not a realistic hypothetical.
It's like saying what if everyone secretly thought being robbed was super fun and was longing for you to rob them (but didn't admit that to you because it'd spoil the fun). In this hypothetical, it'd be ethical to rob people, but that's not a real flaw in whatever ethical system is used.
Ah ah ah, you're changing the parameters now. You started off with plain "what consequences are good, are ethical".
*Now* you're starting off with "before ever we consider the consequences, I have decided some consequences are ethical and some are not, regardless of outcome". It's undeniable that slavery made a lot of people rich and developed the economies of those countries (and God knows, we're always being told that economic development is a Good Thing).
There's also the tongue-in-cheek argument that the descendants of slaves in the USA have benefitted greatly because had their ancestors remained in Africa, they today would be living in much worse conditions.
I'm not saying those are right or wrong, I'm saying that on a strict "what outcomes are good mean that these are ethical" then you'd have to agree that slavery is ethical.
[This is meant to go after the other reply to the same comment but it's displaying first.] Also, if I became convinced that some specific form of slavery in history had good consequences in total (I don't know all the details, it's possible the economics thing works out), and I was offered the opportunity to use a time machine to somehow stop it (assuming I can't use the time machine for anything else and there somehow aren't side-effects of me doing this), I would indeed turn down the offer and believe that was the right choice. That doesn't mean I'd participate in modern slavery, because I'd still expect that to be net-negative.
No, I just disagree about slavery having good consequences. It made a lot of people rich but it made even more people very poor, and the economic development seems like it could have happened without the slavery.
Not a gotcha. (Is anything a gotcha in philosophy?)
First - hence, utilitarianism, not egoism or other forms of consequentialism. I specifically want outcomes to be just. (I will readily admit to egoism in Stirnerian sense, but that's downstream from my belief it leads to society-wide good outcomes, and I guess that's virtue ethics rather than consequentialism anyway.)
Second - there's a difference between slavery being ethical and [some particular arrangement that nominally fits the definition of slavery] being ethically justifiable. The lack of rigid classifications is precisely what differentiates utilitarianism from deontology. Feature, not a bug. (cf.: I hold as slave laborers people who would otherwise be killed, Schindler-style.) (I can still claim slavery the concept is not ethical, because, all other things equal, it diminishes overall wellbeing.)
Scott, this year please allow us to vote for multiple reviews in the contest. Right now I have several reviews that I like, but no clear favorite. If I were forced to pick just one I'd be doing injustice to some good reviews as well as not presenting my opinion very accurately.
We're talking about the final poll that will determine the winner (it won't be by the number of substack likes, or at least the years before it wasn't.)
Strong agreement on this one! Maybe tier lists of "I would be quite happy if one of these won/I would be confused if one of these won/I would understand (but not be thrilled) if one of these won"
I've read some people arguing that the Hunter Biden emails implicate President Biden in corruption ("the big guy") and this is starting to become an important political issue - has anyone who believes they don't implicate him written up a counterargument for why not, and explained what they think was really going on?
Looking at this as a criminal case, there is nothing remotely close to indicting President Biden on. There is a lot of evidence that Hunter Biden used his last name to get financial benefit and a decent amount of evidence that he convinced Ukrainian and Chinese Citizens that he was just the intermediary of the deal, and that they were bribing the president for favourable political actions. What's missing, unless something changed recently, is any evidence that President Biden was aware of any of this. Without that, an indictment is impossible.
Now looking at this as just a concerned citizen that doesn't have to worry about legal standards, this is concerning and should be investigated thoroughly. But I think the most likely explanation, at 80% roughly, is that Hunter Biden was conning the foreigners, and his father was completely unaware of any of this happening until after the FBI found out. It makes the most sense looking at the current evidence and knowing the personalities of those involved.
I have to admit that, personally, I find this a bit disappointing... I was really wishing for the two-ex-presidents-one-jail-cell mpeg (however unrealistically). :-)
At least a couple of people involved in the business dealings in question have testified before the Congressional hearings that they witnessed Biden Sr. joining in phone calls and discussing said dealings while they were meeting with Hunter-- does this change your view at all?
Your question wasn't directed at me, but for the record I knew that before and factored it in. I'm assuming that a certain amount of this sort of thing is normal in the political class, and there's no evidence to suggest that Biden knew it had gone too far. There are also variously corrupt ways of fielding requests to give you bribes and it is quite possible that Joe only heard about the ones that are of the normal type. The best explanation is not that he had zero knowledge, but that there isn't evidence that he had enough knowledge of the scope of things for it to set him apart from the rest of the folks in DC.
I have spent maybe 2 hours of my life trying to figure out what Biden is being accused of, and haven't yet heard a satisfactory explanation. So right now, I'm of the view that there is nothing to argue against.
What should one's priors be re Joe Biden engaging in corruption? Presumably pretty low, given the absence of previous allegations in his 4 decades in office, plus the fact that he had the lowest net worth of any Senator when he left the Senate. https://www.opensecrets.org/pfds../summary.php?cid=N00001669&year=2007. And the supposed evidence is a reference that could refer to any number of people, including Chinese govt officials, who are a) rather prone to corruption, and b) likely to want their share held by someone outside China. And, in an email sent while Joe Biden was a private citizen (so why is it "corrupt", even if he is the big guy?) who was making plenty of money legitimately so didn't need to get involved in anything shady https://www.forbes.com/sites/michelatindera/2019/07/10/bidens-made-nearly-twice-as-much-in-2017-than-previous-19-years-combined/?sh=31f96af368ef
We have pretty different priors on political corruption. I'm from Illinois, where I think that half of our last 8 governors went to jail, and our speaker of the house is probably going to jail too. So my base rate of suspecting politicians of corruption is pretty far up there
Well, I explicitly referred to Biden in particular. Besides, Illinois is clearly an outlier. I daresay few governors of other states have been imprisoned.
More to the point, if money is flowing from Hunter to Joe, it is not at all the normal situation--almost inevitably, the money flows from the successful dad to the messed up, drug-addicted son, not the other direction.
It was already an important political issue before the 2020 election. The only reason it wasn't more widely known is because social media censored the story, calling it Russian propaganda. Twitter went as far as to lock the account of the New York Post, who exposed the story.
In one of the emails, James Gilliar, one of Hunter Biden's business partners, outlined the proposed equity distribution in a new company doing a joint venture with CEFC China Energy Co. It says "10 held by H for the big guy?" Another former Hunter Biden partner, US Navy veteran Tony Bobulinski, later claimed that the "big guy" is Joe Biden. The NY Post claims to have obtained text messages from a whistleblower, which show Gilliar telling Bobulinski not to say Joe Biden was involved (https://nypost.com/2022/07/27/hunter-bidens-biz-partner-called-joe-biden-the-big-guy-in-panic-over-laptop/).
So there's no direct evidence from the emails themselves that the "big guy" is Joe Biden. We just have one former Hunter Biden partner who claims it is, and unverified text messages from Gilliar claiming the same. There are many possibilities that don't implicate Joe Biden in any wrongdoing:
1. Maybe Bobulinski was lying. Perhaps he's a disgruntled former partner and wanted to harm the Biden family, or maybe he just didn't want Biden to win the election.
2. Maybe Bobulinski and Gilliar were wrong, but not lying. They could have made the inference that the "big guy" is Joe Biden from the emails alone, just like a lot of Americans are doing now. It wouldn't be an unreasonable inference, but it doesn't amount to solid evidence.
3. Maybe Bobulinski and Gilliar were both right, and the big guy is Joe Biden--but Hunter was falsely implying his father was involved to convince his partners to go along with the deal.
If I had to bet, I'd put a 30% chance that Joe Biden knew of and was actively benefiting from Hunter Biden's dealings, a 40% chance that he knew of the dealings but looked the other way and didn't benefit from them, and a 30% chance that Hunter was influence peddling without his knowledge (in this specific joint venture; he certainly knew Hunter was up to no good, because even the public knew).
I don't know if Joe himself is personally corrupt. I think we can be fairly sure that Hunter is. So I'd put higher chance on option 3 - Hunter was influence peddling without Joe's knowledge of specifics because Hunter is as unreliable as a wheel barrow with no wheel. So while we can probably take it that Hunter was lying, cheating, defrauding and other fun activities, it's harder to pin it down to "Joe knew he was doing X with Y and demanded a cut of Z".
A wheelbarrow with no wheel is extremely reliable, since it takes great effort to move somewhere else. And if it's not worth great effort, you know exactly where it is and what it can be used for. :)
I mean, who else could "the big guy" possibly be? It needs to be someone who (a) trusts Hunter Biden enough to hold his equity in his name, and (b) someone who can't just openly own things like any normal person.
I would say at this point the Hunter Biden scandal is a lot bigger than this though; the scandal is not that Hunter Biden is a crook but that all major centers of power in the United States have shown absolutely zero interest in investigating whether Hunter Biden is a crook.
It could be another politician, a mob boss, or God knows who else. It certainly seems like Hunter Biden knows a lot of shady people, and maybe one of those people persuaded or forced him to hand over some of his earnings.
I don't know, I could genuinely see it that Hunter asked Joe "Dad, can you hold this money for me but uh it has to be done this way because of reasons" or even Joe putting a condition of "Son, it's great that you've got a new job but your mother and I want you to hand over some of your income so we can put it in an account for you" because let's face it, we *know* he'll spend every penny he has on hookers and blow (literal) so Dad taking some of his money so he can't splurge every penny is sensible. Joe cossets Hunter, that's 90% of the problem right there.
It can't be from that email obviously. Is there a different piece of evidence which suggests that the "big guy" reference is something more than name-dropping as part of a con?
You can't be implicated simply by a reference to you in someone else's email. I don't think there's any proof, yet, of Joe Biden's corruption. So to try to prove Joe Biden's innocence at this time is a fool's errand, because it accepts that there's a solid argument that he's guilty.
I think the evidence of Trump and his circle trading on a namebrand is far greater than anything that I have heard about the Biden so far. And I don’t recall anything close to this level of scrutiny directed at his dealings. He ran a hotel in Washington, and rented rooms out to the Secret Service at extraordinary rates for years, just for instance. Ivanka Trump, a really second rate fashion brand (for a fact, because my wife works for a fashion brand that is quite up in the scale of things,), got all kinds of boost in China when her father was president- no big deal a few people squawked-and I won’t even start about how he operated in New York City long before most people even heard of him.
Joe Biden might well turn out to be a big-time crook, but there’s nothing on the table yet that justifies this level of screeching.
Hunter is his own story. I am trying to keep an open mind about this, but I’m not buying this level of interrogation at the moment.
It is unfortunate that he let his computer fall into the wrong hands but even that is a very suspicious story. In what universe do you take your computer to a repair shop and have it end up in the hands of Rudy Giuliani even if you did forget it.
If it’s a slow news day, just publish a few more photographs of Hunter Biden behaving badly. It works wonders.
"In what universe do you take your computer to a repair shop and have it end up in the hands of Rudy Giuliani even if you did forget it."
In the universe where your lawyer can't even go "Those are fakes and not my client", and where the Serious Media which is Defending Democracy from Darkness writes opinion pieces about "Okay, so these are all genuine, but so what?", which is our one, it seems:
My understanding is that his lawyers have recently gone there. I don’t know how it will work out but the does seem to be some issues of privacy raised here. Yes, he happens to be a celebrity so that changes everything but imagine if it happened to me or you? I drop a computer off to get it fixed and the next thing I know the entire hard drive has been handed over to the FBI and the New York post?
there are a lot of stinky things about that by the way, but it’s a deep dive. There were things not on that computer that were subsequently retrieved from other iCloud accounts referenced on that computer. Likewise, WhatsApp I have to believe that the owner of that computer store was ideologically motivated to do some things that are highly questionable.
Innocent until proven guilty. The difference is that Trump is indicted and will be in court on multiple charges with prima facie evidence that seems pretty strong. We'll see if the proof holds up.
For that matter Trump already has multiple convictions for various forms of fraud, and losses in civil courts too. The new round of indictments are just the most serious ones (so far) on his record.
I hate to jump in just because I happened to be on substack as this was posted, but I have a concise explanation that seems so solid to me that I struggle to believe that those criticizing the Bidens are entirely sincere. Phrased most parsimoniously:
"Everyone in politics engages in some 'normal' amount of lobbying/favors-for-access/tit-for-tat. Joe Biden obviously knows and knew this, and was aware of Hunter's activities. There is, however, no evidence that he knew that the scale of this activity had, in his family's case, crossed the wide and hazy line into 'too much'."
Also, Hunter is an independent adult. He can do stuff his dad doesn't know about or approve of, presumably including drug use and whoring. So he can also do stuff his dad doesn't approve of like promising access to or influence over his dad, whether or not he can really deliver either one.
It's very common for children of politicians to get plum jobs to keep mom or dad sweet on the company employing them. It's hard to see how you'd prevent that without somehow forbidding the children of prominent politicians from ever getting jobs. It seems like Chelsea Clinton and Megan McCain both also benefitted from that kind of job, for example.
How much of an outlier is Hunter here, and how would we tell? Is this something many other kids of major politicians do, only most of them aren't drug addicts bent on wrecking themselves, but rather medium-bright, medium-dilligent folks who've regressed to the mean from their high-flying parents' accomplishments but would still like a nice media or consulting job and a guaranteed prosperous middle-class life.
The other thing is that hindsight is 20/20. That's a platitude, of course, but consider how we might feel about this if Ukraine hadn't happened to become such a mess lately. If it were just money from China and there were nothing going on in Ukraine, we might very well be looking at Biden and saying, "Eh, I don't know, he seems pretty tough on China, I'm sure those allegations were overblown, Hunter probably fleeced some chicoms who overestimated how much one person was going to shift policy."
It's a bit frustrating that the rules of this comment section preclude my just telling you to Google it because it comes right up. Just off the top of my head, I can answer that he took stronger actions regarding sanctions and chip manufacturing than anyone expected, has threatened more sanctions (can't remember why), and didn't do anything at all to reverse the Trump policies that Democrats opposed in the first place.
I have the opposing view. Everything about Hunter Biden is toxic, but so long as this war is going on I'm willing to ignore any past shenanigans involving Ukrainian entities. I suspect that any "Gavin Newsom types" feel the same way.
I have also suggested that "10% for the big guy" could be Hunter's religious tithe, but nobody seems to think that is believable.
"I have also suggested that "10% for the big guy" could be Hunter's religious tithe, but nobody seems to think that is believable."
Well, he does need Jesus, that's true 😁 And of course, all we have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God, so shove over there in the pew, Hunter, I need to pray too!
I’m open to an explanation that exonerates Joe Biden. In fact I’d prefer one. It’s not good for the country to have a compromised president. And I agree that it’s not unusual for some people close to political power to trade on their connections. But that’s very different from actively selling access, and delivering specific outcomes for a fee. There is a significant amount of evidence that this is exactly what Joe and Hunter were doing. To say that people who are looking at this evidence are not “entirely sincere” makes me question your own sincerity.
Which part is it verified that Joe knew about though? We're talking about a man who was a senator for ages before being a vice president. I assume that one of his genuine strengths is an ability to delegate. He loved and trusted his son, who honestly does appear to be an incredibly shrewd operator. The sunk cost fallacy alone would incline him to keep this up. In these circles, I think we call that motivated stopping.
It's Hunter, so it's hard to know. It's just as possible that he was lying about his level of access through his dad, and was implying that a certain amount of vigorish had to go to Dad in order to extort more money from the people wanting to use him to get access.
I will say that I, for one, am sincere in criticising the Bidens because even if Joe was not involved, by now he surely is aware of what Hunter was doing and claiming, and familial love can only cover so much. This has become a matter affecting the public interest and there needs to be some kind of statement about "okay this stops here and Hunter is not going to be able to trade on being my son in order to get soft jobs and money for nothing in a cash-for-access exchange any more".
I dunno, how about making a public statement that "No family member has any access to, or influence over, my decision making in office, so whatever their private interests, they cannot advance those by a back door to the administration" or the likes?
I'm sure he knows now to whatever extent his cognitive capabilities are still up to it, but the damage has already been done, and likely things are different now. One would have to assume that if Hunter is still selling paintings, the people purchasing them are not getting the same value they would have in past years.
The best use of gpt seems to be for coding, but it missing post-2021 data means it's missing a lot of recent libraries or developments, like pytorch 2.0. Is there a plugin or a different AI tool that's similar in quality to gpt 4 and has access to recent data?
before openai disabled bing search (in chatgpt) you could use gpt4 and tell it to include stackoverflow in its search for answers to your question. kind of a weird way to use it but it worked well, albeit slowly.
Here are some miscellaneous thoughts. (I'm majoring in mathematics and computer science, which my school oddly offers both as a combined single major *and* as an explicit double major, and I was a college applicant not so long ago, so I can sort-of empathize with you.)
- Apply to a *ton* of colleges (this should be a platitude by now, but it helps to remind yourself that admissions statistics for many colleges are pretty unfavorable, even for the super obscure mid-tier ones).
- If you struggle with writing well, particularly with phrasing things in an eloquent manner, then the essays are probably gonna be your rate-limiting step (it certainly was the case for me). ChatGPT can't help you with this (at least not yet?), but a very good admissions counselor who talks to you for months and months on end might.
(Anecdotally, a good exercise I've found for writing better is the so-called "free write journaling". In this exercise, you write down a boring log of everything you did today, but if any event starts making you think of some deep philosophical point or something, keep going on it until you can't really think of anything else to say about this point, then go back to the log. To be really effective, I suggest that you do this daily for a few weeks; I did this for only a week but didn't see any big improvements.)
- Don't take too many classes once you're in. Your school will probably have a standard semesterly courseload, and you shouldn't go above it unless you're unusually good at time management. In addition, as 80k hours also points out, you start losing the potential for side projects or activities.
- At the same time, don't worry too much about whether taking any specific class is a good decision, unless your school *forces* all students (or all students in your major) to take this very specific class in order to graduate, as many schools do.
- If you are prone to homesickness, don't go to a school very far away. This should be a no-brainer.
- Make sure to pack enough to survive independently, *even if* you aren't going to a school very far away.
- Don't forget to stay sane! (Going crazy in college is pretty easy, especially if you have a very high course load or if you've had mental health issues in the past).
- Don't get lost on your school's campus. This is easier if you've toured the campus before, or stared at a map of the campus intently, or ideally both at the same time. But, if you need it, use something like Google Maps. Also, if your school gives you the choice, living in a dorm closer to your classes may be a good option (but if there's a dorm with a lots of culture which is a strong match for your personality, then you should consider that too).
- Possible future careers:
- With Economics, the obvious rationalist/EA-endorsed career path to go down is global priorities research, or maybe EA grantmaking.
- With Computer Science, the even more obvious career path is AI alignment research, but most any kind of coding work would be ok unless you're working on GPT-9 or the Pegasus spyware or something insane like that. There's also quantitative finance which is kinda high variance and runs the risk of you becoming the next SBF, but earning-to-give as a quant is apparently a real thing.
- With Physics, ... I don't know, maybe you could try replicating the alleged superconductor thingy or something. Also you get to seem like a Quantitatively Thinking Person™ in general and do other kinds of quantitative work (such as data science or quant trading or whatever). You'll need to like doing the experiments, though.
I double majored in Econ and Math with a Physics minor, so you're a man after my own heart. In hindsight, the CS major would've probably increased my productivity a bit, but I was able to pick that up in the field and I'm glad I haven't been pigeonholed into just coding. In my experience every job everywhere can benefit from CS skills, but I probably wouldn't have seen most of these opportunities in the first place if I was just a software engineer.
But that's just me - you can go far with a strong CS base as well, especially if that's what you're into. So lean into whatever part of this you're interested in.
A few random comments; background: I'm a Physics professor. (1) These are all good paths. (2) Why double major? Taking a wide variety of courses is great; jumping through the hoops for a second credential may or may not be worthwhile, and it would be good to have a clear articulation of what you expect the worth to be. (Most students I ask who are double majoring have some vague, inaccurate idea of how it's perceived.) Especially for something like physics, it's *far* better to devote as much time as you can to doing research, starting around year 2, rather than to fleshing out some other major. (3) Attend lots of seminars, and don't worry if you don't understand most of the content. This is a great way to see what's *currently* going on in various fields, and to gain exposure to things you may never have thought about.
I ended up double majoring in Biochem and Comp Sci. I pursued bioinformatics for a bit, but it turned out to be a dead end for me. I now manage multiple software product teams of about 40 people (Comp Sci, Comp Eng, Mech Eng, Math, Physics) at a large engineering company and haven't done any Biochem in over 20 years.
All that to say that it's hard to leverage multiple majors in a career. I give my folks the flexibility to do what they want, but still, the CS/Math and CS/Physics double majors that I have either code 100% or don't code at all. If you end up planning to move into a more managerial role, IMO the Finance major won't help you much. You're much better off working on your networking and communication skills, and you don't need a credential for that.
I'm not advising you to avoid the double major, because it does provide some additional career options. However, I wouldn't stress about it either.
I have no actionable advice for you, since I'm way too old; I just have some platitudes, mostly about CS.
* Don't double-major in anything unless you have unlimited time, unlimited money, are some sort of a genius who is also exceptionally hard-working by nature, or your two disciplines actually go together very closely. For example Biology/Bioinformatics or Bioinformatics/CS make sense; CS/Business probably does not, unless by "business" you mean "being a quant".
* If you feel like you already know everything there's to learn, and all that remains is to grab a credenital, then... you're exactly the kind of person who would wash out of 1st-round interviews at every company I've ever worked at. Either that, or you're the aforementioned uber-genius. What are the odds, though ? I realize this sounds harsh, but I am kind of tired of watching my industry go downhill, and I hope you can be a part of the solution. No pressure.
* Looking back on it, the most valuable classes in my undergraduate EE/CS program were the kind that everyone tried to avoid: the classes on basic CS theory and concepts. These are timeless, never go out of style, and empower you to learn any domain-specific knowledge extremely quickly.
* Don't be afraid to branch out a little outside of your discipline; in fact, make an effort to do so. Some of the most fun classes I've taken were on topics like comparative religion, art history, technical writing, and biology (at that time, I had no idea I'd end up in a bioinformatics field later in life). Obviously such classes can be a bit of hit-or-miss, but when they hit, they stick with you forever.
* Take classes in statistics and linear algebra, even if you don't strictly speaking have to. In fact, take data science. Trust me, you'll need it.
* Your college advisor doesn't know you and doesn't care about you. Listen to what he/she says, then find a student group (or a quasi-fraternity like the HKN at ye olde Berkeley) and run the advice by them.
* Don't be afraid to sign up for every class that strikes your fancy, even the ones that are overbooked. By the end of the first week, you'll have a good feel for which classes might actually be useful, and you can drop the rest. Also, the overbooking will clear up significantly by that time.
This reminds me of the "Free Software" movement that by the name you might initially think would be a libertarian-esque movement focused on the freedom of developers - to use, modify, and profit off of software however they want - but is in fact a communist-oriented movement that cares not about the freedom of developers, but the freedom of the code itself - the actual text files on my computer, which apparently "want to be free," because the rest of the world is somehow entitled to the fruits of my labor.
No, Marx did not in fact invent the word labor or the concept of labor.
For instance, The Political Constitutions of Great Britain and Ireland, Charles Lucas, 1751:
"I was naturally induced to think, sharing the Fruits of my Labor, with those, who had not the fame Leisure or Opportunity with me, might not be altogether unacceptable to the Public."
That very sentence should either be "there are no grammar mistakes" or "there is no grammar mistake".
This criticism is meant constructively. I would guess English isn't your first language and you're only making minor mistakes here and there, but it complicates understanding already complicated sentences.
A few people have already mentioned that it's difficult to read. I agree, it reminds me of some of the prose I've read by East Europeans writing English as a second language: often abstract, metaphor heavy, with odd sentence structure. Sometimes this works brilliantly (Nabokov) but that's the exception.
I would suggest keeping your sentences short, each containing only one idea/point. Write what your literally mean, without metaphor etc. Avoid uncommon or invented phrases. Get someone to check your grammar/sentence structure. Think about what your audience can reasonably know when they start reading, then start one step before that and take them step by step to your conclusion. Keep the structure linear except for an overview at the beginning - don't digress or try to make it more interesting by presenting anything out of order.
Example from the second paragraph:
"A bias is bias is bias is a suitcase word is a nonsense word, yet is incessant recurrence leaves you wondering if it is a linguistic mirage, a gunflower aimed to deceive the unsuspecting mind."
"Suitcase word" and "gunflower" are not common/real enough phrases to use without defining or discussing them first. I'm not sure how to parse the beginning of the sentence, and there are some grammar issues that make the rest just slightly harder to read (missing commas, is should be it's?). "linguistic mirage" is a nice phrase, but not when the rest of the sentence is unclear/hard to parse.
Of course breaking the above rules is what makes for the best literature, but you have to break them in just the right way. First learn to write clearly, and then start breaking rules for effect!
Yug, thank you for your feedback. Schelling’s spatial segregation model is not an alligator, it was one the first how biased behavior can emerge from simple and rational individual behaviors, and the idea of using a network of agents, where each agent's state depends on the states of its neighbors, is a concept that is shared by both Schelling's model and my toy simulation in the notebook (link attached at the end of the essay).
I am sorry that I didn’t apply his model directly because the toy model violated the assumption of homophily ("love of the same"), where agents prefer to be near others like themselves, while the agents in my toy model have belief scores, influence scores, and resentment thresholds, which are all continuous variables, while Schelling’s agents have only binary states (still I think his focus on spatial segregation can be roughly translated into the temporal segregation as well as its later convergence, both which are the focus of my toy model)
It seems a little hard for me to read. The first sentence appears to have 153 words, which probably doesn't help. Maybe you could try running it through Chat GPT and asking it to make it more readable with shorter sentences.
Those who believe the most important thing in the world is that humans don't go extinct before they colonize the stars strike me as the worst form of nihilists. They are nihilists because:
-They don't believe in God or an afterlife
-They don't belief that this life can have enough meaning that the future doesn't matter much
-They (some of them, to be clear) would prefer totalitarianism in the present to prevent human extinction in the future
In other words, in a worst case scenario, they don't value the quality of this life at all, for any of us, if it poses a risk to human extinction in the future.
Read Zvi if you don't believe me: (I can't find the post, he writes long shit & I can't go through it all right now). Let me be clear that he is brilliant and brilliantly paranoid. EDIT: Since I still can't find the quote I thought I read on a Zvi post, I'm starting to think I hallucinated it. I therefore retract the sentiment I attributed to Zvi.
If this world and this life is not enough, you are a nihilist. EDIT: As Machine Interface points out, my use of the word nihilist here is bad diction.
Well, I agree my above post sounds stupid without actually showing what Zvi wrote (EDIT: I have no evidence Zvi wrote anything of the sort. Either I read the quote somewhere else or I hallucinated it altogether.) The dude writes 50k words per post and I can't find it, but he wrote something to the effect that a curtailment of all human freedoms would be worth it to prevent a high existential risk (by his assessment of risk). That to me is a form of nihilism. It has nothing to do with planting trees.
"A society grows great when old men plant trees in whose shade they shall never sit."
-- the nihilist credo
I quite like this world and this life, and I would like my children and their children and their children etc. etc. to get to enjoy it too - it seems to me profoundly selfish not to find the prospect of human extinction appalling, even if it is stipulated that all currently living humans will live to die of old age.
And yes, I don't believe in an afterlife, since we have no evidence whatsoever that there is one. Is this world and this life not enough for *you*?
Well there was the take by Rust Cole - Matthew McConaughey - in Season 1 of True Detective.
“I think human consciousness is a tragic misstep in human evolution. We became too self aware; nature created an aspect of nature separate from itself. We are creatures that should not exist by natural law. We are things that labor under the illusion of having a self, a secretion of sensory experience and feeling, programmed with total assurance that we are each somebody, when in fact everybody’s nobody."
"I think the honorable thing for our species to do is deny our programming, stop reproducing, walk hand in hand into extinction, one last midnight, brothers and sisters opting out of a raw deal.”
― Rustin Cohle
How's that for nihilistic?
True. I'm using it loosely and sloppily. Probably a bad thing to do on this forum.
I'm trying to say that those who would accept totalitarian measures to ensure the continued existence of humanity -- and perhaps they are the exact opposite of nihilists since they put SO MUCH importance on human existence-- wind up putting zero value on human life (life as opposed to existence) today, now, in the present.
In plenty of old sci-fi, the AI goes rogue. That's also a fear, obviously, among plenty of current futurists.
My question here is: are the fears that say Arthur Clarke expressed in 2001: A Space Odyssey, similar to the fears that doomers today have about AI? Is the reasoning for those fears similar?
It seems relevant because plenty of people accuse doomers of "having read too much science fiction.".
More broadly: do doomer fears of AI have much in common with old school science fiction writers -- or are the fears of the recent doomers something new, for different reasons?
Things I have seen/read in science fiction, similar to today's concerns:
- weaponized robots (sometimes the original war was over and/or humanity mostly extinct, but they kept killing because they didn't get/trust the memo);
- robots that actively resist being turned off, because that contradicts their original utility function;
- self-improving robots (very slowly, at a speed similar to human research);
- robots following an incomprehensible utility function (luckily, mostly harmless);
Concerns that seem new to me:
- recursive self-improvement (i.e. not just "what if we make something too smart and too powerful and it turns against us", but also "what if it then improves itself to be even smarter and stronger");
- computer researching new weapons (rather than merely taking control of weapons currently built by humans, and maybe producing more of the same);
- hacking humans (by hypnosis, propaganda, or making them fall in love with the AI);
Generally, doomers fear that the AI will kill us in a way that *wouldn't* make a good movie, because it will be too fast, or too incomprehensible.
I've noticed that the tone in political TV culture has flipped in the past 20 years. Used to be the liberals were snarky, a la John Stewert, whereas the popular conservative pundits like Rush Limbaugh and Bill O'Reilly were articulate blowhards. Nowadays the Fox News guys like Gutenfeild and Waters are endlessly snarky, whereas CNN pundits like Jake Tapper are the strident blowhards.
Does that say anything about change in political culture beyond those media personalities?
I have never watched political TV and don’t ever plan to, but I think this might potentially be related to the fact that the 20th century was generally a right-dominated era (cf the Oppenheimer movie, where the titular character gets repeatedly shamed for being too leftist), whereas the 21st century is generally a left-dominated era?
LW/ACX Saturday (8/5/23) The The scaling hypothesis - by Gwern https://docs.google.com/document/d/1Cqb2q5OVWkHcFyFTegG563JGnTrxU_Ahoh-iLF6J_KE/edit?usp=sharing
Hello Folks!
We are excited to announce the 37th 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, Aug 5, 2023
Time: 2 PM
Conversation Starters :
https://gwern.net/scaling-hypothesis
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.
Claudes summary:
Why Does Pretraining Work?
- The pretraining thesis argues language models can reach human-level language understanding through next-word/character prediction on large, diverse text corpora. This may seem counterintuitive - how can simply predicting the next token lead to intelligence? But predicting the next token is an extremely difficult task that implicitly requires learning all aspects of language.
- As the model trains, it progresses through stages. First, learning letter frequencies, then common words and phrases, then syntax and grammar, and eventually more complex phenomena like logic, causality, and reasoning. With enough data, the only way to minimize loss is true understanding.
- Pretraining leverages the wisdom of the crowd - implicit human knowledge encoded in textual data. Humans generate highly structured data reflecting capacities like reasoning. A model must learn these to best predict text.
- Each decimal place of loss reduction represents learning nuanced linguistic phenomena. The last fractions require modeling rare reasoning scenarios correctly every time. Tiny model improvements in rare cases translate to big real-world benefits.
- If a model can predict any arbitrary text as well as a human (achieving <0.7 bits loss per character), this essentially indicates human-level language intelligence. The model would have to be able to reason, use common sense, etc, to succeed.
- GPT-3's loss of ~1.73 bits per character shows progress but indicates current models still have a gap compared to human performance. A larger scale is still needed.
The Last Bits are Deepest
- As pretraining progresses, the model exhausts simple statistical patterns and must learn more sophisticated phenomena to reduce loss.
- The last fractions of a bit of loss reduction require correctly handling edge cases involving reasoning, logic, common sense, etc. Tiny model improvements on rare events can translate to big real-world gains.
- For example, a model may learn that objects don't change state randomly. Fixing the few cases where it incorrectly predicts a dead person becomes alive could have a disproportionate impact - reflecting an understanding of causality.
- The hardest bits force the model to go beyond surface patterns and capture something closer to true abstract understanding. They produce generalizable knowledge.
- So, while the last bits of loss are the hardest to reduce, they are also the most valuable. The model must squeeze out every bit of intelligence to successfully handle the full diversity of linguistic scenarios.
Reasons for Doubt
- The pretraining thesis seems almost too good to be true. Just scale up a prediction on text, and all capabilities emerge? This sounds like alchemy, not science.
- It's hard to prove pretraining would work in practice. The model might need infeasible amounts of computing or data. Key algorithms could be fundamentally limited. The model may get stuck in simple patterns.
- But GPT-3 provides strong evidence that pretraining and the scaling hypothesis are, in fact, valid. The surprising new capabilities demonstrate solving pretraining does lead to emergent reasoning abilities, despite no explicit supervision.
- Almost no one predicted the precise capabilities of GPT-3 in advance quantitatively. So even skeptics must update their views in light of these empirical results. The scaling hypothesis proponents have been proven right so far.
Some surprising excerpts from an article about Bronze Age Pervert in The Atlantic:
"Last year, at a conference of political philosophers at Michigan State University, a Yale professor named Bryan Garsten told his colleagues that they were in trouble. The topic of the conference was liberalism—not Ted Kennedy liberalism, but the classical version that predates the modern Democratic Party and indeed America itself. Liberalism is the view that individuals have rights and beliefs, and that politics involves safeguarding rights and making compromises when beliefs conflict. It has existed for only a few centuries and is by some measures the most successful idea in history. Just look where people want to live: the United States, the European Union, Canada, Australia, and the United Kingdom, all liberal places that people will risk their life to reach.
"But Garsten said liberalism had some of his best students hopping into rafts and paddling in other intellectual directions. He said they had been “captured” by the belief “that to be morally serious, one faces a choice.” The choice, he said, is not between liberalism and illiberalism. Liberalism had already lost. Its greatest champion, the United States, had run aground after pointless wars, terminal decadence, and bureaucratic takeover by activists and special interests. Garsten said his best students were choosing between the protofascism of Nietzsche and a neomedieval, quasi-theocratic version of Catholicism opposed to Enlightenment liberalism. These students considered liberal democracy an exhausted joke, and they hinted—and sometimes did more than hint—that the past few centuries had been a mistake, and that the mistake should now be corrected."
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2023/09/bronze-age-pervert-costin-alamariu/674762/
Incredible.
How the fuck does Nietzsche get labelled as "protofascist"? He was anti-nationalist and fell out with Wagner over the latter's German nationalism and antisemitism. Academics always sound like morons these days.
I do not point to the evil and pain of existence with the finger of reproach, but rather entertain the hope life may one day become more evil and more full of suffering than it has ever been; Man shall be trained for war and women for the recreation of the warrior; [You go] to [a] women, do not forget [your] whip; The [destruction] of the humbug called morality, the [destruction] of the decaying races, dominion over the earth as a means of producing a higher type [...] would make possible again [that higher type of Dionysian state].
Some quotes by Nietzsche, I don't know if what he wrote makes him a fascist, but makes him wrong and immoral and irrelevant in my opinion. Fascists at least think they are helping their own country. It seems like Nietzsche was just Evil.
Blame his sister Elisabeth
(now, she herself has been dead for 90 years, so yes, academia should have corrected on that by now)
"Garsten said his best students were choosing between the protofascism of Nietzsche and a neomedieval, quasi-theocratic version of Catholicism opposed to Enlightenment liberalism. These students considered liberal democracy an exhausted joke, and they hinted—and sometimes did more than hint—that the past few centuries had been a mistake, and that the mistake should now be corrected."
All of that was quite present on the Yale campus during the 1980s. Some very-high-IQ guys [all guys so far as I ever saw] were very much on the "liberal democracy is an exhausted joke" train, one of them was my suitemate one year. Had their own regular hangouts, a couple of them tried launching a competitor to the campus newspaper, they'd hold forth in the residential-college dining halls, etc. They'd all read and would quote from Nietzsche.
They also had a couple of older faculty members providing informal encouragement and my impression was that those professors had themselves been of similar mind when they were undergrads.
I suppose nowadays their successors are doing Discord channels and subreddits and whatnot.
Genuine question: how many of these radicals were right-wing?
I mean, I remember "democracy is a joke" stuff from back in the 90s but it was a left wing thing. The shift on the right to embracing this kind of critique feels new but, ya know, I wasn't at Yale in the 80s.
The ones I'm remembering wanted to take over the campus GOP club and purge it, and had loudly celebrated Reagan's win in November 1980 before later turning against him for becoming (in their view) pro-immigrant and various other forms of squishy. So definitely right-wing.
The left-wing version of "democracy is a joke" existed too, and I think always has to some degree. But at least on campus in the 1980s it wasn't as "loud and proud" as the Nietzsche fanboys yammering about how much better the world would be today if Napoleon hadn't blown it, etc.
One difference then -- and maybe now? -- was that the Nietzsche guys had zero success with the opposite sex. (The college at that time was 55-45 male, the inverse of today's ratio.) This wasn't deeply surprising given that they openly/loudly believed the male to be the superior gender and whatnot. But anyway the Che Guevera t-shirt guys, at least some of them, had a bit more luck getting laid, and observationally it certainly seemed as if that difference helped the Nietzsche guys stay angry and frustrated. (We're talking here about 19- to 22-year old males after all.)
I've read it said that the greatest achievement of BAP is single-handedly changing the image of the online far right from a bunch of fat dudes living in basements to a bunch of bodybuilders lifting weights while studying Ancient Greek.
Speaking of Bronze Age Pervert... his real name has supposedly been outed for months (it's the last two words in that URL, but capitalized and without the hyphens). I'm still unsure about whether I want to believe it's the real thing or no (in fact, his English Wikipedia article, which I've also edited, has had a slow-motion edit war about this very issue, though the editors did eventually grudgingly decide to accept the name after Politico reported on it). But also I've heard of BAP before; he's been a huge fixture of the Extremely Online Far Right for *years*, which is practically a founding father if you consider that the Extremely Online Far Right was basically nonexistent before the mid-2010s.
On a mostly unrelated note, apparently BAP, Caroline Ellison, and yours truly all grew up in the same hometown. I wonder if this means something. 🤔
>he's been a huge fixture of the Extremely Online Far Right for *years*, which is practically a founding father if you consider that the Extremely Online Far Right was basically nonexistent before the mid-2010s.
A quibble, but I think of the Extremely Online Far Right as starting around 2007-2008, with a constellation of blogs like Unqualified Reservations, Auster's View from the Right, Mangan, VoxDay, Roissy when he was blogging on subjects other than getting laid. Plenty of others that have been long forgotten. Pretty much everyone Steve Sailer linked to in his Blogspot days.
Hmm, you might be right about this! It was all before my time on the internet anyways.
What was it like growing up in Romania? Yeah. I’m joking.
I only started reading ACX after the move from SSC. I have gone back and read the top posts from SSC but still felt like I was missing out on some of the old classics. I built a website to resurface old content from blogs by sending weekly emails. Let me know if you have any suggestions of other blogs / content you’d like to see, hope you find it helpful!
https://www.evergreenessays.com/
Thank you again for creating Evergreen Essays!
I received, and reread, the inaugural essay by Scott Alexander last week (here it is again: https://slatestarcodex.com/2013/02/12/youre-probably-wondering-why-ive-called-you-here-today/ ). It's pretty good, and I think the old SlateStarCodex aesthetic, especially the theme of charity over absurdity, deserves to still live on.
I also read the Lincoln ape thing; it was a little less appetizing, but it *did* make me wonder about what was in the rest of Fayette Hall's book.
Looking for someone that has experimented with Adderall. I quit coffee many years ago, and sometimes I forget to ask for my coffee to be decaf, and I feel 10 IQ points smarter. I don’t think I could handle daily adderall, but it’s be good to have “smart thursdays” or something like that. I’m curious about intermittent approaches that anyone might have tried.
I've tried it a couple times, my experience was pretty similar to Eremolalos' . It mostly made me worse at anything that required any amount of cleverness or creativity. Coding was notably harder. It made "filling out forms" and that type of rote activity a bit easier I guess. It seemed to still disrupt sleep even though I always take it first thing in the morning
I take it now and then. I am sure I do not have ADHD, just take it once or twice a month either for a mood and energy lift, or to get something done. I use 10 mg, occasionally 15, of instant release, not extended release. Usually I take half of it when I wake up, the other half about 4 hrs later, when I feel the effect start to diminish. I do not feel drugged when I take it, just like myself on an unusually cheerful, unusually energetic day. I don't think it makes me smarter or more creative. What it does is increase my motivation to do tasks, and allow me to concentrate on them for intensively for longer. It is really helpful for something like doing your
taxes -- some long, dry, tedious task you crave to avoid -- or something like painting a room or reorganizing your cupboards. It helps with motivation and concentration for writing, too, but I have found it tends to make me kind of over-explain things and go on and on about points that could be made succinctly and convincingly in a couple of sentences. I usually do not sleep as well the night after I take the stuff, unless I do something like go for a substantial run at the end of the day. I don't have any kind of hangover the next day.
I do not seem to have much tendency to abuse substances, but I can easily see how somebody could get hooked on this stuff, because it is very pleasant, so watch out.
Cheekiest headline of the week:
A picture caption in an Economist article about the Dalai lama and the struggle with the CCP over his potential reincarnation:
"All that Xi wants"
Maybe you have to be of a certain age to get it.
Hmm… Conspiracy to defraud the United States.
I wonder if the “I’m rubber and you’re glue” schtick will work this time.
I suppose he could have been pulling all that stuff in a prescient move to take the heat off Hunter Biden.
Meh.
I mean, this is his 3rd indictment this year and like his 12th...I don't know what to call it, attempted takedown "surely this is the end of Trump" thing.
Does anyone care? And I mean, like, people will talk about but if he gets thrown in jail do you really think his support will decrease and if he gets exonerated do you really think his support will increase?
I dunno, maybe it's just my side of the fence but...nobody really seems riled up.
