and Hollywood as pyramid scheme--https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SHoqcGqnAUY...&ab_channel=TheNewEnlightenmentwithAshley , with the implication that the same applies to academia.
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.
MOSCOW, Aug 24 (Reuters) - Russian President Vladimir Putin sent his condolences to the family of Yevgeny Prigozhin on Thursday, breaking his silence after the mercenary leader's plane crashed with no survivors two months after he led a mutiny against army chiefs.
Two U.S. officials told Reuters that Washington believed a surface-to-air missile originating from inside Russia likely shot down the plane, though they said the information was preliminary and under review. They spoke on condition of anonymity and offered no evidence.
Russian investigators opened a criminal probe but there has been no official word from Moscow on what may have caused Wednesday evening's crash. Until Putin's comments there had been no official confirmation of Prigozhin's death beyond a statement from the aviation authority saying he was on board....
A Reuters reporter at the crash site on Thursday morning saw men carrying away black body bags on stretchers. Part of the plane's tail and other fragments lay on the ground near a wooded area where forensic investigators had erected a tent.
The Baza news outlet, which has good sources among law enforcement agencies, reported that investigators were focusing on a theory that one or two bombs may have been planted on board.....
Yeah, I was really wondering, why on earth did he back down? Did he really think Putin would let him live? In Belarus of all places? He bought himself a lousy extra two months of life--at that point you might as well go down in history as the first man who marched on Moscow after Napoleon.
I actually think that if Prigozhin had never left Belarus and busied himself with sending up giant flares about his willingness to play ball (such as voluntary dissolution/transfer of the PMC) he might have lived. Uncle Sasha did broker the deal, Belarus is his domain, and Putin wouldn't have humiliated him so overtly.
But late-stage grandeur-deluded Prigozhin was quite incapable of such contrition. Quelle tristesse.
It's also possible that Wagner had to be thoroughly declawed first. As well as having both Prigozhin and Utkin together as a convenient target. There's chatter about Wagner fighters being pissed and wowing revenge. We'll see.
Dying in an ‘accident’ so soon after a big risk that went south says enough I think. It’s like when Tony Soprano tells you the new TV ‘fell off a truck’. People get the message.
Not saying it couldn’t possibly be coincidence but the pebble has been removed from Putin’s shoe one way or the other.
Also, if you murder a couple dozen Russian air force officers, maybe don't go flying your private plane through Russian airspace two months later. Karma's a Mach 3 radar-guided bitch.
As always with that basket case of a failed state, we just don't know what happened. Everyone assumes Putin's revenge, but I would not be surprised if this was a mistake by the air defense. There's been an increasing number of drone attacks in Russia, and mistaking a small private plane for a large drone is not out of the question.
Also remember that Wagner shot down several Russian planes during that one-day rebellion. With apparently 0 consequences for anyone responsible.
“But let me say this. I am a superstitious man, a ridiculous failing but I must confess it here. And so if some unlucky accident should befall my youngest son, if some police officer should accidentally shoot him, if he should hang himself while in his jail cell, if new witnesses appear to testify to his guilt, my superstition will make me feel that it was the result of the ill will still borne me by some people here. Let me go further. If my son is struck by a bolt of lightning I will blame some of the people here. If his plane show fall into the sea or his ship sink beneath the waves of the ocean, if he should catch a mortal fever, if his automobile should be struck by a train, such is my superstition that I would blame the ill will felt by people here. Gentlemen, that ill will, that bad luck, I could never forgive. But aside from that let me swear by the souls of my grandchildren that I will never break the peace we have made. After all, are we or are we not better men than those pezzonovanti who have killed countless millions of men in our lifetimes?”
On humanitarian principle, I'd rather he'd been imprisoned, but Prigozhin is not exactly a man to be mourned.
The chances of his being the first private jet (of very many; wealthy Russians zip off to the Gulf States, Turkiye, Cyprus, etc., all the time) to be erroneously shot down by AD are... well, low enough to shake an atheist's faith.
With you on the first point. I oppose death penalty for many reasons.
On the second… yeah would be quite a coincidence but maybe in 10%-ish category. Given the recent sharp increase in drone attacks, and the direction of the flight, and the fact that it only turned its transponder mid flight, the error hypothesis becomes a bit more plausible. Still low, but not near-0 low.
Why do Youtube thumbnails of people with their mouths open looking surprised/stupid do better than basically any other thumbnail? Is this an algorithm thing or a human psychology thing?
I guess the question is whether the algorithm deliberately promotes giant faces with dumb open mouths, or whether it's just common knowledge at this point among creators that this is what gets the most clicks.
(It used to be sexy chicks, but apparently some doofus standing with his mouth open is even more eye-catching than a sexy chick.)
I am assuming it's Youtube capitalizing on human psychology as they are highly incentivized to find whatever keeps people watching. They have research teams trying to figure out what to promote in their algorithm, and I don't doubt they include psychologists.
They also have the benefit of knowing what people clicked on in the past. I'd assume they'd adapt the algorithm to emphasize what was organically clicked on most, so one should reflect the other, even without the explicit inclusion of psych theory.
The default starting algorithm you get when making a fresh youtube account or use it unlogged in seems to start with mouth-open videos by default before adapting to your preferences, so maybe it is the most widely-palatable starting guess? I suppose you're asking more why that is the case than anything. I'd guess it's because some of the largest groups of youtube viewers are children and people looking for completely mindless diversion, both of which shocked people and bright colors seems fitting for.
Setting: a deadly virus killed 99% of Earth population and made the surviving 1% infertile. The extinction of humanity was only prevented by a scientist creating a fertility cure. Four centuries later, all surviving humans live in one city (which has the monopoly on the cure) surrounded by huge walls, with a totalitarian government. No one is allowed to leave the city, probably not even to look beyond the walls.
It later turns out that the "fertility cure" is actually cloning. As a consequence of surviving the virus, humans lost the ability to reproduce naturally. So when someone dies, the government takes their DNA and creates a clone, which is then secretly implanted to a woman trying to conceive (she thinks they are just giving her some fertility medicine). One clone per one dead human keeps the population and the genetic pool constant. The story happens 400 years after the virus.
As a background, not bad. But if you think for a minute about the logistic necessary to make this work, it just doesn't work. Imagine: 99% of population dead, the infrastructure has probably fallen apart. You need to collect millions of people across the planet into one city (where do you get the fuel?) and start administering the "fertility cure" relatively quickly on a relatively large scale (about thousand a day, but you need to keep the details of the "cure" secret for centuries, so all doctors involved need to be a part of the conspiracy). Also, if no one is allowed to leave the city walls, where the you get the raw materials to build your futuristic technology? Where do you get food?
That said, I can imagine some plausible excuses. The people were probably not collected from the entire planet, only from the nearby areas (which would also explain why so many of them are white). And maybe the collection of raw materials and food is done by special government agents, or robots. So far, still kinda plausible.
The cloned citizens remember fragments of their previous lives in their dreams. (It seems like the authors believe that cloning is just a scientific jargon for reincarnation. That would also explain why they are only making *one* clone for each dead person, instead of trying to expand.) Apparently, during those four centuries, they do not discuss the dreams, so they do not figure this out. Also, when the protagonist meets her opponent for the first time, both of them have a strong "I know this person and I actually love them" feeling, because they were married in a previous life. The guy even remembers her name! And then she remembers that she used to be called like that. Apparently, during four centuries (~seven generations) of everyone living literally in the same city, this has never happened to anyone else. (The math does not work out. Population 5 millions, you had ~5 spouses in previous reincarnations; if you only meet 1000 people during your entire life, that is still 1:1000 chance. For each of those 5 million people.)
Then it turns out that after those four centuries, humans finally *can* reproduce sexually again. The bad guys are trying to keep it secret (and murder the women who conceive naturally), to preserve the system. But at the end of the movie, the good guys win, and decide to destroy the cloning system, so that humans do no longer depend on the city. The important part here is that the "good guys" at this moment include the very dictator of the city, who is in love with the protagonist, and whose position in power is safe again; so they are in absolutely no hurry. (And there is absolutely no need to blow up the system using bombs; they could simply turn off the machines and lock the doors. Especially when the cloning facility is literally flying in the sky, so when you blow it up, it crashes on the city.)
Again, this makes no sense logistically. It is not explained whether suddenly all women got the ability to conceive, or only a small subset of them. If only a small subset, then destroying the cloning system can doom humanity. But if all women became fertile overnight, how could the bad guys keep it under control by murdering the pregnant women? (Practically all sexually active women would be pregnant, because if it a common knowledge that you can only conceive when you get the cure, there is no point using contraception. So the bad guys would have to murder them all.) Why not simply let the people reproduce naturally *and* also clone the ones who die? I mean, the entire idea is that you want the humanity expand beyond the city, and the entire planet is literally empty at the moment, so in short term you don't have to worry about overpopulation. A smart person would instead be cautious about the newly appeared fertility -- what if it disappears just as quickly as it appeared; or what if it turns out that the kids are somehow defective (until now all naturally pregnant women were murdered, so they have no data)?
As a cherry on top, it turns out that the doctor in charge of the cloning facility is actually 400 years old. What? Five minutes before the end of the movie you learn that literal immortality is technically possible... but they only ever used it for one guy (not even the dictator is immortal, he keeps dying and being cloned/reincarnated just like everyone else). The protagonist feels bad about the old doctor, because destroying the cloning facility will kill him; but he says he doesn't mind because he is too tired of living. This doesn't make sense at all. Why would destroying the cloning facility kill him? He is the only person who is *not* being cloned. Or he is living in the facility, so he will die when they blow it up? So, why not let him walk away first, and then blow it up? Or, again, why blow up the facility at all, instead of just turning it off?