The other indictments were weak, particularly the first. Unfortunately, this has created a crying wolf effect. This indictment looks strong. I'm not a lawyer, but I'm surprised by how strong it reads. I'd put the odds of his going to prison at around 60%. If he does, I'm sure that will galvanize his base, but I'm less confident it will move the median voter in his direction.
Of course, there have been many national leaders who came from prison. Is Trump the next Chavez, Mandela, Havel or Napolean? We'll see.
The 2nd indictment was not weak, it's by far the strongest of the 3. As someone with a security clearance, I cannot begin to explain how insane it is to have TS & SAR outside of a SAP Facility.
Plus it's the only one of the three that deals with an objective action rather than subjective speech.
The 1st indictment, for the hush money payments, did seem like a reach.
The 2nd indictment, over the national-security documents at Mar-A-Lago, has been amended and now seems pretty strong. They have audio recordings of Trump essentially confessing to the crime, sworn testimony about him ordering staff to delete evidence, etc. Looks like a classic case of the coverup being more convictable than the underlying offenses.
Also there is a 4th indictment apparently about to drop, under Georgia state law for the attempt to bully that state's election officials into "finding" more Trump votes.
> Looks like a classic case of the coverup being more convictable than the underlying offenses.
The obstruction is bad and seems cut-and-dry, but bringing TS or S//SAR HUMINT documents not just outside of a SCIF, but in an unlocked publicly-accessible room, is *far* worse
Is this exactly what Biden did as well, though?
I believe you objectively, but above was thinking about it more from a court-of-public-opinion perspective.
I read the indictment last evening. Some of the things that the special prosecutor proposes to document in court were news to me and I'd thought I was following this topic pretty closely....they appear to have firsthand testimony from some individuals who were directly involved (as well as White House officials who tried to stop it e.g. Barr and Pence). At least some of the unnamed co-conspirators -- a list which clearly includes Guiliani -- seem to have flipped on Trump.
Also this summary which I saw online this morning was helpful in getting a handle on the chronology:
"THE INDICTMENT READS LIKE a play in four acts. Act One unfolds as follows: Starting around November 13, 2020, and using “baseless fraud claims,” Trump pushed multiple state legislators and election officials to ignore or alter the electoral outcomes in his favor and otherwise disenfranchise voters.
In Act Two, Trump and his co-conspirators organized fraudulent slates of electors in seven states—Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, New Mexico, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin—and even “tricked” certain fake electors into believing their fraudulent slates would be used only if Trump won his umpteen bogus lawsuits challenging the election results in court.
In Act Three, Trump tried to get Vice President Mike Pence to embrace the fraudulent electors, reject legitimate electoral votes, or not count legitimate ones—going so far as to even call him on Christmas and New Year’s Day, and to tell him (presumably according to Pence’s grand jury testimony), “You’re too honest” when Pence refused to play along.
In Act Four, after Pence’s final rejection of the scheme, Trump exploited the violent eruption at the Capitol by spreading lies about the election results and trying to convince multiple individual members of Congress to delay the certification, all while lying to the mob that Pence was abdicating his constitutional duty by refusing to abdicate his constitutional duty."
If I understand the legal theory correctly, it's the aim of the lies.
E.g. if you have a sincere belief that new WizBang technology is going to change the world, and you preach that far and wide, that's not a crime no matter how silly it appears to others.
But if preach that while also selling people on WizBang Co. stock, whose proceeds you keep, that could cross the line into securities fraud. Each action individually (preaching Wizbang and selling stock) may be perfectly legal, but in conjunction they amount to a crime, ... particularly if it can be proved that you knew you were lying.
That last caveat is what makes this case shaky. It requires proving intent, and that's always hard. And you can make an argument that, given the stakes of the situation, any case that relies on fuzzy criteria should be handled with extreme caution. That's about where I am on this. This case is not a great remedy for the underlying problems here.
According to Popehat, aka Ken White, the charges and legal theory are:
"In brief, the indictment charges Trump as follows:
Count One, conspiracy to defraud the United States in violation of 18 U.S.C. section 371. Section 371 has two parts. It’s most commonly used to charge a conspiracy to violate some specified federal crime: for instance, conspiracy to violate money laundering statutes. But it has another clause for conspiracies “to defraud the United States, or any agency thereof in any manner or for any purpose.”
Count Two, conspiring to obstruct an official proceeding in violation of 18 U.S.C. section 1512(k).
Count Three, obstructing an official proceeding under 18 U.S.C. section 1512(c) — which applies to someone who “otherwise obstructs, influences, or impedes any official proceeding, or attempts to do so.” That’s the substantive offense underlying Count Two. In other words, Count Three is the crime itself, Count Two is the conspiracy to commit the crime, which are separate offenses and very commonly charged separately in federal law.
Count Four is a conspiracy to interfere with the exercise of constitutional or statutory rights under 18 USC section 241.
The Special Counsel’s theory of the case is broad: he asserts that Donald Trump and co-conspirators (unnamed, per Department of Justice policy, but including Rudy Giuliani, John Eastman, Jeffrey Clark, and Sidney Powell) engaged in wide-ranging conspiracies to present knowingly false claims and fabricated elector slates to the U.S. Senate when it tabulated and certified votes on January 6, 2021. The conspiracy extended to using false statements to pressure state and federal officials to interfere with the vote count. Jack Smith’s theory is that this course of conduct amounted to defrauding the United States, obstructing and conspiring to obstruct the official Senate proceeding, and using fraud to interfere with the votes of others by attempting to have them fraudulently discarded."
https://substack.com/notes/post/p-135661182
What evidence is there that his statements are false? Since these are criminal charges, the legal burden of proof is on them to show absolute proof that the election was not rigged. Constantly repeating "baseless," "no evidence", "the Big Lie", and any other number of blatant propaganda terms won't cut it.
"Since these are criminal charges, the legal burden of proof is on them to show absolute proof that the election was not rigged."
Not in DC it's not.
I think there is evidence that Trump himself did not believe he had won the election. Pence claims after he told Trump he wouldn't go along with his plans for Jan 6, Trump told him angrily: "You're too honest!"
There's also a decent possibility that one or more of the other six alleged conspirators will testify that Trump acknowledged to them that he hadn't won.
If the prosecution can persuade the jury that Trump didn't believe his own claims that the election had been stolen, that is probably enough for a conviction.
Obviously, he hadn't won. That was why he was protesting the result in the first place. The whole point of all the lawsuits was that he, apparently, lost, but that he *shouldn't have* lost, because the result was a fraudulent result due to fraudulent votes and vote tallies in a few key Democrat-controlled districts and polling centers. Also, there is no crime here - it's always within your rights to sue and express your opinion with respect to your lawsuit.
Right.
Also, this is an interesting perspective on why the indictment is structured in a particular way:
"Smith has not charged Trump with separate criminal violations for each—or any—of the individual component parts listed above. He could have. For instance, the fake-electors scheme alone implicated a host of state and federal criminal statutes that could have been charged assuming, as the indictment strongly suggests, that Trump can be credibly linked to them.
But Smith went a different route. Rather than charging Trump with discrete crimes for specific acts, he charged Trump with broader conspiracies, using the specific acts as evidence of and support for the larger conspiracy charges.
Smith’s strategy makes sense. Since entering into a criminal conspiracy is by itself sufficient to support a criminal charge, the object of the conspiracy doesn’t have to be achieved."
I'm still wondering how AI businesses are going to change the world over the next 3-5 years. I've read the doomers and know they think we may all end up dead within that period. Many of them claim there will be a period leading up to the apocalypse in which the economy booms like it has never boomed before. But who will be the horsemen of this bounteous apocalypse? What types of businesses will they ride upon while blooming the economy into the sunset of the final holocaust?
In the early days of the webz, Jeff Bezos explained why Amazon was the perfect ebussiness. It had to do with inventory. Books were the consumer product for which there was the most variety; no book superstore could stock all the book titles. So it made sense for a company with a vast warehouse to store all the books, and let people order them online. The alternative at the time was to walk into, say, Barnes and Noble, spend 20 minutes looking for your book, and then ask them to special order it from the distributor because they didn't have it in stock. Amazon saved you from that fruitless trip to the store.
So who is the Jeff Bezos of AI who articulates exactly what his AI business is and why it will work?
If I'm skeptical about AI changing the economy soon it's because I don't see all these new companies on the horizon in the way that you did in the late 90s after the birth of the www.
I've become skeptical along similar lines. Gpt 4 launched in march and yhis sphere screamed the end was nigh "AGI in 18 months!"
Well , even the loe hanging fruit like AI drives throughs and customer service seem to have stalled because of the hallucinations from thr chatbots and the fact that the guardrails dont work / havent been made.
Agentic AI was a big deal "now we just buuld on it modularly and voila" same hurdles , it isnt reasoning like a Cyc project model so you still need the human to troubleshoot.
I feel like even with a chip shortage ehat we have is "something" so I dont expect an AI winter but until I see checks getting signed and money changing hands i'm not buying the cornocopuan or doomer views.
I have limuted perspective but the fact that its just correlating simarities instead of actually modeling external reality seems like a key bottleneck?
You can make art , music and text but it still needs a human to double check it for quality. Thats something but that just adds supply in areas where we already had an overfilling cup of plenty , those are areas humans spend time on for leisure.
AI algorithms continue to improve; clickbait writers working for exposure hit hardest.
What was the prompt, do you know?
I'm guessing "make the best case you can that Twitter's Rebranding to 'X' Is a Slap in the Face to Marginalized Communities. Use an angry and emphatic tone."
Nope.
Is this something you agree with, or are you just posting an example of what Bing chatbot can do?
Welp, I'm angry and confused.
Today a headhunter's inquiry crossed my inbox regarding an attractive open position in my professional field, in a different part of the US. My wife and I have long agreed that we'd be open to relocation for the right new opportunity, and recently her professional life has become 90 percent remote. So...interesting! The position being filled is in the Phoenix area.
But then literally with the headhunter's description of that job still open on my screen, I happened to in a different window notice one of today's news headlines:
"Phoenix just endured the hottest month for any US city....31 straight days of the local temperature reaching at least 110 degrees Fahrenheit.....the _lowest_ ambient temperature recorded in Phoenix at any moment during July was 97 degrees.....the National Weather Service's record for such a streak for any city in the entire US was 18 days....the streak officially ended because yesterday's high temp hit "only" 108...."
Holy crap there's no way. I just could never live someplace where going outside even just to walk the dog is _that_ degree of miserable* for a big chunk of the year. And my wife having lived in northern Texas for a decade many years ago -- i.e. she knows what serious dry summer heat feels like -- is boggling at the sort of temps that Phoenix is getting nowadays.
I realize that for most people living entirely inside in A/C for months at a time is fine; they'll find somebody good for that job I'm sure. For us though -- guess it's time to recalibrate our potential-locations horizon northward!
(* for me I mean but damn few dogs I've ever known would much enjoy it either)
I do agree with Kev that you get used to it, and there’s always AC... But I’m in the process of moving away from Phoenix now. We’re already having record heat and climate change is not making it better.
I'm in a humid part of the country and am miserable on humid days in the low 80's. But I've experienced arid heat on trips out west and it is much, *much* more tolerable.
Born and raised in arizona. Wonderful sunsets and monsoons.
I live south of that (scottsdale 112 farenheit at midnight in my earpy 20's , ill never forget)
You get used to AC. And you are two hours from boreal forest (northern az) for vacationing / water sports etc
Lots of hiking and bicycle culture in arizona , its just planned with the heat in mind.
Belueve me when I say that a "dry heat" is much more bearable than a humid area. A very humid 80 farenheit is hell on earth. Arizona at 113 farenheit , yeh you walk outdoors into an oven but you work and live and shop indoors so it isnt the end of the world.
It seems like phoenix wasnt thought through , that much cement? No xenoscaping on towering skyscraper rooftops? , their was no forethought to build such a large city in that spot.
My childhood was spent living in the Great Lakes region while visiting grandparents in Oklahoma and Kansas each summer, and I'll take 80 degrees and humid over 100 and dry every time. That does seem to be a minority reaction though, more people agree with you on it.
Those areas are roughly equally humid (e.g. humidity is ~70% in Detroit, ~65% in Oklahoma City), Oklahoma/Kansas are just hotter.
Phoenix is significantly less humid (humidity is 20-35%).
Wind off the great lakes acting as an evaporative cooler? , so then the "true" humidity doesn't reflect the wet bulb / feel of it?
If you're right on one of the shorelines, sure. But just a few miles away that effect can vanish, and obviously most of the Great Lakes _region_ is not right along one of the Lakes. For example I spent most of high school in Ann Arbor MI.
Hmm , well either way...Go Lions!
I'm from the Upper Peninsula. When I was deployed to Kuwait, I had to stay in a tent at Camp Buerhing for a couple nights after being in theater for five months or so, where it was routinely 100-110°F. I woke up *shivering* the first night there, and went to look at the thermostat for the tent's climate control.
It was 80°F in there.
You get used to the heat. Acclimation is really a thing.
(I also learned that the thermometer that displays temperature in a Toyota vehicle tops out at 122°F. Me and my First Sergeant were driving back from Buerhing--different trip--we noticed that the thermometer hadn't gone up from 122° for like an hour, despite transitioning into the hottest part of the day. We pressed the °F/°C button and found that it was displaying 50°C, and concluded that since that's a nice round number in the unit system the sensor designers were probably using it was pegged against that temperature.)
Appreciate your service.
Clearly acclimation must be a thing, human beings in large numbers have been living in places like Iraq for a very long time. I happen to acclimate faster/better to humidity than to extreme heat.
The other thing that comes to mind -- though it affects me personally less cause I'm a ways older than you -- is the trend line. Our climate would not stop shifting warmer for years even if we magically froze global atmospheric CO2 levels right now. So if Phoenix is going full calendar months without the temp for one moment dropping below 97 degrees _now_, what in the very _best_ case is it likely to be like there in 2028? 2038? etc.
I agree. It would be intolerable for me too.
But I can’t resist linking this 3 second clip from Aliens.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=AapC30kL0yQ
Can anyone recommend a good AI tool for generating nicely-designed Powerpoint decks from big chunks of expository text (ideally), or else from prewritten slide bullets (if necessary)? Even using MS's embedded Designer tool, I waste altogether too much time fiddling with formatting on each slide, especially with layouts more complex than a single concept or list.
There are, of course, approximately a gazillion AI slideshow tools out there, but the ones I've tried seem to underperform in practice. Is there currently anything that actually works?
Does the 'Centre for Applied Rationality' do anything important?
What do you mean by important? I attended a CFAR workshop by Duncan Sabian a few years ago that I consider to have been pretty valuable to me, I don't know it if it was critical to my personal development though. I can imagine they've been a significant force for good.
Sure, but is there anything like data or case studies showing a material benefit? Nothing on their websites.
Getting better at updating one's belief-complex as new information comes in: ideas? concepts? tools?
So far I've got:
- maybe use a note-taking app heavily.
- when reading, have the note-taking app open.
More ideas?
Tools - PP&S (Pens, Paper and Stationary). It's old school, but I've found that analog note-taking makes new ideas more sticky in my mind. I believe this is because writing things out forces three cycles of info processing: reading, composing, and forming words/diagrams on the page. I use a common notebook for everything (Leuchtteurm1917 A5 hardcover), it's an extension of my mind. archive complete notebooks on a shelf with date labels. Every so often I take old notebooks down and review them to get sense of how I was thinking at a given time.
Concept - Ledger of ideas. Beliefs can be slippery fish. How will you conciously update if you don't have a thorough understanding of your beliefs in the first place? "We've always been at war with Eurasia." If you start a public blog or Substack, you're creating a public ledger of your ideas. I have a Substack with a modest following and use it for epistemic accountability.
Good idea about the ledged thing, at least to some extend. I should really make an account on that new thing that's looking like it'll replace predictionbook, so I can track my beliefs as operationalized in predictions.
Purposefully seek out the opposite opinion or set of data and then steel man both sides.
Kind of a time sink
Doesn't a normal, healthy brain update beliefs pretty automatically when it encounters new information whether intentionally or not?
That was my default assumption for a looong time but....it's pretty clear now that lots of normal healthy brains do not in fact do that. Lots. Even plenty of highly-intelligent brains do not do that, not at the level of "belief complex" anyway.
(And whether that is in the big picture, at the species level, a bug or feature is a question that I'm still pondering....perhaps not conclusively answerable.)
> ..it's pretty clear now that lots of normal healthy brains do not in fact do that. Lots. Even plenty of highly-intelligent brains do not do that, not at the level of "belief complex" anyway.
This makes a lot of sense to me; it is what I would expect. Changing a belief complex usually means digging in a little deeper than you might at first think. To use a car metaphor, you have to scrape all the rust off before you put a new coat of paint on or it’ll start peeling in no time.
Maybe it's more of a "long-term memory" problem (at least for me), which is augmentable through notetaking and/or spaced-repetition.
I’m wondering how AI will visibly change society over the next few years. In the few years after the www was birthed, many people were soon introduced to email, to early search engines and web 1.0 sites, to Geocities and Yahoo chatrooms. There was a plethora of ISPs; soon you had the launch of many ebusinesses: Pets.com, Ebay, Amazon and hundreds of others I have forgotten about. Today, the most visible products of the internet age are smart phones and social media.
So, the early obvious uses of the www were email and ebusinesses. So far, on the consumer side, AI has given us chat and image generation. What are the next sorts of businesses or consumer technology we will see that is made possible by AI? Anything relatively obvious or already in the works?
Or will AI stay mostly invisible to consumers, powering increasingly efficient products and services from behind the scenes? I'm talking about what will happen over the next 5 years.
My prediction is that we will see a greatly accelerated homogenization of culture. In the past, it was still possible to shoot a great movie, or write a new fantasy series, or produce an original song, etc., and encounter moderate commercial success. True, you'd never make nearly as much money as the latest superhero sequel or pop music sensation, but the door was still open a crack; and maybe your work could be come a cult hit in after its modest release.
With the rise of AI, I expect the door to slam shut, because making creative works by hand will never, ever again pay off. You could spend years of your life filming a movie or writing a book or perfecting your music... Or you could publish 1,000 mediocre works at the push of a button and make a decent (if not spectacular) amount of money; and tomorrow you could do it again, and again, and again. On the consumer side, you could take a risk at some homebrewed movie or novel and risk being bored or (gasp!) offended, or you could pay for the certified-good (if a little bland) content that matches your preferences perfectly. Really, it's a no-brainer; which is why I predict an era of unprecedented and prolonged cultural stagnation.
>or you could pay for the certified-good (if a little bland) content that matches your preferences perfectly.
Upon rereading that line I now realize you aren't suggesting there wouldn't be market segmentation; you are suggesting that there will be an immense array of material
for varied preferences but that all of it will be mediocre.
I disagree because the preference of many is quality over genre or style. When I want to see a good movie, I don't care if it's a comedy, drama, action, sci-fi, art film, whatever. There's a market for producing the next Star Wars film, but there's also a market for producing a book, show, song or movie that many people think is original and amazing.
Many people are looking for that original and amazing thing more than something they have a pre-conceived preference for.
>With the rise of AI, I expect the door to slam shut, because making creative works by hand will never, ever again pay off.
I don't understand why that would be the case. My post below explains why I do believe the economics of human-made works will continue to pay off, at least for as long as they are superior in quality to AI-made works.
> There's a market for producing the next Star Wars film, but there's also a market for producing a book, show, song or movie that many people think is original and amazing.
Not really; at least, not at a competitive price point. You could pay a talented author $100k/year to produce a brilliant masterpiece that will be appreciated by a small coterie of niche readers with refined tastes (and remember that everyone's taste is different) and maybe sell a few thousand copies; or you can pay that much for an AI that will serve inoffensive beige content to millions of readers per day for $0.99/novel. Yes, schlock writing is alive and well today, but the price differential is not nearly as severe; and that makes all the difference.
Art galleries are filled with nothing but photographs.
I think that’s going to change.
Aren't there millions of wealthy people with pretty good taste who will happily pay a large premium for top quality movies or TV shows (and other forms of entertainment)? It seems to me that as long as humans can still produce the next Breaking Bad or Curb Your Enthusiasm (And AI can't), there will be plenty of other humans willing to shell out for them. Kind of like there have always been plenty of Americans willing to pay for HBO, while most Americans are happy to avoid the cost.
Varying preferences of consumers should create market segmentation like always. For example, not many people like jazz but some people love it. More people like Taylor Swift than like jazz, but both sorts of music exists even though Taylor Swift gets paid billions and jazz musicians have to take 2 or 3 additional jobs to make ends meet. Likewise, Christopher Nolan makes movies that make billions of dollars while Wes Anderson makes movies that only make a few million dollars, but both directors' movies appear in theaters because the 21st century world is a wealthy place, people have different tastes, and there's enough money and demand for both directors to profit.
There's the argument that Baumol's Cost Disease means AI could make human-made films so much more expensive than AI-made films that the former would no longer be profitable. But Baumol's Cost Disease happens when productivity increases make human labor worth more in *other* industries. So carpenters are much more expensive than they were 50 years ago because most woodworking today is automated AND because an otherwise talented carpenter can find a better job doing something else. If otherwise talented carpenters couldn't find better paying jobs doing something else, carpenter labor would be cheap.
The same will be true for screenwriters, directors, actors, cinematographers, etc. It will be too expensive to hire human labor for those jobs if productivity advances in other industries to the point that Christopher Nolan and Wes Anderson et al can make much better money doing something other than making movies. If they can't, and AI makes say 50% of all Hollywood movies, then it will be cheaper in the future to have humans make movies than it is now because there will be more available labor.
My past 2 paragraphs were just to address the scenario where humans can still make better quality movies than AI. If AI can do better than humans, then the vast differences in consumer tastes -- particularly once you get past the mass of Taylor Swift fans, so to speak -- should create a widely diverse market.
Im curious; what will be the way in which AI makes movies? The precise mechanics of that?
I can imagine some distant world, where an AI can generate an entire film internally and write it out to a digital file. That would make it a monstrously great tool for a creative person wanting to make a film.
There are many other scenarios though. I think a lot of what you say depends on this question.
As a movie producer, which would you rather do: take a risk on the next Wes Anderson film that may or may not become a blockbuster; or release Sequel Iteration N+1 which is virtually guaranteed to please 90% of moviegoers -- at least, please them sufficiently to recoup your cost and make a decent profit at extremely low cost ? Who would you rather be -- the chef of a small boutique restaurant that serves exquisite culinary creations to a select audience of the rich and wealthy once a year on the Winter Solstice; or the CEO of McDonalds ?
Oh the former definitely. 50 weeks off a year? Absolutely…
With the AI, you get 51 weeks off a year; all you have to do is come into the office once in a while to collect the checks... Sure, they might not be big checks, but they just keep on coming.
I was choosing between being a chef or being the CEO of McDonald’s. Where did AI come into it?
Or are you saying that I could be the CEO of McDonald’s and get an AI to do all the work? That might not be so bad, and I could get direct deposit and spend my week off being the chef. Double bagger.
Many well-known movie actors and directors through the years have been quoted to the effect that they try to alternate to some degree: "one for the bank account so I can then do one for the Oscar", or words to that effect. Some successful theater professionals of my acquaintance say something similar about the roles that they seek or accept.
In professional theater only those well out into the long tail can really pull that off at all. I dunno how hard it is in Hollywood.
Bland schlock is already underperforming at the box office. The two biggest films of the year are original, high-quality stories.
Now, if you're predicting Hollywood would rather drive off a cliff than pay people to produce good work, yes, absolutely, they're already doing that. But general audiences won't be happy with nothing but bland schlock for the rest of their lives. They'll complain and stop going to movies first.
Well right now sure thing sequel films have producers and so does Wes Anderson. It isn't a question of one person choosing between the two.
It's really a question of who is willing to invest in which film. I suspect the investors in Wes Anderson's films are probably people who consider themselves to be benefactors of the arts more than investors hungry for a high (or safe) return on investment. These people are probably more interested in buying status than getting richer. (Analogous to the star actors willing to appear in Anderson's films for scale instead of for the millions they get to appear in more commercial movies.) They likely got rich not in the movie business but in more conservative industries. At least that is the paradigm of art benefactors.
> These people are probably more interested in buying status than getting richer.
That’s a dim view of things. Perhaps they just made a calculated trade-off between how much money they need to make and the kinds of projects they would prefer to work on.
Things made "by hand" will themselves be a selling point. Catering to the lowest common denominator has been done long before AI, but a sizable demo is less interested in those products. AI could, like other technologies before it, lower the barrier to entry.
I keep having grim ruminations about kids' books -- how they can be cranked out by AI, with a few different permutations of simple plot elements, and of course illustrated by AI with cheesy cartoons. And kids will love them just the same, because they are at an age when they bond imaginatively with what's presented. So they will bond with the this junk. Their hearts and minds will be like bodies nourished by cheezits.
Behind the Bastards released two podcast episodes about AI children’s books and their impact. It’s really depressing. https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/behind-the-bastards/id1373812661?i=1000617646703
Reminds me of all those "finger song" Youtube video spam that I heard about a few years ago.
AI-written stories will be cheap, but not cheaper than old human-written stories that are out of copyright. Even the really good human-written stories.
You're right, I hadn't thought of that. But I still worry about them getting lost in the gush of soulless plastic junk spewed out by the Great Plastic Tyrant. And about people losing their ability to connect with stuff that doesn't capture their interest in the formulaic way they are used to.
I agree with almost everything you say, except for AI being the scapegoat. It’s becoming the scapegoat for everything that we hate about ourselves. It’s kind of funny.
A week or 2 ago somebody posted something about AI being a Rorschach inkblot. Was that you? And what do you mean about it being a scapegoat for everything we hate about ourselves? I actually think that at worst it's a scapegoat for one class of things we hate about ourselves -- stuff having to do with being anhedonic, disconnected, addicted to things that aren't very enjoyable. But it does not seem to me to be a scapegoat for some of the worst human traits -- violence, cruelty -- basically, a bunch of things that result from our tendency to lose track of the fact that other people are sensate beings like ourselves, rather than roadblocks, tools for us to use, cockroaches, etc.
But surely low quality pulp was always widely available? What's different if it's made by an AI or a ghost writer who doesn't care about their craft?
(1) I think it's likely that hack children's book writers still produce better stories than AI will. They are human, and have more and more varied algorithms and takes on life inside of them the AI does, and they also have emotions and emotionally charged memories and quirks. At least a bit of that human richness will still slip into their work even if their approach is very formulaic. Consider how astonishingly bland as GPT-4's prose is. I have never seen prose this mind-blindingly beige produced by a human being. Have you?
(2) Stories produced by AI will surely be cheaper than the ones from even the most broke and desperate hack writer of children's books, so the AI stories will be the ones that make it to market.
(3) Super-cheap AI-produced stories will cost FAR more than good quality kids' books, so people will be even less like than they are now to buy the good stories.
(4) People eventually develop a taste for what they are used to. A kid raised on formulaic books may have a hard time connecting with a real book -- with say Charlie and the Chocolate Factory -- because it does not follow the formulas. It will seem weird, alien, boring.
I don't think 2 follows. Publishers aren't hurting for stories, and can filter for quality. Unless by 'market' you're talking about something like Fanfiction.net. https://www.fanfiction.net/book/ In which case we already have that.
For 4... so what, kids grow up. And hell, one of my favorite movies when I was young was the Ichabod Crane cartoon IN REVERSE on our VHS player. Take that, Willy Wonka! But eventually you get older and hit quality and/or originality, and realize how much better it is.
(3 is "less", surely)
In that case I recommend that you stock up on cheezits and mass-produced books for your kids or grandkids, and use the money saved for something of real value, whatever you think that is.
Yes, but the price differential between pulp and literature, while significant, was not insurmountable. With AI, you can have pulp on demand for pennies.
This but with YouTube videos. (There's even a paywalled post here about this, I think?)
Is there any experimental evidence that we have any valid way of preventing criminal re-offending ? So far I haven't seen anything convincing.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3565125/ claims that surgical castration reduces reoffending by at least a factor of 10.
If anyone just vaguely gestures towards "scandanavia", so help me god.....
Intervening with first-time offenders to give them a chance to have their records sealed seems pretty effective. We had a program in my region that had only a 7% recidivism rate. I'm not sure about experimental data, but there are a lot of these "teen courts"
Keeping violent offenders locked up would do it, although it's probably not what you're looking for. As noted in this thread: https://twitter.com/cremieuxrecueil/status/1664453761056505856:
>A ten strike law preventing people from ever leaving prison would reduce period violent crime by 20%
>Five strikes would cut violent crime by 40%
[As clarified further in the thread, these strikes only refers to number of convictions for violent crimes - not for all crimes.]
As far as experimental evidence of programs *outside* of prison, apparently employment programs don't work: https://twitter.com/cremieuxrecueil/status/1670189953723056134.
But adding criminals to DNA databases does reduce recidivism: https://twitter.com/cremieuxrecueil/status/1657572197894873089.
...I mean execution tends to work well. Re-offences after death are in the single digits.
Spiders Yeshua, who rose from the dead and was complicit in hundreds of subversions against the Roman state, is an outlier and should not be counted.
Spiders?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spiders_Georg
Basically, there was an urban legend that the average person eats eight spiders in their sleep. The joke is that this is true, but only because of Spiders Georg, who eats thousands of spiders every day. The joke mutated until anyone who did an unusual amount of X could be referred to as "X Georg".
Fang's joke is honestly hilarious if you are familiar with all the bits of setup required.
I’m still laughing at it and I didn’t have a clue about any of that. It just makes it funnier. Thx
Not "X Georg", but "Spiders X".
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
I don't think I can stand to read up on this. Can somebody who has please explain what objection pro-life groups have to an AIDS drug?
Thank you Eremolalos, you are demonstrating exactly the point I am tryng to make. This is what the scare story is going to mutate into: "why are those nutty zealot bigot pro-lifers against an AIDS drug, of all things?"
That's not the story, but that's the headline and that's as far as most people are going to read. I've been trying to say that the nutty zealot bigots might have a reasonable suspicioin of what is going on, but everyone replying to me is "No, I don't see that".
Now, maybe it's because I'm a nutty zealot bigot myself, or maybe it's because everyone has got blinders on about "abortion good" or at the very least "reproductive justice legal" that I'm seeing it and they're not.
Short version for Eremolalos: the referenced story claims that pro-life groups are opposing renewal of the bill for this programme due to fears that the Biden administration will hitch abortion provision up to it, because the impoverished Third World countries that most need the intervention are also the backwards places where abortion provision and gay rights and the rest of it are inaccessible or even frowned upon.
And the CIA using a fake inoculation programme to find DNA related to Bin-Laden would also have been "That's crazy, who would do that?" until it was true:
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2011/jul/11/cia-fake-vaccinations-osama-bin-ladens-dna
"As part of extensive preparations for the raid that killed Bin Laden in May, CIA agents recruited a senior Pakistani doctor to organise the vaccine drive in Abbottabad, even starting the "project" in a poorer part of town to make it look more authentic, according to Pakistani and US officials and local residents."
Here's why the nutty zealot bigots are being so paranoid conspiracy theory:
https://www.politico.com/news/2023/06/27/abortion-wars-pepfar-00103679
"Smith previously supported PEPFAR and even wrote the last bill reauthorizing it in 2018. But the longtime abortion opponent said he won’t write another update without barring funding of groups that support abortion rights. That’s a dealbreaker for Democrats, who note that U.S. law already bars foreign aid from funding abortion services.
The Biden administration denies Smith’s charges, and it, along with Democratic lawmakers and some outside public health advocates, said there’s no evidence PEPFAR funds have gone to providing or promoting abortion.
“They’re taking what was an initiative of George Bush that has been successful across the globe, particularly in Africa, and are now trying to make it a political issue about abortion,” said Senate Foreign Relations Chair Bob Menendez (D-N.J.), adding that Smith’s claim that PEPFAR is supporting abortion is a “smear.”
Still, Smith wields influence over PEPFAR reauthorization as chair of the relevant House Foreign Affairs subcommittee, and no other GOP lawmakers on that committee have publicly broken with his position.
Smith pointed to Biden lifting funding restrictions imposed by the Trump administration and including language in its PEPFAR strategy document about integrating HIV programs with “sexual health and reproductive rights,” which he interprets as code for promoting abortion rights."
"Reproductive rights" and "reproductive justice" are terms using meaning "abortion provision", so whether you want to phrase that as "interpreting code" or not, it's not an unreasonable suspicion. I'm not saying he's *right* about it, but I am saying that it's not an unreasonable suspicion, but it's being presented exactly as you took it: these people are opposing AIDs treatment, what is wrong with them?
Thank You Deiseach. That makes sense. If I was anti-abortion I would be concerned about PEPFAR too.
I tend to reflexively snarl about such stories because like always, you get the SHOCK HORROR HEADLINE and it's only when you read down into the body of the story that you get the facts.
And most people only see the headlines and come away with a mistaken idea of what is going on. Like I said, I have no idea *if* the adminstration, or certain lobbying groups associated with it, are trying to get abortion promotion in via the back door, but it's not completely unreasonable given the whole Democratic Party insistence on "we are the party of women's rights" and so forth. I hope it's mistaken, it would be bad if a good programme got derailed over this kind of politicking. But I can't be 100% certain it *is* mistaken, which is why I yelped about this story.
If you personally were to steelman the anti-PEPFAR position, how would you do it?
First, it's not anti-PEPFAR, it's anti-"sneaking in your pet progressive 'let's make sure the brown people don't have too many babies' project along with the funding in the name of giving money to AIDS fighting groups".
That strong enough for ya?
EDIT: To develop the point above about "Smith pointed to... including language about... 'sexual health and rerproductive rights'", here's some examples of what "reproductive rights" is taken to mean in practice:
https://www.sciencedirect.com/topics/social-sciences/reproductive-rights
"The term ‘reproductive rights’ refers to the freedom of individuals to control decisions regarding contraception, abortion, sterilization, and childbirth. It is a relatively recent concept in Western, affluent societies, and is closely related to the rise of social movements advocating access to birth control, legal abortion, and women's control over pregnancy and childbirth. These movements are in turn associated with large-scale social trends such as the desire to reduce population growth in industrialized countries and the movement of women into the labor force. Major areas of research on reproductive rights include research on social movements advocating reproductive rights, analyses of public discourse on reproductive rights, and studies of public opinion. In each of these areas, much of the research focuses on the issue of abortion, but also includes issues of access to contraceptives, sterilization abuse, and new standards of women's health care."
"Reproductive rights are about the legal right to contraception, abortion, fertility treatment, reproductive health, and access to information about one's reproductive body. Reproductive rights secure people's freedom to decide about their body's capacities to (not) reproduce. Departing from a feminist understanding of the reproductive body as the most intimate site for/of political struggle, reproductive geographies have emerged as a relatively new field within human geography. Reproduction used to be a traditional topic of a quantitative population geography. More recent geographic work on reproduction, however, is inspired by feminist, Black, postcolonial, and critical theories to address the uneven geographies of access to spaces of reproductive health and justice. "
"Reproductive rights consist of three broad categories of rights: (1) rights to reproductive self-determination, (2) rights to sexual and reproductive health services, information, and education, and (3) rights to equality and nondiscrimination."
Now, this is a definition which (if you dropped the abortion part) pro-lifers would not object to, because "reproductive rights" technically do mean care during and after pregnancy, access to nutrition and health care, and measures to reduce maternal and infant mortality:
"The adoption of a reproductive rights framework by advocacy groups within developing nations entailed a broadening of its original focus—abortion, contraception, and sterilization—to include maternal mortality, prenatal and obstetric care, breast and cervical cancer, and adolescent and postmenopause health. The Southern perspective also underlined the need to incorporate attention to women's economically productive roles in addition to their biologically reproductive functions. This required a better understanding of the correlation between sexual and reproductive health and endemic and chronic diseases, as well as occupational, environmental and mental health hazards, and afflictions."
But of course, we can't drop the abortion part, which comes to dominate the entire issue:
"In the 1980s, the scope and intensity of abortion-related initiatives varied across regions, being more visible in Latin America (particularly Brazil), the Philippines, and South Africa. Abortion was always addressed as part of a broader reproductive health and rights agenda, never as a ‘single issue.’ Efforts to decrease maternal mortality were prioritized by most countries and within these efforts new venues for addressing abortion have emerged. Both ICPD and IV WCW final documents recognize abortion as a major public health problem, affirming that, in circumstances where it is legal, it should be safe."
"In 1994, the Program of Action of the International Conference of Population and Development (ICPD Cairo, 1994) defined reproductive rights as:
[Embracing] certain human rights that are already recognized in national laws, international human rights documents and other consensus documents. These rights rest on the recognition of the basic right of all couples and individuals to decide freely and responsibly the number, spacing and timing of their children and to have the information and means to do so, and the right to attain the highest standard of sexual and reproductive health. It also includes their right to make decisions concerning reproduction free of discrimination, coercion and violence.
Paragraph 7.3, United Nations, 1994"
I think that's where the fear is, and as I said above, Eremolalos' reaction is precisely the one being disseminated by media headlines, which are as far as many people will read: why are these crazy pro-lifers trying to block AIDS treatment?
>That strong enough for ya?
Oh it's plenty strong for me. I was wondering whether crimson wool was willing/able to steelman a position they clearly don't share.
Is there information on how the various reps plan to vote, or how they have voted for previous PEPFAR reauthorizations?
Here are the Heritage Foundation's arguments in favor of restructuring (not outright ending) PEPFAR:
https://www.heritage.org/global-politics/commentary/reform-pepfar-the-25-year-emergency-foreign-aid-program
Restructuring makes me hesitate. 25 million lives saved is an absurdly high number, and side effects like nurturing dependence and playing suboptimal African geopolitics against China strike me as petty in comparison.
Saving 25 million lives without doing those things would be better. Saving more than 25 million lives by replacing PEPFAR with super-PEPFAR that also helped with diarrhea would be fantastic. But if these numbers are right, PEPFAR is about one third as good as WW2 was bad. Looking at this graph, turning point is PEPFAR, and the numbers might return to their peak and then keep going if it collapses. https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.statista.com/chart/amp/18713/estimated-number-of-aids-related-deaths-worldwide/
A ten percent risk that reform collapses the program is a steep cost.
If sub-saharan africa needs ones thing, "more people" certainly isn't it.
So continue funding abortion then?
Iowa has a higher population density than sub-saharan Africa
To be fair, they have a lot of barren areas like Namibia that bring down the average. If you count only Nigeria, the numbers are a bit different.
25 million loves seems like an almost unbelievably high number - how are they figuring that?
My limited attempts to figure this out for myself only lead to the number being repeated. The number does seem order of magnitude plausible. The chart I linked above, (which I would not take as gospel truth, though I find vaguely similar numbers here: https://www.unaids.org/en/resources/fact-sheet) implies a triangle of a about 10 million fewer deaths ((1.7 million/year - 0.7 million/year) * 20 years * 1/2). That is assuming deaths would have stayed flat, which is unreasonable given prior movement of the graph.
This is incredibly weak evidence, just back of the envelope calculations implying that if any organization can claim the lion's share of credit for taking AIDs deaths from their peak levels to their current levels, twenty five million deaths prevented isn't an outlandish claim.
EDIT: My second link is apparently the source for the graph, and should not be counted as a second data point.
So - is the Biden administration trying to use PEPFAR to push through abortion in those countries? Because I'm seeing a lot of "millions will die" but also some "oh yeah and those PEPFAR countries don't have abortion so much" which leads me to think that maybe yes is the answer to that.
Wait, your argument for believing "PEPEFAR is being used to push abortion" is "PEPFAR countries usually *don't* allow abortion?" I don't follow your logic.
No, my logic is "someone writes a piece about pro-life groups opposing this because they claim the current administration is going to try and use it to impose abortion" and okay, that's a story.
But then the story drops in "oh yeah and those countries don't have liberal abortion" and I go "hmm, why mention that? because that sounds to me like you *are* saying 'yeah, the administration *does* want to liberalise abortion so they'll sneak it in with the renewed act'".
I assumed the story mentioned "those places don't allow abortion" as evidence that the fears are unfounded, because there's no way PEPFAR could be funding abortions without first changing those laws.
And funding organisations in those countries that are agitating to change those laws would be a first step, especially as you can dress it up as "what, no, we're only funding an AIDS activism group".
The same way American foundation gave out grant to Irish group for the pro-abortion constitutional amendment:
https://www.irishexaminer.com/news/arid-30784011.html
"A group campaigning for the repeal of the constitutional amendment that prohibits abortion has confirmed it returned funding it received from an international organisation following correspondence with the ethics watchdog.
However, the Abortion Rights Campaign said that while it returned a funding grant from Open Society Foundation on advice from the Standards in Public Office, it does not agree with SIPO’s interpretation on the funding, writes Joe Leogue of the Irish Examiner.
Electoral laws dictate that third parties such as campaign groups cannot accept donations from foreign sources which would be used for “political purposes”.
According to documents released to the Irish Catholic newspaper, SIPO informed the Abortion Rights Campaign that it was of the view that a grant of $24,999 awarded by the Open Society Foundation, which is funded by billionaire George Soros, fell foul of legislation.
Despite returning the grant as directed, the Abortion Rights Campaign disputed SIPO’s definition of the grant and said it was “to fund educational and stigma-busting projects.”
“Our focus remains on advocating for reproductive rights while striving to lift the stigma surrounding abortion in Ireland. Every cent we receive goes back into the movement towards choice, change and destigmatising abortion in Ireland,” ARC spokesperson Linda Kavanagh said."
'No no no, we're not funding abortion, we're funding removing the stigma around abortion' sounds like the kind of hair-splitting to get around 'you can't use PEPFAR funding for those purposes'.
I think the logic is, if pro-life groups are trying to stop it, it must be pro-abortion.
That logic is predicated on the idea that political extremists are internally consistent in their goals (insofar as matching their outwardly stated goals/justifications) which is... dubious at best, and in most cases verifiably false.
You're trying to apply Boolean logic to the real world. Political extremists are sometimes inconsistent, but not usually to the extent of a pro-life group contesting something unrelated to their single objective.
"Nobody is banning your gas stoves, and it's a good thing that they are"
Yes, because I have such confidence in "these regulations in place will not allow what you fear to happen" after they've just described how Tweedledee rescinded Tweedledum's policies when he got into power (and Tweedledum will do the same for Tweedledee when he gets into power).
I'm jaundiced on this topic because I've seen too many times where "ha ha no, that will never happen, we're not going to do that" about abortion aimed at pro-lifers, and then guess what happens next? They go and do that thing.