I also disliked the casual deathism. "We're meant to die. It's what makes anything about us matter." Only a bad guy would think there might be something bad about death. They have immortality technology -- actually two of them: the literal immortality they only used on one person, and the "cloning" that preserves the memories and personality (and probably could work even better if they stopped being in denial about it) -- and they just throw them away. Yet, for some reason, murdering people is considered bad; even murdering people who were already being cloned/reincarnated for 400 years; but giving them one more reincarnation would also be bad. Also, the protagonist is happy to find out that her previously murdered sister was reincarnated as a baby. But a few minutes later she denies the same opportunity to other murdered women. And it's just a happy accident that the cloning facility doesn't kill anyone when it crashes on the city.
Why does the city need a wall, or restrictions on leaving? I would think that the city being the only place where people can have babies would keep almost everyone nearby anyway.
Never mind the shared memories, has the knowledge been lost that children used to look a bit (not very) like one or both their putative parents, and not identical to some random person who died a bit before the child's birth?
Is anyone really a nihilist? *Can* someone be a nihilist? The term instantly reminds me of five things. The first is that Nietzsche called Schopenhauer a nihilist. The second is that when my mother caught me reading Nietzsche she grew concerned and informed me that Nietzsche was a nihilist. The third time I encountered nihilism was reading Turgenev’s Fathers and Sons, but I have been made to understand that the nihilist in Father’s and Son’s is really an anarchist and Turgenev used the term “nihilist” to evade the czar’s censors. The fourth time was The Big Lebowski in the scene where Flea from the Red Hot Chili Peppers plays a German nihilist punk who motivates the famous ”...at least they had an ethos...” line from John Goodman’s character, supposedly channeling screenwriter John Milius.
The fifth time -- and I found this time more interesting than the others -- was watching economist Karl Smith on Blogging Heads talk about monetary policy during the Great Recession. Karl was for aggressive expansionary policy. Among other things, he said something to the effect of: “This is what’s great about being a nihilist. You don’t have to worry about future generations. Yeah, everything might collapse at some point, but who cares? You care about your kids and your grandchildren and after that... I don’t care. If we can kick the can down the road three generations we should.”
Other than Karl Smith I’ve never heard anyone in real life claim to be a nihilist. But I think Karl Smith was on to something. We can only see into the future so far. We live in an era in which change happens fast. Is it not reasonable to let tomorrow worry about tomorrow at some point?
C. S. Lewis wrote a bit about what he called "Heroic Nihilism" in his allegory "The Pilgrim's Regress". Note that this was written in 1933. Lewis represented Heroic Nihilism as a huge man named Mr. Savage, who was the leader of an army of dwarves.
"He sat on a high chair at the end of his barn—a very big man, almost a giant. When I say that I don’t mean his height: I had the same feeling about him that I had about the dwarfs. That doubt about the species. He was dressed in skins and had an iron helmet on his head with horns stuck in it.
…
‘As soon as the dwarfs brought me in, Savage rapped on the table and bellowed out, “Lay the board for us men,” and she set about laying it. He didn’t say anything to me for a long time. He just sat and looked and sang. He had only one song and he was singing it off and on all the time I was there. I remember bits of it.
‘Wind age, wolf age,
Ere the world crumbles:
Shard age, spear age,
Shields are broken. . . .
‘Then there was another bit began;
‘East sits the Old ’Un
In Iron-forest;
Feeds amidst it
Fenris’ children. . . .
I sat down after a bit, for I did not want him to think I was afraid of him. When the food was on the table he asked me to have some, so I had it. He offered me a sweet drink, very strong, in a horn, so I drank it. Then he shouted and drank himself and said that mead in a horn was all he could offer me at present: “But soon,” he said, “I shall drink the blood of men from skulls.” There was a lot of this sort of stuff. We ate roast pork, with our fingers. He kept on singing his song and shouting. It was only after dinner that he began to talk connectedly. I wish I could remember it all.
‘It is hard to understand it without being a biologist. These dwarfs are a different species and an older species than ours. But, then, the specific variation is always liable to reappear in human children. They revert to the dwarf. Consequently, they are multiplying very fast; they are being increased both by ordinary breeding among themselves and also from without by those hardbacks or changelings. He spoke of lots of sub-species besides the Marxomanni—Mussolimini, Swastici, Gangomanni. ... I can’t remember them all. For a long time I couldn’t see where he himself came in.
‘At last he told me. He is breeding and training them for a descent on this country. When I tried to find out why, for a long time he would only stare at me and sing his song. Finally—as near as I could get it—his theory seemed to be that fighting was an end in itself.
‘Mind you, he was not drunk. He said that he could understand old-fashioned people who believed in the Landlord and kept the rules and hoped to go up and live in the Landlord’s castle when they had to leave this country. “They have something to live for,” he said. “And if their belief was true, their behaviour would be perfectly sensible. But as their belief is not true, there remains only one way of life fit for a man.” This other way of life was something he called Heroism, or Master-Morality, or Violence. “All the other people in between,” he said, “are ploughing the sand.” He went on railing at the people in Claptrap for ages, and also at Mr. Sensible. “These are the dregs of man,” he said. “They are always thinking of happiness. They are scraping together and storing up and trying to build. Can they not see that the law of the world is against them?