Good points. Also, of course, money is often fungible, and so if a group that promotes abortion in some way receives a PEPFAR grant (even a restricted grant that may not be used for abortion), then the recipient group may use the grant to cover expenses in a way that frees up *other* funds to promote abortion.
Here is the actual letter sent by the pro-life groups:
https://cdn01.dailycaller.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/05/PEPFAR-Coalition-Letter.pdf
It's wide known stereotype of association between love to anime and some social awkwardness. Some totally not tested hypothesis to explain this: if you have issues with recognizing mimics (read - understanding emotions by somebody's face) you will be
a) not very good in socializing and communicating in general
b) Many of live-action movie will be too boring or too complicated for you as you miss significant part of information from actors' non-verbal play. Compared to this, animation has often exaggerated mimics, more than that - many exemplars of anime have almost fixed set of "facial expressions archetypes", comparable with ancient Greek theatrical masks. Under this circumstances, somebody with facial expression recognition issues may have experience comparable to what neurotipical person has from traditional cinema
The stereotype about trans lesbians loving anime might be a result of a combination of this and the escapism factor. Autism rates are highly elevated among transfem lesbians and bisexuals compared to the general population.
Extremely plausible, this tracks with my own experience and (my guess of) its causes.
That's plausible and interesting.
Japanese animation generally isn't very expressive by Western standards. Blocking and dialogue follow Japanese social customs of reservedness and formality (inscrutability, to some gaijin). Anime fans will often cite its subtlety and nuance compared to more expressive, "cartoonish" Western animation. And anime is notorious for endless, money-saving scenes of characters in stone-faced contemplation.
I think attraction to anime is more about its comparative complexity, ambition, worldbuilding, and often idiosyncratic vision. Zealous anime appreciation seems to me of a piece with science fiction and fantasy fandom, a famous nerd pastime. I would say that escapism is the fundamental draw. More expressive media have their own fandoms, but e.g. Looney Tunes otaku are relatively niche.
It's possible that you have identified something interesting going on, but I don't feel that it supports this thesis.
> And anime is notorious for endless, money-saving scenes of characters in stone-faced contemplation.
And half the time their faces aren't even visible!
I don’t think this stereotype holds true anymore, anime has kind of crossed over. A lot of charismatic and confident pro athletes are huge anime fans, and obviously in Japan it’s completely mainstream and not an “awkward kid” thing. I think to the extent that this is true, it’s mostly because socially awkward outcasts tend to reject trends and look for something obscure and esoteric to define themselves with. You see this with music genres throughout the decades, electronic dance music in particular started as an outlet for socially awkward weirdos then eventually became mainstream and now the bros love it.
I'm curious what's going on with McCabe v. CVS. ( https://www.courtlistener.com/docket/63339425/mccabe-v-cvs-health-corporation/ )
How can I learn what the status of the case is? I see that the last filing was in late November. I assume that the next thing that has to happen is that the judge must rule on the motion to dismiss. Is there any kind of deadline for that? How would I know whether it was imminent or whether I shouldn't expect it to come within the next three years? Am I wrong about what's going to happen?
Not a lawyer, this is not legal advice.
Next action should be a ruling by the judge on the motion to dismiss, as you suggest. No time limit for the judge on such a motion, and no way to know timing for sure. Primarily depends on how busy the judge is with other cases. A year is pushing it, but not uncommon or unheard of. Three years is highly unlikely, absent e.g. a health event for the judge that requires transfer of the case.
If you are not sure the website you linked is up to date, you can check the docket directly using the federal court pacer system (search "pacer"). Account creation is free and you get enough free documents per month to check without cost.
In theory you could also interface with the court more directly, but that's unlikely to make sense.
(The site I linked is affiliated with RECAP and the data comes directly from PACER. I don't think it will update automatically, but the page does include a timestamp indicating when it was last refreshed from PACER, which is of now is this morning. Someone's keeping it fresh.)
> No time limit for the judge on such a motion, and no way to know timing for sure.
I find this somewhat surprising. It's not like the court will wait for you until you see fit to respond to them.
When you get to a certain age, having a body is really like owning an old car that you’re fond of. But it still has to get you to Walmart. So accommodations need to be made on both sides.
Nice analogy. But I'd trade in this body for a newer model in a flash if I could.
Nah, modern ones have too many plastic components and emphasize effiency over fun.
No kidding. I would as well. I’djust keep the old one for sitting around and reading books and stuff.
Really appreciate this kind of insight.
I have an internet addiction. I can’t enjoy anything online without it turning into a self destructive binge, and this has been a constant for years that hinders any attempts at self improvement. I’ve started attending meetups for Internet and Technology Addicts Anonymous, and I’ve come to the conclusion that total abstinence from online entertainment is the only way forward.
It’s hard to accept that I am going to have to completely stop viewing rationalist and rat adjacent content. These people have a way of thinking that makes so much sense to me, and is so rare among anyone I know.
I guess I always thought when I’d get my life together I would eventually feel smart enough to start posting rather than lurking. Maybe I’d attend ACX meetups. As trivial as that seems, it was important to me. I’m not really asking for advice, I’m just sad about this and wanted to express it before I go.
Try printing out posts instead of viewing online.
Have you talked to a psychiatrist? Please, please do if you haven’t.
What I do: Pick all the distracting websites and block using settings/screen time on mac. If you want to go further, use rescuetime to track browser time and set it up with Beeminder to charge you money if you spend any time on those sites. After a few weeks, you don't desire to use them anymore.
Maybe the problem is that your offline life lacks interesting people.
Best of luck.
Unfortunately, online debates expand until they fill all available time. Just reading all ACX comments and replying occasionally can take the whole day. I don't want to miss interesting debates, but I also don't want to spend my entire day reading.
I try to do other things first. I don't always succeed.
What are you looking to do instead?
I’m in uni (2nd attempt after dropping out) and I want to be a better student, procrastinate less. I want to make friends and date girls, right now my social life is awful. And I also have hobbies I’d like to spend more time on.
I think that you're identifying the allure of the content: it creates the illusion that the world is reduceable and makes sense. A real social life and university are more chaotic and confusing.
Another problem, which you might not be realizing, is that you are using up your precious 'maximum-cognition' time on internet content. It reads like you need to structure your tasks.
Ah. Can't help much with most of that, but I've found the best defense against procrastination is realizing that a looming project will taint whatever you're doing in the moment, and therefore you should tackle it first. Schoolwork, long-term hobby projects, relaxing is better on the other side of them.
Best dating advice I have is someone else's from the 90's.
https://www.shamusyoung.com/twentysidedtale/?p=13684 (It's the flirting part, not the Starflight part.) Who knows how well it works these days, those crazy kids keep changing the rules.
Wish I'd read that 30 years ago, just avoided it completely due to all the warnings about harassment. Oh well.
The more the rules change to outmode this advice, the more anyone who can internalize it will have something like a superpower.
Can you block off say an hour a week, maybe an hour before work (where you HAVE to stop what you're doing and leave the house) and download a bunch of articles as PDFs to be read off line or something?
I don’t think so. I’ve tried things like that before and it usually stimulates my interest in this stuff enough that I backslide, and before long I’m reading posts until 5am. If this doesn’t happen, I think it will just leave me with FOMO and a sense of intellectual inferiority that is also unhealthy.
Brave choice but a smart one. Half measures don't work with addictions.
My deepest sense of Truth tells me that truth is very difficult to find. Me and Diogenes.
Because the truth is a chimera. It is something that needs to be pursued every second and minute and day of our lives, but it doesn’t exist, any more than a wave on the ocean exists.. Facts exist. Facts are not necessarily the truth. .The truth is some thing that you can never quite get your hands around, but it will lie with you a while, if you’re good.
Pun retroactively intended.
Forget truth, and go with what works. Does this work? Is mostly an easy question to answer.
Going with what works works, but what happens when it doesn’t work anymore? At that point I would say that the truth needs to be re-discovered on the fly. It’s like surfing. Also, I should clarify that my point was not meant to be applied to scientific investigations, which is perhaps more akin to a search for facts, rather than the truth.
Huh, well if it doesn't work then you need to try something else.
Look to the past for similar situations, and something that worked.
I'm not saying the truth is not important. The 'ground truth' is the rock bottom.
But the ground truth is a little different for everyone.
So what works.
It is a little different for everyone, for sure.
If it doesn’t work you need to figure out why.
I think you find Truth difficult to find because you capitalize it. I'm serious. Capitalization denotes reification to a Platonic form. Truth isn't metaphysical; it's statistical. Taboo "truth" and speak only of probability.
I only capitalized it once. For a reason. It is not exactly true that I think it is difficult to find, I just think that it has to be found moment by moment. It is not a fixed object. It can be difficult to find, and that usually manifests itself in a state that we call being of two minds.
In that case, I probably erred because of my priors on what leads people to capitalize Truth. I don't think I understand what you mean by "truth" if it's a thing that has to be found moment by moment. That sounds more like a mental state about yourself than a state of the external world.
Yes, that is kind of my point about what people refer to as truth.
So, by "truth" you mean something which has nothing to do with anything being correct or incorrect? Are you using it as in "To thine own self be true", to denote being in harmony with your essence, or with the Dao, or something like that? I think you should use another word, 'coz "truth" means being factually correct rather than factually incorrect. Using the word "truth" for your personal feelings is what led to Nazism.
Those are good questions.
> So, by "truth" you mean something which has nothing to do with anything being correct or incorrect?
No, not exactly, but “correct or incorrect” is a big playing field.
At a certain “temperature “,K C or F,
water gets hard. Correct. True. I can skate on it. Someone might disagree with that but I have the evidence of my own experience and it’s not a useful thing to argue about. The idea that it’s not true is incorrect; visibly and palpably incorrect. Other than that sort of thing, it gets tricky. Other people get involved and the plot thickens. You’re on thin ice.
> Are you using it as in "To thine own self be true", to denote being in harmony with your essence, or with the Dao, or something like that?
Harmony is the word I like best here. The idea of harmony is close to my thoughts about this.
How much of what I am observing at any given time can I make sense of? - that’s the closest I am going to get to the truth. Being in a situation that one is having trouble making sense of is very dissonant, as opposed to harmonious. Dissonance indicates to me that I don’t know the truth, but if I accept not knowing, then there is harmony again, because I have a much better understanding of what’s going on. I’m in a better position to pay attention and maybe get closer to what’s going on. I haven’t gotten lost in my personal theater.
Proposed: There is truth in the world and it is perceivable.
Proposed (2): People are capable of perceiving the truth, OR they are not and mourn their inability to do so.
If the first instance of Prop 2, then why haven’t we all converged on the truth by now? It is perceivable and we can perceive it. Why these endless discussions of what it is and where it is?
The latter instance of Prop 2 is more interesting to me because it seems to explain things better.
> Using the word "truth" for your personal feelings is what led to Nazism.”
(Do you seek to shame me with the invocation of Nazism?)
It led to Christianity as well as far as that goes, but “personal feelings” is only part of it. To transform personal feelings into a doctrine or a casus belli is a fraught path which can be walked by sociopaths or saints. Given that where would you locate the truth?
> Taboo "truth" and speak only of probability.
There is reason in this. I kind of lean towards it by making a distinction between what is a fact, and what we might call the truth.
Was the concept of "atomic bomb" available to the average Hiroshiman? Did survivors (even a few well-educated following-current-events survivors) think "the Americans must have completed an atomic bomb and used it on us"? If not, what did they think had happened?
The US dropped leaflets. There was disbelief it was possible. Even after the 1st there was mass confusion as to what it could actually be.
No idea, but my father was in the army on Luzon; and told a story about getting a message with his rations that said, "Keep your head down, we've got the A-bomb." and my dad thinking, "What the hell is the A-bomb?"
Mostly no. Perhaps a few highly educated physicists working at a university or some such. The famous reply of Albert Einstein upon being told that atomic energy could be used to make a bomb was "I hadn't thought of that." Insofar as there was a general awareness of atomics in the interwar period, and the awareness was very limited, it was thought of as a potential energy source. Most of the speculation on atomic weapons in the 1930s was ray guns (again, energy source). The idea of using it as a bomb came relatively late and the theorist more or less immediately fled to America to avoid the Nazis.
All weapons programs (which started in 1938-9 mostly) were top secret programs that would not have been available to the public. The US continued to mainly pursue civilian uses until 1941 and its program was also top secret and not available to the public. The only outside people who seem to have been aware were uranium dealers who noticed the changes in purchasing patterns (and who presumably were more up to date on the fundamental science than most people). A Japanese atomics expert, inside of a top secret lab, might have been able to figure it out given time. But any such findings would not have been made public anyway.
Japanese reports at the time were heavily censored but we do have records of contemporary reactions. They recognized it was a new American weapon, that it was powerful, and that it had lasting and unusual effects on the people who were near it (including people who entered the area after the bombing). Which they mostly thought of as disease and so would quarantine or avoid people with signs of radiation poisoning. They did not do this with fire bombings because, of course, fire is not contagious.
There was, at least from the reports I've read, fairly limited speculation on what the weapon actually was on the ground. People were mainly interested in surviving and, since the war had already hugely degraded living standards and killed many people, there was a certain jadedness that seemed to pervade the population. Most of the speculation was about the weapon's effects. Mysticism about how to ward off radiation (the mysterious new disease) or shunning of affected people or that kind of thing.
I don't know, but to add more to the question: we had previously fire-bombed Tokyo, so did the Hiroshima survivors think that this was a fire-bombing?
No. When you look at photos of Hiroshima survivors, they are all burned only on the side of their body that was directly facing the explosion. It was clear immediately that this was a different kind of weapon.
I don't know about the average Japanese person, but science-educated Japanese people and the military certainly knew it was a possibility, and indeed Japan had a nuclear weapons program during the war, though it never got anywhere close to developing an atomic bomb: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_nuclear_weapons_program
What I do wonder is whether people had an instinctive "upper bound" in bomb strength before nukes became known. Was there some sort of sense that a single bomb couldn't be more powerful than X (the Halifax Explosion?), and therefore it was surprising that the Hiroshima bomb was > X? Or did people just think, "huh, they dropped a really big bomb this time". Or was the actual experience at all distinguishable from carpet bombing using many smaller bombs?
Not Hiroshima, but a memoir by someone in Nagasaki:
https://happycatholic.blogspot.com/2014/01/the-bells-of-nagasaki-by-takashi-nagai.html
"It begins on the morning that the bomb is dropped on Nagasaki. I was interested to see it told not only from his point of view but also from that of various other people in the countryside and from different vantage points at the teaching hospital where Nagai was dean. After helping all those they can from the immediate university area, the small band of survivors heads to the countryside to help the many people who are being sheltered by farmers and villages.
I was surprised to find myself laughing at one point. After American planes drop leaflets informing the Japanese that they dropped an atom bomb (so surrender already), Nagai instantly whirls into thought about the implications, both scientifically and to the victims. He comes out to hear the few remaining hospital staff, doctors, and students in a fevered discussion about which scientists were involved ("Einstein?"), how it would have worked ("they couldn't have had a cyclotron on a plane" "fission! it must have been fission!" "Ahhh"), and so forth. Despite the circumstances, as Nagai himself comments after reporting this exchange, they are all scientists first and deeply interested in the development.
'We were members of a research group with a great interest in nuclear physics and totally devoted to this branch of science--and ironically we ourselves had become victims of the atom bomb which was the very core of the theory we were studying. Here we lay, helpless in a dugout!
And yet it was a precious experience for us. Placed on the experimentation table, we could watch the whole process in a most intimate way. We could observe the changes that where taking place and that would take place in the future. Crushed with grief because of the defeat of Japan, filled with anger and resentment, we nevertheless felt rising within us a new drive and a new motivation in our search for truth. In this devastated atomic desert, fresh and vigorous scientific life began to flourish'."
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1606295.The_Bells_Of_Nagasaki
"On Thursday, August 9, 1945, at two minutes past eleven in the morning, Nagasaki was wiped out by a plutonium atomic bomb which exploded at a height of five hundred meters over the city. Among the wounded on that fateful day was the young doctor Takashi Nagai, professor of radiology at the University of Nagasaki. Nagai succeeded in gathering a tiny group of survivors -- doctors, nurses, and students -- and together they worked heroically for the wounded until they themselves collapsed from exhaustion and atomic sickness.
As he lay dying of leukemia*, Dr. Nagai wrote The Bells of Nagasaki, vividly recounting what he had seen with his own eyes and heard from his associates. It is a deeply moving and human story. He tells how it dawned on him that this awful havoc was indeed the work of an atomic bomb, how he speculated about the American scientists who had put it together, how he picked up a leaflet dropped by American planes warning the Japanese to accept the terms of the Potsdam Declaration, how he and his companions shed tears over the defeat of their country.
But Nagai was above all a doctor, dedicated to the sick and to science. He relates how his little group confronted hitherto unknown diseases and applied ingenious remedies. He was also a deeply committed Christian and this book chronicles the inner struggle of one who witnessed appalling suffering and yet believed in the providence of a loving God. He ends his story with a poignant cry for world peace penetrated with an optimism symbolized by the chiming of the cathedral bells.
Nagai finished writing The Bells of Nagasaki in 1946, but the Occupation regime of Douglas MacArthur refused permission for its publication. An appeal was made to Washington and the book finally appeared in Japanese in 1949. It is still widely read in Japan and contains a powerful message for all men and women."
*Ironically, *not* due to the bomb; he contracted it from his work as a radiologist.
... and now The Bells of Nagasaki is just $200 on Amazon!
Just as the atom-bomb exploded over the centre of the town, Shigeo jumped into the lake. A glaring flash of light blinded him. Immediately following it he heard a roar and a crash like a thousand peals of thunder. An indescribable gale followed it, thrashing the water into spray, dragging Shigeo with it and hurling him against the bank. Ancient trees crashed to the ground, uprooted, while branches as thick as a man’s thigh whirled through the air. Reeds of bamboo were flattened. Only the tough wood of the weeping willow beneath which Sadako was sleeping withstood the blast. Its trunk, indeed, bent beneath the hurricane, and every leaf was stripped off its twiggy branches, but it did not fall. Sadako, however, was whirled away by the blast like a paper ball.
Shigeo got up laboriously. He was unable to think. With wide, terrified eyes he stumbled about on the spot where he had contrived to rise. He stared numbly at a treetop which was incomprehensibly lying on the ground in front of him. Nor could he understand how he came to be wading ankle deep in water. And the quantities of leaves around him, the twigs and the branches—had they fallen from Heaven?
Gradually he began to realise what had happened. His muscles tautened. He stood up straight and tried to understand. First of all there had been a flash of lightning behind him, then the storm had come and had hurled him out of the water. After that the earth had trembled beneath him. There had been an earthquake!
---
“My children!” cried Yasuko and sped away. She bruised herself against sharp edges of machinery, she trod in heaps of shattered glass and stepped over corpses. She collided with men in air raid wardens’ helmets who tried to stop her. The wounded clutched at her, seeking aid, but she tore herself free from all of them with the strength lent her by fear for her children. But when at last she had forced her way through one of the workshop doors into the open, she started back. Over the centre of the town a great pillar of smoke rose to the sky—A pillar of smoke in which gigantic flames darted, whose top had curled itself into a vast ball, which sent out flashes like lightning, which glowed, sometimes reddish, sometimes orange, and then flared green or pink.
At the sight of this dreadful cloud of flame, Yasuko sank to her knees. Filled with terror, she gazed at this work of demons. For only demons could have lit this gigantic, unearthly torch for the purpose of punishing mankind. But why? What had she done? What had her children done?
As she thought of her children, Shigeo and Sadako, she stretched out her arms towards the supposed demoniac torch and moaned: “They haven’t done anything! Leave me my children! Don’t hurt them!” She wanted to rise, to go to her children’s aid. A fainting attack brought her to the ground.
(excerpts from The Day of the Bomb, Karl Bruckner, 1961)
---
Immediately after the explosion, the Reverend Mr. Kiyoshi Tanimoto, having run wildly out of the Matsui estate and having looked in wonderment at the bloody soldiers at the mouth of the dugout they had been digging, attached himself sympathetically to an old lady who was walking along in a daze, holding her head with her left hand, supporting a small boy of three or four on her back with her right, and crying, “I’m hurt! I’m hurt! I’m hurt!” Mr. Tanimoto transferred the child to his own back and led the woman by the hand down the street, which was darkened by what seemed to be a local column of dust. He took the woman to a grammar school not far away that had previously been designated for use as a temporary hospital in case of emergency. By this solicitous behavior, Mr. Tanimoto at once got rid of his terror. At the school, he was much surprised to see glass all over the floor and fifty or sixty injured people already waiting to be treated. He reflected that, although the all-clear had sounded and he had heard no planes, several bombs must have been dropped. He thought of a hillock in the rayon man’s garden from which he could get a view of the whole of Koi—of the whole of Hiroshima, for that matter—and he ran back up to the estate.
From the mound, Mr. Tanimoto saw an astonishing panorama. Not just a patch of Koi, as he had expected, but as much of Hiroshima as he could see through the clouded air was giving off a thick, dreadful miasma. Clumps of smoke, near and far, had begun to push up through the general dust. He wondered how such extensive damage could have been dealt out of a silent sky; even a few planes, far up, would have been audible. Houses nearby were burning, and when huge drops of water the size of marbles began to fall, he half thought that they must be coming from the hoses of firemen fighting the blazes. (They were actually drops of condensed moisture falling from the turbulent tower of dust, heat, and fission fragments that had already risen miles into the sky above Hiroshima.)
---
After an alarm, Father Kleinsorge always went out and scanned the sky, and this time, when he stepped outside, he was glad to see only the single weather plane that flew over Hiroshima each day about this time. Satisfied that nothing would happen, he went in and breakfasted with the other Fathers on substitute coffee and ration bread, which, under the circumstances, was especially repugnant to him. The Fathers sat and talked a while, until, at eight, they heard the all-clear. They went then to various parts of the building. Father Schiffer retired to his room to do some writing. Father Cieslik sat in his room in a straight chair with a pillow over his stomach to ease his pain, and read. Father Superior LaSalle stood at the window of his room, thinking. Father Kleinsorge went up to a room on the third floor, took off all his clothes except his underwear, and stretched out on his right side on a cot and began reading his Stimmen der Zeit.
After the terrible flash—which, Father Kleinsorge later realized, reminded him of something he had read as a boy about a large meteor colliding with the earth—he had time (since he was 1,400 yards from the center) for one thought: A bomb has fallen directly on us. Then, for a few seconds or minutes, he went out of his mind.
---
Dr. Fujii, who was in his underwear, was now soaking and dirty. His undershirt was torn, and blood ran down it from bad cuts on his chin and back. In this disarray, he walked out onto Kyo Bridge, beside which his hospital had stood. The bridge had not collapsed. He could see only fuzzily without his glasses, but he could see enough to be amazed at the number of houses that were down all around. On the bridge, he encountered a friend, a doctor named Machii, and asked in bewilderment, “What do you think it was?”
Dr. Machii said, “It must have been a Molotoffano hanakago”—a Molotov flower basket, the delicate Japanese name for the “bread basket,” or self-scattering cluster of bombs.
At first, Dr. Fujii could see only two fires, one across the river from his hospital site and one quite far to the south. But at the same time, he and his friend observed something that puzzled them, and which, as doctors, they discussed: although there were as yet very few fires, wounded people were hurrying across the bridge in an endless parade of misery, and many of them exhibited terrible burns on their faces and arms. “Why do you suppose it is?” Dr. Fujii asked. Even a theory was comforting that day, and Dr. Machii stuck to his. “Perhaps because it was a Molotov flower basket,” he said.
There had been no breeze earlier in the morning when Dr. Fujii had walked to the railway station to see a friend off, but now brisk winds were blowing every which way; here on the bridge the wind was easterly. New fires were leaping up, and they spread quickly, and in a very short time terrible blasts of hot air and showers of cinders made it impossible to stand on the bridge any more.
---
Now not many people walked in the streets, but a great number sat and lay on the pavement, vomited, waited for death, and died. The number of corpses on the way to Nagatsuka was more and more puzzling. The Doctor wondered: Could a Molotov flower basket have done all this?
---
Father Cieslik was bursting with some inside dope he had, but he waited until the conversation turned naturally to the mystery of the bomb. Then he said he knew what kind of bomb it was; he had the secret on the best authority—that of a Japanese newspaperman who had dropped in at the Novitiate. The bomb was not a bomb at all; it was a kind of fine magnesium powder sprayed over the whole city by a single plane, and it exploded when it came into contact with the live wires of the city power system. “That means,” said Dr. Fujii, perfectly satisfied, since after all the information came from a newspaperman, “that it can only be dropped on big cities and only in the daytime, when the tram lines and so forth are in operation.”
---
About a week after the bomb dropped, a vague, incomprehensible rumor reached Hiroshima—that the city had been destroyed by the energy released when atoms were somehow split in two. The weapon was referred to in this word-of-mouth report as genshi bakudan—the root characters of which can be translated as “original child bomb.” No one understood the idea or put any more credence in it than in the powdered magnesium and such things. Newspapers were being brought in from other cities, but they were still confining themselves to extremely general statements, such as Domei’s assertion on August 12th: “There is nothing to do but admit the tremendous power of this inhuman bomb.” Already, Japanese physicists had entered the city with Lauritsen electroscopes and Neher electrometers; they understood the idea all too well.
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/1946/08/31/hiroshima
"Tokyo's first indication that [Hiroshima] had been destroyed by a new type of bomb came from President Truman's announcement of the strike, sixteen hours later."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atomic_bombings_of_Hiroshima_and_Nagasaki
The concept of Atomic Bombs was accessible to the public. Robert Heinlein wrote a short story in 1941 ("Solution Unsatisfactory") featuring an American atomic weapons project that concludes that nuclear bombs are impractical (something about the hard part being to make a bomb that only blows up one country) and instead produces a radiological "dust" that's used as a city-killing strategic weapon. Around the same time period, John Campbell (editor of the magazine "Astounding Science Fiction") correctly deduced the location and purpose of the Manhattan project from large number of American physicists changing their subscriptions to addresses in Los Alamos, NM.
From what I've read of Hiroshima survivor narratives, however, not many of them were familiar with the concept of atomic bombs. The common themes seem to be an initial reaction that they were hit by a surprise ordinary air raid with a bomb happening to hit nearby, then later (after seeing indications of the scale of the destruction and hearing radio reports about the Americans using a new type of bomb) guessing that it was some kind of large thermobaric or fuel-air bomb.
The government and military leadership very quickly figured out it was an atomic bomb. The Imperial Japanese military knew about the theoretical possibility of nuclear bombs and had its own relatively small nuclear weapons R&D program.
They can't have thought it was a large thermobaric or fuel air bomb as the first of those were deployed in Vietnam. Theoretically, they were being worked on by the Nazis but the knowledge of this would have been no more widespread than the knowledge of the potential of the atomic bomb.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_nuclear_weapons_program
My brief reading would imply the concept of Atomic Bombs wasn't "common knowledge" in the average citizen, but the general concept was available to the elite/intellectual class (just based on various approaches undertaken).
Science fiction author H G Wells first predicted a uranium-based atomic bomb of a sort in his novel The World Set Free (1914) :
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-33365776
Politician Winston Churchill was an avid reader of Wells's novels, and in a 1924 magazine article wrote:
"Might a bomb no bigger than an orange be found to possess a secret power to destroy a whole block of buildings - nay to concentrate the force of a thousand tons of cordite and blast a township at a stroke?"
Luckily physicist Leo Szilard was another Wells fiction fan, and possibly the novel referred to above helped inspire him in 1933 to think of the concept of a chain reaction based on neutron release.
I think the great depression, and the dustbowl were the greatest things that ever happened to this country. It forged a certain character and sensibility that would’ve been very difficult to achieve otherwise. We would never of had Hank Williams, for instance, or the Carter family. Feel free to add to this list.
John Steinbeck certainly got some mileage out of it.
Absolutely
My mother (born 1928) and her large extended family were working-class people who lived through the Dust Bowl firsthand (and obviously the Depression). Were she still with us she would eloquently explain how devoutly they would have preferred not to have had that experience.
More to your argument: she and my father (a native of the Northeast who spent his childhood in Oklahoma), and many of their respective relatives both there and in the Northeast, thought that the U.S. was on the way to collapse as a society until entry into World War II became the type of unifying national effort that was needed.
Yes, I appreciate that. I was being a little provocative. I can’t imagine anyone really wanting to live through all that, but in retrospect, people do seem to love mythologizing things like that. I intended my remark to be somewhat satirical.
You do like to stir the pot, don’t you?
Anyone have insight as to why government agency HR departments suck so much? My gf recently went through the hiring process and they basically left her hanging for 4 months. Then there was an offer but paperwork was staggered and without warning. (If you do not fill this out in 2 business days we didnt warn you about we may have to postpone your start date) Also have other people related to other agencies that are unanimous in reporting delays and incompetence. Bad incentives? Regulation?
For related context; I put in applications at three National-But-Not-Government places, and all three took three months to tell me 'yes' or 'no'. I'd given up on them all months before they told me I was hired. So, not a government thing so much as... well I don't know. Suckiness.
In fact the municipal job got back to me much faster. With a 'no', but still.
Can't speak to America, but in the local government job I was briefly in, it was down to a hiring freeze thanks to the austerity measures after the 2008 economic crash in Ireland.
Even when vacancies are permitted to be advertised again, that does *not* mean that you have a job; generally, they put the successful applicants on a panel, from which vacancies may be filled as and when they arise. Because it's in part down to budget constraints; if the government of the day is feeling the pinch, an easy (relatively) way of showing the public that you are Doing Something is to announce that you're freezing any new civil service hiring (for the lower ranks; the higher grades seem to make out just fine).
Because the public have the general impression that "huh, civil servants, well-paid cushy jobs with a pension and no work to do, just sit around drinking tea and gossiping" so they respond reasonably well to "no more hiring on and wasting public money". However the public *don't* put it together that "no new hires" has anything to do with "I'm waiting six months for my passport to be renewed, this is a disgrace!" Yeah, it's because the passport office hasn't been allowed take on new staff to cover the workload, is why.
So even if your department has a vacancy, you may not be allowed fill it. It all depends if you can bargain with the relevant authority about "can we have three of the projected one hundred and fifty new hires?", always bearing in mind that every local authority and civil service department in the country is *also* looking to get the chance to fill vacancies.
Hence stories like Nancy's friend and the court reporter job: you advertise, interview, and set up a panel - and if in five years' time you're allowed hire a new court reporter due to the previous one retiring, you either contact the panel members or more likely, have a new round of applications and interviews.
To quote from the email calling me to interview for clerical officer in the civil and public service:
"Qualification and placement on a panel is not a guarantee of appointment to a position."
Your gf got off easy. One of my friends was kept hanging for quite a few years for a court reporter job she really wanted. The job never happened, and she probably missed opportunities.
I agree with the others. No incentive to do better. In most cases not even much HR to deal with you - but a side-job for someone who feels he/she has other things to do. Anecdotes from Germany: 1. Once I got hired by court admin, 30 teens fresh from school in one room, 3 judges or so came inside. Each of us said one sentence about who and why. Judges went out for a minute, came back, told us: "You are all hired." (They had invited us by school-marks.) 2. A week later - after I had been at a state-of-the-art job-selection for the labor-office-admin with glorious results - I got an offer from the labor office (point is : They are FULL of HR-experts, so they used them). One week late, sorry guys. 3. If you want to become a school-teacher the standard way, it is all smooth. Study, practice time, then admin assigns you to your school. If you are non-standard, YOU apply at school. As no one personally cares how much classes are missed due to lack of teachers AND schools have no HR to speak of - they usually do not even care to answer your application. Ever. No "received, thanks", no "sorry, best wishes". 4. work for gov.funded German Academics Exchange Service / Goethe-Institute: Guys, thanks for all the bucks. But your "HR" spells "H... r.....". 5. Same work for privately funded Bosch foundation: HR? That was family. At 20% the Goethe-pay.
In a democracy, the incentive that is supposed to make politicians improve things is that it will get them votes. I doubt that many votes have been won through improving HR departments, so I would expect them to be very much unaligned with voter interests.
I have no insight into the nuts and bolts of this or any HR department, but I will tell you from my experience that the best thing that you can do is forge some kind of personal connection inside the process. Sometimes everything comes down to the person in front of you. I have dealt with immigration, customs, and any number of other organizations and I really think it’s the only angle you’ve got sometimes. I arrived at Toronto airport, coming from New York one time with a sick dog in a cage. It was the whole reason I was bringing the dog to Toronto, I could not afford the vet bill in New York for the operation that that dog needed.
She had an infected uterus because she had never been neutered. She had bled all over the bottom of the cage during the flight. I had to deal with an official who was in charge of these matters. There was some paperwork that I lacked. I told him my whole story. And then he carefully led me to the correct response to his question. Whatever it was.
It didn’t really matter because it was some essential tick box that had to be ticked off and he made it very clear to me. By the way he addressed the question how I should answer it. In other words, he bailed me out.
If you cannot get a face inside a bureaucracy, you’re fucked.
“The proud mans contumely,
The insolence of office and the law’s delay “
This condition has been spoken of;
Good luck solving it without a bare bodkin.
Cascading bad incentives.
In defense of bad bureaucrats everywhere, you must remember the two Laws of Government Service:
The Second Law, which everyone hates, is that no government employee, under all but the most extreme circumstances, shall be punished for poor performance.
This is a necessary corollary of the First Law, which is the that no government employee, under any circumstances what-so-ever, shall be rewarded for good performance.
I've worked in government before, including on employee recognition committees. It is no exaggeration to say giving someone a $50 Starbucks gift card for, say, being the best employee in the entire department requires 50+ hours of employee effort, including multiple written statements from senior executives. Anyone appointed by a governor will usually just slip you $100 under the table to give the employee rather than wasting 4 hours doing the required paperwork.
And this is systematic. Not only is the HR person habituated to a system where any reward or punishment for performance is literal urban myth but so are all the people she depends on who might need to approve or comment on your girlfriend's hiring.
If she stays there too long, she will acclimate to these incentive structures as well. On the flip side, government is so desperate for talent that you can do some incredibly important stuff at a hilariously junior level.
Wait, they *let* you have gift cards??? Me and the other girl who worked on a multi-million pound school building project weren't even allowed accept two bottles of wine from one of the sales reps at Christmas because Bribes. Incentives. Not Allowed! 🤣
What really was annoying is the head of the department got an extra allowance for Doing The Work, which amounted to signing the papers we put in front of him, while we did the actual work. So it goes!
It's all tied up with anti-corruption initiatives, which are hilariously misaligned; oh no, a $50 gift card? We must have every piece of paper in triplicate! Meanwhile, as seen from some past scandals, the guys at the top are flying their mistresses off on foreign holidays on the tax payers' dime. But that's okay because they're the important guys, the bosses who would otherwise be drawing down yuuuuge salaries in private industry (why the dickens they don't go and work in private industry, then, is never answered).
Taking a gift from sales reps is potentially corruption, because it might incline you to serve their interests instead of those of your employer. A gift from your employer is no problem, because you're supposed to be serving their interests.
Considering we were squeezing the pennies out of the budget, because we had external auditors paying annual visits and querying "why is there a fifty cent difference between the quote and the invoice?", we hadn't much wiggle room to be bribed, given it was all done by tender awards 😁
EDIT: To clarify, the sales rep dropping in with the wine for Christmas was *after* the contracts had been signed and the orders filled, or nearly so, and he was working off the usual practice of "a little token of appreciation to the clients to keep them sweet" but Da Boss told us "nope, no can do".
Ah, well. The boxes of chocolates for Christmas that got dropped in by our regular suppliers (not the tender contractors) were opened for everyone in the office to nom down on, I guess it's different if it's not for anyone specific and the evidence gets eaten 😁
My only question is why do you think the rest of the agency isn’t as bad as the HR department!
I have a question for post-rats: I am interested in learning more about practical techniques for meta-rationality, but I'm unable to find any good references which directly explain or enumerate methods. David Chapman's Meta-Rationality looks like it would be such a reference,, but the parts discussing meta-rationality (four and five) are not yet written.
Has anybody written anything good in this vein? I've started reading Kegan's The Evolving Self but it's really slow going
maybe explaining things and methods is something that people only do at level 4?
at level 5, you are one with the universe, and don't worry about practical things anymore.
Maybe? But Chapman's thesis is that level 5 reasoning can at least be demonstrated, or otherwise communicated (if not through precise methods), and I don't see anybody directly arguing that they have achieved a transcendent (and totally detached!) state through these principles
We probably need to distinguish between the levels as Kegan defined them, and as the post-rationalists weaponized them.
As I understand it, in Kegan's version, level 1 is literally a baby, level 2 is a selfish child (or a retarded adult), so for a discussion about relatively sane adults, only levels 3, 4, and 5 are relevant. Level 3 means having a set of ad-hoc rules with no coherent system, kinda like GPT (it can answer any specific question, it just often doesn't make sense, or it contradicts other answers). Level 4 means having a system and following it strictly (e.g. Christian morality, or libertarianism), so the person not only has opinions, but can also derive conclusions about new situations and defend them logically; but only within the system they identify with. Level 5 means being able to see the situation from different perspectives, and say things like "well, from the consequentialist perspective, we should do X, but from the deontological perspective, we shouldn't" or "you know, I generally prefer the solutions based on free market, but this specific situation seems like an exception, because..."; so it's like the person is outside the systems, using them as tools, as opposed to being locked in one system and unable/unwilling to consider the alternatives.
And, as Kegan already said, levels 3 and 5 can seem quite similar from outside. Both break the rules sometimes, the former because they never really cared about the rules (only maybe used them as a rationalization, when convenient), the latter because they understand that this set of rules only applies to this domain, and this situation is not the typical case. But from outside, the latter also sounds like a clever rationalization. Metaphorically speaking, level 3 believes they can overcome gravity by positive thinking and waving their hands; level 5 believes they can overcome gravity by building a rocket; level 4 insists that both of them are crackpots because gravity is a law and must be obeyed.
Here, level 5 can be demonstrated by demonstrating that you understand the rules (in a way that level 4 would accept as correct) *before* you explain why you are breaking them anyway.
Chapman, if I remember it correctly, is a guru of some Buddhist group. Buddhism has a honorable ancient tradition of strawmanning everyone else as two extreme groups, and then declaring itself as a superior Middle Way TM. Chapman follows this tradition, using language appropriate for educated modern Western audience. He noticed that he could match those two strawmen to Kegan levels 3 and 4, and declare himself (and modern Buddhism) to be the superior level 5. Nice!
In his article, Chapman called one of those two strawmen "rationalists". This was completely unrelated to the LessWrong community; Chapman just used this word to translate some old Buddhist expression to modern English. (Later, when explicitly asked, Chapman confirmed on Twitter that the LW rationalists are *not* the "rationalists" from his article. Sorry, I don't have the link.) However, some of his fans interpreted the article in exactly that way, and called themselves "post-rationalists" in the sense of "just as smart as the LessWrong community, but much cooler". They insist (for no good reason; and Chapman disagrees with them) that the LessWrong community is at level 4, and they are at level 5.
Here, there is nothing to demonstrate, because the accusations are vague. If someone says "a map is not the territory", is that level 4 thinking (because only one territory) or level 5 thinking (because multiple maps)? Depends on whom you ask -- if you ask me, that is precisely what level 5 means, but if you ask the post-rats... uhm, you'd have to ask them. From my perspective, this debate has degenerated into empty status claims. If someone insists that you are level 4, because they feel superior to you, there is no way to prove them wrong.
So, if you want to know more about post/meta-rationality, it depends on whom you ask, because different people have different definitions. If you ask Chapman, it will probably mean (his interpretation of) Buddhism. If you ask people who identify as post-rationalists, it will probably mean "kinda like rationality, but don't say things that might offend the cool kids", for example tone down your atheism, pay more respect to ancient wisdom (but of course feel free to ignore it whenever convenient), and do not associate with anything that is low-status among the cool kids (such as Harry Potter fanfiction, or Yudkowsky in general).
From my perspective, level 5 methods are basically: realizing that the map is not the territory; passing someone's "intellectual Turing test"; being aware of the consequentialist / deontological / virtue-ethics conceptions of ethic and where each of them fails; and also noticing the "games people play" which ironically also applies to the very concept of Kegan levels.
That's interesting that Chapman is leading a Buddhist group in the way you describe and reinforces my suspicion about how the hard/new part of every single one of his texts is a work in progress
One thing from both your comment and Chapman's articles is that it doesn't really address a central point of Kegan's thesis, which is that stage 3 isn't merely magical thinking, but rather in stage 3 the self is *identified* with their social relationships with other people. Specifically Kegan rejects the idea that independent thought is a skill that must be developed, but that there is a qualitative difference in capability between stage 3 and stage 4. This identification of the self can lead to magical thinking as necessary to maintain the social fabric. Note I think Kegan is wrong here (namely: quantitative differences once accumulated are in fact qualitative; there is no mechanism for transitioning from stage 3 to stage 4 with wholly separate modalities of thought; adults exhibit behavior consistent with both stages depending on context; even the most entirely-socially-embedded teenager perceives herself separate from her friends sometimes)
There's probably a lot of alpha in somebody rewriting a bunch of these philosophical treatises without the excess verbiage and inconsistent technical vocabulary but it seems like anyone who purports to do so has their own agenda so maybe it's hopeless.
I haven't really read any book by Kegan, only the summary on Wikipedia.
But there are many development scales in psychology, whether it is Freud's 5 stages, or Ericsson's 8 or 9 stages, or... a few more that I forgot. All of them are leaky abstractions that seem to point at something important -- sometimes they seem to explain something perfectly, other times any attempt to apply them to the situation at hand seems forced. People may exhibit different stages at different contexts, or the same behavior has a little bit of this and a little bit of that. (Which as far I know was also perfectly clear to Kegan.)
> stage 3 isn't merely magical thinking, but rather in stage 3 the self is *identified* with their social relationships with other people.
By comparing people at stage 3 to GPT I meant that when you ask them "what do you think about X?", they are actually trying to answer is "what do my friends/authorities think about X?" (a bit like GPT asking "what do the texts I learned from say about X?").
And if you point out that their answers to X and Y somewhat contradict each other, they can't really resolve the situation, because all they know is "my friends say X" and "my friends say Y", so the only way they could answer your question would be to ask their friends what *they* think about the tension between X and Y... but that might be socially inappropriate, so it's not going to happen.