Where will any of them be a hundred years hence?” I said they might be building for posterity. “And who will posterity build for?” he asked. “Can’t you see that it is all bound to come to nothing in the end? And the end may come to-morrow: and however late it comes, to those who look back all their ‘happiness’ will seem but a moment that has slipped away and left nothing behind. You can’t gather happiness. Do you go to bed with any more in hand on the day you have had a thousand pleasures?” I asked if his “Heroism” left anything behind it either: but he said it did. “The excellent deed,” he said, “is eternal. The hero alone has this privilege, that death for him is not defeat, and the lamenting over him and the memory is part of the good he aimed for; and the moment of battle fears nothing from the future because it has already cast security away.”
...
‘The rot in the world is too deep and the leak in the world is too wide. They may patch and tinker as they please, they will not save it. Better give in. Better cut the wood with the grain. If I am to live in a world of destruction let me be its agent and not its patient.'"
Can one not be a nihilist, absent religious belief? Earth gets eaten by the sun which then dies and then so does everything, and the way things used to be on planet earth and what humans did to each other will have made no ultimate difference to anything. What else is an atheist meant to think?
And of course it is perfectly possible to think that without also adopting a GK Chesterton caricature belief, that therefore it is OK or praiseworthy to set fire to orphanages. There's an extraordinary novel https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/When_It_Was_Dark which I can't bring myself to read, published 1903, where an inscription is forged to show that Jesus never actually rose from the dead, and everybody thinks they are absolved from any sort of morality. In fact the likes of Plato and Aristotle and Confucius, and various enlightenment philosophers, suggest at least the possibility of a secular set of ethics.
Sorry, my ambiguity. I am saying a belief held by GKC (not by a caricature version of him) consists of a caricature version of nihilism, according to which etc. See the Man Who Was thursday etc.
Nihilist (official definition) -- a person who believes (or rather, expressed the belief) that life is meaningless, human values don't matter, and knowledge is impossible.
Nihilist (popular usage) -- a person who disagrees with me about importance of something (that I consider important, and the person does not).
I've always been confused if the most devout hedonism counts as nihilism. If your mentality is "I'll do anything with any consequences if it personally brings me pleasure because nothing matters", are you a nihilist, or does pleasure have too much meaning to you?
Just as you can derive any proposition from a contradiction, I think you can probably give any value you like to x in "I am going to do x, because nothing matters."
Every time I'm out in public and see someone folded up over their phone, I wonder if it woulda been smart to be a chiropractor or back pain specialist or something. I'd imagine that widespread extra spinal strain from reading has been with us ever since the printing press or so...but people don't regularly read newspapers or whatever with their torso at a perpendicular angle to the ground. "Isn't that position painful?", I feel like asking, despite knowing that'd be rude.
Sometimes I wonder if it's less that phones are actually engaging in and of themselves, and more that meatspace reality just sucks a lot for most people. If it wasn't a black rectangle, it'd be some other cope...
The 'smart phone' is the perfect weapon: it obsesses the target so much, he has no clue of the robbery when his wallet is removed; when he blindly walks into the path of a commuter bus while scrolling thumbnails on his Dick Tracy phone, they identify him through his gym membership ID on the clever machine.
I'm afraid this isn't particularly responsive to the main thrust of your post, but I try to have good posture while using my phone. :-) In particular, I like to push the C1 vertebrae up and back as much as possible, which often takes the rest of my spine with it. Cobra position is also nice, if I'm flopped on the ground.
So if someone has immunity to media like phones and TV, by finding them mostly dreadfully boring, do they have a dopamine problem? Would we expect to find noticeably different levels of media consumption among those with, say, ADHD?
TV is boring, I have no idea how it ever got as popular as it is.
If you find your phone boring, it's because you either have another piece of technology that is more capable but just as accessible, or you haven't spent enough tine exploring the internet. There is something engaging on the internet for everyone, at least for short periods of time. There are plenty of people who can't spend too much time on their phone because it burns them out. I know that because I'm a too-online nerd since the early 2000s, and even I get really burnt out on my phone after a short while. My PC, though...
Sure, I'm sympathetic to that argument. At the same time, whether or not there's actually a construct called "ADHD", there seems to be enough signal that certain groups of people have reduced dopamine activity in general + share XYZ traits. One of those traits seems to be even greater phone usage than the norm, which is what I was getting at. More broadly, boosting dopamine saving throws among the populace might be a more fruitful avenue than tinkering with the media itself to be "less addictive". Not necessarily in a medicalized way either - I'm sure it's a teachable skill one way or another. (And as an upside, perhaps we'd get fewer alcoholics and such...)
Suppose I'm a government interested in urban development in a currently somewhat crappy area (but not the absolute ghetto, we need people to feel safe). I acquire a few hundred cheap apartments in the area. Then I announce some kind of fellowship -- free rent for two years (and maybe a modest stipend) for young people who want to work on a startup or art project or other worthwhile project. Ideally I manage to rustle up enough applications to make this fellowship somewhat selective and prestigious.