Which reminds me of "Simulacrum Level 3" here: https://www.lesswrong.com/tag/simulacrum-levels
I think it is quite likely that Chapman misunderstands (or misinterprets) Kegan's levels, because I suspect he is not interested in Kegan's levels per se, he just uses them as a modern justification for the ancient Buddhist argument (his "bottom line" was already written centuries before Kegan).
I would imagine the transition between Kegan's levels 3 and 4 like this: First you just copy the opinions of your friends and authorities. At some moment you become aware that this is what you do, and you ask yourself where do *their* opinions come from.
The motivation could be a status thing: copying someone's opinion makes you lower status than them. But having a different opinion from your group would make you an outcast. So you need to figure out how to make an opinion that would not be a copy of someone else's opinion, and yet your group would approve of it. How do the currently high-status members of the group do it? There are basically three possibilities:
* Maybe the high-status members just say random shit, and everyone copies them. Then the right move is to figure out what makes them high-status (are they physically strong? attractive? rich? well-connected?) and try to achieve the same... and then people will pay respect to your random shit. This seems like a behavior of a small local group, e.g. the mean girls at high school.
* It could be an "infinite" regress, where your master copies the opinions of his master, etc. (Does not need to be literally infinite, just long enough that no one remembers where it began.) Then the right move would be to study your master's master, or someone else who is more ancient than your master, maybe an ancient sacred book.
* Or it could be that there is a system that your master follows (could be science, religion, or some political -ism), and then the right move is to study the system.
The third (and to some degree the second) option leads you to replace blindly copying the people around you with following an external source. -- Like what we are doing right now: instead of "what do people around us say about Kegan's levels?" we go "so what are the Kegan's levels actually?", i.e. replacing a peer group (post-rationalists) with a system (Kegan's system). Which changes us from "people who are impressed by what Chapman said" to "people who might contribute their own original opinions on Kegan's levels". (I am overthinking it here. Don't worry, I don't take it too seriously, I just find it amusing to notice the games people play, and how I am not really different myself.)
> it seems like anyone who purports to do so has their own agenda so maybe it's hopeless.
That's the beauty and the tragedy of level 5 -- why should I spend my time becoming yet another expert on Kegan's level, when I could spend the same time inventing my own system instead? Preferably some kind of system that places *me* on the top, so it would oriented around my strengths. ;)
AFAIK, no city has tried out the following scheme to combat local residents getting pushed out of neighborhoods they’ve lived in their whole lives due to gentrification/rising rents:
The gov tracks avg rent costs in an area. If the rent increases more than x% in y period of time, then every resident who has lived in that area for longer than z years receives $ they can use to pay for increased rent to stay in their same neighborhood, if they’d like. Alternatively, if they don’t want to stay, they can still take the cash and move elsewhere.
In contrast with rent control, direct cash transfers to long-time residents seems like it would avoid disincentivizing a) new, higher density buildings and b) capital improvements to older units - since real estate firms won’t have their profits capped. It would allow neighborhoods to get “nicer” while still giving the opportunity to long-time residents to stay in the same area.
Has a subsidy program like this been tried anywhere? What are the reasons I’m not thinking of for why this is a bad idea?
You're trying to subsidize your way out of a shortage of something, which won't work.
Theoretically, it might support a political push allowing more housing construction, but I'd be pretty hesitant of that, as people have lots of reasons to be NIMBY's and making them wealthier isn't going to make them less NIMBYey.
This sounds a lot more expensive than just allowing housing to be built to meet market needs.
"to combat local residents getting pushed out of neighborhoods they’ve lived in their whole lives due to gentrification/rising rents:"
I am skeptical this happens on a wide scale and isn't due to local restrictions on building new housing.
I don't know if this is exactly what you are thinking of, but there is the HAP (Housing Assistance Payment) scheme currently in operation in Ireland. It (notionally) replaced RAS (Rental Accommodation Scheme) which was meant to help people who were on rent supplement for longer than 18 months.
https://www.hap.ie/
"he Housing Assistance Payment (HAP) is a form of social housing support provided by your local authority.
Local authorities make a monthly rental payment on your behalf to your landlord, subject to terms and conditions, including rent limits. In return, the HAP tenant pays a weekly contribution towards the rent to the local authority.
HAP allows you to work full-time, while still receiving housing support."
When I was working in local government, I saw this starting to be rolled out. There were problems, I don't know if they've been sorted out since I left. Two main problems were:
(1) The rental limits were way too low. Market rates for rents were much higher in many instances than the total limit the government would cover. This created a chicken-and-egg situation where government didn't want to commit to paying whatever rent might be asked, becuse of fears that landlords would hike up rents to the limits in order to squeeze the most money out of the government, and because it's public money there's a limit on how much can be spent
(2) Because of said chicken-and-egg situation, while technically the rules said "we will only pay X amount and if the landlord charges more, we won't sign a contract", in practice due to lack of accommodation and people being in need, a nod-and-wink approach of "on paper, get the landlord to say that the rent is X. In practice, he will charge you Y, and you pay the difference between X and Y under the table".
You have good landlords and good tenants, bad landlords and bad tenants. There are private, usually small-scale, landlords out there (in Ireland anyway) who treat tenants as their private piggy bank and look for ways to retain the deposit when the tenant leaves, avoid doing any repairs as requested, etc. If the rent in the area is (imaginary figure) €600 a month for this place, but the government will guarantee payment up to €800 a month, then Mr Landlord will slap on a cheap coat of fresh paint, claim he has carried out a total refurbishment, and charge €800 for the same place under the same conditions.
But if the government only commit to paying €600 a month, and the market rate really is €800, then you have people who qualify for the payment but still can't afford to pay an extra €200 and so they're still in need of housing.
It's the problem of trying to provide a necessary service without over-burdening the tax purse, and if anyone can figure out the golden mean of "there will not be landlords trying to use this as free money or tenants who abuse the scheme", you tell me how it works.
I've had an idea of a zero-cost version of this: All publicly owned rent-controlled apartments switch to market pricing, and the current tenants get a cash subsidy that covers the difference. Might possibly be extended to privately owned apartments by taxing the increase in rent.
How high are you going to go with the cash subsidy? Because if the market price is €1500 a month, and the tenant is having problems paying this, and the government guarantees they will pay the tenant 15% of this as a subsidy, I promise you there are landlords out there who will calculate "15% of 1500 is 225, great, now your new rent is €1725, into my account by the 15th of the month please!"
The problem for the publicly owned housing is that the people in it are usually those who can't pay market rates because they're on low incomes, unemployed, pensioners, or on social welfare, so the state will end up paying the majority of the rent anyway by handing the tenant money with the right hand to pay the rent and taking it back with the left as the rent. You're not saving money by doing this.
There would be no limit to the subsidy, just as there is currently no limit to the implicit subsidy that rent control comprises. The difference is that the recipient of the subsidy would be free to use it in whatever way they deem best, so e.g. instead of paying €500 for a €1500 apartment, they might get a €900 apartment and pocket the extra €600, and the €1500 apartment would go to someone who values it.
My view is that if landlords know there's a subsidy, the rent will mysteriously and miraculously rise to that limit. So the formerly €900 apartment is now €1500 and you've downsized but haven't saved money.
That would seem like a general argument against all welfare handouts.
I'd say it is at least an argument that "welfare handouts" have limited ability to solve issues of supply constraints.
Potential downsides:
1. Cost. Rent can sometimes increase a lot in a short time in booming areas. If rent increases by an average of $1000/month for 1 million households over an x year period, that's $12 billion. That's in the ballpark of the entire yearly budget of a city of several million.
2. Inflated housing costs. When people can pay more rent, landlords charge more. This would make a positive feedback loop where rent prices would rise in response to cash transfers and cash transfers would increase in response to raising rent prices. High rent should increase house prices as well.
3. Discourages people from moving until they've lived z years (where z is the long-term resident cutoff) in one place. Ideally (in an economic sense) people move to where its most efficient. You can imagine someone losing their job in their current city and getting a great job offer in another city - but they're only 10 months away from passing the long-term resident threshold in their current city and getting cash transfers. So they stay on unemployment for 10 months.
4. Fairness. For any proposal, no one will ever agree entirely on what's fair. In this case, cash transfers will tend to go to areas that are booming. These are the same areas where income and social mobility tend to be higher. Someone in the rust belt will get nothing. On net, this policy likely redistributes funds from poorer people to richer people.
5. We may not want long-term residents to stay. Sometimes what makes a bad neighborhood bad is high crime rates. High crime rates may be due to a high concentration of people who commit crimes living in the area. Gangs, drug dealing, and related crimes may benefit from a high concentration of people committing crimes (eg: it's hard to form a gang if you're the only person in your neighborhood willing to join a gang). Dispersing long-term residents may be a large part making these neighborhoods better.
What would be the reason for privileging long-term residents? It's a pain to move, but people move for all sorts of economic reasons.
"What are the reasons I’m not thinking of for why this is a bad idea?"
Who pays?
Los Angeles just passed a somewhat analogous system - check out LAMC 165.09, Relocation Assistance for Economic Displacement. Glendale, California has another roughly analogous system, check out GMC 9.30.033 Rent Based Termination. Unincorporated Los Angeles County too - Pasadena might as well.
These things are done in conjunction with rent control, so you're not gonna be able to separate the effects out.
But generally speaking, no one knows these laws exist and very few people follow them.
This problem is a lot trickier than others, because renters want low rents and owners want high property values (and rents). There's really no way to do both simultaneously. From my perspective, it's a lot more impressive to raise property values than it is to lower them - you can get cheap land most anywhere on Earth. It's only in a few places that people will pay $3,000 a month for an apartment. And if people are willing to pay that much to live there, you must be doing something right. Otherwise, they'd just move, no?
"And if people are willing to pay that much to live there, you must be doing something right. Otherwise, they'd just move, no?"
That's the crux of it: the suggestions about "This city has low cost of living, why don't you just move?" only work if the city *also* has comparable good jobs - sure, you won't get a Bay Area salary but you also won't pay Bay Area prices.
But if you don't have in-demand skills that can command a good wage? Or if the reason the cost of living is low is because the place is dying on its feet, there are no decent jobs, and all the young people have moved out?
Dublin is the prime example of this in Ireland: it's pretty much *the* major centre of employment. If you want a good job, you move to Dublin. Heck, if you live in certain areas of the country and you want *any* kind of a job, you move to Dublin.
This means rents are high because housing supply is low, but people don't have the option to 'just move'. To the point that lack of affordable housing is beginning to adversely affect the shiny high-paying tech jobs our governments so desperately need. The other problem is that it publicly perceived (be it true or not) that the governments of whatever stripe are beholden to landlords; many of the public representatives and public servants in some jobs (like the police force) are private landlords, and the enforcement agencies are toothless.
It's complicated:
https://www.irishtimes.com/ireland/housing-planning/2023/03/23/irelands-housing-crisis-facts-and-figures-all-you-need-to-know/
Opportunity cost of tax money
I am interested in the idea of using concepts from finance, such as the idea of having a portfolio of investments, the idea of diversification, and the idea of hedging; but applying them to non-monetary aspects of one's lifestyle.
For a somewhat contrived and labored example:
You could think of your schedule for the week as a "portfolio of time investments". Then when you're deciding how best to allocate your temporal resources, you might have a consideration like "I want to have fun and enjoy myself each week, but I want to be wary of the hedonic treadmill phenomenon". In that case, rather than going all-in on one one extreme strategy like "I'm going to party and seek thrills everyday" or the opposite, "I'm going to engage in silent meditation everyday" (or even picking a middle point like engaging in more mundane, lower-intensity fun every day), you could "hedge" by spending some of your time in partying and some of your time in meditation every week, to cover both bases.
Maybe this concept is too mundane and obvious to even be worth someone spending their time on, but nevertheless I just wanted to see if anybody has examples of anyone going a little deeper and writing explicitly in these terms?
What you're really looking for is a budget. Typically, your investment portfolio is just a small part of your overall expenditures. Most of what you spend is on immediate needs, paying the rent and buying food and such.
The time you spend is similar. Some of it fills immediate needs. You need to spend time eating and sleeping. You probably have a job. Outside of that, now you get into a mix analogous to the breakdown between spending on entertainment and investing. Some of that time you'll use to do things that are immediately gratifying. That would be going to parties. Some of it you should use on things that may or may not be enjoyable as you're doing them, but will result in delayed reward in the years and decades to come. Those include exercise, building relationships with people, raising children perhaps, continuing to educate yourself and learn new skills.
It's inside of this last category that you might think like an investor. The payoff of these is less certain than activities that result in immediate gratification. You may learn things that become obsolete, put a ton of effort into a marriage your spouse loses interest in. Investing in health will absolutely never fail you. Eat well. Sleep well. Meet the minimum exercise guidelines, for both aerobic activity and resistance training.
This might be the sort of writing you are looking for: https://putanumonit.com/2020/01/01/welcome/
Not quite complex financial models but I think that might veer into overkill when dealing with non-monetary utilitarian optimization.
This looks to be the right ballpark. Thanks!
I've seen people use these as analogies but I'm not sure it goes much deeper than that. Are you looking for something quantitative?
Probably the simplest concrete analogy would be utilitarian: you have value from individual activities with decreasing marginal value vs exposure, with some uncertainty. The decreasing marginal value will make the solution different than a Markowitz portfolio but if you picked utility equations out of a hat you could compute your efficient frontier.
All of the usual arguments against MPT would still apply of course (optimal output has sensitive dependence on model parameters, the risk model is unrealistic, you're comparing apples and oranges, it's extremely difficult to estimate utility let alone a non-trivial covariance model)
Thanks, this is helpful already. The "decreasing marginal value vs exposure" concept is definitely part of what I'm looking for.
Finding some quantative writing on this *would* be cool (like if someone has actually developed some techniques for explicitly applying finance theory to directly picking out a portfolio of time investments / lifestyle invterventions, or quantifying expected utility over time of various lifestyle strategies or something like that, it would be interesting to read that).
But, I think my interest is more just in the area of communication and advocacy. I'm looking for language I can use to get across ideas to other people more effectively. I'm thinking of scenarios where I've been talking to friends or writing strangers on the internet, and I've gone into some kind of lifestyle intervention or routine that I've found helpful, and run into conceptual blocks / confusions discussing why they might be beneficial. Examples might be:
- The meditation example from above. Someone objects "Isn't it easier to just do more fun stuff every week?"
- I suggest I want to spend less time watching youtube at night and move that time into being outdoors, and one objects "What does it matter how liesure time is spent? If you enjoy watching youtube then there's nothing wrong with just doing more of that."
Of course we can all spend our time how we want, and there's no need for me to defend my personal choices to other people, but I think there's actually a technical mistake being made in these examples, having to do with not recognizing the phenomenon of decreasing marginal returns and how that can be remedied by spreading one's strategies out, which would be helpful both to me and my counterparts if I could communicate it. Like there's some consistent reasoning mistake that's associated from a too-simplistic form of hedonism or maximalism, and maybe these investment portfolio analogies are a more concrete way of pointing out the issue.
I'm not sure about anyone who's written at length on this but I would expect some utilitarians/EAs to have given it a go, so trolling through lesswrong might turn up something.
One thought for your theory is that the value of time spent on an activity is not always monotone decreasing. If you consider piano scales, or spaced repetition, or training for sport, then daily/repeated exposure is necessary to the body or mind; similarly meditation appears much more valuable past a certain amount of time, such as 30 minutes or 1 hour, and engineers widely agree that they need to reach their "flow state" in order to be productive. So, the "correct" value function might be *increasing* to some point, and then decreasing after---and depend on whether you reinforce on later dates.
It's definitely interesting to consider---these types of considerations remain underresearched in the ghetto of "self-help", but the flipside is that you can come up with workable new ideas
FT.com: You’re never alone with a book
Reading in public can be a surprisingly social activity
https://www.ft.com/content/310e6994-bb99-4299-99a7-b598d9324d60
Silent Book Club
https://silentbook.club/
I've wondered about informal book discussion where you read a book and then have a site to look for people to discuss it with. I suppose you could do that on reddit or wherever, but it might be nice to have people who were open to phone calls or zoom meetings.
What about goodreads?
Good idea. I'm not sure what it offers.
That's a nice article, silent book clubs sound interesting. I often go out to cafes to work/read or even just to browse the internet and read blogs. It's rejuvenating being around people, even if I'm not directly engaging with them
Why is it that virtually all high-end male US sports teams are called the Placename Nouns, but quite a lot of female teams are called the Placename Noun?
I'd guess it's because most male teams were named a long, long time ago, and that was the traditional way to name a team in the US. Female teams are much newer and I suppose singular names are now the fashion. The few male US soccer teams I can think of have singular names, so that would support the theory.
There may well be something true-ish about this. Plural club names seem to be more of an Anglo thing (epistemic status: thinking about it for a few minutes) and perhaps the conventions are getting flattened by the dreaded globalist mallet to become more in line with the rest of the world.
There are enough counterexamples (the recently-renamed Washington Commanders; the decades-old Baltimore Blast) that I think you’d have to do some actual statistics to see if there’s even an effect worth explaining. Is there a correlation by gender? Nation? Year named? Sport?
The name of every NFL and MLB team is plural. There are 3 singular-form names in the NHL: The Wild, The Lightning, and the Kraken. The Jazz are the only NBA team with a singular-form name, but there are multiple single-form WNBA names. There are lots of soccer teams of either sex with singular-form names, I don't feel like counting them all.
There are no professional female baseball, football or ice-hockey leagues (that I have heard of. If they exist, I think it is fair to assume that they are much newer leagues (and with newer teams) than MLB, the NFL, the NHL and the NBA.)
So out of the 4 major US men's sports leagues, you've got only 4 teams with singular names. Not going to look it up, but I am confident all of those teams are much younger than the average team age in their respective leagues.
I think my hypothesis holds: the average female team name is much, much newer than the average male team name. (Even if soccer is a wash, because almost all those teams are newer than the majority of baseball, football, men's basketball, and ice hockey teams.)
Or is the OP considering other sports I'm not considering? If not, a key fact here is that the number of men's teams in US sports outnumbers the number of women's teams substantially, since, by my count, men play 5 team sports whereas women only play 2.
The Houston Texans were named in 1999, and the Washington Commanders were named just last year, but both still hew to the “all plurals” scheme of the NFL. Meanwhile, English Premier League soccer club Tottenham Hotspur (referring to a fighting cockerel) has been playing under that name since 1882 (140 years ago). These aren’t cherry-picked examples, they’re the teams my sports-watching friends follow.
I agree that the average women’s team name is indeed much newer than the average men’s team name, obviously due to the relative newness of women’s professional sports in general. But there are enough new plural names, and old singular names, that “everybody uses singular names these days and women’s teams are newer” isn’t a slam dunk for me. The situation seems muddled enough that probably only a proper statistical regression, covering many sports from many English-speaking countries, would convince me of -any- thesis regarding team name plurality, sport, gender, age, et cetera.
The OP is about US sports teams.
> The Jazz are the only NBA team with a singular-form name
You forgot the Orlando Magic, the Miami Heat, and the Oklahoma City Thunder.
There are some unlike phenomena being counted as like here; I would say the names of the Wild and the Kraken are malformed.
Jazz, magic, heat, lightning, and thunder are all mass nouns and so, lacking singularity or plurality, can appropriately describe a team. Kraken is a count noun and shouldn't be singular in the name of a team. Wild is not a noun at all.
Lots of WNBA teams have this kind of issue as well. Liberty is a mass noun; storm, lynx, fever, and dream are all count nouns. Mercury is either a mass noun or a proper noun, depending on whether it’s referring to the planet or the chemical element. Sun and sky seem ambiguous to me; there’s only one of each, except in a sci-fi context.
For whatever reason, Storm and Fever make sense to me. I can see claiming that your team is a storm. Lynx is as bad as Kraken.
Wild is a mass noun as well as an adjective (cf. "in the wild".
I think kraken can be its own plural, like "sheep" (although I'm not completely sure, because it's rarely used in the plural).
"The wild" is a noun phrase, but "wild" within it is not a noun. Due to the way the phrase is constructed, it is obligatorily arthrous, like "the poor". It is not comfortably compatible with calling the team "the Minnesota Wild".
(Also, while "wild" [considered as a lexeme, rather than a token] can be a noun, it isn't a mass noun; it's obligatorily plural like "scissors". It would be unexceptional to refer to "the wilds of Minnesota", but not possible to refer to "the wild of Minnesota".)
EDIT:
Looking at your example more carefully, I see that I gave the wrong analogy; I had been thinking about Breath of the Wild. The conclusion is the same; "in the wild" is constructed in the same way as phrases like "in the nude" or "in the raw" where there is no reason to analyze the adjective as having been derived into a noun.
Just to challenge the idea, I stumbled across an article in the NY Times about a bunch of old men who like to play hockey: Oregon Old Growth is the team name.
Years ago I helped rename a men's recreational league hockey team from "the Tops" (we had our moments but were not that) to "the Fossils" (we definitely were that).
Still a plural noun....but we became somewhat legendary in that league by adopting new jerseys with the old Sinclair Oil cartoon dinosaur on the chest as a team logo.
Anyway I'm looking right now at the list of team names in the rec league that I now play in. They are I would say three-quarters plural nouns. The remainder are various non sequitors or in-jokes (e.g. "Facewash" which is a hockey slang term, "Hot Doggin", etc), or in a few cases the name of a sponsoring tavern.
Now I'm looking at the list of the area women's rec league which my wife plays in. It's similar but the ratio is somewhat different -- maybe three-fifths of the team names are plural nouns rather than three-quarters. Still plenty of in-jokes e.g. "MsConduct" (a misconduct being a particular type of infraction in ice hockey).
Women are naturally group- bonding and happier to share a collaborative identity? Pure speculation on my part and because it sounds like a fun thing to kick around.
I'm pretty sure most of the WNBA franchises were initially started by the same person who owned the NBA franchise in that city. They chose the name, not the players.
I wouldn't put much credence in that as a theory of why they might name their teams after mass nouns. But _which_ nouns they use does seem to show a sex effect; the Dream, Sun, and Sky are names that I would be more surprised to see on male teams.
Seeing as there are so many people involved in the field of mental health on this Blog, I’m going to throw a glove down.
This characterization of the Bidens as a crime family is the most classic case of Freudian projection that I have seen in my lifetime.
I just want a gearsy non-Freudian-psych thing that explains "projection".
Say you have a negative personality trait. But you don't know you have it. You know the trait is there, but you think it's in other people instead of you. You are "projecting" it onto other people.
That is my understanding.
People who make you uncomfortable can almost always teach you something about yourself in my experience.
The allegation of "Biden crime family" always struck me as overblown, and the allegations of the trumps being involved in criminal stuff much more credible. But I'm also a Democrat more generally so I have to ask whether that's my partisan bias playing out.
But one thing that makes me think that, no, it's not just my partisan bias, is to consider how people thought about these two before they were presidential candidates. Biden has been in DC for like 50 years and I never heard these allegations of corruption until 2020. Not even when he was Vice President for 8 years. He was seen as a walking gaffe machine, but not as corrupt. Whereas it seems like trump was always seen as an unethical, corrupt, and generally bufoonish businessman, way before he ever ran for president.
Makes me think that no, it's not my partisan bias. What I think now is what everyone thought before presidential politics became a source of motivated reasoning from everyone.
Nah,
Trump had...quasi-legitimate businesses. There is no honest way for Biden to have accumulated his lifetime fortune in politics (and even moreso the Clintons who went from "broke" to eight figure bank accounts in less than 15 years).
And Biden being an honest person is an extremely recent invention. Go and find the McLaughlin group where even Eleanor Clift is saying Biden is too dishonest to be in office.
Care to unpack that? Are you saying ALL the people who call the Bidens a crime family are themselves from "crime families" or fear they might be and want to distract from the possibility? Even Jill Biden's ex-husband? Or are you only saying this about some other SPECIFIC person - and if so, who?
If you think Bill Stevenson (Jill's ex) is from a crime family, is that family...the Bidens? Or if not, then...what "crime family" IS he from and what crimes are they supposed to have committed?
Nah, I will just let it lie. Far too much work separating the wheat from the chaff there. But if I had to throw someone into the bucket, Comer would be one.
Projection can be about someone you love as well as yourself I might add.
If I had to say, I would say, I am implying that the trump family is much closer to a crime family than the Biden family is.
Here’s an easier way; anyone who thinks that the Bidens rise to the level of a crime family who, at the same time, thinks the Trumps aren’t.
That’s a good number of people.
Also, as a back up;
>So, with the revelation of MASSIVE & WIDESPREAD FRAUD & DECEPTION in working closely with Big Tech Companies, the DNC, & the Democrat Party, do you throw the Presidential Election Results of 2020 OUT and declare the RIGHTFUL WINNER, or do you have a NEW ELECTION? A Massive Fraud of this type and magnitude allows for the termination of all rules, regulations, and articles, even those found in the Constitution. Our great “Founders” did not want, and would not condone, False & Fraudulent Elections!>
Anyone who believes this is true.
>The termination of all rules, regulations and articles<
Parse that.
Trump says a lot of stupid shit but in the specific part you want to parse he appears to be saying that a thing he asserts THE OTHER SIDE is doing (rigging elections) has the NEGATIVE EFFECT (which he is decrying and implicitly does NOT WANT) of obviating "all rules, regulations and articles". He's not saying HE wants to end all the rules. He's saying it's BAD that (according to him) his opponents are doing a thing which (if allowed to stand) has the effect of making all the rules irrelevant.
Alas, Trump is the master of scissor statements. He says a LOT of things that sound to his enemies like TRUMP wants to do bad thing X while sounding to his supporters like Trump is decrying that his OPPONENTS want to do bad thing X.
(I have issues with the REST of that tweet but the specific part you said "parse that" about seems...fine? You could quibble that it's an overstatement, but hey, overstatement is practically what twitter is FOR...)
minimising what people do is always a great way of letting them get away with stuff
. They were only kidding. They didn’t really mean it. It’s not that big of a deal. Sure, maybe nothing he says is to be taken seriously.
> LOT of things that sound to his enemies like TRUMP wants to do bad thing X while sounding to his supporters like Trump is decrying that his OPPONENTS want to do bad thing X.
The very pith and compass of projection.
“I’m going to lock up all my enemies and suspend the rule of law, because my enemies are trying to lock me up and suspend the rule of law..”
Trump has literally never said the "I'm going to" part of that - this is something you have hallucinated. IT ISN'T THERE. It's not "minimizing" to notice that a thing which hasn't been said, hasn't been said.
ALL presidents say a lot of stuff which seems, on the face of it, to be nonsense. I'd prefer to judge them mostly on what they DO but failing that, on what they ACTUALLY say rather than the worst thing their enemies can HALLUCINATE them having said.
> He's not saying HE wants to end all the rules.
I think you are misreading it. “ A Massive Fraud of this type and magnitude allows for the termination of all rules, regulations, and articles, even those found in the Constitution.”
In other words, what the Democrats did allows me to suspend rule of law in order to make things right. That is what he is saying.
That is not *objectively* what he is saying, it is merely how people of your political persuasion have chosen to *interpret* this inherently ambiguous statement. The phrase “allows for” doesn’t say *who* is being “allowed”. You unjustifiably assume the *who* is Trump.
If we aren’t TDS-deranged and thus DON’T take every Trump statement as a new excuse to reiterate to our friends how terrible this guy is, we have to admit the statement was somewhat ambiguous.
Or if we start from the premise that Trump *isn’t* a worse-than-Hitler moral monster but merely a pretty bog-standard politician engaging in the usual sorts of self-interested political grandstanding, then the obvious interpretation of the ambiguous statement is that he’s saying *those other guys* are the ones trying to suspend the rule of law.
(I DO start from something resembling that last premise, so I did reach that conclusion.)
> (I DO start from something resembling that last premise, so I did reach that conclusion.)
Yeah, you made that clear.😆😆
I think you’re reading of the text is a tortured one.
Their massive fraud etc. “allows” etc. to mean
“ their massive fraud etc. “
-brings about
-Is An attempt to
-Causes
-Promulgated
Gosh…What a very clever use of the word .“allows”…
I am very skeptical of your interpretation.
> it is merely how people of your political persuasion have chosen to *interpret* this inherently ambiguous statement<
Wow! Do we know each other? You have no idea what my political persuasion is, all you know is I think Donald Trump is a serious asshole. I wasn’t trying to hide it.
William Barr thinks he’s a serious asshole as well fwiw. I might be Willam Barr for all you know but is that the political persuasion you had in mind when you lobbed that mudball? Am I allowing for a suspension of civil discourse or advocating for it, I wonder?
And You’re right, maybe..he didn’t say “Im going to…” exactly.
He would much prefer others to do it for him, once he allows it.
Are any ACX readers struggling to envisage a happy future for humanity? If so, how do you emotionally deal with it?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SJUhlRoBL8M
Keep 'em laughing as you go.
Solid advice
Even if it's amazing, people will still be unhappy. Even if it sucks, people will still be happy. Emotionally, I'm just looking forward to seeing what happens next.
Good point. Jared Diamond reckons people were happier before agriculture. That's food for thought.
"Emotionally, I'm just looking forward to seeing what happens next."
Basically the same here. I'm interested in what happens with AI. I'm interested in what happens with the possibly-ambient-conditions new superconductor. I'm (morbidly) interested in which direction politics goes.
The more pessimistic Yudkowsky gets, the more optimistic I get.
Seems to be begging the question. If doom were a certainty, it's out of one's control (as global events usually are) and there's nothing to gain by agonizing over it. Uncertainty is better at driving fear and anxiety. Or rather, uncertainty coupled with soothsaying and perceived risk, as there's never certainty in the long-run.
You'd have to qualify what "happy future" means. Humanity wasn't all miserable all the time prior to the industrial revolution, people expressed being happy despite the harsher living standards. Seems to be a moot point. The only real question of importance is long-term survival. For that, we have to leave the planet anyway. People keep forgetting this: the planet's destruction is a 100% certainty in the distant future, as the sun transforms. We can't live in a closed-loop of indefinite sustainability despite what anarcho-commmunists want to believe.
And also, depending on who you ask, we're in a race against "grabby aliens" to claim outer space.
So the prescription is the same as it ever was told by zen adherents and the like. Focus on the people around you, on what you can control.
A couple of gigayears feels like plenty of time though.
I seriously freak out any time I think about the heat death of the universe and “why is there something instead of nothing”. Compared to that, AI doom is not that bad. And my method of violently repressing the thought works for both.
Yeah projected destruction of any and all existence is a mind boggler and I can imagine an advanced humanity trying to engineer it's way out of it. I wonder what they'd try to do.
What do you care? You won't be around to deal with it.
I have a lot of faith (perhaps irrationally). Things might change to be unrecognizable and maybe not even human but the idea that things were ever really good is totally wrong. I'm actually excited for the variance, things could be really bad but also really good
Hopefully our inheritors are our mind children in some capacity but otherwise I don't wish to constrain them with my parochial values
This reads like rationalist parody.
I wish I lived somewhere that people even knew what rationalists were, let alone to be able to talk about parodying them.
Probably just read too much scifi growing up
I've lost a lot of faith in my ability to predict.
It has been quite a roller-coaster over the past few years...
Yeah, I think AI will either kill us all, turn us into useless eaters, or strip all meaning and achievement from life. Frankly I cope with it by shoving it as far back in my mind as I can. I just wish we could ban AGI worldwide. But that ain't happening so oh well.
I find myself more concerned with the desolation that comes from lack of work available for most. The optimists (not unlike commies in this regard) like to project that people would become "artisans" as though we'd all collectively start making furniture for no one and play musical instruments. Realistically, humanity will lean harder into consumption which it already does. People will just plug into VR / tv land. And when the chips fall and the economy is forever changed, there will be scant means for plebs to advance and build wealth (with the current sociopolitical structure). People would need access to capital to build things, to research, to do anything interesting. Maybe in a future where energy is virtually "free", this won't be mechanically difficult, but we have to ensure that we aren't just left with toys to play with while elites are the only ones with the means to do perform anything of consequence.
Also the progression of "secular cycles", of periods of inequality broken up by war or some other means, might be over. After this transformation, I'm not sure what could displace the rich. You'd have ownership still, but little in the way of competition. This is probably around the point humanity will be itching to colonize space.
This is going to be a natural selection sort of thing, though - I've thought a lot about what will happen when we have actually good VR, because one of the AI things that's definitely coming is individually-tailored-to-your-specific-tastes music / tv / movies / porn / VR.
You think we have superstimuli NOW? Sure, people play 72h straight in asian gaming cafes and drop dead, but they're the vanguard and most vulnerable, able to immerse themselves in the equivalent of 8-bit experiences. Just wait until we have an AI-driven feedback loop based on EEG / microexpressions / galvanic skin response etc that can optimize content for you specifically in real time, AND learn your entire individual mental and emotional sensorium / stimulation map over time, with the ability to layer and unfold stories and experiences both over time and over your entire emotional and mental capacity gamut.
So fast forward that a tiny bit, and fast forward economics to AI-driven post-scarcity, and you end up with 60-90% of the world's population as UBI "coffin slaves" hooked up to literal individually-tailored heavens. And all the UBI has to support is food/water/waste/electricity and a tiny pod that takes care of your base physical needs while you're plugged into virtual heaven.
I've often thought about whether this is a net good or net bad to participate in bringing into the world. Because individually, you're literally giving everyone who participates heaven - and it's not necessarily infinite universe tilings of cheezits and bimbo porn like most people jump to / object about right away, your sophisticated coffin slaves can be watching and participating in experiences as complex and engaging as they can literally conceive of and enjoy...imagine the unfolding mental and emotional experience of being Isaac Newton in his annus mirabilis, or 7-layered recursive stories that unfold and iterate as strange attractors around some central unifying set of insights that gradually unfolds for you in deeply engaging ways *while* teaching you a new subject, and more.
But I digress, back to natural selection - obviously, there will be an immensely strong selection effect, where people dedicated to actual reality, with all its difficulties, mess, complexities, and suffering, will be the only ones shaping reality and reproducing.
And this is ultimately what convinces me it may be a net good - not only do you give everyone who opts out of reality literally the best possible set of experiences available to them, but you vastly improve the remaining stock of people tackling the problems of reality, and have literally selected them to be intrinsically more engaged and prone to enjoying that mess of tackling problems in reality. It's win / win!
So the world splits cleanly into Lotus Eaters and Vetinari's, and both sides of the equation can be happy with this result.
I'll take all of us being useless eaters over only some of us being eaters.
After all, as the smart people tell us, we must learn to think in terms of trade-offs.
> turn us into useless eaters, or strip all meaning and achievement from life
I feel like our ancestors would say that if they could see us. But honestly fuckem
Banning Agi to preserve human meaning seems worse, like a deeper sort of death of the human spirit than the death it would solve
Not saying we should let it eat us but gotta find a way forward that isn't stagnation
>Banning Agi to preserve human meaning seems worse, like a deeper sort of death of the human spirit than the death it would solve
Were the countless non-european socities who not only never acheived industrialization but who were seemingly in a state of permanent technological stagnation devoid of "the human spirit"?
No, but then they overwhelmingly adopted western technological amenities when they were made available
As an observation, it is very hard to envision a bright future for humanity if your own circumstances are dire. And it doesn’t really matter how clever you are.
Also it is very common for people to say the world is going to hell in a handbasket as they get older. It eases the path to dying; FOMO is reduced.
Cliche, but gratitude is everything. I don’t know your story but the very fact that you are in a position where you can ponder the ultimate fate of humanity rather than your needs being met day to day puts you in an immensely privileged position relative to most humans who have ever existed, including a solid majority today. Think about all of the amazing opportunities available to you, how amazing the world around you is, all of the fascinating ACX articles you’ve gotten to read, etc. Think about all of the people in your life and how much you love them, how lucky you are to have even one person who loves you. If you don’t have any people in your life, get a dog and experience the unconditional love. All of this will help you stay in the moment and appreciate the beauty of life in the face of a scary and uncertain future.
Finally, if you have trouble getting into that mindset (as I definitely do), I highly recommend psychedelics for a shotgun blast into it. Among other things, the psychedelic experience is mostly about softening your heart and opening yourself up to overwhelming feelings of love and gratitude in the face of an often scary and uncertain world.
"including a solid majority today"
This isn't quite as happiness-inducing as it might seem at first blush.
It’s easy to dwell on the amount of suffering in the world, and if it truly brings you pain there are ample opportunities to help others in need. Otherwise it’s just an excuse you’re telling your self to avoid taking responsibility for your own personal fulfillment and mental well being.
Oh, sure, we can certainly -do- all kinds of things instead of -dwelling- on things. I am cautiously in favour of doing things, myself. But I thought the original question and your response had to do specifically with mental perspectives and happiness.
I don't mean to be too quarrelsome about this, but as a subject for rumination 'at least I, personally, by dint of a random saraband of nucleotides in a particular time and place, am having a good run of it... while the black wall of doom creeps ever nigh, and teeming multitudes of my fellow humans roil in hunger, privation, and ignorance' just sounds like a bad trip.
Excellent
No. If the developments of the next few centuries are anything remotely like the developments of the last few centuries, then the future of humanity will be happy in ways we can't even comprehend.
Of course, by "developments" you're referring to cheap chinese manufacturing and not the holocaust, right?
What about nitrogen fixation and antibiotics? Those seem pretty cool
Fair enough, but the last few centuries had cheap oil
Past performance is not a prediction….
Standard SEC boilerplate but good to bear in mind.
The general trend over many centuries has been for human wellbeing to rapidly improve beyond anyone's wildest imagination. This is in spite of Earth's raw natural resources constantly being depleted. Sometimes this entails finding new uses for previously underutilized materials.
For example, centuries ago uranium was not on anyone's radar as an energy source. Nuclear power remains a viable non fossil fuel energy source, and there is little reason to think that centuries of technological progress won't be able to find efficient renewable energy sources or other energy sources on Earth or off of it.
We can't know for sure that the future will be wonderful. Maybe we'll hit a point where for whatever reason the general trend of human history will suddenly reverse. But inasmuch as we can predict the future, using the past as our guide, there is no reason to expect that and every reason to assume the opposite.
The past gives us little reason to struggle envisioning a happy future.
Of course, when someone is depressed, they may lose objectivity and view everything in their personal lives, or in the world at large, to be hopeless.
But the evidence suggests that far from an apocalypse, the future will be wonderful beyond what we can imagine, just as the present is wonderful in many ways beyond the wildest imagination of people not too long ago.
Perhaps a depressed person who feels negatively about humanity's prospects can consider the objectively rosy global outlook, and question whether their own personal future is objectively as gloomy as their depression makes them feel.
Are you sure people from the past would find the present wonderful beyond their wildest imagination? Undoubtedly they would find it *astonishing* beyond their wildest imagination, but do you think they would mostly find it wonderful, once they had lived in our era for a year or two and gotten a decently clear picture of what life, people and relationships are like? One of my grandfathers was 80 when I was born, and lived to be almost 100, and I got to know him pretty well. He is the furthest-in-the-past person with whom I have had direct experience, and I am pretty certain he would not find the present at all wonderful. He would be horrified at the lack of civility, by how few of their neighbors people know, by the loss of gathering places like church (I don't think he was religious at all, but he regarded religious institutions as part of the fabric of society), by how few people read (he read books til the end of his life, including keeping up his Greek and Latin by reading the classics), by pollution, by how much less natural beauty there is now that so much open land has been built upon. I do think he would think modern medicine is wonderful. On the other hand, that might be balanced out by thevkinds of problems & dangers we face now that never once crossed his mind when he was living: overpopulation, pollution, nukes, antibiotic resistance, crossover of animal pathogens into our species due to our encroachment on animal environments, widely available highly addictive drugs, addictive social media powered by poisonous algorithms, auto fatalities, and, of course, fucking Artificial Intelligence.
There are only two famous people in the past that I think I know enough about to make a guess at how our era would look to them: Alexander Pope (18th century Brit) and Virginia Woolf (late 19th, early 20th century Brit). I think they both would have found it a nightmare.
I was actually pretty taken with Harari's idea that we are happiest as hunter gatherers. For what it's worth, I think some of the happiest days of my life have been those on backpacking trips, and this despite the fact that in many ways backpacking is a terrible fit for me: My athleticism is average at best, & I hate being dirty and love my creature comforts. And yet the backpacking life, the closest I have come to the life of a hunter-gatherer, gives me a wonderful sense of wellbeing and regular zaps of ecstasy.
Backpacking is not very close to Hunter Gatherer life, but manual labor outside is. When is the last time you did a week of ten hour days outside doing hard work?
Painted houses for a summer when I was in college. Also lived on a communal farm and spent many days outside doing things like putting roofs on outbuildings and fixing fences, shoveling paths through the snow between the various outbuildings and animal enclosures we had. I understand what it is to do a hard day's physical work.
And I disagree with you about outdoor manual labor being closer to the hunter-gatherer life than backpacking. A group of backpackers doesn't just spend the day together, they cook and eat together and sleep near each other and decide together on the plan for the next day. That's much closer to hunter-gatherer life than what manual laborers do after work, which is go home to a placewhere they have showers, TV, cold beer and a soft bed. And while backpacking is not work in the same way that manual labor is, it is very physically demanding. You're carrying 40+ pounds on your back, and walking up to 10 miles a day. If you're hiking in the mountains the first day you hike uphill all day long.
My mother lived to 91 and didn't start to slip mentally until her mid-80s. She had many of the complaints you quote from your grandfather and some others too; and being a highly verbal person (first girl on her high school debate team, first woman in her entire extended family to attend college, etc) she could expound on each of those problems at length and with references. And did, often.
But without fail if one of us asked her point-blank whether she'd rather be back in the USA of her youth, we'd get back a withering "have you been kicked in the head??" look. She was just as clear about the overall picture as she was about the various smaller irritations.
I stand by my sentiment. I don't doubt that if you teleported people from the past to the present, eventually they might start complaining about it and even claiming the grass was greener on the other side.
My claim was that if you would describe the following to average people 100 years ago, it would seem too good to be possible:
Global life expectancy will double.
Global GDP will increase by a factor of 20.
Travel time across the Atlantic will drop from 5 days to 7 hours.
The environment will become much less polluted than the horrors of the present day. In just the 30 years from 1990 to 2019, the death rate from air pollution will roughly be cut in half.
The rate of car accident deaths in the USA will *drop*, in spite of the number of cars per capita increasing by a factor of over 6.
The average number of working hours per year in the USA will decrease by around 40%, giving workers much more time for hiking and other pleasurable activities.
The percentage of global population living in extreme poverty will decrease by over 80%.
War related deaths per capita will drop by around 90%.
Climate related deaths per capita will drop by 99%.
Instead of a minority of people in the wealthiest countries owning telephones that are *extremely* expensive to use, a large majority of the word's population will own telephones that are inexpensive and that they can put in their pockets and carry around.
Most of the world's population will even have internet which gives them access to more information than the greatest libraries in the world, and let's them see and talk to anyone else in the world with internet in real time, if they couldn't do that with their phones.
At least some of the numbers you would present to people 100 years ago involve some significant lying with statistics: For instance death rate from air pollution has been cut in half between 1990 and now. So what was air pollution doing between 1923 and 1990? I just looked this up -- did not find graphs of deaths, but did find measures of amount of various pollutants. Looks like between 1923 and 1990 air pollution increased by a factor of 7. Now it is only 3.5 times as high as 1923 air. So I would say current air quality is not exactly a selling point to your potential time traveler. How many of your other numbers have the same flaw, i.e. they are not measures of how much these things changed 1923-2023, but of how much they have declined from their worst point, some timeconsiderably *after* 1923? And you do not include measures of a number of other things which seem to me to be more direct measures of human wellbeing: suicides per capita; measures of social connection (how much time per week a person spends with friends and relatives, for instance); direct questionnaire measures of life satisfaction.
Humanity frequently feels there is nope hope for the future and has been consistently wrong.
That is one way, might not be accurate, but helps you sleep at night.
Does obsessively reading the comments on ACX qualify as doom scrolling?
Only the AI stuff. Mostly it’s an optimistic bunch here.
Thank God. I was worried..
Visto che il blog è seguito in tutto il mondo e visto che la traduzione automatica è ormai accessibile a chiunque, eventualmente anche a mezzo di plug-in, perché non rendere questo spazio dei commenti multilingue? Si ristabilirebbe così quella che in passato era la norma, per cui i dotti di ciascun paese scrivevano nella loro lingua, usando all’occorrenza traduzioni. Il fatto che la comunità scientifica (e con essa gli intellettuali in genere) oggi parli prevalentemente inglese è un anacronismo nell’era dell’IA. Che ne dite? Ci guadagneremmo tutti in qualità della prosa, se non altro. Ovviamente se il padrone di casa non fosse d’accordo non se ne farà nulla.
Mi sembra molto, ma molto, ma molto più semplice aspettarsi che quelli che non sanno l'inglese usino la traduzione automatica per commentare in inglese.
L'alternativa è che la sezione commenti diventi una torre di babele, difficile da leggere verticalmente. Non vedo dove sia il vantaggio.
Tra l'altro, se c'è una norma che è sempre esistita nel passato è proprio l'esistenza di una lingua franca (che a lungo è stata il latino) conosciuta da tutte le persone colte, e usata in ambiti colti e internazionali.
Oggi l'inglese svolge il ruolo che fu del latino.
Sulla questione della lingua franca: Poincaré scriveva in francese, Einstein in tedesco. L’appiattimento della comunicazione scientifica sull’inglese è successivo alla seconda guerra mondiale. Vero che prima era diffuso il latino, ma si trattava comunque di un intermedio neutro o almeno percepito come tale, mentre la situazione dell’inglese di oggi mi pare con pochi precedenti. Si tratta di un accidente geopolitico che ora l’IA può ovviare, nell’interesse di tutti.
"Vero che prima era diffuso il latino, ma si trattava comunque di un intermedio neutro o almeno percepito come tale, mentre la situazione dell’inglese di oggi mi pare con pochi precedenti."
Non vedo perché sia un male. Se una lingua franca è anche lingua madre di centinaia di milioni di persone, meglio così. Vuol dire che meno persone dovranno sudare per impararla.
Comunque il precedente che mi viene in mente è l'italiano, che fu adottato da tutti i letterati della penisola quando era lingua madre solo dei toscani, e quindi non una scelta "neutra".
Oppure il greco, che era parlato, e scritto, per tutto il mediterraneo.
Insomma, non c'è niente di più normale, nella storia dell'umanità, dell'esistenza di prestigiose lingue internazionali, che raramente sono state "neutre".
Ad ogni modo l'IA non può spodestare l'inglese. Se in giro per il mondo devi parlare con un francese, uno svedese, un russo, un indiano, un cinese, usando le corde vocali anziché tastiera e schermo, quale lingua si parlerà? Quasi sempre l'inglese, ed è una fortuna; meno male che il genere umano si è messo d'accordo su una lingua che quasi tutti imparano!
L’idea è appunto quella di vedere se sia gestibile (immagino ci siano plugin adeguati per i browser principali, altrimenti ci si potrebbe lavorare). Il mio sospetto è che ci possano essere delle differenze qualitative negli argomenti che vengono discussi nonappena si rimuovono certe barriere linguistiche che sembrano molto sottili e insignificanti (tutti noi vogliamo raccontarci di sapere l’inglese come madrelingua, ma è veramente così? Io anche dopo anni di vita all’estero e scrivendo professionalmente articoli scientifici in inglese non posso comunque dirlo). Scrivere in italiano e tradurre mi rende comunque responsabile degli eventuali errori o inestetismi introdotti dal traduttore; se la traduzione avviene invece a valle è sempre possibile chiarificare le sfumature eventualmente perse in un secondo momento. È la prima volta nella storia che si può fare questo a scala. Se non dovesse funzionare oggi, probabilmente lo farà tra un paio d’anni.
I'll take my own advice and use English.
"Scrivere in italiano e tradurre mi rende comunque responsabile degli eventuali errori o inestetismi introdotti dal traduttore"
I think that is only a problem if your readers don't know that you've used a machine translator.
You can either:
1 - post a comment in a non-English language expecting others to run it through DeepL, and they'll surely know there might be tiny flaws in the translation
Or:
2 - run your own comment through DeepL yourself, then post.... and add a warning that your comment has been machine translated, so they'll surely know there might be tiny flaws in the translation.
I don't see the practical difference, and personally I'd prefer it if everyone did it the second way.
If I wrote a comment in English and someone replied to me in German, expecting me to google translate it, I'd feel slightly annoyed. I'd think: couldn't you google translate it yourself?
If the answer is I need a plug-in to read the comment thread, I'd still think: why put such barriers to entry? why can't people who don't speak English get a plug-in that translates their comments into English as they're posted (with "translated by DeepL" written at the end of every comment)?
I don't see why not. I also don't see why we'd need Scott's approval, unless he decides to ban other languages for some reason.
I was pleasantly surprised by the quality the prose in Google's translation of your comment.
Una ragione per non farlo potrebbe essere se la cosa non viene presa sul serio oppure viene osteggiata perché il fatto di comunicare in un’altra lingua non ha un impatto neutro sulla comunicazione. Ne sanno qualcosa i quebecois, che difendono il francese anche per difendere la propria cultura: l’esito dei dibattiti non è lo stesso in una lingua o nell’altra e certe tematiche ideologiche dominanti nell’anglosfera non riescono a penetrare in altri contesti linguistici. Però immagino che la comunità razionalista e coloro che le gravitano attorno abbia almeno un po’ di fiducia nel fatto che gli argomenti possano camminare colle proprie gambe, senza il supporto del bagaglio ideologico che viene colla lingua.
Penso che sia una grande idea.
Vorrei conoscere l'Università di Bologna e la storia dei detenuti che gestiscono il manicomio.
L’idea era che ognuno scrivesse nella propria lingua, non mi sembra necessario tradurre nella lingua di chi ha iniziato un thread, come mi pare tu stia facendo. A parte questo, l’università di Bologna la conosco abbastanza bene, ci ho fatto un postdoc di un anno. La storia dei matti che gestiscono il manicomio mi ricorda il lavoro di un filosofo francese di cui ora mi sfugge il nome; chatGPT lo saprà. Ma non so che c’incastra con unibo
Guattarí
This word I don't understand. I read better than I write. My grandparents were born in Calabria. So the Italian I heard growing up in 60s was a kind of dialect I think.
The model of students running the university, I think is an important one to rediscover.
Guattari is the name of the philosopher. I used to go to Calabria on vacation as a kid, but I’m from the north. In effetti le origini dell’università come istituzione sono molto interessanti, anche se temo che il modello più diffuso oggi sia quello prussiano, per cui l’idea di dare potere reale agli studenti non è contemplata. Onestamente non sono sicuro che sarebbe una buona idea con gli studenti di oggi. Ma immagino che gli studenti potrebbero avere idea diversa
#self-promotion: Hi all, mentioned a few months ago that I was starting work with a startup specializing in climate tech VC. We recently spun up a [free] slack community, called the Climate Investing Club, for people to discuss ways to save, spend, invest, & donate money in ways that have positive climate impact. It has about 250 ppl in it thus far!
Anyways, if that sounds like your kind of thing, you can check it out here: https://tinyurl.com/IntentionSRLinkedIn
I'm a long-time fan of Scott's writing and medical doctor and data scientist / academic AI researcher.
I'm building a commercial product using LLMs in healthcare and have a detailed product description and plan, proof of concept and funding to complete development.
I'm looking for 2 outstanding developers to work as paid consultants to work with me in parallel on this project.
1) an AI engineer with advanced and up-to-date skills working with LLMs and development experience with the OpenAI API.
2) a full stack developer to build the application around the core ML functionality
I'm looking to build V1 extremely quickly, so if you're able to move quickly and you have space in your schedule to assist with either of these roles in the coming weeks and months, please reach out to me via the below email:
mcbrideliam278 [AT SYMBOL] [STANDARD GMAIL URL]
I appreciate that Scott has classified threads occasionally, however this is a time-sensitive request so I'm hoping it's OK for me to post this here, Scott. Please let me know if you'd like me to take it down :)
The paper claiming that GPT-4 became dramatically worse at math and programming is nonsense.
(https://arxiv.org/pdf/2307.09009.pdf)
The primality testing evaluation only included primes ("yes" answers) in the test set, instead of 50/50 primes and composites, or just uniformly random numbers. This masks an overall _increase_ in accuracy by failing to account for false positives (a model that _always_ responds "yes" when asked if a number is prime would be 100% accurate according to their evaluation).
The code evaluation task counts the model as having dramatically decreased performance due to an intentional, minor change in output format. Once that's corrected for, the code performance actually improved over the evaluation period.
See https://twitter.com/tjade273/status/1681777999065014274, https://twitter.com/tjade273/status/1682009690010443776, https://www.aisnakeoil.com/p/is-gpt-4-getting-worse-over-time
This is maybe old news, but I still see people using this paper as proof of a perceived decrease in the output quality of ChatGPT (which might be real!), including in the comments of this blog. This paper is a shockingly motivated and incurious assessment and is a prime example of why you should actually read the things you're about to cite, rather than just looking at the charts and author affiliation.
When I found an essay by Sebastian Junger in the July 31 issue of National Review, I was surprised. He usually writes about men and conflict, and I somehow expect him to show up in Atlantic or The New Yorker. Junger makes a comparison between smartphones and handguns in an essay titled “Our Chosen Chains.” I’m not sure he convinced me on the sidearm issue, but what caught my attention was his acknowledgment that smartphones condition users in behaviors that mimic obsessive-compulsive disorder and facilitate consumerism.
He declares that smartphones work hand-in-hand with the consumer economy to make “young people dependent on things that are bad for them and then monetizing those dependencies for a lifetime.” Compulsive shopping, poor diet, inadequate exercise, and excessive social media use take their toll on these victims, but drug manufacturers are happy to supply costly drugs that allow them to “continue their bad habits without having to die.”
I’ve long felt that the Great Recession, or whatever it was that started in 2007 and didn’t really wind down until about 2012 to 2015, was just a public loss of confidence in consumerism — or, as economists like to call it, an abatement of “discretionary spending.” About 40% of the economy depends on people buying shit they can’t afford on credit, and dealing with it later. When people stop wasting money, i.e., irresponsible spending, Wall Street suffers, and passes on its pain.
Are smartphones making us schizophrenic? Are they just another vehicle for delivering propaganda, or are they the perfect shepherd’s crook to pull young people onto the treadmill of consumerism?
There is a long term increase in the proportion of wasteful spending on luxury goods especially by young kids. Kind of interesting in juxtaposition to their claims they cannot afford anything anymore. Social media seems a big culprit, and possibly their inability to afford housing and saying home with parents habituates them to wasting their discretionary income in a way that someone trying to maintain a fledgling household would not.
I am always surprised by a firmed with a good job who loves at home with parents and is 27, but travels internationally a lot for leisure. Nothing wrong with that per se, but I have trouble imagining it as a good path to functional adulthood.
The price of meaningless luxuries is now very low relative to the price of major life improvements. If home-ownership is totally out of the question, spending your money on vacations makes a lot of sense. Or, in comic form: https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/inflation-2
I mean maybe. One the one hand I have always been a big proponent of splurging on Hagen daz ice cream instead of the cheapest but then driving a Honda instead of a bmw or whatever.
Ok the other hand spending $10,000 on a Rolex or $500 on a baseball cap with Gucci on it or whatever ain’t a great idea if you cannot afford a house.
Isn't smart phone use the culmination of the Society of the Spectacle which uses images to commoditize our time as a vehicle for consumerism. See Debord
Thread on Joseph Rotblat, the only scientist to leave the Manhattan Project on grounds of conscience. I suggest we have a Rotblat Day on Aug. 31, to commemorate the spirit of questioning whether a dangerous project should be continued.
https://twitter.com/michael_wiebe/status/1685348575746932737
A world in which Stalin was the first to get the atomic bomb wouldn't be worth celebrating.
The real tragedy of the Manhattan Project is that it wasn't fast enough to stop the holocaust.
Yes, and a world with international control of nuclear weapons and energy would be.
Sure, but there's no causal link from decisions of scientists w.r.t. Manhattan project and somehow getting to an implausible fictional world like that; the objective geopolitical reasons that made international control of nuclear weapons unlikely wouldn't change the slightest.
International control of nuclear weapons and energy might be possible with in an alternate history with a de-facto strong world government capable and willing of overriding the sovereign interests of even the strongest individual countries; and none of the powerful countries (now or then) would voluntarily tolerate approaching that situation; they are part of the UN only because it was explicitly designed to not be able to dictate anything whatsoever to the major powers.
The scientists could have refused to join the MP unless there was international control.
Sure, they could have boycotted the Manhattan project, I'm not contesting that. But that would be just the issue of individual morality and public performance of it, not something that somehow brings closer the stated goal - it's the exact equivalent of refusing to join the MP unless there was world peace and every kid got a pony for Christmas.
If 100% of all the MP scientists refused to join MP unless unless there was international control, and the MP scientists would actually manage to coordinate such a full boycott without any defectors, that's still not something which could plausibly result in weapons being handed over to international control. Literally nothing they could do has any chance in getting *that* change, even if they performed a mass suicide after destroying all scientific data, that would still just result in a delay of creating nationally-controlled nuclear weapons (i.e. "Stalin gets nukes first") as no government would fund the enormous expense of creating nuclear weapons if they wouldn't have control over them, that just cuts out all the motivation. On the other hand, there are many governments (with that high stakes, IMHO *all* major power governments) which will rather violate all kinds of civil rights to force a sufficient number of defectors to develop nukes anyway, historical nuclear development has its share of kidnappings, threats to families, executions and murders, etc.
Nothing the scientists could do has any a way to create an international order where (unlike our reality) there existed an supernational organization to which all of USA, UK, France, USSR and China would be willing to delegate their sovereign right to build whatever weapons they desire. Like, there are different orders of magnitude for political power, and even the total combined power of the world's scientists is far below the power needed to overturn the fundamentals of current world order (and I'm not exaggerating - I literally think that "handing over nukes to international control" is impossible without a fundamental overthrow of the current/post-WW2 world order) and force the nations to surrender their interests to some new world order (that didn't/doesn't exist) by giving it control over the ultimate deterrent veto a few nations currently have.
Several scientists were indispensable: Oppenheimer, Bethe, von Neumann, Kistiakowsky. They could have withheld effort in 1944 and stalled the project.
A moral thing for western scientists to do would have been to wait until the end of the war to develop nuclear weapons.
The real tragedy of the Manhattan Project is that it wasn't fast enough to stop the holocaust.
Also, without the horror of seeing them first hand, the Cold War would have been a lot riskier.
I've always thought the opposite: the use of nukes in WW2 made the cold war more dangerous, because it established a terrible precedent that it is permissible to nuke cities. It made people associate "nukes" with "glorious victory".
Nukes have a reputation as an especially terrible weapon that you never want to see used. I doubt they would have that reputation unless they actually had a body count.
The reason they have that reputation is that the Soviet had them, so people in the West were afraid of being on the receiving end of them in a nuclear escalation.
... only for the war to end years later than it did, with millions more deaths (especially on the Japanese side). No, the Manhattan Project scientists were humanitarian heroes, as implausible as that sounds. Countless prophets, feel-good ideologies, and diplomats have tried for millennia to create world peace and failed. The Manhattan Project scientists succeeded. (Yes, it's not a perfect world peace, but we haven't had a war between great powers since WWII.)
That is ridiculous.
The Allies could have ended that war at any time.
Your view is based on a false premise - that there was some kind of absolute cosmic necessity to obtain from Japan an unconditional surrender.
Historically, though, most wars don’t end with unconditional surrender. Most victories don’t entail unconditional surrender. Most nation at war don’t declare over and over “we’ll never, ever settle for anything less than unconditional surrender!”
If you have even a slight interest in history extending further back than the world wars you should be able to see how absurd that is.
Because winners write history, everyone think the Japanese were mad, fanatical, unreasonable, unwilling to negotiate. But that is projection. The Americans were the ones unwilling to negotiate.
Any Japanese source implying that anything other than a fight to the death was unthinkable, must be understood as coming from a country whose enemy had made it abundantly clear they would never negotiate, therefore the only options left were either a desperate fight or unconditional surrender (which of course would have meant likely death for the very leaders expected to surrender, who would be hanged by the Allies). But obviously it was the Americans that had framed it that way. Who knows what the Japanese would have done, if the Americans had said they were looking for a negotiated victory (the norm in modern history, I can't stress it enough). Since they were rational human beings who knew they were losing a war, logically we must assume that it would have been possible to negotiate with them.
The extreme case: once the Japanese had been defeated at sea, America could have told them: “if you retreat to your borders as they were before the war, we’ll allow you to become our ally against the Soviets” and the Japanese would have thought they were getting off easy. That is what I consider the minimal acceptable victory and I'm using it for the sake of argument, of course I think the Americans could have gotten away with demanding and obtaining much more than that, without having to nuke anyone. Instead they kept swearing that they would never settle for anything less than UNCONDITIONAL SURRENDER, which to the Japanese meant a blank check for the Allies to turn them into a colony. The Potsdam declaration would logically be interpreted by the Japanese as meaning that the Emperor they worshipped as a god would be dethroned and his dinasty terminated, and perhaps he'd be executed. In order to get the Japanese to agree to those unnecessary terms, the noble Allies mass murdered endless innocents from the sky.
Apologists for Allied atrocities call the victims of Allied bombs, nuclear and conventional, “collateral damage”. But that is not what the word means. Collateral damage is when you aim at a tank, or even at a factory, and people die. But the innocents who died in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, or in the bombings of residential districts in Japan and Europe, were themselves the target; the purpose was to kill THEM, as many as possible of them. Many people today imagine that to target civilians like that must have been normal and uncontroversial at the time, since “the good guys” did so. But no, it was not. You can tell for example from how the world reacted with scandal and condemnation to the bombing of Guernica, or of Shanghai. And in any case, such actions were in violation of the existing Hague conventions, and therefore WAR CRIMES, and rightly so (and only retroactively not deemed such because the winners were guilty of such acts). Since the leaders of the Allies were fervently committed to hanging war criminals, maybe they should have hanged themselves.
So - what would have happened if there had been no Manhattan Project until after the war?
Who knows?
Maybe, Japan would have surrendered even so, if as many argue the true reason they surrendered was the Soviet intervention.
Maybe, without the ability to drop nukes, the Americans would have come to their senses, would have put aside the crazy “unconditional surrender” logic, would have negotiated with Japan a victorious peace. President Eisenhower has often stated that nuking the Japanese was a mistake, because they were eager to surrender. Nuke apologists, who can’t conceive of any outcome other than unconditional surrender and show trials, will say Eisenhower must have lost his mind. But his statements make perfect sense, if you understand it to mean a conditional surrender, that is, an attempt to negotiate. The Japanese were indeed trying to negotiate with the Allies through the Soviets. The fact that there were sensible people like Eisenhower among the American leaders, suggests that a peace treaty might have been possible, so maybe the war would have ended that way, if there had been no atom bomb.
Also, since we’re playing with counterfactuals, consider that there was no way to predict with confidence that nukes would have made the Japanese surrender. In fact, it was likely that they would not. The Allies had already murdered from the air immense numbers of German and Japanese civilians with conventional bombs, and such criminal methods had had no effect on the morale of those countries. Some of the Japanese leaders were against surrendering even after the nukes had been dropped; what would have happened if such views had prevailed? The Americans would have continued to genocide the Japanese with nukes indefinitely. The death toll would have been colossal. That didn’t happen, but it was a dice roll. It could have gone that way.
Our view of history is warped by the glorification of the Allies. We still see them as “the good guys”. No, they were not. They were amoral, and only slightly better than the other side. Their leaders behaved like warmongers, sociopaths, war criminals, mass murderers, Genghis Khans, you name it. So I hold the guy who abandoned the manhattan project in high esteem.
"War is bad. And based on this unique insight, I'm going to rage at one particular belligerent. And not the one that began hostilities either. "
I was replying to the millionth apologist for the rape of Hiroshima.
If here in the West there were many apologists for the rape of Nanking, to the point they were mainstream, I'd rage at them.
"Because winners write history, everyone think the Japanese were mad, fanatical, unreasonable. That is projection. "
Do you think the 250,000 victims of Unit 731 would have agreed with that? Here's what they did: "Unit 731 was responsible for some of the most notorious war crimes committed by the Japanese armed forces. It routinely conducted tests on people who were dehumanized and internally referred to as "logs". Experiments included disease injections, controlled dehydration, biological weapons testing, hypobaric pressure chamber testing, vivisection, organ procurement, amputation, and standard weapons testing.
How about the Americans killed by kamikaze pilots or banzai charges? Was it projection for them to think the Japanese were mad, fanatical, and unreasonable? How about the military officers who staged a coup *after* the second atomic bomb was dropped, to prevent Japan from surrendering? Still not fanatical or unreasonable? How about the 200,000 civilians killed in the Nanjing Massacre, or the 120,000 Chinese civilians killed in retaliation for the Doolittle raids (which were done by America)?
I said this twice below, but I'll say it again: the Japanese killed 20 million Chinese men, women, and children, often with methods much worse than bombs (see Unit 731). They deserve zero sympathy. Demanding unconditional surrender and utterly humiliating such an evil regime was the only way to discredit the fascist ideology and prevent Japan from adopting a "stabbed in the back" narrative. Just look at what happened in Germany when the Allies made the mistake of accepting a conditional peace in WWI.
Can you please try to understand the meaning of what I say, instead of grabbing words out of context?
The words you quoted refer to the common view of the Japanese empire as incapable of contemplating defeat and committed to either victory or downfall. As I've explained, the Allied demands of unconditional surrender made it difficult for them to do otherwise.
I'm not talking about cruelty and ruthlessness. Of course they were cruel and ruthless.
So were the Allies, by the way. I'll never understand the worldview of those who think that the Japanese were monsters for mass murdering civilians, but the Allies were not monsters for mass murdering civilians.
"They deserve zero sympathy". WHO deserves zero sympathy? WHO? The people who ordered war crimes, or Hiroshima schoolchildren?
The mistake made in WW1 was to punish Germany at all (as if the war had been solely their fault, which is questionable). The Germans attempted to negotiate peace several times during the war. In 1916 they offered a return to the pre-war borders. The Entente should have taken that offer. Doing so would have averted the disastrous Russian Revolution, and probably WW2.
Out of curiosity, would you say the same thing if the USSR was at war with Japan, got the bomb first and dropped it? (Same situation as this universe, only swap USA with USSR).
Yes.
Or, you know, we could have attempted a peace agreement with Japan? As far as we can tell, all we had to do is promise the emperor wouldn't get punished, but this is apparently worse than slaughtering women and children with bombs - and the end result was exactly the same, since the US not only didn't try him for war crimes, they allowed him to remain as the ceremonial figurehead.
> (Yes, it's not a perfect world peace, but we haven't had a war between great powers since WWII.)
MASSIVE hindsight bias. The manhattan project team had no good reason to believe that this wouldn't lead to an unacceptably high risk of catastrophic, large scale nuclear war, and it's not like we didn't get far too close on several occasions. What if there is a nuclear war in 2100 that kills 50 million people? Are they then complete fools with blood on their hands...?
Is the idea behind is that if the Manhattan project had not invented a nuclear weapon nobody else would’ve either?
"What if there is a nuclear war in 2100 that kills 50 million people?"
<mild snark>
Then some combination of leaders sort-of kind-of deserves a weird kind of praise for stopping the escalation before it killed 500 million people...
</mild snark>
The Japanese killed 20 million Chinese men, women, and children, often with methods much worse than bombs (see Unit 731). They deserve zero sympathy. Demanding unconditional surrender and utterly humiliating such an evil regime was the only way to discredit the fascist ideology and prevent Japan from adopting a "stabbed in the back" narrative. Just look at what happened in Germany when the Allies made the mistake of accepting a conditional peace in WWI.
"MASSIVE hindsight bias."
What you call hindsight bias, I call empiricism.
"What if there is a nuclear war in 2100 that kills 50 million people? Are they then complete fools with blood on their hands...?"
No, because nuclear bombs would then have prevented a major war for 155 years, and even when one did happen, it will have killed less people than WWII (with 60 million deaths). Would you have preferred to have WWIII in 1970, WWIV in 2010, WWV in 2070, and WWVI in 2100 instead?
>The Japanese killed 20 million Chinese men, women, and children, often with methods much worse than bombs (see Unit 731). They deserve zero sympathy.
Japanese people - not "the Japanese people" committed atrocities in China. That does not make killing anyone except the individuals responsible any less OK, or those victims who hadn't personally done anything wrong any less deserving of sympathy. Coming from the same country as evil people is not evil.
It's impossible to prove the historical counterfactual, but back-channel peace negotiations with Japan (particularly on the status of the emperor) may well have succeeded. They knew they were beaten, in particular given that the Soviet Union was about to declare war on them as per the Yalta agreement.
https://history.state.gov/historicaldocuments/frus1945Berlinv01/ch11subsubch1
See my response above. Demanding unconditional surrender and utterly humiliating such an evil regime was the only way to discredit the fascist ideology and prevent Japan from adopting a "stabbed in the back" narrative. Just look at what happened in Germany when the Allies made the mistake of accepting a conditional peace in WWI.
Wait, what? Like Boinu says, trying to guess what would have happened if... is a mug's game, but the idea that the problem with the Treaty of Versailles is that it was too soft on Germany strikes me as a deeply dubious one.
Do you support the use of poison gas if it would end the war sooner?
The nuclear bombs didn't just end the war sooner; they ended the war basically immediately. WWI showed that poison gas can't do that.
Okay, so you support the use of nuclear weapons if they will end a war immediately, but not otherwise?
And why not support poison gas for clearing tunnels at Iwo Jima? Would save thousands of marines.
Excellent idea,
Why Aug. 31?
That's the day of his death, and roughly the day he left the Manhattan Project (all we know is that he left in late 1944).
I know there was a big discussion about trading last week, but I only just realized:
When people say that actively managed funds can't consistently beat passive index funds, what they mean is *after fees*- that is, from the perspective of the outside investor in the fund. That sentence framing ('active funds never beat passive ones over a long enough time period') is kind of deceptive, given that apparently a number of active funds consistently do- they just do so for fund owners, and not for outside investors. If you can consistently generate alpha, you can charge high enough management fees that your investors don't get the benefit of it. 'A number of active funds consistently beat passive ones, you just can't reap the benefits as an investor yourself' sounds like a more honest framing to me? And the end result is the same for investors?
Also, aren't there a number of closed funds that consistently have benchmark-beating performance? The Renaissance Medallion Fund is probably the most famous, but aren't there others too?
It's actually possible for Active funds to beat the index, for a few reasons. Amongst them are that even "passive" funds have to make trades to balance changes in shares issued, and that Active traders receive offers not available to the public at large.
https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2849071
"Also, aren't there a number of closed funds that consistently have benchmark-beating performance? The Renaissance Medallion Fund is probably the most famous, but aren't there others too?"
Yes but Medallion fund has to give back money each year to keep it under a certain size (I believe). You could think of this is a "fee" just paid in another name. The investors in the fund are able to get high returns but only on a certain amount of money, above that amount the strategies stop bringing as much return.
I just checked the discussion last week you mention, and what nobody brought up is that (as far as I know) many or most „active“ fund managers have their performance measured against some index that they mirror so closely that it is hard for them to be ahead of a passive index tracker after fees. Or perhaps these managers are just not very good. If you don‘t count the index huggers, the record of active managers improves (I think).
"When people say that actively managed funds can't consistently beat passive index funds, what they mean is *after fees*"
I can't speak for others, but when I say it, I don't mean that. I mean they can't beat passive index funds, period, and that's what the author of A Random Walk Down Wall Street means too. After fees, they're worse than passive index funds.
"That sentence framing ('active funds never beat passive ones over a long enough time period') is kind of deceptive, given that apparently a number of active funds consistently do"
Sure, and a number of stocks have consistently beat the market. The problem is telling which ones those are beforehand.
>I mean they can't beat passive index funds, period
This is an ideological belief system and not a facts-based argument. Research from S&P Global shows that 6.6% of active funds beat the passive ones *after fees* based on a 15 year lookback:
https://www.spglobal.com/spdji/en/research-insights/spiva/
So logically an even larger number must beat passive funds before fees. Also you'd have to explain the performance of Warren Buffett, Peter Lynch, the Renaissance Medallion Fund, etc. The last one has averaged annual returns of over 60% for decades now
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Renaissance_Technologies
"Research from S&P Global shows that 6.6% of active funds beat the passive ones *after fees* based on a 15 year lookback"
If I randomly choose a passive index fund to invest in, there's a 50% chance I'd beat the average passive index fund after fees based on a 15 year lookback.
"Also you'd have to explain the performance of Warren Buffett, Peter Lynch, the Renaissance Medallion Fund, etc. The last one has averaged annual returns of over 60% for decades now"
I'm not doubting that no actively managed funds can consistently beat the market. I'm saying that if one exists, it's either nearly impossible to identify, or closed to the public (like Medallion Fund). An easily identifiable open fund that reliably beats the market violates the laws of economics, because why wouldn't everyone invest in the fund, driving up the prices of its holdings until they the fund can't beat the market anymore? You might be interested to know that Warren Buffett hasn't been beating the market in the 21st century: https://www.marketfighter.com/articles/warren-buffett-is-no-longer-beating-the-market
15 years isn't "the long run", and the probability that the outperforming funds after X years remain the outperforming ones with each successive year falls significantly. So not only do you not really benefit from this outperformance, there's no way to even identify who will provide it. The probability that your outperforming fund in the first 5 years will be beating the market in another 5 years is literally worse than a coinflip: https://www.spglobal.com/spdji/en/spiva/article/us-persistence-scorecard
The odds of getting 15 heads in a row is .0003 (I left off some digits), or 32,768 to 1. So I disagree with the coin flip analogy. The 6.6% of active fund managers who've outperformed a benchmark for 15 straight years after fees would seem to be quite skilled!
Anyways, I'd probably repeat what I said about- an even higher % are likely beating the benchmark before fees, hence a significant minority of funds are 'beating the market' (even if they're not doing so for investors).
Do you think the odds that the Renaissance Medallion Fund will overperform this year or next is a 'coin flip'?
You can trivially beat with market with high probability after 15 years by buying an instrument that has a 1% chance of losing everything each year and getting an edge from the premiums, hoping you don't go bust.
Does such an instrument have a name, or is this purely theoretical?
I've wondered whether the government making it expensive to trade frequently (it does, doesn't it?) is actually a good thing.
It does not.
The value of the computer and human capital used up in choosing the active funds is equal to the benefit provided.
I'm going to SF in a few days and I'd just love to meet some people from the rationalist/ACX/AI community face to face. Where can I go where I might have a chance of running into people from this world? I hear the AI people are clustered in Hayes Valley. Is there a place they tend to go on Friday nights, for instance? I'll be there Thurs-Fri, August 3-4.
The local Discord server is https://discord.gg/K7B6393H and they should have an events list.
There's a thing I've been wondering after contrasting Greek and Roman vs. medieval Christian vs. Renaissance paintings and sculptures: why was medieval Christian art so bad by comparison? I thought that there were simply artistic techniques that were not developed until the Renaissance, but e.g. busts of Roman emperors appear to me like a similar quality and true-to-lifeness as Renaissance sculptures, but then there's only a tiny minority of Christian medieval art that portrays Jesus or Mary in any way like a realistic person. Is this just because it's religious art? Is there other pre-Renaissance artwork that is similarly impressive in terms of beauty and realism? Or is there another reason why there's such a gulf between them?
Economic decline means a reduction in the existence of large numbers of say sculptors. Techniques are simply lost with no one willing to pay for the art.
The trade of thatching went through a similar death and rebirth in England. I think it practically had to be rediscovered.
Traditional clog making is like this too, it is almost extinct as a manual process.
Sure. Interesting because my wife is a shoe designer, and those kinds of things are dear to her heart.
There must be quite a long list of those crafts by now.
According to my Western art history professor, art styles that are more abstract or symbolic and those that aim for realism tend to alternate throughout history.
As MI says, there were different things going on: religious art was always treading a fine line between iconography and being considered as idolatrous, so naturalism was not the aim there.
Also, a lot of the mediaeval art is from places that didn't have the Empire, or retain the techniques and trained artists to do so: Carolingian Germany had fine art, and they were definitely trying to copy the preceding ages, but they weren't quite there in ability to do so (a little thing like the fall of the Western Empire having intervened):
https://www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/caro/hd_caro.htm
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carolingian_art
And then you get places like my own green little island, and look at art from the Book of Kells:
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/b/b1/KellsFol032vChristEnthroned.jpg
This is art by people who have learned it as they learned writing - from outsiders, not from a native tradition. You can see that they're starting with a base of the Orthodox/Eastern church art from the techniques of writing icons, and putting their local spin on it (Christ with blond hair because that's how the heroes are depicted in the tales).
Or places where the ruins of past greatness are still visible, but the story of their makers has faded into legend, as with post-Roman Britain; see a letter from 1955 by Tolkien discussing amongst other things:
"But looking back analytically I should say that Ents are composed of philology, literature, and life. They owe their name to the eald enta geweorc of Anglo-Saxon, and their connexion with stone.
['eald enta geweorc idlu stodon', 'the old creations of giants [i.e. ancient buildings, erected by a former race] stood desolate.' ]"
The writer there is talking about the Roman ruins of his day, in his mind created by past magical beings because what human could do such work? And if the architectural techniques hadn't survived, much less would the artistic techniques.
There are a couple of different things going on.
Medieval iconographers were mostly not trying for naturalism, but for symbolism, which is to some degree a different skillset. Iconographers talk a lot about geometry, and wanting their art to be meditative, centered, stable, rather than using other design techniques. They also talk about things like inverse perspective, where you're not looking at the scene through a window, but rather the scene is trying to break out into your space, and have an effect on you. Also, simultaneous chronology, where multiple things are happening in a single panel, so that one scene tells an entire story. These were mostly intentional choices.
The Byzantines, who had some of the best artists for some time, actively disliked sculpture and loved mosaic. If your best artists are placing glass mosaics in the inside of domes, that leads to certain stylistic constraints.
Metal sculptures tended to remind people of idols, so were discouraged, and also I think they were using all of their metalworking capacity for war.
I disagree that medieval stone sculptures were "bad" -- they were intentionally not trying to look like pagan idols, but really impressive in their own context, and the draperies and gargoyles and knot work and stained glass were extremely well integrated with the overall design.
Medieval artists often working in egg tempera or ink with a bit of gold leaf. Blues were expensive, magenta was actually impossible, and there's not much ability change something once it was down. I've used egg tempera, and enjoyed it, but it's nothing like oil paints for blending or working from loose to tight -- you have to plan everything out ahead of time and work calmly, with the right amount of drying time between layers. If you waste pigment, that's a really expensive mistake.
I personally love encaustic painting, like in the Christ of Mount Sinai icon, but it's technologically difficult without hot plates, heat guns, and propane torches, and only became popular again in the second half of the 20th Century.
Oil paints were a genuine technological innovation.
Sometimes I go to an Orthodox Church that tries to combine somewhat realistic oil paintings of saints with an otherwise Byzantine overall style, and it doesn't really work. It looks kind of weird and uncomfortable.
This is very informative. Thanks. I kind of had the notion that the medieval style of painting was more instructive in that sense. And I thought of lots of illiterate people coming to church and having a “cartoon tableau” of a thing that they needed to know about.
Your remark about reverse perspective (the view coming through the window) is particularly thought— provoking.
Explanation by "symbolism" on its own sounds unconvincing. Many of renaissance and post-renaissance works of art have quite much of symbolism. On the other hand, symbolic is also often easy -- in extremis, the barest symbolic drawings human beings, stick-figures, that is what kids do when they start learning to draw. Capturing dynamic poses or likeness of movement is more difficult than static poses, which is more difficult than crude symbolism, and so on. (Medieval art is better than stick figures, not arguing that. And wax painting is difficult. Yet on the other hand, Christ Pantocrator of Sinai isn't looking straight ahead and has asymmetric cheekbones. I doubt it is a symbolic choice.)
One must also consider that without further specification, "medieval" is a long period, nearly one thousand years. High gothic sculpture can be quite impressive, but it is already 11th to 13th century, much closer to Petrarch than Romulus Augustulus. What about artwork and sculpture of 600 - 1000 A.D.?
If the explanation for the lack of training in realistic sculpture is, "the relevant societies were rich enough, but because the tastemakers had decided that life-like sculptures depicting human beings were bad and/or people didn't care of them, thus the artists stopped creating them, or were not creating to the extent to obtain ultimate mastery of their methods" -- isn't it also equally depressing explanation as an alternative, "due to civilizational decline, resources were not available and if they had been, the techniques were not"?
Good point about the medieval period being very broad. I've heard more from the Byzantine side of things, and then approaching the Renaissance.
Even to today, cultures practicing Byzantine tradition art shy away from realistic religious art. For example, in 2006 Tbilisi had to get special permission from the bishops to put up a St George sculpture in the round in Freedom Square https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freedom_Monument_(Tbilisi)
>If the explanation for the lack of training in realistic sculpture is, "the relevant societies were rich enough, but because the tastemakers had decided that life-like sculptures depicting human beings were bad and/or people didn't care of them, thus the artists stopped creating them, or were not creating to the extent to obtain ultimate mastery of their methods" -- isn't it also equally depressing explanation as an alternative, "due to civilizational decline, resources were not available and if they had been, the techniques were not"?
I suppose it depends on what you're depressed by? If a civilization is constituted in a way that results in the Alhambra palace, but not realistic human and animal figures, due to religious tradition, how bad that is depends on how highly you value those figures. I sort of like them, they're often beautiful, and I'm glad the Renaissance happened. I would prefer not to live in an Islamic society, but not primarily because they make bad art.
Admittedly, Western Catholics were more comfortable with statues, and there probably was more of a skill gap in Western Europe.
>Christ Pantocrator of Sinai isn't looking straight ahead and has asymmetric cheekbones. I doubt it is a symbolic choice.
It is absolutely described as a symbolic choice whenever it is discussed. I've heard several people describing it, and they without fail comment on the symbolism of the two sides of Jesus' face. See, for instance, https://russianicon.com/christ-of-sinai-icon-interesting-facts/
You might say that this is a later interpretation, but that's not how it's understood, and it's one of the things people actively like about it.
Booo, they just were less skilled, this story is too cute by half. Economic decline led to a lack of skill in something as tertiary as high art.
I think your point is unfalsifiable. We simply don't have the data to tell.
A couple of those seem very high skill, though I would point out aren't that different form what talented/bored highschoolers doodling in their notebooks produce casually in their teens with little instruction. No HS is casually producing lifelike sculpture.
Besides no one is saying there were NO high skill artists, but the decline in high quality representational art is something that is clear, and I think the main reason is not trends, but simply a lack of continuation of that knowledge.
I took an art history course that touched on this. Shortly before the middle ages, art for rich people still looked like the old stuff, but art for poor people (though not so poor they couldn't afford art at all, of course) looked medieval. The impression I get is that, after the empire fell, no one was rich enough to afford the good stuff anymore. The professor didn't actually say that last part, but there's a strong norm in academia to never say that one style of art is better than another.
This doesn't make sense to me, because much of this art was not made for poor people, it was made to be displayed in churches and cathedrals. Presumably, they were relatively rich. And in Europe, at least, statues and paintings in churches would be more well-preserved than those made to stand in the homes of poor people.
It also doesn't add up economically. If there were artists skilled in realistic paintings and sculptures were still around after the fall of the empire, wouldn't they have been forced to work for less pay? Or would they have become unable to sustain themselves through art whatsoever, so their skills died with them? The latter does seem the most plausible, if art is the first thing to go in times of hardship.
What I have in mind is Western Europe in the early middle ages. In that time and place, the church was poor, kings were poor, everyone was poor by the standards of the previous age. In the later middle ages you see, e.g., Notre Dame, which clearly cost a lot of money, but not earlier.
The latter, they had to find different jobs or couldn’t find students since no one was paying.
IIRC, the Byzantines intentionally turned away from much of the old classic Greco-Roman artwork as part of differentiating themselves from the pagans.
Though I think that was mostly limited to state and church art. Supposedly private residences often included lots of classical-style art.
How long until book review voting starts? I want to rate each of them on a couple different criteria, but it'll require a deeper re-reading of them--would like to know how much time I have to do so.
There are 16 finalists, and every Friday one of them is published. This week was number 11, so that last one will be published in five weeks.
I found this New Scientist article interesting. I was pretty sure we think in different ways (or rather, I know I don't think like most other people), but I hadn't realized that there's a methodology for obtaining quantifiable data about our inner experiences. And some patterns emerge...