Lots of creative young people moving into the area makes it cool, and cool businesses spring up to service them. Now lots of other people want to move in too, and pretty soon I've turned a blighted area into a hotbed of economic activity. Ideally, I can now sell off those cheap apartments I bought at a massive profit, offsetting the cost of the entire program.
At least, that's how it could work in theory. Has this kind of thing ever been tried in practice?
What you need to do is forget the superficial application of Richard Florida, and re-read Jane Jacobs instead. You have to match the businesses you are subsidizing to the needs and available infrastructure of the local neighborhood. Creative start-ups might work in an area that already has a legacy of attracting the artsy demographic, but otherwise business development has to be carefully customized. You might do better with restaurants, or small grocery stores, or DIY/hardware, or whatever, but it has to grow organically on top of the local economy. And you also impose costs on the locality (like rising rents) so nothing beats an up to date impact assessment.
Sure, of course. I want to know how to make it happen deliberately.
It's one of those things that really ought to happen. We've got areas needing economic development, and we've got loads of young people complaining that they can't afford to pay rent in the cool areas that they want to live. If you can make an obvious Schelling point and say "Fine, South-East Cleveland is the new hip area, it's a veritable full-time Burning Man with art projects and orgies and decent coffee" then you can solve both problems at once.
(I know nothing about Cleveland, that was a random example)
If only it were that easy. I think that local economies are complex nonlinear dynamic systems such that small changes can have unpredictably large outcomes. What to invest in will be sensitively dependent on what types of businesses already exist there, customer preferences, and interpersonal connections (two small business owners who know and trust each other can share expertise and resource opportunities, resulting in higher performance for both of them). Complicating all this is the probability that economic systems below a certain size are probably internally unsustainable, especially in "edgy" areas: their development relies in infusions of outside money and expertise. The "Sixty Minute Market" of any street intersections is uniquely different from that of every other. Internet sales add further complications.
I would classify economic development as a "Hard Problem." I don't think there is a standard formulaic solution. I am basing all this on anecdotal experience (I used to work for the City of Detroit, including the economic development folks). So far as I know, no one has done the systematic research.
It's worth looking into the Vegas Downtown Project, which was as good an attempt at this as anything I've ever seen, and even did it in what seemed like a favorable location (the one walkable and underdeveloped part of a fast-growing city, not far from California). But somehow it never came together.
Forgive my cynicism, but a bunch of hipster baristas and singer-songwriters in subsidised housing may work as "promoting and supporting the arts" but they'll never be self-sufficient, and if you want tech entrepreneurs they're going to move to Silicon Valley because they'll never get their Automated Vegetable Peeler And Combination Picture Frame Duster startup off the ground in Nowheresville, PA.
"pretty soon I've turned a blighted area into a hotbed of economic activity"
Governments try this all the time, with varying levels of success. 'Blighted areas' in big(gish) cities will work, because you'll already have a critical mass of organic vegans and the restaurants which cater to them living there. Small rust-belt town? Not so much.
EDIT: This is called "urban renewal" and how it's done is also as important as where and for whom. The council in our local big city has been doing this, and the changes are - if you will pardon my vehemence - fucking awful. They've fucked up the streets and traffic flow, the 'public art' they've put up is godawful trash that looks cheap and nasty, and replacing tarmacdam roads with 'walkable' cobbles is a dreadful idea if you want pedestrianisation. They haven't a clue about aesthetics or maintaining the built heritage, they're plainly operating off wishful thinking of "if we just do some cosmetic alterations, out of thin air cool businesses will appear" and I'm here to say no, that's not going to happen.
"Repaving and Resurfacing
The repaving and resurfacing of the street surfaces as well as the provision of new street lighting, street furniture and in some cases, public art pieces. Changes to traffic layout in the city centre, including the provision of measures to improve pedestrian, cycle and public transport access and to minimise unnecessary 'through' traffic The full nature and extent of these works is set out in the attached proposals and the description below."
Sounds lovely, doesn't it? In practice, they've fucked up the remaining cityscape and don't even get me started on the traffic layout.
EDIT EDIT: They tried this in Dublin with Temple Bar which was going to be a home-grown version of the Latin Quarter in Paris 🙄 Again, in practice, it devolved into a bunch of tourist-trap bars and cheap stag nights for UK visitors.
The worst of it was in the 90s/early 00s and it has been somewhat improved since, but the notion of "artsy trendy cool creative area that will attract cool creative people, the cool businesses to service them, and engine of economic activity" idea never panned out like that. I think the impression most native Dubliners have of the area is "overpriced, touristy" but I could be wrong.
"In 1991, the government set up a not-for-profit company called Temple Bar Properties, managed by Laura Magahy, to oversee the regeneration of the area as Dublin's cultural quarter.
In 1999, stag parties and hen nights were supposedly banned (or discouraged) from Temple Bar, mainly due to drunken, loutish behaviour, although this seems to have lapsed. However, noise and anti-social behaviour remain a problem at night."