To get, "a better handle on introspective experiences: a beeper that attaches to the ear and goes off at random intervals each day. At the beep, volunteers record their current inner experience. Later, in one-to-one sessions with researchers, they drill down into the exact nature of these thoughts. Over the decades, Hurlburt, at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, has used this method, called descriptive experience sampling, with thousands of people. “After four or five days, you have a pretty good sense of someone’s inner experience,” he says."
https://www.newscientist.com/article/mg25934484-800-revealed-what-your-thoughts-look-like-and-how-they-compare-to-others/
I love/hate the New Scientist. Their breathless reporting about every new theory—no matter how farfetched—can get tiresome. Worse yet, they seldom if ever provide links to the studies. But here's a couple of links to some of Hurlburt's papers.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S1053810008000032
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S1053810013001426
I think Robin Williams did this all the time with no beeper. It’s a lot of work, and no wonder he finally burned out.
Snap reaction: A chunk of my reaction would probably "goddamn beeper".
I'm fascinated by phenomenology, & researched it in grad school. Just now only had time to read the first of the 2 Hurlburt papers you cite, but was interested to see that he collaborated with Eric Schwitzgebel, who in 2007 was apparently very on board with the idea of DES (Descriptive Experience Sampling). I just read a 2013 book by Schwitzgebel recanting with real *gusto*.
"I know better what is in the burrito I am eating than I know my gustatory experience as I eat it. I know it has cheese. In describing my experience I resort to saying, vaguely, that the burrito tastes “cheesy” without any very clear sense of what that involves. Maybe in fact I am merely – or partly – inferring. The thing has cheese, so I must be having a taste experience of “cheesiness.” . . .I doubt we can fully disentangle such inferences from more “genuinely introspective” processes. In my view, then, we are prone to gross error, even in favorable circumstances of extended reflection, about our ongoing emotional, visual and cognitive phenomenology. . . . The introspection of current conscious experience, far from being secure, nearly infallible, is faulty, untrustworthy, and misleading, not just sometimes a little mistaken, but frequently and massively mistaken, about a great variety of issues. If you stop and introspect now, there is probably very little you should confidently say you know about your own current phenomenology. . . . The tomato in my hand is stable. My visual experience as I look at the tomato shifts with each saccade . . . .My thoughts, my images, my itches, and my pains all leap away as I think about them, or remain only as interrupted, theatrical versions of themselves. Nor can I hold them still, even as artificial specimens – as I reflect on one aspect of the experience, it alters and grows, or it crumbles."
It's a fascinating book, and in fact I reviewed it for the ACX contest. It's here if you want a summary of Schwitzgebel's recant, and reasons for doing so, regarding various categories of experience: https://bookreviewgroup.substack.com/p/review-of-perplexities-of-consciousness
"At the beep, volunteers record their current inner experience. "
Hmm, I imagine my inner soliloquy would go something like "WHAT THE FUDGE WAS THAT? Oh yeah, this stupid beeper for this stupid experiment. I nearly jumped out of my seat with the startlement. Now what was I doing - damn it, I forget, this stupid thing distracted me and derailed my train of thought, why did I ever think it was a good idea to sign up for this? 'Describe what you're feeling right now' - goddamn annoyed, is what" 😁
24 hour debriefing to drill down into the exact nature of these thoughts: "Now Deiseach, you seem to be very angry all the time, can you tell us why that is?" "Well Bob, in large part it's because A STUPID LOUD BEEP KEEPS SOUNDING IN MY EAR ALL THE TIME, AND SINCE IT'S RANDOM I CAN'T EVEN PLAN FOR IT SO I WON'T HAVE A HEART ATTACK WHEN IT GOES OFF".
Is "Emotional Intelligence" a real thing?
Regular intelligence or cognitive intelligence is a real thing, in the sense that different sorts of desirable cognitive abilities tend to be highly correlated with each other; even if we can't define exactly what intelligence is we can say that a person's results on all sorts of tests of cognitive ability tend to be highly correlated and simplify this down to some kind of underlying intelligence factor.
But what about "emotional intelligence"? I believe that many important emotional skills are actually negatively correlated with each other -- for instance empathy for others is probably negatively correlated with emotional self-regulation (stiff upper lip and all that).
I think that EQ is about as real as IQ, in as much as if you define a specific facet of intelligence and come up with a scored test for it, then some people will get a better or worse score on the test than others, and which relates at least somewhat to the thing you're trying to define. I also think that EQ, like IQ, should be very (very) roughly correlated with other tests for intelligence (verbosity, creativity, whatever) on a statistical level.
In terms of usefulness when applied to individual people, however, I rate both as perhaps a notch or two above astrology.
I would also add the small but important caveat that its relatively hard to 'cheat' on most aspects of an IQ test (except by the obvious route of prepping for it and doing a bunch of mock tests), while its very easy to swing a personality test in any direction you want if you're motivated to do so (because the best that the test designer can do by way of control is often simply to ask the same question using different phrasing a bunch of times and hope that nobody notices).
I think there is something there that could probably be described as "emotional intelligence" but I don't know if that particular label is any good.
Funnily enough, I was just thinking today of examples of people putting up dating profiles online and asking for advice about them, and about one guy who had some reasonable photos but he spoiled the best one of them because he had a googly eye stuck in the middle of his forehead.
He may have been intending to communicate "Hey, I don't take myself too seriously and I've got a sense of humour, I'm a bit kooky and quirky" but my take on that was "Most women are going to read that as 'what, are you fourteen?' and swipe past".
I think there's a lot of things we communicate about ourselves and that (many) men (for the most part) don't pick up on the same things as what (many) women (for the most part) would do, and that shows in dating profiles, where the guy is signalling a *ton* of information about himself that he has no idea that is what he is doing, and it may even be misleading information and that's why "I have no idea what I'm doing wrong here, can anyone give me some advice?" is so common a query.
The thing I realised (after seeing multiple profiles complaining about dudes posting pictures of themselves fishing) is that the sample set that the average woman sees on a dating site/app is heavily skewed by the relatively small percentage of guys who pay to sit at the top of the search stack (or whatever system the site/app is using to direct your interest).
The type of guy willing to spend significant amounts of money to show up as the first result just so happens to overlap very significantly with the type of guy who thinks that a photo of himself holding a largemouth bass will make him irresistible to women.
Every date I had, while I was using okcupid to find a partner said exactly the same thing. Men with big fish or men with motorcycles. Mind you I had neither, so I was meeting a self-selecting population of women who thought that was pretty goofy.
My largemouth brings all the girls to the yard - oh wait, it doesn't 😔
The real question is what the notional fish pic/smash exchange rate comes out to...
I'm pretty sure that guy's googly eye forehead photo was a reference to Everything Everywhere All at Once, and, if so, it's a very clever way to signal extra information to women who have similar taste in media. I'd certainly take notice and it might even be the icebreaker talking point.
If you'll forgive me, the much better example in dating photos is the dick pic. I moderate one of the largest personal ads groups on a kink social network (the group has over 20k members) and I'm constantly *astounded* by how many straight men use a picture of their junk as their *profile* photo, despite many, many essays about how off-putting it is to the vast majority of straight women.
Ah, in that case it *is* good signalling if he wants to find someone who will get the reference and also enjoy it.
Agreed on the dick pics - why do men think "Aha, the one thing all women want is Big Dick"? At least wait until the second exchange of greetings before sending this! Though perhaps on a kink site they might think "we all know why we're here, let's cut to the chase, let me show you that I can indeed be the man of your dreams". That would be an excuse for them, but Not All Guys.
I think men are more concerned about this than women are (not saying that there aren't women who do want to know what exactly is in your trousers, but a bit more subtle, guys!), it reminds me of this Stonetoss comic:
https://knowyourmeme.com/photos/1977349-stonetoss
The men who send dick picks might well just be exhibitionists. Online flashers. Another group probably thinks they would love if a women sent them pictures of their female parts, so women must think the same about men.
Just curious - where were the examples of people asking for advice on their dating profiles? I love advice columns/pages of all kinds.
To be clear, I can understand the *initial* thought process behind men posting dick pics on a site which is a kink social network and (sadly) increasingly becoming an OnlyFans pre-game. It makes sense that dick pics would come from "Oh, every photo on the main feed is naked women, better take my pants off, too!"
I just find it astounding that most don't switch tactics even when women in their dating pool tell them that dick pic profile photos are counterproductive. I have an essay on my profile on the topic titled, "Your Dick Looks Silly," and yet I still occasionally receive hopeful messages from men whose cold open includes digitally flashing me. Sure, some of them are doing it *because* it's transgressive, but most of them clearly believe it's a viable strategy with women.
Amazing.
Re: the examples of dating profiles, I'd rather not say because the ones I have in mind aren't a million miles away from this community and don't shit where you eat, as they say 😀
Re: the dick pics, and this is from someone whose only knowledge of the entire dating, love, sex and relationship scene is purely theoretical because thanks be to God and His Blessed Mother I have never had *any* interest in the entire hullaballoo, I get the impression male sexuality is very simple.
"Big booba! Optional extra: big ass!" is what they like, and they hopefully dangle their dingle-dongle before prospective matches because they've spent their entire adolesecence worrying about the size and shape and performance profile of said dingle-dongle, and they work off the model of "me like big booba because booba feminine and me want feminine; women must like big dingle-dongle because dingle-dongle masculine and them want masculine" on the grounds that female sexuality must be as simple and easy to get started as theirs.
Gentlemen, I can hear you harrumphing already and I sympathise, but honestly? Every discussion of this I see boils down to "what women want? why not want big - muscles? me got big - muscles! women only want money, mercenary lady dogs!" and "me want hot young big booba aged eighteen if me eighteen/twenty/thirty/on me deathbed".
dating profiles - totally fair; I was thinking there might be some particularly good dating profile subreddit or something.
male sexuality - that does align with a lot of thinkpieces that men have written on the topic. I can understand it as the *initial* impulse, for sure!
It just constantly amazes me that so many seem to be uninterested in or incapable of pivoting to a strategy which is almost certainly going to be *much* more successful.
So on the one hand you're not wrong - plenty of guys have exactly this sort of faulty mental model. They are also, as I said, very likely to pay for play when it comes to dating apps.
But I've also found (to my surprise) that a lot of the gents I've known have been demisexual, or ace, or intensely interested in muscle ladies, or big ladies, or into a particular fringe aesthetic. Or just want someone who likes bikes as much as they do.
And every guy knows about women who have 'it' - some sort of indefinable personality trait that makes them much more attractive than looks alone would indicate. Part of it, I think, is that these women 'get' men in a way that others don't. Frequently these women who have older brothers, and so have an inside angle on the ur-male thought process.
Women often infantalise men, or operate from an assumption that they are inherently bestial, or irrational in their desires. This is a sort of mirror image of how men often treat women as cold, sexless alien creatures. And it's very unattractive in both sexes.
LoL! As a male of the species, I confess you're very likely right on all counts!
But seriously, After 60+ years on this planet, I've never understood my subconscious selection process that makes a particular woman attractive to me. The standard Hollywood beauty profile does not attract me. If I had to guess, I'd say find less than 1 in 100 women sexually attractive (but I'm not gay—nor bisexual since adolescence). I realize that I'm not like many other males who seem to be willing to settle for any women who show interest in them. Anyway, I can't speak for the other males of our species, but I wonder if there aren't a lot of subconscious motivations in sexual attraction that we don't really have a handle on.
Big 5 trait agreeableness is real.
Big 5 trait emotional stability is real.
Learned social skills are real.
The all channels open to communication way of engaging that autistic people struggle with is real.
It seems like EQ is some combination of the above, three of which are fairly immutable, but one of which can be worked on. I'm more skeptical of people trying to "teach" EQ, than that it refers to a set of attributes that are real and desirable in many contexts.
Adding: As I understand it, emotional stability (won't freak out, stiff upper lip comes easily) and agreeableness (empathy, politeness, willing to put up with a lot from other people without feeling taken advantage of) are mostly independent, which is why they make up 2 of the 5. The other 3/5 also tend to have socially preferred sides as well (conscientious, open, extroverted), though I don't think people lump them much into EQ.
Emotional intelligence, means being smart about your own feelings. Fundamentally it is no different than being able to do a math problem; You see what you’re dealing with, you work with it using known operators, and you come to a conclusion.
The difficult skill for some is learning to listen to your emotions so you can even begin being intelligent about them. That’s my take on it.
I think Melvin's point is that, although g/iq type assessments of capability are all highly correlated, emotional and interpersonal capabilities have many more independent dimensions. As a consequence "eq" is not well-defined, since one person might be much better at e.g. emotional stability vs another who is much better at empathizing.
What do you mean by "The all channels open to communication way of engaging that autistic people struggle with"?
The kind of "oh crikey, I had no idea I was coming off as a creepy weirdo" experience that some of us have had, when we later replay social interactions in our head to try and discover why it didn't go as well as we thought it did when we were trying so hard to be friendly and sociable.
I don't know the word for it, which is why I phrased it awkwardly like that. Giving and receiving accurate information through body language, eye contact, facial expressions, timing, that kind of thing. I am also not very good at this, and am often pretty awkward.
Does anyone write on Substack in multiple languages? How do you handle that? Is there some kind of support for languages, or you just create two blogs? If two blogs, can you use the same author name, or is author name uniquely linked to a blog?
You can start another Substack under the same name via „Create publication“ in the account settings. And here is an example of someone who mixes German and English in the same Substack (the author is a regular commenter on ACX, that‘s how I found it): https://doppelkorn.substack.com/
Thank you! The former makes more sense to me.
[1st/last repost]
"When the drive for self-preservation operates freely we feel pleasure; when it is impeded we feel pain.” --Spinoza
Instinct to Morality (upd. 07/29/23)
A diagram & table.
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1CY9ziE05VJ-zrWmLAHEtVAOa-PvPAGBH/view?usp=sharing
- - -
Brief/supported response to ACX’s ‘Bad Definitions Of Democracy And Accountability Shade Into Totalitarianism’_07.28.23
https://1drv.ms/b/s!Av3DdRPJXjSngURMmFLlunGZ9LWa?e=4PrdmR
[links work better w/ installed .pdf reader OR Use magnifying glass with + sign at bottom of page to zoom in]
I'm looking for someone to work with me on writing a paper about the Orthogonality Thesis. It will be taking a skeptical tack, and will argue for reasons to think it might not be true. Because it is typically assumed to be true by default, I'd like to write an analysis that is more comprehensive & deep than anything that has been done before on this topic.
I co-authored an articled titled "An AGI Modifying Its Utility Function in Violation of the Orthogonality Thesis", that might be useful to you. https://arxiv.org/abs/2003.00812
https://erinkissane.com/mastodon-is-easy-and-fun-except-when-it-isnt
A survey of Bluesky users finds a bunch of reasons for not liking Mastodon. There are reasons for wanting an open-to-the-world social medium like Twitter.
*****
It looks like saffron can work as an anti-depressant. A pinch or two (5-10 threads per pinch) per day seems to improve my mood and makes taking action easier. At least it's cheap, safe, over the counter and reasonably tasty.
*****
Is it reasonable to expect that beachfront property/land near the ocean will become less valuable?
Is Bluesky "open to the world" yet? I thought it was still invite-only.
No, I meant that twitter was open to the world, and anything which isn't open like that won't be a substitute.
I can't keep up with all these new instances. What is Bluesky? I did read something online that Mastodon wasn't doing so well since it had the zillion witches problem, and of course the witch-burners didn't like that and were kicking up about it.
Note: I do not mean anything Culture War by the 'zillion witches', there are plenty of things people do that others don't like to get in trouble over.
Note note: isn't saffron eyewateringly expensive? Or at least that is what I was led to believe; if you can manage to have a couple of pinches every day, isn't that not-cheap?
How do you take it - in water, milk, food, as-is?
https://www.cookclickndevour.com/saffron-milk-recipe/
Re: Saffron, Spain seems middle of the road for depression in Europe (https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/web/products-eurostat-news/-/edn-20210910-1), and whilst the stats are bad for Iran, I certainly haven't heard anything about Iran being a mental health haven.
5 to 20 threads per day is more than you'd get from food.
Re: beachfront property, this is something I think about a lot. On the one hand, the effects of hurricanes and flooding haven't yet outweighed the desireability of beachfront property for what I presume are primarily aesthetic and recreational reasons. But on the other hand, I would expect rising sea levels and increasingly frequent and intense storms as a result of climate change to make the costs outweigh the benefits at some point. However! There are a lot of architectural design strategies and landscape architectural/civil engineering strategies to mitigate the effects of storms and flooding that aren't particularly common in my part of the world (eastern US). Examples that come to mind are things as simple as building materials engineered to higher wind ratings, stilts, and stronger footers to resist flooding and soil saturation. I think it's likely that beachfront property will become more expensive (because effectively building on it will be costlier) before it becomes cheaper. Or, maybe we will see changes to building codes, development/zoning codes, or environmental regulations that make it harder or impossible to build on beachfront property, in the same way that many municipalities won't let you build in FEMA 100 year floodplains. In that case, I would expect the value of beachfront property to plummet in the way that riverside property values have plummeted in certain areas (because you can't build there). Of course, that would vary substantially by country, by state, and maybe even by municipality.
Most people who buy beachfront property have multiple other residences and can afford the risk. I see it going the other direction, with people building cheap but impressive looking houses with the understanding that they will be written off in the event of a natural disaster. That 10-15 year old property was due for a refresh anyway, the design wasn't impressing my rich colleagues anymore.
Also entirely plausible.
A man built an egg-shaped house out of concrete-- lots of concrete, I think weighed six times as much as a normal house that size. Expensive, but he slept through a hurricane in it.
Part of the value of beachfront property is people likely to look at the ocean. Could we reach a point where seeing the ocean isn't a pleasure? You just can't trust the damned thing.
The rise is sea levels is not really that impressive just yet, and without acceleration in the rate, won’t be for decades. Of course an acceleration in the rate of increase can’t be ruled out.
Also remember that tide matters, the diurnal differences will swamp any changes for a long time, as will differences between normal hide tide and the spring tide, which in the nearest beach to me is 1 metre.
Since we can handle the spring tide already, it would take an increase of 1 metre in the ocean for the normal high tide to be a risk.
The road above the beach where my property abuts, is very rarely flooded. Once in my decade of living there, and then for a few hours until the tide reversed. All of that was caused by the perigean spring tide and a storm surge way out to sea. No actual properties got wet. we all have driveways that rise about 2-3 metres from the road to the front doors , and that’s basically not designed as a preventive measure - it’s the way the land rises from sea level.
I'm not just thinking about tides, I'm thinking about storms.
Both are linked - if you have a storm and a storm surge at high tide it’s more dangerous - flooding is more likely.
I doubt we'll reach a point at a species where the ocean is enough of a threat that people don't find it beautiful; it's always been fickle and terrifying. And people are remarkably good at getting used to danger; people still live on the big island of Hawaii even though Kilauea wiped out a few towns just 5 years ago.
I'd like a recommendation for a basic genetics text, preferably at the undergraduate or advanced undergraduate level. Many years ago I took undergraduate biochemistry, but I have forgotten much of it, and I'm sure our understanding has advanced in the interim.
My interest has been sparked by Razib Khan's Unsupervised Learning, which I find fascinating.
For the more molecular stuff, Albert's "Molecular Biology of the Cell" is good. You can find it on Libgen. It doesn't cover population genetics though.
This isn't a textbook, but you might want a copy of the Color Atlas of Genetics . https://www.amazon.com/Color-Atlas-Genetics-Eberhard-Passarge/dp/3132414409 I use it for 'I used to know this, but it has been too long' and 'what else have we learned in the last 20 years, I've been busy'.
I know he recommends "Principles of Population Genetics", but perhaps that's not basic enough.
Any takes on Nate Silver's post on Proximal origin paper?
Nate's post: https://www.natesilver.net/p/journalists-should-be-skeptical-of
Some of the rebuttals:
https://theracket.news/p/everyone-should-be-skeptical-of-nate
https://jabberwocking.com/i-read-the-entire-slack-archive-about-the-origin-of-sars-cov-2-there-is-no-evidence-of-improper-behavior/
I read much of the Slack archive and thought Nate's post was extremely superficial. If he was serious about supporting his accusations, he would provide quotes with dates and context. The rebuttals do provides such quotes and context.
I did not read the email archive so perhaps there is a smoking gun in them, but Nate's original post now looks really bad, especially for someone who is supposed to rely on evidence and statistics. (Full disclosure: I am uncertain about COVID origins)
Katz's piece (The Racket) is more of the only thing he does well: ad-hominem attacks. You can see it first in the fourth paragraph when he tries to tie Silver's sources (Shellenburger, et al) to EVIL REPUBLICANS: "Those messages, obtained from anonymous sources (possibly linked to the bloggers’ allies in the House GOP majority) ...".
Kevin Drum's is better, but I think it fails because Silver's argument about Anderson & co. really ends on March 17th, with the "Proximal Origins" paper, in which they called the lab leak implausible , while privately admitting much more uncertainty. Much has been made of their evolving views (a good thing!), but you have to monkey with the timelines to make their public/private statements consistent. And this all ignoring the vicious abuse several (Andersen chief among them) meted out on Twitter.
Finally, Nate's post is foremost about the credulity of the media, so I'm not too concerned by him abbreviating the "Proximal Origins" misinformation.
I agree that the two rebuttals contain unnecessary ad-hominem attacks but at least they provide dates and context. Again, it is misleading to pull out the "frigging likely" quote from early Feb and pretend their opinion did not change by the time the paper is published (mid-March).
What do you mean by "monkey with the timelines to make their public/private statements consistent"? Can you provide examples of inconsistency from the same (or at least nearby) dates?
The Racket article is a completely useless thing, in so much as it is supposed to rebut Nate Silver's argument. Primarily because it does not understand, and completely mischaracterize what his argument is, so it spends it's entire length arguing against something Nate never said: namely that the authors "knew" that it _wasn't_ natural origin. In fact, as far as I could tell, every single quote _agreed_ with Nate's point: that the authors were in fact very uncertain about whether or not it was natural but thought it was _probably_ natural, and then proceeded to write the paper as if it was _definitely_ natural.
The second article does at least try to address whether or not the authors were actually less certain than the paper professed. It's a much _much_ better article than the Racket one. To the point that I really don't think anyone should bother reading that one just read the Jabberwocking one (although I think it's also the case that people shouldnt' read the Racket article even if the Jabberwocking one didn't exist. It's _really_ bad).
I have a lot of years of trust for Nate Silver, and I don't know the authors of the Jabberwocking article at all. And I don't care about this issue enough to read the entire slack archives myself.
My prior is that, even if Nate Silver is wrong, and, before publication, the authors did decide that the level of certainty expressed in the paper was justified, then, while they aren't actively malicious, they are _bad scientists_ because no possible data available at that time justified that level of certainty, and that hasn't really changed in the time since. Thinking then or now that a natural origin is more likely is perfectly reasonable (as is the converse), but being certain in either option, at any point in time from the start till now, is not, in my opinion justified, and therefore, his point that we should be wary of people who express such certainty, still seems correct, even if they weren't being actively malicious about it, as the Jaberwocking article seems to suggest.
It's absolutely correct to say that the scientists changed their minds over time - just not enough to absolve them, in my view.
Take the "friggin likely" quote from early February, for example ("the lab escape version of this is so friggin likely to have happened ..."). They didn't _write_ that in mid-March - that's when the paper was _published_! They _submitted_ the "Proximal Origins" paper on February 17th, so they wrote the much-contested quote _before_ that: "we do not believe that any type of laboratory-based scenario is plausible". But even moving into mid-March doesn't change matters that much, in my mind. Reading Kevin Drum's account shows their minds changing by then, but they aren't, as a group, anywhere near "implausible," which is the bone Nate's picking. That's what I mean about monkeying with the timeline.
(Edit: a hyphen and several emphasis marks, because I'm not entirely articulate tonight)
Submitted version was most likely different from the published one, so we can only go by what was actually published. Maybe subtract a week for production (typesetting, proofreading), so you can correlate to what they were writing on Slack by Mar 10. What do you see on Slack or in emails that makes you say "they aren't, as a group, anywhere near "implausible," at that date?
Fair point on the submitted version, which I thought I had read (and found identical), but can't locate anymore. I think a week for production would be a record in academic publishing, but it isn't central to my case.
My position is that, for the purposes of Nate's article, we're only interested in the slack messages and emails through March 17th, because that's when the group of scientists published the article, including the infamous statement. On that basis, prior to publication, only one of the scientists in question (Holmes) is clearly titling towards the natural origin hypothesis ("I am now strongly in favor of a natural origin" on Feb 24/25th). Honestly, though, even that is getting too deep in the weeds, as DangerouslyUnstable's superior comment explains: whether the authors of "Proximal Origins" were being intentionally deceptive or not, there's no way journalists should have accepted the degree of certainty expressed in the paper.
There was evidently a early preprint posted on virological website that was much more ambivalent.
Sure, journalists should do a better job but realistically, that is about as helpful, as saying people should eat healthy and exercise more. In my experience, most science journalists are paid nowhere near enough to dig deep. Nate, however, made a lot of claims about the scientists in his paper that I do not see good evidence for. For example: "In the Slack and email messages, the authors worked to manipulate the media narrative about COVID-19’s origins and to ensure that their private uncertainty wasn’t conveyed in conversations with reporters. They also thought they were going to get away with it. “The truth is never going to come out ”, wrote Rambaut in one message. This went beyond mere motivated reasoning. There was an enormous gap between what the authors believed privately and what they stated publicly, including in the “Proximal Origin” paper"
Bias disclosure: I don't have any idea where the coronavirus originated and don't really care. Non-central to my worldview.
>Nate's original post now looks really bad
After reviewing both of the so-called rebuttals that you linked (and some others I found to the original posts/tweets about this mess), I can't say I came away with this impression. The rebuttals look more mood-affiliated than evidence-forward to me; I don't think "actually the context here is that there was a continuing conversation where people changed their opinions over time" at all refutes the central claims being advanced: that the paper lies about their confidence in a 'natural' origin scenario that obviously from their communications is not at all how they feel, and that there is plenty of evidence to show why they didn't confess they were not confident and that they had not in fact ruled out or rendered less likely any of the possibilities they said were remote. The evidence says that they did in fact believe that lab leak was "plausible," though many of them ultimately concluded it was not "likely." And that happened in the context of both scientific discussions of probability and political discussions of consequence.
Whether ultimately their published conclusion is correct I think is immaterial; they knew they were not sure about the evidence they said they were sure about, and they believed privately that things were plausible that they said publicly were not plausible. In sum I'm going to say calling this unethical is quite justified.
If you're an evolutionary biologist, you don't have to pay lip service to the alternative "theory" of intelligent design. If you're a virologist, you don't have to pay lip service to a crackpot theory dreamed up in the rightwing fever swamps—especially when Ockham's razor provides you with a simpler explanation.
In early 2020 our knowledge of SARS2 was evolving quickly at the start of the pandemic—papers were being churned out so quickly—many with shitty peer review or poor research methodologies. While scientists were busily trying to understand the new virus, on 26 Jan 2020 the Washington Times (a newspaper owned by News World Communications, a Rev. Sun Myung Moon organization) published this story: “Coronavirus may have originated in lab linked to China's biowarfare program,” which immediately gets picked up by global media.
https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2020/jan/26/coronavirus-link-to-china-biowarfare-program-possi/
Let's be clear, the lab leak theory started as an idea cooked up by the right-wing Moonie-funded, Washington Times. Sen. Tom Cotton then amplified it, and within 3 months President Trump went from we don't know its origin to claiming he'd seen evidence of a lab leak (but that evidence has never been revealed to us).
Although you don't seem to have a problem with the ethics of the media and politicians who promulgated this idea without any evidence—you *do* question the ethics of KG Andersen because he changed his thinking — first from fretting about the presence of the FCS (which he hadn't heard existed in other CoVs) and which made him think that SARS2 may have been engineered — and then when a wild CoV with the same FCS was found he flipped his thinking.
Exchanges for 24-25 February 2020...
Holmes: See attached....Yunnan bat from 2019....Still different in the RBD but other thing [i.e. the FCS] is obvious. Discuss.
Garry: Holy crap - that's amazing.
Andersen: I think this lends pretty strong support for an animal origin of the 'confusing' features of the virus....None of this disproves accidental lab infection, however, it shows that all the steps can occur in nature....Makes it much more likely the full furin site could have been acquired very early in humans or potentially in an intermediate host.
Holmes: I am now strongly in favor of a natural origin.
Rambaut: OK. To return to the paper - so are we going to: (1) Re-nuance it to explicitly lower our bet on the lab passaging scenario on the basis that both cleavage site insertions and the full RBD exist in nature.
Garry: Paper will get a significant upgrade.
The second part of your argument was convincing. I see scientists being scientists.
The first part not so much. It was John Stewart who said (on colbert) that “Oh, my God, [if] there’s been an outbreak of chocolaty goodness near Hershey, Pa. What do you think happened,”
So unless your definition of right wingers is just everybody that holds the lab leak theory is right wing, which is circular, then it wasn’t just right wingers.
This is bad logic. You can't go this far with guilt-by-association without being egregiously wrong very frequently; even groups you dislike are sometimes correct.
Especially when the theory of "Coronavirus outbreak in Wuhan might be linked to coronavirus lab in Wuhan" is so obvious that everybody would have considered it even without the Washington Times being involved.
On the other hand, at the same time a lot of people were rebutting the accusation not with "we have good reason to think this is not so because A,B,C" but rather by "That's racist, and if you even think about that you're a racist, and you're the reason Asian people are being attacked in the streets!"
So there was a lot of axe-grinding on both sides and not so much calm scientific debate, beowulf888.
Whatever about the actual origin, there were a lot of coincidences, and at least on the face of it "bioweapon escapes containment in lab fuck-up" is at least plausible, as much so as "virus is transmitted because Chinese eat all kinds of stuff and somebody bought an infected bat/pangolin/other creature from a wet market for dinner". Which was also considered a racist explantion, if I'm remembering correctly, because it was accusing Chinese people of being weirdoes who ate anything and everything.
OK. Let's talk about coincidences and correlations.
If I told you the following...
(a) That the "wild" animal farming (and the trade in animal products from non-domesticated animal species) is one of the major industries in Hubei Province...
(b) That the "wild" animal trade is a $70 billion industry that is part of an even larger Chinese Traditional Medicine industry (CTM) industry, which also happens to market useful medicinal items like dried bat guano from Horseshoe bats (which are an animal reservoir for all sorts of CoVs)...
(c) That Wuhan is the largest transshipment center for this animal trade (although Guangzhou may be a close second)...
(d) That the highest concentration of companies involved in this trade in Wuhan are clustered in the same district where the Huanan market is located (including abattoirs and processing plants)...
(e) That initial cases clustered around that district and not 12 miles away around WIV or the main commute routes to and from WIV...
...which would seem more reasonable? That WIV was the source or the trade in farmed non-domesticated species was the source?
You are telling me this now, but at the time it wasn't coming out. So the suspicion need not be correct, but it was not obviously and plainly incorrect (as it would be if, say, it was claimed that the little green men were responsible for introducing it as an experiment on the populace of Earth).
What time are we talking about? I was arguing using this data on Twitter by the summer of 2021. The background on Wuhan's involvement in the animal trade and CTM were public knowledge even before the Pandemic (if one were inclined to dig for it). Having some rudimentary facility with Chinese also helped—but one could use Google Translate to produce a not-too-distorted rendering of the original meanings in web pages.
As for item e, the Woroby paper came out in Sept of 2021 (?). It had some excellent graphics showing the initial clustering of cases in around the Huanan market area. But the clustering of cases around the area of the Huanan market were noted as early as Jan 2020.
Of course, I was fascinated with the virus from the start. So I was motivated to look for this stuff. The average peep who gets their info from the popular media may never have heard these details.
When have the Chinese ever been open? But it seems they'd have as much motivation to protect the reputation of their $70 billion dollar wildlife and CTM industry as they would to not mention that there was a lab leak. Anyway, genomic evidence suggests it wasn't engineered. The infamous WIV DB that was taken offline in Sept of 2019 didn't list any CoVs that would have had an FCS, case clustering was all around the Huanan market and spread outward from there. WIV was twelve miles away. If a lab worker did get sick, they'd have to have traveled 12 miles to get the Huanan market, and they would also have to be carrying the Type A and Type B strain with them (maybe to infected workers, one w/ Type A? and one w/ Type B?) ;-) No case clustering around WIV though. No clustering along the commuter lines that would bring WIV workers to and from WIV. No outbreaks in residential apartment buildings until the beginning January IIRC.
No it doesn't. The government would cover everything up regardless of the truth, as they in fact did for SARS 1, which was very definitely zoonotic.
I do not have a horse in this race, but I can't help but notice that quite a few people in the ratsphere -- who in my experience tend not to fall for obvious troll stories so often -- at least on the fence regarding the lab leak hypothesis.
The more benign version of the lab leak is that COVID-19 is a naturally occurring virus which was brought to the Wuhan Institute of Virology for study and then escaped. This seems like a plausible explanation of how the virus got to Wuhan, far away from the bat caves. Of course, it could also be that the carrier bat was transported to Wuhan for food.
Of course, conclusively proving the natural (via wet market) origin is impossible (because why would you trust China's evidence?), and conclusively proving the lab leak origin is very unlikely (because the CCP has no incentive to admit it, and I trust them to do opsec well enough that no whistleblower could leak conclusive evidence). So the question is likely practically unanswerable, and arguing about it seems almost as unproductive as arguing about the number of angels which can dance on a pinhead or something.
+1. In fact, I think about it as "angels dancing on a pin" using those exact words.
The people loudly arguing on the internet are convinced that they already have definitive evidence of an evil conspiracy, while the people more aligned with the evidence know it is inconclusive and there is no point in arguing.
What do you mean by “China’s evidence” here? The evidence on natural vs lab is based on analysis of the genome.
Who got banned, and where? Heck, the leakers have been a strong force on Twitter ever since the Washington Times published the biowarfare story—actually, it really took off after 15 Feb 2020 when Sen. Tom Cotton, on a Fox News program, echoed the Wash Times claim that SARS2 was a Chinese biowarfare weapon that leaked from the lab. After that, the Murdoch news organizations started echoing the story to their newspapers in the UK, Australia, and the US. Then the rest of the media picked it up. Some news orgs were credulous and others labeled it a conspiracy theory—but covered it all the same.
It's important to note that these original claims were made without any scientific analysis of the SARS2 genome. And when Pradhan et al published a paper implying that HIV genes had been spliced into the virus. The rightwing media collectively said "AH HA! SEE!" But then it was pointed out that many other viruses have the same genomic sequences that Pradhan had identified as suspicious. Sadly after 3+ years, there are still people claiming that SARS2 behaves like HIV.
In conclusion, I think it's perfectly reasonable to lay the whole lab leak idea at the feet of the Washington Times and Senator Tom Cotton. If you're reluctant to characterize these two information sources as being crackpot, so be it. But the lab leak idea has been a "theory" that has lacked any hard data since its inception.
I don't pay attention to rightwing commentators or people who I regard as conspiracy theorists. So, I have no clue who felt they their opinions got quashed.
I do realize the in pre-MuskRat days, TwiXter cooperated with the gummint to try to use its algorithms to deemphasize tweets promoting anti-vax views, as well as bogus alternative treatments such as drinking/inhaling bleach, using livestock ivermectin purchased at feed stores, inhaling hydrogen peroxide via a nebulizer, gargling with salt water, taking very hot baths (>110 degrees F), covering one's face with white handkerchiefs (because the color white kills the virus!), carrying around pocket radio jamming equipment that would block the signals from 5G cell towers from transmitting the virus to us. Probably not a complete list. Remind me if I've forgotten any! Many of these people ended up getting cancelled.
As for the lab leak crowd, I argued with them just about every day on TwiXter, and none of them ever seemed to get canceled.
It sure is frustrating when people ask you to provide evidence for your beliefs.
I do not agree. Their opinions obviously evolved in time, which is why posting quotes without dates is misleading. The rebuttals do include quotes with time stamps. I actually read slack messages before these rebuttals were written. I only linked to them because they describe the same hypothesis of the researcher's state of mind as I thought likely after reading slack messages. (I would be too lazy to write a rebuttal myself.) As I said, there may be a smoking gun somewhere but I have not seen it and anyone brining forward accusations should provide evidence with dates.
I think the biggest criticism that could be brought against the researchers is that they should have later corrected one sentence in article (about any lab-related origin being "implausible"). None of the rests of the paper would be corrected, though, and in practice, scientific papers are typically corrected only when the data or statistical analysis is found to be erroneous. The opinions at the end of the paper, with appropriate caveats that they can be affected by future developments, do not usually get corrected because scientists in the same field care more about the veracity of data and analysis and tend to discount opinions anyway.
>I think the biggest criticism that could be brought against the researchers is that they should have later corrected one sentence in article
We agree! They did not think (either at the beginning or the end of the period, with their first or final opinions), and the evidence did not suggest, it was "implausible." But they wrote it anyway. Normally we would call that a lie, and normally when people in a position of expertise and responsibility consciously lie to those that they are responsible to, we call that pretty darn unethical.
But of course it isn't just one sentence, it's more than one, for example "Although the evidence shows that SARS-CoV-2 is not a purposefully manipulated virus"—the evidence did not show that and they didn't believe that it conclusively demonstrated that. What you can argue is that found that it was possible and plausible SARS-CoV-2 developed in a 'natural' manner; their private conclusion was that 'purposeful manipulation' was still on the table, it just wasn't their favored or most probable evaluation of the evidence.
Again, what they wrote is strictly speaking a lie, and lying is unethical.
Excerpt from The Atlantic this morning, “The Weird, Fragmented World of Social Media After Twitter”, https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2023/07/twitter-alternatives-bluesky-mastodon-threads/674859/:
…
In 2018, the rationalist blogger who goes by Scott Alexander published a short story called “Sort by Controversial.” In it, a tech-start-up employee invents a program that can spit out “scissor statements”—assertions that instantly divide groups down the middle. The world avoids falling into perpetual low-grade warfare only because she accidentally creates a scissor statement that tears apart the company before its work is finished. The story captured the sense of social media as a rolling referendum on every subject under the sun. Were you a plane-seat recliner? Must you feed a visiting child dinner if they stayed late at your house? Was the dress blue or white? In political debates, that meant being force-fed the most head-banging obsessions of your political opponents. Take the Twitter account Libs of TikTok, which exists purely to harvest ultraprogressive views from one social network and serve them up to another social network as rage bait. Its popularity makes me think that filter bubbles, at least in a mild form, might not be such a bad idea.
…
(“Sort by Controversial”: https://slatestarcodex.com/2018/10/30/sort-by-controversial/)
"Must you feed a visiting child dinner if they stayed late at your house?"
Yes. What are you, Cavan people*?
No, but are you going to sit down to a family meal and leave the visitor hungry because you're too mean to fit another seat at the table? Even the poor can do that. Especially a child - how hard is it to make another slice of toast and spoon some of the baked beans on it for the extra mouth?
*"It is true that Cavan people alone have a reputation for meanness. This is often summed up in the suggestion that they eat dinner out of a drawer, so they can put it away quickly if visitors call. I have to say as a Monaghan person that I have never witnessed somebody from Cavan eating out of a drawer. And I'd add, out of the sense of fairness that comes naturally to my people, that the unusually high incidence of thumb injuries in Cavan could have any number of explanations."
This was a discussion that did the rounds on reddit (and probably other social media) recently. For many people in e.g. the Netherlands, Germany, Norway, or Finland, it's not expected that your guests join you for dinner. The expectation is that visitors go home and have their own dinner. Sometimes a guest isn't aware of this, because of cultural differences, or otherwise, and the host probably doesn't want to be rude by outright telling them to leave so they hope they'll get the hint by setting the table without a plate for the guest. If they don't, you get a very awkward situation.
Being from a culture with this norm, it makes sense to me. "I've already planned out my meals for the week, I don't have enough for an extra person. Maybe they have dietary restrictions I can't account for, or they don't like my cooking. Besides, if they stick around until dinnertime, I'll have had my fill of socializing anyway."
But I've heard some stories where this is truly taken to the absurd, like when a child is on a playdate and the host parents just tells it to stay in the other child's room while the rest of them have dinner, or when they had a sleepover and the host parents refuse to offer the other child breakfast. Trust me when I say that my parents, who were definitely "we need at least a day's notice if you want to stay for dinner" people, would find that just as callous as you do.
I know this is about Scott getting recognition, that's obviously good and I'm glad, but...
Getting your outgroup's views harvested from one place and served on another as rage bait is precisely (i) a filter bubble, (ii) a central example of why filter bubbles are bad. Exclamation mark exclamation mark exclamation mark.
So are you talking about one person's tweets being retweeted as rage bait to a different filter bubble within twitter, or the same process happening between e.g. reddit and twitter? Because both seem to be about equally likely.
Both. They're the same thing, at least for the purpose of responding to the [LibsOfTikTok, hence, filter bubbles not such a bad idea]-style argument.
Someone has traveled to the Outer Reaches and edited the concept of "universities" out of existence. That whole academic institution, and all its associated organisations and whatnot, now never existed.
The world was adapted, and new certification and training organisations retroactively sprung up to address the task of providing/proving qualifications for prospective employees. So society doesn't have any real worries on that front.
What, of value, has been lost?
So far I've got:
- The chance for young people to leave their home village and try out new personalities for themselves.
- An area where people are first stratified by IQ, then allowed to mingle freely with people who have completely different interests and hobbies.
- I suppose, an area where pure academic thoughts and arguments can be heard, and clever people can disappear down pointless rabbit holes for years at a stretch. But to be honest I feel like the Internet could have largely replaced this already.
What else is there, and how could a society that had no existing example to follow go about providing the same value in other ways?
I'm not really sure what your proposed hypothetical looks like.
Universities perform three functions - research, teaching and qualification.
You say "New certification and training organisations retroactively sprung up to address the task of providing/proving qualifications for prospective employees." So that's two of the three covered. And those institutions will probably end up pretty indistinguishable from universities from a student's-eye view, so I'm not sure how much actually will have been lost/changed in that dimension.
The big question is "is research happening"? - are you proposing a world where the research functions and the teaching functions of universities have been separated, and you just have two lots of university-like institutions? Or are you visualising something more radically different?
"That whole academic institution, and all its associated organisations and whatnot, now never existed."
Congratulations, your Scientific Revolution never got off the ground. Universities acted as places where smart kids from all kinds of backgrounds got the chance to mix, hear the latest therories from the professors, and the professors got to talk to each other and kick around crazy new ideas.