Here's one of the culture vulture types rah-rahing it in 2011 but it's still mainly economically active by dependence on tourism, not on "hotbed of economic activity due to cool businesses following cool creatives":
"It is fair to say that many things never happened according to the original plans. However, we should acclaim the many great things in the area today that were never imagined in those plans.
Our company and its predecessor led development here until 2001 through innovative urban renewal, local governance, building design, and arts and cultural development and presentation.
Bringing culture closer to people in Temple Bar has been our focus since 2006. Managing a property portfolio allows us operational independence to organise and support hundreds of events and provide about €1.7 million in subsidises annually to cultural organisations. The exchequer receives €450,000 of our €2 million turnover.
The most recent economic impact assessment, an Amárach Consulting report in 2009, said Temple Bar generates over €680 million annually. If Temple Bar was listed in this year's Irish Times Top 1,000 Companies List, this figure would rank us 68th. Dairygold, for example, was 66th.
The area is an established, significant residential community of more than 2,500 people. It is also a high-profile tourism destination attracting about 3.5 million visits a year."
We want the startups for the economic development, but we want the singer-songwriters to make the place cool. What we desperately need is hot chicks, but we can't just go round paying hot chicks to live there... can we?
Temple Bar is the only part of Dublin that I remember, I had no idea it was ever supposed to be anything other than a strip of seedy pubs.
>, and if you want tech entrepreneurs they're going to move to Silicon Valley because they'll never get their Automated Vegetable Peeler And Combination Picture Frame Duster startup off the ground in Nowheresville, PA.
Yeah I thought of that version of the plan too. The government version might be more realistic because they don't _need_ to make a profit off the apartments, that's just a bonus.
But the private version would probably be a lot better at making decisions about whom to admit, they can afford to be rational rather than appeasing various groups. What you'd really want is some kind of private organisation with a track record of picking winners -- Ycombinator city maybe?
Blockbusting seems to have been successful in the US, so I guess there's kinda precedent, though usually it's easier to destroy value than to create it. I'd think that attracting the right employer to the neighbourhood would be a lot more efficient than attracting the right individual tenants, though – obviously a residential building next to a Google office or whatever is going to skyrocket in value.
The idea of selling off the cheap apartments at a profit once the area has been regenerated may or may not work; if the creatives are still struggling along on arts bursaries and foundation grants, they may not be able to pay the high prices to purchase their apartment.
And if the apartments are cheap, people who can pay for them may not find them good enough quality. Your best bet is probably to sell them all on as a property portfolio to a development company which will charge higher rents (and may or may not drive out the impoverished creatives to be replaced with the tech bros who work elsewhere and can afford the higher prices). The vegan restaurants and seventy small coffee houses will probably keep going, though; even office drones instead of conceptual musician performance artists need their caffeine fix and ethically sourced lunches.
"1: ACX Grantees Will Jarvis and Lars Doucet (the Georgism guy!) report "tremendous progress" on their company ValueBase, which helps governments implement Georgist land value taxes. They describe partnerships with a major US city and a foreign country (they're not ready to say which ones just yet) and an upcoming research paper. They got their pre-seed funding from Sam Altman, but are now raising a seed round to scale up operations (looking for seven-figure amounts). Please email will@valuebase.co if you're interested."
This is horrifying. LVT is demonic. Forces people out of their homes that they've fully paid for, for the sake of muh efficiency.
The main problem is that people are not able to distinguish between economics from 150 years ago vs. now. This policy USED to be progressive, now it is pure stupidity.
150 years ago in America, there was not the huge concentrations of wealth that we see today. And most of the vast wealth being made was made from land speculation. So the classic route to vast riches was: buy up a bunch of cheap farm land, and then lobby the government to build a rail road near by, then make vast amounts of money. American was developing SO fast that billions and billions of dollars were made in this capacity: just owning the right land at the right time, which tends to benefit people with connections, power, and insider information. Basically: there was a financial private externality to America developing that was reflected in the price of land-- this was going into the hands of a few rich people-- George wanted to make this externality public.
These days however, wealth is made in a drastically different way. Land speculation is not at all what it was back then. These days, speculation is much more discrete (like buying up defense stocks right before a war). A modern "Georgeism" equivalent would be only letting companies keep the "value" they create-- taxing away all circumstantial/speculative profits. But, of course this is way too complicated to actually work (companies would just move spread sheets around until they don't have to pay anything anymore).
Thus LVT in no means serves its original purpose, rather Wendigo is right, these taxes serve to benefit wealthy people and those who want to develop communities. Here are some effects of a modern LVT.
1) People who are rich and have good tax lawyers would record every tree they plant, renovation they make, and mowing of the lawn. Like always, the people with good tax lawyers, would pay nothing. While, average people, like always when the tax code gets more confusing, would lose a ton of money.
2) Gentrifying neighborhoods would gentrify faster, and large companies would get massive tax breaks.
A LVT upon the SALE of a house would make more sense: that way people who just want to live in a neighborhood would be exempt, while speculators would get hit hard. But, that will not happen, because the whole reason why "modern Georgeism" is popular is to convince middle class people to sell their homes to rich people, who will develop them, mess around with the tax returns, and make tons of money.
Henry George was a progressive, and would NEVER support this.
"1) People who are rich and have good tax lawyers would record every tree they plant, renovation they make, and mowing of the lawn. Like always, the people with good tax lawyers, would pay nothing. While, average people, like always when the tax code gets more confusing, would lose a ton of money."
You seem to misunderstand what a LVT is. The whole point is that unlike standard property tax only the unimproved land is taxed. So a parcel will be taxed the same no matter what is built atop it.
> You seem to misunderstand what a LVT is. The whole point is that unlike standard property tax only the unimproved land is taxed. So a parcel will be taxed the same no matter what is built atop it.
I think a lot of the confusion is due to the motte-and-bailey that goes on around LVTs.
Motte: let's replace existing property taxes with an LVT
Bailey: let's replace _all_ existing taxes with an LVT. In fact, let's raise even more money using an LVT! Let's set the LVT so high that the value of property goes to zero!
LVT advocates seem to slip between these two positions with disturbing ease, so you never know what you're dealing with.
Yeah, I see why that comment would have been confusing.
But what I meant was this: as I am sure you know, currently, property taxes are determined by appraisals, which mostly go off of what similar houses have sold for. With LVT, determining what cost increase is due to land appreciation and what is due to improvements is really hard, and even less based in "facts" and comparisons than the current mechanisms. In the current tax system, people "encourage" appraisals to artificially undervalue the house price. And in a LVT system (as taxes get more complicated) there would be all kinds of other loop holes that open up: is your land value inflating? Or is that tree you planted just a great improvement to the property? Or maybe your land value is less than anticipated because it has some kind of defect (like marsh-land)? As I understand it, since LVT taxes the value of the LAND (not the structures on it), these would all be fair game for tax deductions.
You *will* live in the multi-storey blocks of pods while we slap up smoke-belching factories on all the formerly residential land, because that was the vision of the past!
Of course, now the economy is working on different models than smoke-belching factories producing physical goods, so, uh, we're taking the formerly residential land to put up starchitect vanity buildings for extremely rich megacorporations that may remain mostly empty, but still: think of the density! think of the value released instead of you having your own house and garden!
Which is why there's a lot of "formerly owned by..." vanity buildings that were/are intended to be investment vehicles (or maybe money laundering for wealthy foreign nationals who need to get their fortunes out of their home country and the grasp of their governments):
"The Gherkin, formally 30 St Mary Axe and previously known as the Swiss Re Building, is a commercial skyscraper in London's primary financial district, the City of London.
In September 2006, the building was put up for sale with a price tag of £600 million. ...On 21 February 2007, IVG Immobilien AG and UK investment firm Evans Randall completed their joint purchase of the building for £630 million, making it Britain's most expensive office building. ...The new owners are seeking compensation from four of their former managers on the deal, in which about £620 million was paid for a building with a build cost of about £200 million, giving the previous owners a clear £300 million profit.
Deloitte announced in April 2014 that the building was again being put up for sale, with an expected price of £550 million. The current owners could not afford to make loan repayments, citing differences in the value of the multi-currency loan and the British pound, high interest rates and general financing structure. In November 2014, the Gherkin was purchased for £700 million by the Safra Group, controlled by the Brazilian billionaire Joseph Safra."
He seemed to be considering selling it on again in 2017, but he did manage to boost the rent received:
"Since Safra bought the building, the building’s rental performance has increased. At the time of purchase, some tenants were paying as little as £40 per sq ft. New leases are now being signed at more than £90 per sq ft. Tenants in the multi-let building include pension fund Standard Life and law firm Kirkland & Ellis."
But there was no sale and his family inherited it as part of the portfolio after he died in 2020. And immediately got into a row over the will which seems to be still going:
"An associate of Lord Foster of Thames Bank for nearly 30 years, Mr Shuttleworth declares that the days of designing buildings with "crazy shapes, silly profiles, and double curves" are over.
He says he regrets his design of 30 St Mary Axe, the 40-floor City office block known as "the Gherkin", which won the Stirling Prize in 2004.
"I was in there the other day," he said. "I was looking at the glass all the way around thinking, 'Why on earth did we do that?' Now, we would do things differently. Even if it was still a funny shape, it probably wouldn't have glass all the way around and, as it went further up the building, the facade would be more solid."
The Birmingham-born Mr Shuttleworth, who is known as "Ken the Pen" because of his draftsmanship, attributes the fad for unconventional shapes to the self-obsession of his colleagues. "I think a lot of architects are really egotistical, almost like artists who see themselves as a one-man show," he said."
No, London's problem is too many people. We don't need to keep cramming more and more people into megacities, we need to send them out to develop smaller cities instead.
Hmmm... it is almost like people in cities like having some green area around them, not just blocks and blocks of concrete. Like perhaps there are certain functions of land beyond just maximal profit. Perhaps green space around a city and local agriculture have positive externalities for everyone. Sometimes bureaucrats are needed-- not everything can be solved by large sweeping generalized legislation.