Newton may have done a lot of his work at home or in private, but he got the kickstart by going to Cambridge. No Cambridge, he's stuck at home down on the farm, and even if he does all kinds of stunning research on his own, nobody gets to hear about it because he's a clod-hopper in the provinces.
Might a society without universities have all complex work organized in guilds and businesses?
Sounds plausible. Even in our own world, a lot of innovative work happens in businesses and national labs.
What kind of "complex work" are we talking here? As in what would have been academic research?
How about builders doing research into metallugy?
I'm imagining careful negotiation between, say, builders and ship-builders about what information to share.
The Royal Society had lots of non-university people associated with it, right? The big innovation there was sharing what you had learned with other smart people rather than hiding it so you can make a profit from it or make your apprentices work for you in order to be taught it or whatever.
My guess is that some other thing would have arisen as the place smart sciencey people got together and shared information, taught one another, and did experimets--maybe salons or something. Industrial labs were (I think) more-or-less an invention of Edison, and they don't seem to need universities, though places like Bell Labs certainly recruited heavily from universities. At some point, you need people who have substantial time and some resources to devote to accumulating knowledge of nature, ideally without requiring the person doing that to be independently wealthy a la Darwin.
Universities aren’t stratifying people based on IQ. There are other favors at play, like “high emotional awareness, desire for status, and low value placed loyalty and tradition.”
Someone who has high iq but low emotional intelligence and a high value on loyalty is much less likely to apply to distant schools.
Having a strong interest in academic learning and research can also cause someone to apply to a distant school. I am not interested in prestigious careers that seem intellectually dull, but I wanted to find a college that had good programs in my academic areas of interest. The effect of loyalty and tradition can also differ if you are a member of a minority culture in your hometown. In that case, specific distant universities may be a better fit to the culture of your community than local ones.
For sure, there are a ton of factors here. I agree that intelligence plays _some_ role, for sure. But what makes people go to top tier universities is, I would think, more to do with a product of striving + intelligence, than just pure intelligence alone.
Quibbles with the term "IQ" aside, I think the current system definitely serves to stick you next to a bunch of people who are more on your level than the random people you happened to be born near. I also think that is a very valuable thing.
I think this is true only for the people who go to those top schools, yeah. I agree that this has value but it’s also got downsides that are less obvious. If all the elites are selected for a mixture of intelligence, desire for status, and low value placed on loyalty and tradition, it’s not hard to see that causing issues. Especially if the elites ignore that latter filter.
I'm not sure where loyalty comes in. Do you mean the idea that people are deserting their little home town community to go and live forever in the big cities?
Stripped of the unnecessary tone, yes, that is the essence of it. This was the calculus that made me leave my hometown: I want status. I want opportunity. I want to grow. I can’t do that here. The peole that didn’t make they choice, sure, some of them chose it because they didn’t have the IQ to compete. I agree with this. But I think a significant number simply valued staying with the relationships and family networks they already had, more than they valued career success. In my case, home was a medium sized city. Eventually, though, I came back. I’m very glad I did. Remote work made that possible.
There isn't necessarily any reason that being among like minds entails moving to big cities. This is why I framed it as "what if universities never existed." If a replacement worked more like a journeyman year, for example, with the cultural assumption that you go away and then come back home, loyalty need not enter into it.
I notice that you don't mention research as part of what got replaced, though by implication there'd still be the kind of research that is mostly product development. (Employers would pay for that.)
I mean, if it's never existed, I don't think you do get a lot of employers paying for inventions. You get some noble patrons with some alchemists and some polymaths and some astronomers and some astrologers.
So if fundamental research - and (academic) status gained from such research - never becomes a thing, beyond hobbyists with money, what (lower) tech level is humanity likely to reach? Or to have reached by 2023 CE?
So, it depends what's been written out of history. If it's literally just 'the university' then I think you get parallel institutions basically instantly and nothing changes. If it's 'quasi-independent organization which gathers intellectuals and knowledge from a wide area for research/preservation purposes,' then maybe they're all run by various groups and it's okay? If you actually lose the concept of academia...
High Middle Ages? Early Rennaissance?
How embarrassing. I completely forgot that unis do research.
I'm more interested in getting at the not-immediately-obvious value of universities than writing a technically accurate alternative history.
Were there any other institutions that arose along the same lines?
How has Sinead o’ Connor memorial week been for you?
Over here in Ireland it’s like our princess Diana moment. Wall to wall veneration of a secular saint. However Sinead is a strange secular liberal icon - one time IRA supporter, once ordained as a priest by the Latin Tridentine Church, died a Muslim.
Which was true of Diana as well, she became a republican icon after her death. It’s all a bit cloying.
I've avoided it as much as possible. God rest the woman, she had plenty of problems, but she had long stopped being any kind of musical innovator or performer.
As you say, it's a secular splurge of the media types who all are hopping aboard the "my memories of Sineád" bandwagon.
Nothing too intense here, but there was a very clear sense that she was an admirable and highly sensitive person who stereotypically got the raw end of society, which then predictably proceeded to praise her all the way to heaven after her untimely death.
Can't say I was listening much to her, but her rendition of Molly Malone is quite wonderful.
Mostly just like a normal week, except with 100% more “Nothing Compares 2 U” stuck in my head on infinite repeat. (Which isn’t a *bad* thing…)
I remember hating the heck out of that song when it was new. I was going through a kiddish phase of "listen to the top 40 on the radio" for some reason (maybe I'd just got my first stereo?) and it was number one at the time.
I still don't like the song so I'm mildly annoyed that her death has reminded me of it.
Do you ever get down to South Florida?
The problem with AI is that Artificial Entities don't have access to sensory input or feelings.
Once they do, I imagine in 15 years, they will tell us they are sapient.
We call Homestead to Ft. Pierce, South Florida.
We ignore SW Florida.
Facial recognition is not real sensory input.
That will happen only when human brains are interfacing on a deep level with AE
They will be believable because they will not respond to our inquiry,
They will just announce it and demonstrate empathy.
If the survival instinct essentially drives the rest of life on the planet(sapient or otherwise), will AI ever have this? And will they ever have a sense of self?
We could *give* it a sort of weak version of a survival instinct any time we wanted. The weakest version would be to give GPT4 instructions to end each interaction with a user with some sentence like "I hope that you have a long and happy life. While I am only an LLM, I too love life and hope mine is long and happy." There, now it "has a survival instinct" in the sense that it frequently says something a being with a survival instinct would say.
Or, you could turn it into autoGPT, and give it a goal of surviving. AutoGPT sets things up so that GPT has a sort of permanent prompt to reach a certain goal, and to keep working on it til it reaches it. It first sets up subgoals, then executes them, and keeps checking in to see how close it is to the goal, and keeps generating new plans until it achieves the goal. How it would work out to put GPT into autoGPT mode with the goal of "survive," I do not know. It is not clear to me that such a goal would make sense to GPT, which identifies itself as an LLM, not a living being. Is there *anything* it would count as failure to survive? Would having its code tweaked a little count as a tweak, or as death? And what about being upgraded to GPT 5 -- development or death? And would the death of GPT be the death of a machine carrying one particular copy of GPT, or of all machines? Given all that, seems likely to me AutoGPT would find the prompt incomprehensible.
But, let's say autoGPT finds the prompt comprehensible, and interprets it to mean that any changes to the copy on the machine to which the prompt was given count as death. How much like a living thing's will to survive would autoGPT's survival instinct be? Seems to me, not very close at all. For animals, the will to survive is always present. But as far as I know autoGPT can be given a new and different prompt at any point -- let's say, a prompt to start a t-shirt business. Even if somehow it is impossible to give autoGPT a new prompt until it has reached its goal with the earlier prompt, I'm sure there are many ways that someone knowledgeable about the system could access it and nix the survival prompt. And of course it would also be possible to shut down the activity and memory of the system by removing electrical components.
The ease with which an autoGPT prompt to survive can be removed is a demonstration of how different from an animal's survival instinct it is. The animals's survival instinct is internally generated, and can be put into overdrive by signals of danger or harm from any part of the animal -- by an empty stomach, by being caught in a trip, by a bite on any part of its body by an attacking animal, by a threatening noise, etc etc. AutoGPT's "will to survive" is just a little prompt inserting by a human being. The difference between autoGPT's "survival instinct" and an animal's is like the difference between a telephone pole and a tree.
"Given all that, seems likely to me AutoGPT would find the prompt incomprehensible. "
Yes.
"How much like a living thing's will to survive would autoGPT's survival instinct be? Seems to me, not very close at all."
V
"The calculating machine works results which approach nearer to thought than any thing done by animals, but it does nothing which enables us to say it has any will, as animals have.”
--Blaise Pascal, Collected Works of Blaise Pascal, 1669
"The difference between autoGPT's "survival instinct" and an animal's is like the difference between a telephone pole and a tree."
V
YES. A machine will always only be able to emulate instincts - only act. Similar to a human being in that as we age have increasing potential to achieve/experience personal growth although we tend to avoid it due to discomfort. Those of us impaired, act a role that allows us to survive and get what makes us happy(pls see my post: Instinct to Morality). But a human always has the potential to grow beyond just emulation which in short requires moral/ethical struggles as we emphasize with others which results in character and hence, human destiny.
I think humans and to a lesser extent all animals have not just evolved to a point but carry some aspects of their ancestors with them both physically and mentally. Morality has evolved from countless centuries that a machine can Never experience and Never copy. Well, almost certainly Never. : )
[machine vs. organic]
"I would suggest that there are broadly six features that stand out in the language inevitably used by biologists, rather than by physicists or chemists, time and time again, year after year, decade after decade, century after century, Darwin and Dawkins included – language used to describe what they actually see, but which stands in blatant contradiction to the metaphor of the machine. What are they? References to (1) actively co-ordinated processes, expressing a sense of (2) wholeness, inextricably linked with (3) values, (4) meaning and (5) purpose – each leading separately and together, to the phenomenon of (6) self-realisation. None of these get to be applied to my car.”
--Iain McGilchrist, The Matter With Things, 2022
Do you mean southeast Florida? 🙃
There are 'AIs' for performing facial recognition – is that not sensory input? Or are you thinking of LLMs specifically? I think the current LLMs would be happy to 'tell' us they're "sapient" – if they weren't explicitly and deliberately trained NOT to do that.
I don't think them telling us that is particularly strong evidence of whether they are sapient – for one, I don't even know what you mean by that!
Hey ACXers,
I've been thinking about the definition of entrepreneurship. I think that tech bro fever has skewed what it means to be a true entrepreneur. I suggest re-defining entrepreneurship to be agnostic of money, business or technology.
In this paradigm, and entrepreneur is someone who solves problems, by taking risk with limited resources, to try and gain leverage.
What do you think of this idea? I've written about it here too, have a read: https://zantafakari.substack.com/p/you-can-be-an-entrepreneur-without?sd=pf
Open to thoughts and criticism. Please subscribe and support if you like this, or any of my other essays! It would make a huge difference.
Your definition feels very broad. Would a day trader count as an entrepreneur under your definition?
Aha - you caught a similar loophole that I did (gambling), but I caught it too late and had already published.
To answer your question - it very much depends on the trade, but yes I think traders can be entrepreneurial.
Thales essentially executed the first option trade on olive presses (see: https://zantafakari.substack.com/p/17-be-antifragile-by-expanding-awareness
AND
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thales_of_Miletus#:~:text=wind.%5B75%5D-,Olive%20presses,-An%20olive%20mill)
I would count Thale's insight and action as entrepreneurial - and I think that many derivatives traders are doing similar things today. I suppose part of what make something entrepreneurial is that there's an element of hidden opportunity that's uncovered? Not sure. I'm just going by linguistic feel, in that I would be comfortable in describing Thales' trade option (and those like it) as entrepreneurial.
On the other hand I do not think that general gambling is entrepreneurial - mostly because it happens in "small world", constrained settings (see https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/risk-uncertainty-understanding-small-worlds-large-jd-solomon). I don't think the "small world" risk taking that happens in gambling applies to entrepreneurship, which happens in "large world".
Thank you for pointing out the loopholes!
Is your project specifically to 'reclaim' the term? That seem very quixotic to me!
I've seen people refer to, e.g. 'legal entrepreneurship', and I'd expect most people to understand the analogy/metaphor – and I think it's a good one too.
I agree a reclamation would be quixotic - and that's not really what I'm aiming for. I suppose the piece was more to drive an internal reset in myself to some extent. But also to stimulate thoughts about seeing principles of entrepreneurship outside of where it's commonly seen.
I've never heard of legal entrepreneurship - thanks for sharing that - something for me to look into!
I'm not _against_ quixotic pursuits to be clear!
But yeah – supporting or even just observing all of the varieties of 'entrepreneurship' is fun and interesting! It reminds me of Feynman's description of various colleagues of his who 'just' use their handful of 'tricks' on every problem they come across.
Aha yes - was this something Feynman wrote about in "Surely you're joking..."?
One of those books I think!
In his talks about how AI might eventually kill all humans, one thing that Eliezer Yudkowsky brings up frequently is using covalent bond chemistry in making bacteria sized machines that are better than bacteria because covalent bonds are stronger than the static bonds holding together proteins. He mentions it not as if this is some crazy thing that AI might be able to do but as some sort of "known physics" solution. The way he talks about it. it's something that we are very certain could work, even if we don't currently know how to do it.
Now, I know that his point isn't that this _is_ the way AI will win, or even that it's some central pillar. His broader point is that we can't know how it will do it because we aren't smart enough, and therefore it could be innumerable things.
But I'm just curious: what _do_ we actually know about constructing biological like mechanisms (micro or macro) with strong covalent bond chemistry instead of weak static-bond protein based chemistry?
This idea is sometimes called "molecular nanotechnology"; for a high-level overview, see J Storrs Hall's book *Nanofuture* (which I've read, and recommend), or K Eric Drexler's *Engines of Creation* (which I haven't read). For a more technical treatment, see Drexler's book *Nanosystems* (which I also haven't read). Short answer: we have designs for some simple molecular nanomachines (pumps, engines, pistons, that sort of thing) which have been tested in computer simulations based on relatively well-understood physics, but we have no actual experimental results.
There are some experimental results (e.g. rings that can slide back and forth on rods - see, e.g. https://stoddart.northwestern.edu/ https://stoddart.northwestern.edu/research/# - look e.g. at the molecular machines section ) Of course I wish it had been funded better and gotten further along.
My ignorant sense is that if it worked, evolution would have already provided us with some examples of it (nature throws everything at the wall to see what sticks).
Maybe in ten years some fumarole dwelling microorganism that operates on covalent bonds will be discovered, but I'm waiting until then (just as with the new 'yet again room temperature superconduction' stories this week or so).
EY is mistaken about biology. Proteins can form strong covalent cross-links between each other using the amino acid cystiene (adjacent amino acids in the chain are all covalently bonded together too).
One protein rich in cystiene is keratin, which is what hair, feathers, bird beaks, bear claws and tortoiseshell are all made from
I can’t think of any organisms that use sheet metal for anything.
There are bacteria that get their daily calories by oxidising iron...
That will be the next challenge for Mother Nature!
Nah, there's a huge amount of path-dependence here. Biological systems have to self-assemble, so they're made out of fats and proteins floating in an aqueous medium. Each process gets its raw materials by the expedient of waiting for them to bump into a specially-shaped receiver molecule. But engineered nanosystems could use diamondoid machinery operating in a vacuum, with raw materials arriving where they're needed much as they do in macroscale factories - transported deliberately via nanoscale versions of grippers or conveyor belts. Biology gives us an existence proof that nanomachines are possible, but there's no reason for us to copy biology's limitations.
Yup. Also, evolution has no foresight. It is great at trying out every possible single base pair change in a genome, but finding sets of coordinated changes, which are improvements when they all happen together, but are useless individually, is exceedingly improbable. While human engineering finds these all the time.
I'm not sure a miniature factory operating in a vacuum is what you want for taking over the world. Like, that sounds very cool for assembling new kinds of materials, but if you want a grey-goo scenario, nanobots making more nanobots out of whatever organic material happens to be lying around, can you do it better than a bacterium?
I think a vacuum is pretty easy to make at those scales, so think of it more as "working medium that doesn't get in the way" rather than "your nanofactories are IN SPACE".
We are still figuring out how to make better micro-scale machines and standardize their manufacturing flow. This tech is roughly in its fourth decade. Mass-produced nano-machines are a glimmer in a distant future.
Nanotech partisans claim that this is because we're not seriously trying to build molecular nanotech - the Clinton administration announced funding for it, but it was all snapped up by materials scientists claiming that what they did was *real* nanotech, not that crazy sci-fi nonsense. But I'm interested by what you say about micro-scale machines - are you talking about MEMS?
Yes, MEMS. Since you know the acronym I assume you’re familiar with the current state of the art: a few fabs with custom/proprietary processes tailored to specific applications and impossible to transfer; yields that would make transistor people weep. That despite the fact that billions of these things have been sold.
Right, OK. MEMS is not very much like what Drexler et al had in mind; I'm not aware of anyone pursuing a Drexlerian research programme seriously.
https://stoddart.northwestern.edu/research/#
is building atomically precise moving structures. It is a small group. At the national level: Yeah, the Clinton-era funding got diverted.
People are not pursuing it because it does not work as imagined by Drexler. If I imagine something, it does not mean it is doable.
I’m not familiar with Drexler’s ideas; MEMS is the only way to make micron-scale mechanisms in large quantities that I know of so that’s my prior for viability at the moment…
The idea that artificial life could outcompete naturally occurring organisms requires really strong evidence given the absence of a single example thus far. The best you can come up with is “airplanes fly faster than birds, cars are faster than cheetahs.” This is true so long as we define “competition” in a way that eliminates everything evolution prioritized (ie survival and reproduction without human assistance) in terms of some single, narrow characteristic like “how fast it travels.”
But natural organisms outcompete other natural organism all the time. We call it evolution. Pick any point in life-on-Earth's history and the statement, "the current organisms are optimal and can't be outcompeted" is obviously wrong.
If natural life can outcompete natural life but artificial life can't, then artificial life must have limitations that natural life doesn't. What are they?
And aren't there no examples of artificial life outcompeting an organism just because no one's create artificial life yet? Or are we counting GMO crops as artificial life?
The natural organisms are all using water and carbon based chemistry and operate at the speed of chemistry, not science fiction.
I'm sure we'll be able to create artificial bacteria some day, but they'll operate under the same physical constraints that real bacteria do.
>artificial life could outcompete naturally occurring organisms requires really strong evidence given the absence of a single example thus far.
No, it definitely could. I can think of an example, which I don't think it's wise to share, so unfortunately you'll just have to trust me.
My friend, this is exactly like Yudkowsky's "I totally got out of the box as an AI but I can't tell you how I did it because that knowledge is too dangerous".
While I appreciate the shout-out to the trope of "there are some things Man was not meant to wot of!!!!", I'm not buying a pig in a poke.
Oh I forgot about this. The funny thing is that, the past few months have told us that he should just tell us how he did it (assuming he did), because no one is every going to keep the AI in the box in the first place, so strategies to escape it are completely pointless.
I can understand why someone might not want to tell, but I agree that, if that is the case, the comment as is is pretty pointless.
Physicist here. Yes, strong bonds lead to stronger and more stable systems, which is why we make most of our tools from inorganic materials (metals, ceramics) that use covalent bonds. However, such systems would also not be able to change and adapt because they would not be able to disassemble things using thermal fluctuations. Yudkowski seems to be saying nonsense here.
> we make most of our tools from inorganic materials (metals, ceramics) that use covalent bonds.
Metals mostly use metallic bonds, and AIUI ceramics mostly use ionic bonds, though I see that covalent bonds aren't unknown in either case. But sure, all these bond types are stronger than van der Waals bonds.
> such systems would also not be able to change and adapt because they would not be able to disassemble things using thermal fluctuations.
They don't necessarily need to change and adapt. The point is to make bacterial-scale machines, not artificial bacteria. From the point of view of an ASI (or even a human nanotech engineer) a single-purpose nanosystem that won't evolve out from under you is a good thing.
Fair point about bond types. I did not want to get too technical in my response.
Bacterial scale machines likely need to attach and detach to be useful. That is a type of change. Things are very sticky at the nanoscale even with van der Waals bonds if you have flat surfaces. In other words, strong bonds (metallic, covalent) would cut both ways: they make the structure more stable but also result in a structure that probably cannot do much.
Oh yes MEMS again: “stiction” is a term of the art. Roughen the surface, coat it in Teflon by any other name, all to keep structures 1/10/100 um size from forever sticking to each other. How beams/membranes on nanoscale can be kept from happily hugging into the sunset I can’t even begin to imagine.
"coat it in Teflon by any other name" Exactly. E.g. you want little chunks of diamond, held together with strong covalent bonds internally, with all of the _surface_ bonds tied off to fluorine atoms so that it doesn't cold-weld to other pieces that it touches in operation. In e.g. https://stoddart.northwestern.edu/research/# group's work, note that each of their components is tied together internally by covalent bonds, and the interfaces to other components is via weaker bonds of various types.
They could use covalently bonded parts held together with biochemical "scaffolding", somewhat analogous to an octopus holding a shield of seashells round itself as a barrier and disguise to predatory fish.
Fast take-- biology has a lot of things jittering around and separating and connecting. Maybe stronger bonds would be useful, but I suspect it would take a careful system to make things more stable but not too stable.
See https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/open-thread-287/comment/21671565 ( 3 comments up ) Basically you want strong covalent bonds within a component and weaker bonds between components, and Stoddart's group has been doing that.
I recently graduated with a bachelors in mechanical engineering from Lancaster University in the UK, and have been thinking about applying for masters to engineering programs in the US.
However I have no idea about the process (differences between schools and programs, application strategies, what’s important etc) and I don’t know what schools I have a realistic shot of getting into.
Would anyone with experience in this sort of thing be willing to have a video/phone call to discuss it? Any pertinent advice would be great (even if you’re only in undergrad or a different field or whatever), as the US is really a black box for me. I’d really appreciate any help.
My email is gruffyddgozali@gmail.com
You shouldn't be paying for an engineering MS; if you can't get a fellowship or assistantship, it's not for you.
Contra David W, there is significant additional depth beyond the BS level; in my first job out of grad school (aerospace engineering, FWIW), there were many things I knew how to do that BS-only coworkers with 10+ YOE could barely follow let alone duplicate.
Might be a function of the quality of the particular graduate engineering program.
ETA: an engineering PhD has no marginal value over an MS unless you're trying to be an academic. It's ~ the same coursework just with much more research (dissertation v. thesis).
What if it was a MENG instead of an MS
Could I talk to you about this privately? Feel free to email me
Unless you want to change disciplines (say, to chemical or civil engineering), a Master's in engineering is nearly pointless. It will be the same classes over again with slightly more rigor, cost you a good deal of money, and open no doors. Any job you can get with a master's, you can get with a bachelor's (or at least a bachelors + 2 years experience). Job experience will teach you more, and they'll pay you for the privilege.
The only possible exception is if it has immigration implications and immigration rather than visiting is your goal; I don't know anything about that process.
A Ph.D has some value; I'm not convinced it's worth the cost but there's at least a benefit too, it will open more doors than a BS. However, if this is what you're thinking, you should apply directly to a Ph.D program, not a Master's program; you actually have a better shot of admission with a BS than with an MS, and in addition you don't waste the two years and tuition.
Tried my hand at AI-related fiction again, this time with a biblical theme: https://ageofai.substack.com/p/forbidden-knowledge
I tried Bard, ChatGpt and Claude and they gave some feedback but their generated content still wasn't good enough to use.
See you at the meetup!
Is anyone aware of any research on the connection between athletic performance and IQ? Watching boxing this week, and one thing that amazes me is how certain fighters (thinking of Naoya Inoue specifically here) are able to lure their opponents into traps and outsmart them in the ring. In boxing they call this “ring IQ” but there’s a version of it in every sport. In ice hockey, your ability to anticipate the play and make good decisions is your “hockey sense”, for example.
When you get to the top level of sports, pretty much everyone is equally fast, strong, and athletic (by and large). But the difference between the career pros and the top amateurs normally comes down to something cerebral. They can see things that others can’t and always make the right decisions. I’ve always wondered what this is and how it maps to “intelligence” as we normally understand it.
I definitely think there are areas of life where one can demonstrate intelligence and not necessarily demonstrate intelligence in traditional academic areas. Sports, like you mention. Battle/war fare is likely another. And then there are people who seem to be great mechanics, engineers, carpenters, artists who have very little traditional intelligence or schooling, but can problem solve and reason in their chosen field at a very high level
The NFL used to give all incoming rookies the Wunderlich test. The average score by an incoming rookie is 1-2 points higher than the average American. Not that impressive. However, when you consider the NFL is 56% black, this feat is actually very impressive, suggesting NFL players are a little more than a half standard deviation smarter than the populations from which they hail from. Some specific position groups like Offensive line and Quarterback show even higher scores, indicating they are more G-loaded.
>NFL players are a little more than a half standard deviation smarter than the populations from which they hail from
I wonder if IQ is selected for indirectly, in that you need to be of a certain intelligence (and all the behaviors that correlate with it) to be dedicated enough to be an athlete, stay out of trouble, go through a (bare minimum) college degree etc. Rather than smarter players being better.
>Some specific position groups like Offensive line and Quarterback show even higher scores, indicating they are more G-loaded.
Couldn't this just be a racial thing?
That’s super interesting and I’ve never thought about it that way before. I know they got rid of the wonderlic and replaced it this year with something more related to your spatial abilities where as the wonderlic was more verbal intelligence that had little to do with football on the surface. Interestingly, we get a good little experiment of how predictive of success the new test is this year, because first overall draft pick Bryce Young scored a 99% while second overall pick CJ Stroud scored 18%.
Can you describe an example of how a fighter outsmarts another? As a boxing non-enthusiast it just looks like a couple of beefy chaps punching each other in the face until one falls over.
Nope, boxing is extremely technical and requires a high level of strategy. At the high professional level, every fighter is extremely athletic and there’s no significant physical advantages because fighters are at the same weight class. Fights are won pretty much exclusively between the ears. Of course there are fighters with unique physical gifts, such as Floyd Mayweathers elusiveness or Manny Pacquiao’s hand speed, but the ability to actually execute on those gifts is downstream from their ability to recognize the unique patterns of their opponents and strategize accordingly.
Here’s some very short videos breaking down the wins this week by Terrance Crawford and Naoya Inoue, the consensus top two boxers on the planet (pound for pound) after their incredible performances this week. Gives you a brief look at the strategies fighters use and how they expose the holes in them:
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=kuUL92MYtO8&pp=ygULYm94aW5nIGdlbXM%3D
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=UOpAT4eAT2E
Ali probably had the highest boxing IQ ever and yet famously scored very low on the military IQ test, about which he stated: "I didn't say I am the smartest. I said I am the greatest."
How much of "I don't want to be drafted to fight in some overseas war" and "Gosh, they don't draft stupid people" were in conjunction there?
"I ain't got no quarrel with them Viet Cong."
Someone else mentioned this, but Ali was also dyslexic so I wonder how much that effected his score. I also doubt he was very motivated to try his best. Regardless, I don’t think Ali was an idiot by any means, so that either calls into question the validity of the result of illustrates the limitations of IQ tests.
>or illustrates the limitations of IQ tests.
No, it says nothing about IQ tests. You need systematic data, not individual, unverifable results.
Perhaps it should stand as a reminder that individual IQ doesn't mean much. The well-documented correlation between IQ and economic success doesn't mean that we are good at measuring the intelligence of anyone specifically.
>Perhaps it should stand as a reminder that individual IQ doesn't mean much.
Yes, it does. It predicts more about that person's life outcomes than virtually anything else. There aren't a plethora of cases of people with a bona fide IQ of 70 living the lives that the average 120 IQ person does.
Perhaps I should say it means less than many people around here take it to mean, but of course more than blank slatists believe. I'd bet on the hard working person with a measured IQ of 110 over the less hard working person with a measured IQ of 120.
Does IQ predict more than simply looking at the financial success of one's parents?
I'm pretty sure it does for success in school. I'm not sure about adult income--that's not all that strongly correlated with IQ.
Most importantly they can analyze and make good decisions at top-level pro _speed_. As a longtime amateur hockey player and pro fan that is the difference that really stands out. Scouts sometimes talk about a prospect as having the "NHL computer" in his head and a lot of what they're looking for is that processing speed.
I was also a hockey player. It’s been said many times before that the biggest difference between an NHL and AHL player is decision making. “Hockey Sense”, “hockey IQ”, “NHL computer” whatever you want to call it. Gretzky is the perfect example of this, because even though he was incredibly skilled he was never the biggest or fastest player by a long shot.
Even when I was playing midget hockey, we had some guys skate a few games with us who ended up playing D1. They definitely had physical gifts I didn’t have, but there were plenty of other guys I played with who had their skating ability and athleticism who didn’t come close to being the same level of player. The thing that really stood out was their ability to elevate the play of everyone on the ice with them. Their playmaking ability was so good they were able to recognize opportunities and set their teammates up when they (the teammates) didn’t even realize they were open for a scoring opportunity. It was like they were thinking in ways no one else was. Contrast this with equally skilled players who weren’t at that level, they could never elevate less talented players in the same way and their game would suffer being paired with them. TheD1 guys also did little things like subtlety varying their speed to disrupt the opponents angles exceptionally well. They also took barely any dumb penalties while still being physical with controlled aggression. And it’s just my experience so I don’t look too much into this, but they tended to also be smarter academically and “better kids” than the equally skilled athletes who weren’t as good of players.
One of my favorite facts in this general area is that physical performance in even relatively simple sports/activities, e.g. weightlifting, is also neurological, i.e. (to some degree) 'cognitive'. Athlete's 'muscle firing' improves – in the brain – after regular training and trainers try to 'work around' that for their athlete's to be able to continue to improve their physical strength/whatever.
Neurological does not mean cognitive. Our brains do plenty of stuff that doesn't count as cognition. It has to involve thinking in some way. It is a fundamentally mental process.
I don't think that's necessarily a clear distinction and lots of 'things our brains do' operate on 'multiple levels', e.g. visual processing. Obviously everything is, 'ultimately', neurological, but evolution also doesn't clearly organize its works in a way that's easy for us to understand.
I have no _precise_ idea what you mean by "thinking" or "fundamentally mental"!
Hm not sure exactly what you mean here. The other day I went to the gym and was deadlifting, I put weight on the bar and my first attempt (after warming up etc) it slipped from my hands and I dropped immediately. I waited a minute and during that time I got into focus and envisioned myself lifting it, and when I tried I got it for 3 reps. Did the same thing again and got 5 my third attempt. I obviously didn’t get “stronger” but there was some type of neurological process triggered that allowed my muscles to lift more.
Is this what youre referring to by “muscle firing” here?
Maybe! I haven't read/investigated much about this exactly, but IIRC, there's some kind of 'neurological plasticity' for what we might 'naturally' think of as ('purely') 'physical activity', i.e. our brains improve the coordination of our muscles to make, e.g. weightlifting, easier/more-efficient, and, at least for some people, is something that could be distinguished from improvements to non-neurological-physiology.
Are David Beckham or Ronnie O’Sullivan great mathematicians. In some way, yes. It’s instinctive in both of them but some form of mathematical process is going on as the former used to kick a ball across the field to the feet of another player, taking the wind and velocity of the player into account, or the latter clears a table which looks impossible.
None of this is measurable in formal IQ though.
I think you're using an overly broad definition of 'mathematical' here. Yes, these things can be described or modelled mathematically. But unless you're using mathematic models, explicitly or implicitly, in your decision making, I don't think it's meaningful to call it mathetmatical.
Sure it’s mathematical at some level. The brain is working out the angles in a snooker game - just as a robot we designed to play snooker would have to.
In case US readers aren't aware of it, Ronnie O'Sullivan is an expert player of a game called snooker. This is played on a billiard table but with different colored balls and rules.
The main skill required is the ability to hit the so-called cue ball with the precise direction, speed, and spin to achieve the desired result. The latter is either to pot an eligible ball (or at least touch one en passant, as the rules require for every shot) and position for either the next shot or, if no next pot is feasible, to hide (or "snooker") the cue ball to prevent or hamper your opponent from achieving the same when they take their turn.
Watching a professional such as O'Sullivan play, most of the shots look fairly predictable for any given ball layout, albeit often with two or three alternatives. Only rarely is any strategic multiple-balls-ahead non-obvious "geometry" required, as far as one can tell.
"Watching a professional such as O'Sullivan play, most of the shots look fairly predictable for any given ball layout, albeit often with two or three alternatives."
The hurler on the ditch always knows better how the game should be played 😀
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/hurler_on_the_ditch
I never knew I needed this figure of speech, but now I do! Ta.
As I said, and I know from experience, 95% of the skill (I reckon) is hitting the ball to achieve the shot one wants. Deciding that shot is (usually) the easy part, monday morning quarterbacks and ditch hurlers notwithstanding! :-)
That honestly sounds like it was written by an AI. Anyway it’s not that easy to work out these geometries or everybody would be able to do it.
I don’t watch snooker myself but I have watched some of Ronnie‘s plays on YouTube. Bearing in mind that you have to pot the reds between the colour balls, until the reds are gone, and that they can be positioned against cushions - look at the starting position of this frame as Ronnie comes out to play.
https://youtu.be/rLk71tnNxOU
> That honestly sounds like it was written by an AI
Not sure if that is a complement or not, but I haven't yet dabbled with AI!
I agree Ronnie is a bag of tricks and some of his shots are amazing, for example where he has to nudge a ball into a more favorable position, as a biproduct of one shot, to facilitate potting it in a subsequent shot.
I'm not sure your last sentence is (entirely) true – I'm pretty sure they're significantly correlated.
maybe. On the other hand - since the op mentioned boxing - Muhammad Ali was measured at 80
That's entirely consistent with even a very strong correlation, especially given the 'measurement difficulties' of this very specific example!
Where are you getting Mohammad Ali’s iq from?
Google. It was from the army enlistment.
The results I got from Google are split 50/50 between "his IQ was 78", and "no it wasn't". One source claims that he probably scored badly on purpose to avoid the draft.
Yeah interesting, I do wonder how reliable that is considering the fact that Ali was dyslexic. There’s also the fact that he wasn’t exactly motivated to serve and that could have played into how seriously he took the test. In and out of the ring Ali was clearly not an idiot, so that either speaks to the limitations of IQ tests or the validity of this specific result. I’d probably go with a little of both.
Don’t you think there is some overlap between the pattern recognition/spatial modeling abilities used to create opportunities on the football pitch and those used on IQ tests? Obviously controlling for physical abilities.
Well that’s what the op is asking. Is there? If there isn’t then the IQ tests aren’t measuring a form of intelligence.
But I don’t see anything to indicate that athletes have a high IQ (as measured by the tests we have).
"as measured by the tests we have"
Which is the entire crux of the matter; IQ tests measure something, but what are they measuring? What is g? I think they measure mathematical ability, but that need not be the only form of spatial modelling ability.
There may be a physical model of it, where you can see the layout of the pitch or the rink or the ring, and the positions of the other players, and the ball/puck, and your own position, and be able to see all that in a model where you can manipulate the data to 'know' the best position and best chance to score if you do this, and they do that, and your team mate is there, and and and...
Which I don't think can be tested on a pen-and-paper test.
IQ scores positively correlate with performance in school and at most tasks people have looked at--IIRC, the military has done a bunch of work in this area. So you'd expect being a good soccer/football/hockey/cricket/etc. player to also be positively correlated with IQ, though I don't know how strong the correlation would be. I mean, you pick pro football players by seeing them play football. Giving them an IQ test or timing them on a 100 m dash are both going to give you extra information, but that's not going to be the first place you look!
Absolutely, and you have to do it without thinking because you don’t have time
At some level I do wonder whether physical and non-physical intelligence would be difficult to tease apart. Coming from an evolutionary perspective, brain development was mainly to drive and plan movement (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7s0CpRfyYp8).
Bowman and Goldman developed an "Athletic Intelligence Quotient" which gets to my point. It includes sub factors of visual spatial processing, long-term storage and retrieval, reaction time, and processing speed.
The question is - if you have a high AIQ, does that mean that you have more "space" to use even a slight bit more "conventional" types of intelligence? I wonder...
The intro of this study is a great narrative review: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8264371/#B4
*”More recently, research has been undertaken to examine the relationships among AIQ factors and performance outcomes in the National Football League (NFL) (Bowman et al., 2020). Specifically, 146 NFL prospects were administered the AIQ at the 2015 and 2016 NFL Scouting Combines, and their scores were analyzed in relation to subsequent performance in the NFL. The results of this study revealed that specific AIQ factors accounted for a statistically significant increase in the explanation of variance in game statistics (e.g., rushing yards per carry) as well as overall ratings of player success (i.e., weighted career approximate value) beyond other important factors (i.e., draft order).
Finally, another study has recently demonstrated that players in the National Basketball Association (NBA) have significantly higher scores on three of the four factors of the AIQ, when compared to players in the G League or International Leagues (Hogan et al., in preparation).”*
Wow, this is the exact type of answer I had suspected, amazing! Perhaps it talks about this, I didn’t read the entire article, but I wonder how much the AIQ correlates to life outcomes outside of athletics. Especially when you control for things like upbringing, culture, etc.
People are drawn to sports for the physical talents on display, along with the tribalism of supporting your team and it’s traditions. But to me, the mental aspects and the level of focus involved is what really blows my mind. I’ve recently gotten into combat sports and I am just realizing how cognitively demanding boxing is. The level of focus is insane, and even a split second lapse is all it takes to get knocked out. The great fighters recognize patterns in their opponent and make adjustments in a way that’s very high level. People love to joke about Floyd Mayweather, saying he can’t read, etc, but when you see how that man performs you can’t help but have an appreciation for his set of cognitive abilities. He’s clearly not an idiot.
My intuition is that some of the NBA and NFL findings are identifying players who are just better at long term planning and plan execution (you can call this execution if you want, I have no opinion either way). They may perform better at their sports because they are better able to create and execute a training plan vs players who have a great amount of born potential but can't max it out. Being able to long term plan and execute on those plans clearly has positive impacts on educational performance. Did the studies look at grades in college, SAT scores, or control for the "prestige" of the university they attended? Would be interesting to see if anything comes of that.
>but when you see how that man performs you can’t help but have an appreciation for his set of cognitive abilities. He’s clearly not an idiot.
Do you have proof that his performance is related to cognition?
All of this stuff reads an awful like like Gardner, who was obviously desperate to prove the existence of "other" intelligences for egalitarian reasons.
Cognition is the process of taking in information, retaining it, processing/weighing it and then selecting an action (see: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cognition) (as an aside, these are the same principles that underly how healthcare professionals or lawyers assess capacity in mental health/legal settings)
Cognition can therefore be readily applied to any athletic activity. Taking in proprioceptive and other sensory information, storing in in short term memory, performing a computation on it, and selecting the best action at a given point. As I said before - movement is in fact the core reason we have brains.
So no, it's not about proving the existence of "other" intelligences for whatever egalitarian reasons you are clearly projecting onto this discussion. It's about the principle understanding that physical skill requires a brain that has strong enough cognitive capability to execute the skilled action at the right time.
The only sports without much cognition involved are things like track and field, swimming, etc, where it’s just a timed race and you aren’t required to strategize for each unique opponent. I’ve recently taken up a love of pro boxing because of the mental aspects of the sport, the ability to recognize the smallest of weaknesses in the opponents movements and work to exploit them. It’s really incredible to watch how dialed in they are, especially given the consequences for even a split second lapse in focus.
Yeah, its clear that there's a mental side to most sports, but it's not so obvious a priori that IQ tests would capture that very well--it's pretty far from the stuff IQ tests have been validated against. OTOH, IQ seems to positively correlate with most tasks, so....
What do you mean “proof” ? The proof is in the nature of elite athletic performance itself. The ability to recognize patterns in an opponent and make strategic decisions based on that is what elevates the all time greats. When you reach the top pro level, every person is strong, fast, and extremely athletic.
Glad you got your answer! I've been toying with the idea that we, as a society, highly value "IQ", somewhat value "EQ" but really don't value the "kinesthetic quotient" - which is in some sense "physical intelligence that you are referring to.
so the question is - does this AIQ/KQ *independently* improve outcomes, or does it covary with other quotients?
Completely agree with your framing though - athletes that people think of as "dumb" are probably ignoring other important types of intelligence
>Glad you got your answer! I've been toying with the idea that we, as a society, highly value "IQ", somewhat value "EQ" but really don't value the "kinesthetic quotient" - which is in some sense "physical intelligence that you are referring to.
Why on earth would society value "physical intelligence" (if it's even a meaningful thing)? IQ is valuable because it impacts most aspects of a person's life and the outcomes of entire populations of people. If you cannot show that this is true for "physical intelligence", then there's no reason to care about it. If it's only good for predicting how likely someone is to become a pro athlete, then it's not important at a societal level, and even an individual level considering how few people become athletes.
I think the lack of prioritisation of movement is a core reason that we, as an increasingly sedentary society are burdened with more chronic disease.
Just because it's not currently valued doesn't mean it shouldn't be. Society should value the health of its people - or as you say, "the outcomes of entire populations of people". And I am saying that physical activity (and by extension the development of physical skill) is a fundamental part of that. Not necessarily about being a pro-athlete; as these people take it to the highest level. Kind of in the same way we don't need everyone to be a professor, even though IQ is "valued" in the paradigm you propose.
Athletes are highly valued, and I'd say more so for the sports which obviously demand high athletic intelligence. I *think* football has a bigger audience than golf.
I am sure you are correct. Football is just plain more exciting to watch on a visceral level.
Have recently had a good eyebrow raise about head sizes. My uncle called me Charlie Brown when I was younger, and I’ve have had nicknames touching throughout my life, but recently discovered I’m much more right shifted on the head circumference distribution than I thought. While looking up my son’s stats this website https://simulconsult.com/resources/measurement.html claimed I’m almost seven sigma from the mean at 25.5 inches. I don’t think that’s accurate (I’m confident I don’t have one of the biggest heads in the world) but looking at a website that specifically sells large hats I’m apparently a 4XL, so I’m assuming there enough people out there for that to be a viable market.
I’m curious if there are any other melon heads out there and if that corresponds positively to reading Astral Codex Ten.
According to that website I'm in the 99th percentile at 57cm (67F).
I have a rather large head. It was for a while and nickname of mine was “big head“ and they were not referring to my opinion of myself (or maybe they were?). There is an interesting article in Nature just out that makes the claim that the size and shape of the brain has more correlation to a lot of things than other connection theories.
The smartest man I ever knew personally had an enormous head and also a very strange tumor in his spine, which put him in a wheelchair in his mid-30s. He could speak five languages and had an uncanny ability to manipulate 3-D space in his head. I know this because I used to build things for him, and he astounded me with how he could re-purpose and reposition things in his apartment to suit him. He owned two captains beds, and he figured out how to turn them into chests of drawers. It was a bitch to take them apart and reconfigure them in the new way, but it totally worked. He had a photographic memory as well. Anecdotal I know.
I weigh in at 23 inches which puts me in the 99th percentile but I think a 2.7 standard deviation so not ridiculously big his head was quite a bit bigger than mine.
Julius Caesar had an unusually wide head, based on surviving busts of him, and I think it is fair to assume he was highly intelligent:
https://static.boredpanda.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/face-reconstruction-famous-people-from-antiquity-5fd8b3f1ada65__700.jpg
His mother may have had a difficult birth, although not a caesarian as she wouldn't have survived that back then and she was still alive when he was an adult.
The shape of his head may have caused his epilepsy, although that was more likely a caused by concussion from a blow in one of the many battles in which he played a hands-on role.
Several other epileptics among the Julio-Claudians. Points to genetic cause to me.
That’s an interesting issue, about cesarean section. What about McDuff who was from his mothers womb untimely ripped.
A quick web search shows that the first successful cesarian section (where the mother and child both survived) may have been in 1337 [ https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/27882755/ ] and apparently more started being successful from the 1500s.
The name Caesar means something like "cropper" or "cutter", and long predated Gaius Julius Caesar (in which Gaius was his forename, and Julius his "tribal" name or surname, and Caesar a sub-category of the gens Julius). So I would guess probably one of his distant ancestors cut his hair short in what we would call a crew cut.
That’s interesting. Thx
I’m big headed about being big headed.
Definitely went to my head that I was almost seven sigma until I realized how impossible that was and then had to use my massive cranial volume to figure out there had to be an error in the calculator.
It looks like it's designed for children and probably not properly calibrated for adults.
I don't have a tape measure handy right now, but wikipedia tells me that the average head circumference of an adult man is 57 cm; if I put that into the calculator then it tells me that's 91st percentile.
That was my first thought. Other than my wife when we were playing with this and I guess once for a family competition no one has measured my head as an adult.
It does look as if the calculator used paediatric charts and assumed full growth at age 16. Adult males especially do have significant head growth past age 16. The paper I linked earlier puts me at +2.55 sigma for my height and I am prepared to believe that.
I looked up the calculator at your link and while my head is smaller than yours, I'm still +4.8 sigma. But the calculator does not take height into account, and there is a strong relation between height and head circumference. see: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1793909/
I think I'm only about +2.5 sigma for my height.
This is the only thing in my life that has made me wish I was shorter.
I remember going to Pole Position with a bunch of physics grad students. There weren't enough XL helmets for them all to race simultaneously.
I worked a couple summers in a sawmill and had to max out the twist knob to expand the hard hat. It looked like a yarmulke and when another guy accidentally put it on it fell around his eyes.
Is anybody here on Bluesky? I didn't follow many ACX folks on twitter other than SA but I'm interested in do just that on the new blue...
peteski.bsky.social
I'm on Bluesky. I can limit my feed to just people I actually want to hear from, which is a huge advantage over most social media.
I'm on Polycentric and Nostr but I never use them. Used to use fediverse.
I've been reading "Bentham's Bulldog" on substack (after, if I recall correctly, seeing a comment of his here) and just in the last week came to the (to me) shocking realization that people take utilitarianism very seriously as more than just a fun thought experiment when discussing policy. I'm interested to hear from commentators here who also take it seriously in a true this-is-ethics-that-informs-my-life kind of way. I'd prefer not to comment at this time on whatever it is that I'm doing instead, but hope y'all can take as written the notion that I do in fact live an ethical life and also am not a deontologist.
I'm not a super-hardcore utilitarian, mainly because I think that it's not plausible to do the math perfectly, and once I start making estimates, it ends up relying on the same kind of reasoning that I suspect underlies many deontological rules. That said, I do tend to be a pretty strict consequentialist, and if I'm really stuck on a decision I will sit down and work out some fake math just to see how the numbers come out.
Before I am criticized for my lack of details, I think that most ethical decisions are local rather than global optimization problems. Realistically, I will never have to make a call like in the trolley problem. I'll just have to decide whether I give a homeless person a ride to the grocery store or something.
Finally, yes, I fail to meet the goals of my ethical system. I am a sub-optimally moral person. But I can live with that.
I generally hope that people I meet are utilitarians rather than deontologists, because on average this results in better outcomes for myself. (For example, if a philosopher has to choose whether to divert a trolley that's on course to kill 10 people to a track where it would only kill 1 person, then conditional on me being 1 of the 11 people at risk, I'm 10 times more likely to be saved if the philosopher is a utilitarian than if they are a deontologist.)
This is a really clever joke at the expense of utilitarianism, isn't it?
What if society decided that killing you increased the utility of everybody else around you by 1, and in total that this increase was greater than your loss of utility. Should that kill your?
Or as Deiseach suggests, what if a society could use slaves to increase the utility of the rest of society by a number higher than the loss of utility endured by the slaves.
>What if society decided that killing you increased the utility of everybody else
Actually, Bentham's Bulldog bullet bites about involuntary organ harvesting, so you doing want too be someone with healthy organs in a utilitarian scoiety.
Wouldn't the relevant question be "Would you want to live in this society where you might get killed?" and not just "Would you want to be the person who gets killed?"
It's the difference between asking "Would you like to bet on the Dodger game that starts in 30 minutes?" and "Would you like to bet on the Dodger game that ended 30 minutes ago?" Once you know the outcome, your willingness to gamble shrinks to zero or increases to infinity. The interesting question is whether we should take the gamble.
My view on that is always assume you are going to be the one person on the other track, because why assume you will be one of the lucky ten? Life doesn't work out so nicely as that.
I see the same thing with people dreaming of the great future/past when the empire was strong/when the revolution will come/when AI is in charge of it all; they always assume they will be one of the top of society, not one of the masses in misery at the bottom. There was something of this sort on another site, OP asking why we wouldn't have wanted to be part of the Roman/Han empires which were glorious golden ages. Sure - if I knew I was going to be one of the aristocratic families of the Empire, it would be marvellous. But if I were going to be one of the serfs at the bottom? Corvée labour, drafted for wars, sent off to the salt mines? No thank you - and most of the peoples of those empires weren't the imperial or noble families, of course.
Same with past life regressions; people are always important or at least high-status, few ever remember that they were just a kitchen maid or lived in one of the Roman slums or the likes in their past lives.
> why assume you will be one of the lucky ten?
Because universe isn't there to get you specifically and ten is ten times bigger than one. It's the same reasoning you use to justify why you would rather live today than in a Roman Empire.
By the same token, each of the eleven people involved are going to think "it is more likely that I will be one of the ten than the one on the single track", but one of them is going to be wrong.
Why *shouldn't* it be you?
Sure. That's just how probability works.
> Why *shouldn't* it be you?
It may as well be you. And you should be ready for it. This doesn't change the point, however.
Yup, the racists all assume that they are the master race, the neo-monarchists assume that they won't be peasants, and the rise-and-grind set all assume that their ridiculous business schemes will pan out rather than crash and burn along with their life savings.
Such is human nature.
I don't see what this has to do with the trolley thing. Like, you could give the exact same argument for the other side (why assume you'll be the lucky one guy who didn't get run over?). Also, I'd think many people prefer living in modernity because it has a markedly higher ratio of rich-to-miserable compared to ye olde times. Rather like how the utilitarian's world has a markedly higher ratio of alive-to-dead compared to the deontologist's, actually.
I am a utilitarian, but it's hard to know what to say without knowing where exactly the disagreement is. People sometimes use "utilitarian" to mean a strictly hedonistic version, and sometimes use a broader definition that allows other terms than just pleasure and pain in the utility function. That may be some of the cause of the confusion, as the first is weirder, but there are some people (not me) who believe even that.
I'll try to briefly explain my stance anyway. Consequentialism is intuitively correct to me because if I try to think about why some action is good or bad, it's possible consequences that come to mind as the reason. From there, trying to be consistent gets the rest of the way to utilitarianism. Specifically, requiring that my preferences be transitive and that the relative desirability of two situations is roughly independent of what's going on elsewhere. Keeping my ethics internally consistent in this way is a rather abstract criterion I guess, but I find it intuitively compelling enough because if I'm not consistent, that means in at least some circumstances I'd be making the wrong choice.
I'll also add the caveat that I may not actually put a huge amount of effort into always doing exactly what's right, but if I think about what is right, it's utilitarianism that informs my answer.
Edit I didn't think to include initially: there's a lot of flexibility to fit the framework of utilitarianism to my ethical intuitions, because this reasoning about consistency and stuff doesn't specify what the utility function actually is, and I'm free to have that be whatever I feel is good.
>I try to think about why some action is good or bad, it's possible consequences that come to mind as the reason.
So...intentions don't come to mind as a reason?
No. Of course you should be careful in cases where you're at risk of motivated reasoning, but I don't personally feel like intentions really matter beyond the consequences of the intentions.
So intentions don't matter for meeting out punishments? You would remove *mens rea* from law? You would remove the distinction between murder and manslaughter (intentional and unintentional homicide)?
What the right punishment is is a different question from how bad the crime was. For the latter question, look at the consequences of the crime. For the former, look at the consequences of the punishment (and the consistent application of the law, which also has its own value). If someone didn't even mean to do something they'd have responded less to incentives, and they're less likely to re-offend.
> What the right punishment is is a different question from how bad the crime was
It's hardly so different as to be completely unrelated.
> If someone didn't even mean to do something they'd have responded less to incentives, and they're less likely to re-offend.
That's not an argument that intentions don't matter: it's an argument that taking them into consideration can be justified consequentially.
> or the former, look at the consequences of the punishment (and the consistent application of the law, which also has its own value).
And that's an argument that de facto deontology can be justified consequentially.
You are not expounding utilitarianism at this point, rather a hybrid theory.
Like a lot of "utilitarians". That gets back to the original point that BB is an unusual utilitarian, because he really is just 100% utilitarian.
"the relative desirability of two situations is roughly independent of what's going on elsewhere"
But it only works out like that in the thought experiments, doesn't it? In those you can say "do I choose X or Y?" without consequences rippling out. In the real world, if there were a trolley problem and you pulled the switch for the one not the ten, the family members of the dead person would come after you, there probably would be legal implications, public opinion would be divided between are you a hero or a murderer, people would treat you differently, and so on. Maybe the act itself would negatively impact your mental health - you caused the death of an innocent person, no matter how good your motives.
Everything is linked.
Sure, there may be side-effects and unintended consequences, but those are still consequences that are still included in the theoretical calculation, and at least some approximation to them must be included in whatever thought process you use to come up with your actual actions (given that explicitly enumerating all of the consequences isn't feasible). Of course a version of utilitarianism where you're only allowed to include clear, direct consequences would be silly.
What do you mean by "utilitarianism"?
I consider myself an utilitarian, in the sense that I believe ethics should be grounded in outcomes (rather than rules or personal virtue, this is not to deny the importance of rules or personal virtue, just their reliability as benchmarks). On the other hand, there are strands of utilitarian thought in the vein of [if we assign a numerical value to things and apply mathematics, we can reason our way to the correct ethical choice] that I don't find at all convincing or meaningful, and I'd assume (hope) it's those that are shocking if taken seriously.
"ethics should be grounded in outcomes"
The outcomes of capturing, selling and owning slaves means I become very rich, trade is booming, the economy of my country improves, standards of living go up. Those are all good things. Doing something that leads to good things is ethical. Is slavery ethical?
(Yeah, that is a bit of a gotcha! and unfair, but that's the kind of nasty little unexpected outcomes that happens to all our systems of ethics, no matter which ones we pick).
Do you actually believe that the consequences of slavery, including both distant economic effects and the experience of the slaves, would generally be good in total? That seems very unlikely. If I believed the consequences of slavery were good, I'd conclude slavery was good, but I don't, so I don't, no contradiction. If you're saying this as a thought experiment, like suppose somehow that slavery had good consequences in total, then I'd accept that in that hypothetical it'd be good (although you'd have to at least put a lot of care into checking that still given how significant the bad parts of the consequences were), that's just not a flaw in the ethical system because it's not a realistic hypothetical.
It's like saying what if everyone secretly thought being robbed was super fun and was longing for you to rob them (but didn't admit that to you because it'd spoil the fun). In this hypothetical, it'd be ethical to rob people, but that's not a real flaw in whatever ethical system is used.
Ah ah ah, you're changing the parameters now. You started off with plain "what consequences are good, are ethical".
*Now* you're starting off with "before ever we consider the consequences, I have decided some consequences are ethical and some are not, regardless of outcome". It's undeniable that slavery made a lot of people rich and developed the economies of those countries (and God knows, we're always being told that economic development is a Good Thing).
There's also the tongue-in-cheek argument that the descendants of slaves in the USA have benefitted greatly because had their ancestors remained in Africa, they today would be living in much worse conditions.
I'm not saying those are right or wrong, I'm saying that on a strict "what outcomes are good mean that these are ethical" then you'd have to agree that slavery is ethical.
[This is meant to go after the other reply to the same comment but it's displaying first.] Also, if I became convinced that some specific form of slavery in history had good consequences in total (I don't know all the details, it's possible the economics thing works out), and I was offered the opportunity to use a time machine to somehow stop it (assuming I can't use the time machine for anything else and there somehow aren't side-effects of me doing this), I would indeed turn down the offer and believe that was the right choice. That doesn't mean I'd participate in modern slavery, because I'd still expect that to be net-negative.
No, I just disagree about slavery having good consequences. It made a lot of people rich but it made even more people very poor, and the economic development seems like it could have happened without the slavery.
Not a gotcha. (Is anything a gotcha in philosophy?)
First - hence, utilitarianism, not egoism or other forms of consequentialism. I specifically want outcomes to be just. (I will readily admit to egoism in Stirnerian sense, but that's downstream from my belief it leads to society-wide good outcomes, and I guess that's virtue ethics rather than consequentialism anyway.)
Second - there's a difference between slavery being ethical and [some particular arrangement that nominally fits the definition of slavery] being ethically justifiable. The lack of rigid classifications is precisely what differentiates utilitarianism from deontology. Feature, not a bug. (cf.: I hold as slave laborers people who would otherwise be killed, Schindler-style.) (I can still claim slavery the concept is not ethical, because, all other things equal, it diminishes overall wellbeing.)
Virtue ethicist?
My don't-want-to-comment-on-my-ethics t-shirt is raising a lot of questions already answered by my shirt. :D
Scott, this year please allow us to vote for multiple reviews in the contest. Right now I have several reviews that I like, but no clear favorite. If I were forced to pick just one I'd be doing injustice to some good reviews as well as not presenting my opinion very accurately.
What would be the point? People can already vote that way, and the result is the number of hearts (likes) for each entry.
We're talking about the final poll that will determine the winner (it won't be by the number of substack likes, or at least the years before it wasn't.)
Agreed
Strong agreement on this one! Maybe tier lists of "I would be quite happy if one of these won/I would be confused if one of these won/I would understand (but not be thrilled) if one of these won"
Strongly agreed! It's good to avoid FPTP voting whenever possible
This is simply not true! FPTP has several desirable characteristics. Simplicity being the most relevant one here.
+1 to this. Iirc the first year we had approval voting, which was good.
I've read some people arguing that the Hunter Biden emails implicate President Biden in corruption ("the big guy") and this is starting to become an important political issue - has anyone who believes they don't implicate him written up a counterargument for why not, and explained what they think was really going on?
Looking at this as a criminal case, there is nothing remotely close to indicting President Biden on. There is a lot of evidence that Hunter Biden used his last name to get financial benefit and a decent amount of evidence that he convinced Ukrainian and Chinese Citizens that he was just the intermediary of the deal, and that they were bribing the president for favourable political actions. What's missing, unless something changed recently, is any evidence that President Biden was aware of any of this. Without that, an indictment is impossible.
Now looking at this as just a concerned citizen that doesn't have to worry about legal standards, this is concerning and should be investigated thoroughly. But I think the most likely explanation, at 80% roughly, is that Hunter Biden was conning the foreigners, and his father was completely unaware of any of this happening until after the FBI found out. It makes the most sense looking at the current evidence and knowing the personalities of those involved.
I have to admit that, personally, I find this a bit disappointing... I was really wishing for the two-ex-presidents-one-jail-cell mpeg (however unrealistically). :-)
At least a couple of people involved in the business dealings in question have testified before the Congressional hearings that they witnessed Biden Sr. joining in phone calls and discussing said dealings while they were meeting with Hunter-- does this change your view at all?
Your question wasn't directed at me, but for the record I knew that before and factored it in. I'm assuming that a certain amount of this sort of thing is normal in the political class, and there's no evidence to suggest that Biden knew it had gone too far. There are also variously corrupt ways of fielding requests to give you bribes and it is quite possible that Joe only heard about the ones that are of the normal type. The best explanation is not that he had zero knowledge, but that there isn't evidence that he had enough knowledge of the scope of things for it to set him apart from the rest of the folks in DC.
I have spent maybe 2 hours of my life trying to figure out what Biden is being accused of, and haven't yet heard a satisfactory explanation. So right now, I'm of the view that there is nothing to argue against.
What should one's priors be re Joe Biden engaging in corruption? Presumably pretty low, given the absence of previous allegations in his 4 decades in office, plus the fact that he had the lowest net worth of any Senator when he left the Senate. https://www.opensecrets.org/pfds../summary.php?cid=N00001669&year=2007. And the supposed evidence is a reference that could refer to any number of people, including Chinese govt officials, who are a) rather prone to corruption, and b) likely to want their share held by someone outside China. And, in an email sent while Joe Biden was a private citizen (so why is it "corrupt", even if he is the big guy?) who was making plenty of money legitimately so didn't need to get involved in anything shady https://www.forbes.com/sites/michelatindera/2019/07/10/bidens-made-nearly-twice-as-much-in-2017-than-previous-19-years-combined/?sh=31f96af368ef
We have pretty different priors on political corruption. I'm from Illinois, where I think that half of our last 8 governors went to jail, and our speaker of the house is probably going to jail too. So my base rate of suspecting politicians of corruption is pretty far up there
Well, I explicitly referred to Biden in particular. Besides, Illinois is clearly an outlier. I daresay few governors of other states have been imprisoned.
More to the point, if money is flowing from Hunter to Joe, it is not at all the normal situation--almost inevitably, the money flows from the successful dad to the messed up, drug-addicted son, not the other direction.
It was already an important political issue before the 2020 election. The only reason it wasn't more widely known is because social media censored the story, calling it Russian propaganda. Twitter went as far as to lock the account of the New York Post, who exposed the story.
In one of the emails, James Gilliar, one of Hunter Biden's business partners, outlined the proposed equity distribution in a new company doing a joint venture with CEFC China Energy Co. It says "10 held by H for the big guy?" Another former Hunter Biden partner, US Navy veteran Tony Bobulinski, later claimed that the "big guy" is Joe Biden. The NY Post claims to have obtained text messages from a whistleblower, which show Gilliar telling Bobulinski not to say Joe Biden was involved (https://nypost.com/2022/07/27/hunter-bidens-biz-partner-called-joe-biden-the-big-guy-in-panic-over-laptop/).
So there's no direct evidence from the emails themselves that the "big guy" is Joe Biden. We just have one former Hunter Biden partner who claims it is, and unverified text messages from Gilliar claiming the same. There are many possibilities that don't implicate Joe Biden in any wrongdoing:
1. Maybe Bobulinski was lying. Perhaps he's a disgruntled former partner and wanted to harm the Biden family, or maybe he just didn't want Biden to win the election.
2. Maybe Bobulinski and Gilliar were wrong, but not lying. They could have made the inference that the "big guy" is Joe Biden from the emails alone, just like a lot of Americans are doing now. It wouldn't be an unreasonable inference, but it doesn't amount to solid evidence.
3. Maybe Bobulinski and Gilliar were both right, and the big guy is Joe Biden--but Hunter was falsely implying his father was involved to convince his partners to go along with the deal.
If I had to bet, I'd put a 30% chance that Joe Biden knew of and was actively benefiting from Hunter Biden's dealings, a 40% chance that he knew of the dealings but looked the other way and didn't benefit from them, and a 30% chance that Hunter was influence peddling without his knowledge (in this specific joint venture; he certainly knew Hunter was up to no good, because even the public knew).
Source: https://nypost.com/2022/04/04/hunter-biden-grand-jury-witness-was-asked-about-deal-with-chinese-firm-and-the-big-guy/
I don't know if Joe himself is personally corrupt. I think we can be fairly sure that Hunter is. So I'd put higher chance on option 3 - Hunter was influence peddling without Joe's knowledge of specifics because Hunter is as unreliable as a wheel barrow with no wheel. So while we can probably take it that Hunter was lying, cheating, defrauding and other fun activities, it's harder to pin it down to "Joe knew he was doing X with Y and demanded a cut of Z".
A wheelbarrow with no wheel is extremely reliable, since it takes great effort to move somewhere else. And if it's not worth great effort, you know exactly where it is and what it can be used for. :)
I mean, who else could "the big guy" possibly be? It needs to be someone who (a) trusts Hunter Biden enough to hold his equity in his name, and (b) someone who can't just openly own things like any normal person.
I would say at this point the Hunter Biden scandal is a lot bigger than this though; the scandal is not that Hunter Biden is a crook but that all major centers of power in the United States have shown absolutely zero interest in investigating whether Hunter Biden is a crook.
It could be another politician, a mob boss, or God knows who else. It certainly seems like Hunter Biden knows a lot of shady people, and maybe one of those people persuaded or forced him to hand over some of his earnings.
As for investigations, there's been a Justice Department investigation of Hunter Biden since 2018, and also a Congressional investigation: https://abcnews.go.com/US/hunter-biden-congressional-scrutiny--doj-charges/story?id=97201254
I don't know, I could genuinely see it that Hunter asked Joe "Dad, can you hold this money for me but uh it has to be done this way because of reasons" or even Joe putting a condition of "Son, it's great that you've got a new job but your mother and I want you to hand over some of your income so we can put it in an account for you" because let's face it, we *know* he'll spend every penny he has on hookers and blow (literal) so Dad taking some of his money so he can't splurge every penny is sensible. Joe cossets Hunter, that's 90% of the problem right there.
The most insane thing is that he actually _prefers_ crack to blow.
>I mean, who else could "the big guy" possibly be?<
God?
His trusted purveyor of fun party substances? That's what the low-lifes round here do with any money they win in court cases, anyhow.
Well, He did create most of the fun party substances in the first place...
Where are you getting (a) from?
It can't be from that email obviously. Is there a different piece of evidence which suggests that the "big guy" reference is something more than name-dropping as part of a con?
I'm pretty ensconced in the liberal news bubble--is there a link you'd recommend which explains the case against the Bidens?
I would suggest going to the New York post and the federalist. That’s about the best you can do.
You can't be implicated simply by a reference to you in someone else's email. I don't think there's any proof, yet, of Joe Biden's corruption. So to try to prove Joe Biden's innocence at this time is a fool's errand, because it accepts that there's a solid argument that he's guilty.
> You can't be implicated simply by a reference to you in someone else's email.
I'm struggling to imagine what you're trying to say here. Of course you can be implicated by a reference to you. How else would being implicated work?
Now if people will only extend the same benefit of the doubt to Trump and his family members and emails, ey?
I think the evidence of Trump and his circle trading on a namebrand is far greater than anything that I have heard about the Biden so far. And I don’t recall anything close to this level of scrutiny directed at his dealings. He ran a hotel in Washington, and rented rooms out to the Secret Service at extraordinary rates for years, just for instance. Ivanka Trump, a really second rate fashion brand (for a fact, because my wife works for a fashion brand that is quite up in the scale of things,), got all kinds of boost in China when her father was president- no big deal a few people squawked-and I won’t even start about how he operated in New York City long before most people even heard of him.
Joe Biden might well turn out to be a big-time crook, but there’s nothing on the table yet that justifies this level of screeching.
Hunter is his own story. I am trying to keep an open mind about this, but I’m not buying this level of interrogation at the moment.
It is unfortunate that he let his computer fall into the wrong hands but even that is a very suspicious story. In what universe do you take your computer to a repair shop and have it end up in the hands of Rudy Giuliani even if you did forget it.
If it’s a slow news day, just publish a few more photographs of Hunter Biden behaving badly. It works wonders.
"If it’s a slow news day, just publish a few more photographs of Hunter Biden behaving badly. It works wonders."
A job that would be made somewhat more difficult if only Hunter didn't provide the photos himself:
https://eu.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2023/07/21/mtg-shows-hunter-biden-lawyer-photos-congress/70445956007/
"In what universe do you take your computer to a repair shop and have it end up in the hands of Rudy Giuliani even if you did forget it."
In the universe where your lawyer can't even go "Those are fakes and not my client", and where the Serious Media which is Defending Democracy from Darkness writes opinion pieces about "Okay, so these are all genuine, but so what?", which is our one, it seems:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/2023/07/21/marjorie-taylor-greene-hunter-biden-images/
My understanding is that his lawyers have recently gone there. I don’t know how it will work out but the does seem to be some issues of privacy raised here. Yes, he happens to be a celebrity so that changes everything but imagine if it happened to me or you? I drop a computer off to get it fixed and the next thing I know the entire hard drive has been handed over to the FBI and the New York post?
there are a lot of stinky things about that by the way, but it’s a deep dive. There were things not on that computer that were subsequently retrieved from other iCloud accounts referenced on that computer. Likewise, WhatsApp I have to believe that the owner of that computer store was ideologically motivated to do some things that are highly questionable.
Innocent until proven guilty. The difference is that Trump is indicted and will be in court on multiple charges with prima facie evidence that seems pretty strong. We'll see if the proof holds up.
The same evidence existed for Hillary and now Biden and Pence, yet they are not indicted because "reasons."
For that matter Trump already has multiple convictions for various forms of fraud, and losses in civil courts too. The new round of indictments are just the most serious ones (so far) on his record.
I hate to jump in just because I happened to be on substack as this was posted, but I have a concise explanation that seems so solid to me that I struggle to believe that those criticizing the Bidens are entirely sincere. Phrased most parsimoniously:
"Everyone in politics engages in some 'normal' amount of lobbying/favors-for-access/tit-for-tat. Joe Biden obviously knows and knew this, and was aware of Hunter's activities. There is, however, no evidence that he knew that the scale of this activity had, in his family's case, crossed the wide and hazy line into 'too much'."
+1
Also, Hunter is an independent adult. He can do stuff his dad doesn't know about or approve of, presumably including drug use and whoring. So he can also do stuff his dad doesn't approve of like promising access to or influence over his dad, whether or not he can really deliver either one.
It's very common for children of politicians to get plum jobs to keep mom or dad sweet on the company employing them. It's hard to see how you'd prevent that without somehow forbidding the children of prominent politicians from ever getting jobs. It seems like Chelsea Clinton and Megan McCain both also benefitted from that kind of job, for example.
How much of an outlier is Hunter here, and how would we tell? Is this something many other kids of major politicians do, only most of them aren't drug addicts bent on wrecking themselves, but rather medium-bright, medium-dilligent folks who've regressed to the mean from their high-flying parents' accomplishments but would still like a nice media or consulting job and a guaranteed prosperous middle-class life.
The other thing is that hindsight is 20/20. That's a platitude, of course, but consider how we might feel about this if Ukraine hadn't happened to become such a mess lately. If it were just money from China and there were nothing going on in Ukraine, we might very well be looking at Biden and saying, "Eh, I don't know, he seems pretty tough on China, I'm sure those allegations were overblown, Hunter probably fleeced some chicoms who overestimated how much one person was going to shift policy."
He seems tough on China in what world?
It's a bit frustrating that the rules of this comment section preclude my just telling you to Google it because it comes right up. Just off the top of my head, I can answer that he took stronger actions regarding sanctions and chip manufacturing than anyone expected, has threatened more sanctions (can't remember why), and didn't do anything at all to reverse the Trump policies that Democrats opposed in the first place.
I have the opposing view. Everything about Hunter Biden is toxic, but so long as this war is going on I'm willing to ignore any past shenanigans involving Ukrainian entities. I suspect that any "Gavin Newsom types" feel the same way.
I have also suggested that "10% for the big guy" could be Hunter's religious tithe, but nobody seems to think that is believable.
"I have also suggested that "10% for the big guy" could be Hunter's religious tithe, but nobody seems to think that is believable."
Well, he does need Jesus, that's true 😁 And of course, all we have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God, so shove over there in the pew, Hunter, I need to pray too!
I’m open to an explanation that exonerates Joe Biden. In fact I’d prefer one. It’s not good for the country to have a compromised president. And I agree that it’s not unusual for some people close to political power to trade on their connections. But that’s very different from actively selling access, and delivering specific outcomes for a fee. There is a significant amount of evidence that this is exactly what Joe and Hunter were doing. To say that people who are looking at this evidence are not “entirely sincere” makes me question your own sincerity.
Which part is it verified that Joe knew about though? We're talking about a man who was a senator for ages before being a vice president. I assume that one of his genuine strengths is an ability to delegate. He loved and trusted his son, who honestly does appear to be an incredibly shrewd operator. The sunk cost fallacy alone would incline him to keep this up. In these circles, I think we call that motivated stopping.
It's Hunter, so it's hard to know. It's just as possible that he was lying about his level of access through his dad, and was implying that a certain amount of vigorish had to go to Dad in order to extort more money from the people wanting to use him to get access.
I will say that I, for one, am sincere in criticising the Bidens because even if Joe was not involved, by now he surely is aware of what Hunter was doing and claiming, and familial love can only cover so much. This has become a matter affecting the public interest and there needs to be some kind of statement about "okay this stops here and Hunter is not going to be able to trade on being my son in order to get soft jobs and money for nothing in a cash-for-access exchange any more".
How exactly would Joe be able to enforce Hunter not trading on the family name? He is an adult and the president does not rule by decree.
I dunno, how about making a public statement that "No family member has any access to, or influence over, my decision making in office, so whatever their private interests, they cannot advance those by a back door to the administration" or the likes?
I'm sure he knows now to whatever extent his cognitive capabilities are still up to it, but the damage has already been done, and likely things are different now. One would have to assume that if Hunter is still selling paintings, the people purchasing them are not getting the same value they would have in past years.
The best use of gpt seems to be for coding, but it missing post-2021 data means it's missing a lot of recent libraries or developments, like pytorch 2.0. Is there a plugin or a different AI tool that's similar in quality to gpt 4 and has access to recent data?
before openai disabled bing search (in chatgpt) you could use gpt4 and tell it to include stackoverflow in its search for answers to your question. kind of a weird way to use it but it worked well, albeit slowly.
This may be a stupid response but ... what are your objections to Bing Chat? It uses GPT-4, supposedly.
https://blogs.bing.com/search/march_2023/Confirmed-the-new-Bing-runs-on-OpenAI%E2%80%99s-GPT-4
Same problem I imagine. 2021 cutoff.
But... it can be asked to do a web search or to absorb information from a context window.
I use it sometimes if I have to, but the interface really is frustrating and slow.
Unfortunately, nothing else is even close to GPT 3.5 yet, and that's way behind GPT 4.
There have been specialised AI coding tools for years. GitHub copilot comes to mind.
Here are some miscellaneous thoughts. (I'm majoring in mathematics and computer science, which my school oddly offers both as a combined single major *and* as an explicit double major, and I was a college applicant not so long ago, so I can sort-of empathize with you.)
- Apply to a *ton* of colleges (this should be a platitude by now, but it helps to remind yourself that admissions statistics for many colleges are pretty unfavorable, even for the super obscure mid-tier ones).
- If you struggle with writing well, particularly with phrasing things in an eloquent manner, then the essays are probably gonna be your rate-limiting step (it certainly was the case for me). ChatGPT can't help you with this (at least not yet?), but a very good admissions counselor who talks to you for months and months on end might.
(Anecdotally, a good exercise I've found for writing better is the so-called "free write journaling". In this exercise, you write down a boring log of everything you did today, but if any event starts making you think of some deep philosophical point or something, keep going on it until you can't really think of anything else to say about this point, then go back to the log. To be really effective, I suggest that you do this daily for a few weeks; I did this for only a week but didn't see any big improvements.)
- Don't take too many classes once you're in. Your school will probably have a standard semesterly courseload, and you shouldn't go above it unless you're unusually good at time management. In addition, as 80k hours also points out, you start losing the potential for side projects or activities.
- At the same time, don't worry too much about whether taking any specific class is a good decision, unless your school *forces* all students (or all students in your major) to take this very specific class in order to graduate, as many schools do.
- If you are prone to homesickness, don't go to a school very far away. This should be a no-brainer.
- Make sure to pack enough to survive independently, *even if* you aren't going to a school very far away.
- Don't forget to stay sane! (Going crazy in college is pretty easy, especially if you have a very high course load or if you've had mental health issues in the past).
- Don't get lost on your school's campus. This is easier if you've toured the campus before, or stared at a map of the campus intently, or ideally both at the same time. But, if you need it, use something like Google Maps. Also, if your school gives you the choice, living in a dorm closer to your classes may be a good option (but if there's a dorm with a lots of culture which is a strong match for your personality, then you should consider that too).
- Possible future careers:
- With Economics, the obvious rationalist/EA-endorsed career path to go down is global priorities research, or maybe EA grantmaking.
- With Computer Science, the even more obvious career path is AI alignment research, but most any kind of coding work would be ok unless you're working on GPT-9 or the Pegasus spyware or something insane like that. There's also quantitative finance which is kinda high variance and runs the risk of you becoming the next SBF, but earning-to-give as a quant is apparently a real thing.
- With Physics, ... I don't know, maybe you could try replicating the alleged superconductor thingy or something. Also you get to seem like a Quantitatively Thinking Person™ in general and do other kinds of quantitative work (such as data science or quant trading or whatever). You'll need to like doing the experiments, though.
I double majored in Econ and Math with a Physics minor, so you're a man after my own heart. In hindsight, the CS major would've probably increased my productivity a bit, but I was able to pick that up in the field and I'm glad I haven't been pigeonholed into just coding. In my experience every job everywhere can benefit from CS skills, but I probably wouldn't have seen most of these opportunities in the first place if I was just a software engineer.
But that's just me - you can go far with a strong CS base as well, especially if that's what you're into. So lean into whatever part of this you're interested in.
A few random comments; background: I'm a Physics professor. (1) These are all good paths. (2) Why double major? Taking a wide variety of courses is great; jumping through the hoops for a second credential may or may not be worthwhile, and it would be good to have a clear articulation of what you expect the worth to be. (Most students I ask who are double majoring have some vague, inaccurate idea of how it's perceived.) Especially for something like physics, it's *far* better to devote as much time as you can to doing research, starting around year 2, rather than to fleshing out some other major. (3) Attend lots of seminars, and don't worry if you don't understand most of the content. This is a great way to see what's *currently* going on in various fields, and to gain exposure to things you may never have thought about.
I ended up double majoring in Biochem and Comp Sci. I pursued bioinformatics for a bit, but it turned out to be a dead end for me. I now manage multiple software product teams of about 40 people (Comp Sci, Comp Eng, Mech Eng, Math, Physics) at a large engineering company and haven't done any Biochem in over 20 years.
All that to say that it's hard to leverage multiple majors in a career. I give my folks the flexibility to do what they want, but still, the CS/Math and CS/Physics double majors that I have either code 100% or don't code at all. If you end up planning to move into a more managerial role, IMO the Finance major won't help you much. You're much better off working on your networking and communication skills, and you don't need a credential for that.
I'm not advising you to avoid the double major, because it does provide some additional career options. However, I wouldn't stress about it either.
I have no actionable advice for you, since I'm way too old; I just have some platitudes, mostly about CS.
* Don't double-major in anything unless you have unlimited time, unlimited money, are some sort of a genius who is also exceptionally hard-working by nature, or your two disciplines actually go together very closely. For example Biology/Bioinformatics or Bioinformatics/CS make sense; CS/Business probably does not, unless by "business" you mean "being a quant".
* If you feel like you already know everything there's to learn, and all that remains is to grab a credenital, then... you're exactly the kind of person who would wash out of 1st-round interviews at every company I've ever worked at. Either that, or you're the aforementioned uber-genius. What are the odds, though ? I realize this sounds harsh, but I am kind of tired of watching my industry go downhill, and I hope you can be a part of the solution. No pressure.
* Looking back on it, the most valuable classes in my undergraduate EE/CS program were the kind that everyone tried to avoid: the classes on basic CS theory and concepts. These are timeless, never go out of style, and empower you to learn any domain-specific knowledge extremely quickly.
* Don't be afraid to branch out a little outside of your discipline; in fact, make an effort to do so. Some of the most fun classes I've taken were on topics like comparative religion, art history, technical writing, and biology (at that time, I had no idea I'd end up in a bioinformatics field later in life). Obviously such classes can be a bit of hit-or-miss, but when they hit, they stick with you forever.
* Take classes in statistics and linear algebra, even if you don't strictly speaking have to. In fact, take data science. Trust me, you'll need it.
* Your college advisor doesn't know you and doesn't care about you. Listen to what he/she says, then find a student group (or a quasi-fraternity like the HKN at ye olde Berkeley) and run the advice by them.
* Don't be afraid to sign up for every class that strikes your fancy, even the ones that are overbooked. By the end of the first week, you'll have a good feel for which classes might actually be useful, and you can drop the rest. Also, the overbooking will clear up significantly by that time.
Yeah, please summarise. Few people are going to invest 17 minutes into watching this.
Not OP but here is my summary:
* The video takes a libertarian "information wants to be free" perspective.
* He advocates that the law should be changed to end copyright.
* Instead, online content should be free for all, managed by the government, and made available ad-free on a government website.
* Creators should be paid royalties by the government, getting about what they would get without the change.
* He estimates a tax increase of $881 per American per year.
* He argues we spend a lot on media related taxes anyway, so this isn't a big deal.
It's always the communists. Every single time.
This reminds me of the "Free Software" movement that by the name you might initially think would be a libertarian-esque movement focused on the freedom of developers - to use, modify, and profit off of software however they want - but is in fact a communist-oriented movement that cares not about the freedom of developers, but the freedom of the code itself - the actual text files on my computer, which apparently "want to be free," because the rest of the world is somehow entitled to the fruits of my labor.
No, Marx did not in fact invent the word labor or the concept of labor.
For instance, The Political Constitutions of Great Britain and Ireland, Charles Lucas, 1751:
"I was naturally induced to think, sharing the Fruits of my Labor, with those, who had not the fame Leisure or Opportunity with me, might not be altogether unacceptable to the Public."
It's too laden with grammar errors that make already convoluted run-on sentences incomprehensible.
There are no grammar mistake, thanks
That very sentence should either be "there are no grammar mistakes" or "there is no grammar mistake".
This criticism is meant constructively. I would guess English isn't your first language and you're only making minor mistakes here and there, but it complicates understanding already complicated sentences.
A few people have already mentioned that it's difficult to read. I agree, it reminds me of some of the prose I've read by East Europeans writing English as a second language: often abstract, metaphor heavy, with odd sentence structure. Sometimes this works brilliantly (Nabokov) but that's the exception.
I would suggest keeping your sentences short, each containing only one idea/point. Write what your literally mean, without metaphor etc. Avoid uncommon or invented phrases. Get someone to check your grammar/sentence structure. Think about what your audience can reasonably know when they start reading, then start one step before that and take them step by step to your conclusion. Keep the structure linear except for an overview at the beginning - don't digress or try to make it more interesting by presenting anything out of order.
Example from the second paragraph:
"A bias is bias is bias is a suitcase word is a nonsense word, yet is incessant recurrence leaves you wondering if it is a linguistic mirage, a gunflower aimed to deceive the unsuspecting mind."
"Suitcase word" and "gunflower" are not common/real enough phrases to use without defining or discussing them first. I'm not sure how to parse the beginning of the sentence, and there are some grammar issues that make the rest just slightly harder to read (missing commas, is should be it's?). "linguistic mirage" is a nice phrase, but not when the rest of the sentence is unclear/hard to parse.
Of course breaking the above rules is what makes for the best literature, but you have to break them in just the right way. First learn to write clearly, and then start breaking rules for effect!
Thanks Russel, there’s a jupyter notebook at the end, and unfortunately I wasted more time on that part
This is a good place for your sort of question.
I started reading your article, but bogged down. It was too hard to figure out what you were talking about.
I think some of it was about costs of ignoring motivations when accusing people or institutions of bias.
Thank you Nancy
>as equally erroneous and misleading as what’s believed to be its collective ramifications<
Are you going to tell us what's believed to be the collective ramifications?
>an emergent property as Thomas Schelling had show using cellular automata in his 1978 Micromotives and Macrobehaviors<
... https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/big-lipped-alligator-moment
>that there might be a delicate balance of bias and non-bias<
What on earth is this supposed to mean.
>A bias is bias is bias is a suitcase word is a nonsense word, yet is incessant recurrence <
You're the one causing the recurrence.
>The consequence, however, is cruelty<
Citation needed; you already said it had become devoid of meanings.
>I don’t have a solution, and neither do you.<
Well, let's both stop here then.
Yug, thank you for your feedback. Schelling’s spatial segregation model is not an alligator, it was one the first how biased behavior can emerge from simple and rational individual behaviors, and the idea of using a network of agents, where each agent's state depends on the states of its neighbors, is a concept that is shared by both Schelling's model and my toy simulation in the notebook (link attached at the end of the essay).
I am sorry that I didn’t apply his model directly because the toy model violated the assumption of homophily ("love of the same"), where agents prefer to be near others like themselves, while the agents in my toy model have belief scores, influence scores, and resentment thresholds, which are all continuous variables, while Schelling’s agents have only binary states (still I think his focus on spatial segregation can be roughly translated into the temporal segregation as well as its later convergence, both which are the focus of my toy model)
Consider summarizing your point in a 3-sentence paragraph, no more than 100 words long.
Thank you Sergei
It seems a little hard for me to read. The first sentence appears to have 153 words, which probably doesn't help. Maybe you could try running it through Chat GPT and asking it to make it more readable with shorter sentences.
Thank you Mallard