You'd have been happy so, Hank, about forty years ago living in my town where the leather factory was located besides terraced houses and the water in the harbour regularly turned blue as they flushed their waste water out 😁
So what if there were funny smells and odd-coloured water, at least there was no separated commecial from residential zone! Just like God and Henry George intended!
First, the local council finally listened to the complaints and stopped them dumping untreated chemical waste into the harbour.
Second, the company eventually went bust and the premises were left derelict until bought, demolished, and turned into blocks of flats during the late 90s.
If it got vacant derelict buildings either demolished or replaced for use, and/or prevented landbank hoarding, I'd be for it.
But given the way the world works, it will be Granny Smith being forced out of her family home because she's not using the land to the utmost theoretical value that she could do if she instead built a factory turning out Model Ts, while Vulture Fund Inc. can pay accountants, lawyers, and consultants megabucks to find loopholes and ways round the laws in order to demonstrate why it shouldn't be forced to make use of the empty three acre plot in the prime rental district that it's waiting to sell for the maximum price.
The main issue with LVT is that it has a lot of consequences, and the initial reasoning for implementing it (to stop land speculators and get people to actually develop the land) is really not as large of an issue now days as it was 150 years ago. Our land is pretty well developed, and most improvements to efficiency are not through developing land these days anyways (so this wont really help boost the US economy as intended).
Taxes are a 0-sum game-- towns need to make back their budget, so if the apartment complex beside you pays less, you pay more. Towns are not allowed to fund functions with income tax (and this is not changing any time soon), so the de facto effects are 1) a significantly more regressive tax system. 2) more loop holes, due to more complicated tax laws. 3) uprooting of communities and faster gentrification (leading to a more aggressive boom and bust cycle in cities). 4) Issues with green space and public health (esp. if this is taken to the extreme and replaces all zoning policy and regulation, like many proponents advocate).
Wait, how is a land-value tax more regressive than a property tax? I would think that the land-value take should be more *progressive* because the three residents of a triplex *together* pay as much tax as the person in the single-family mansion next door, while under a property tax, they *each* pay (nearly) as much tax as the person in the single-family mansion next door.
Well property taxes are not perfect, but if you own a more expensive house, generally make more money, and then you pay more in taxes. This system kind of messes that up. So someone owning a high rise of luxury apartments would pay way less with LVT. Someone living in the "slums" in a 4-story apartment would pay more. Similarly, in most big cities large complexes are owned by large companies and rented out-- so the renters will not really get the tax deduction. . Although I do think that this would change depending on the area and city that this was set up in (this would be interesting to look at). I was thinking a "big city" environment, where newer and larger generally mean luxury and there are more renters than owners.
Edit: And one more thing-- most of the "single family homes" are present due to zoning restrictions... not financial incentives. Developers are trying to get their hands on them all the time. The lands value is pretty directly tied to the zoning restrictions. I am actually not sure how LVT-proponents plan to handle this, but I would think that might have a massive effect too.
If a high-rise pays less property tax per unit than the 4-story apartment, that incentivizes tearing down the 4-story and building a high-rise in its place, thus increasing the housing supply and lowering rents.
Also, this is assuming the high-rise and the 4-story are paying equal LVT, but that's only true if the land they're built on is equally valuable. But land in the slums is not very valuable (kind of by definition), which means they'll pay a lower LVT.
Your property taxes don't go up when a developer builds apartments down the street. It basically voids the whole concept of land ownership and makes it so you only get to have a piece of land for yourself if you are using it the most "efficient" way possible. Efficiency is properly an instrumental value, not an intrinsic one. When taken to this extreme it destroys much that is right and good in life for the sake of number go up on chart.
Let's also be real here: the *explicit* goal of an LVT us to force people out of single family homes. As someone who *likes* SFHs and thinks this weird new density cult is bad, of course I oppose such a thing. Lots of YIMBYs like to insist that *of course* they don't want to force anyone out of their SFHs and they just want people to be able to do what they want with their property and have the right to build things other than SFHs if they want. Then they turn around and advocate for LVTs, which make it so you *can't* do what you want with your property, if what you want is a single family home.
But to be clear, I also think property taxes are bad! Just much less so.
>Your property taxes don't go up when a developer builds apartments down the street.
Sure they do if that causes the land value in the area to increase. (Perhaps things work differently outside the USA. Oh, and obviously they do in California.)
The explicit goal of an LVT is to force landowners to do something with valuable, unused land. Shit or get off the pot.
Hey retired guy, our algorithm has assessed that you have a body that could be being used to do $100K per year of work at least. We're just going to tax you for the work you could be doing instead of the work you are, okay?
We all pay a tax for having a body, it's called "food, clothing, and shelter." It's a pretty solid incentive to find ways to make it productive. (And to save enough money to continue paying for it when it's no longer capable.)
Land, on the other hand, collects money without doing anything productive, simply because more people need it as the population grows.
The explicit goal of a high LVT is forcing single family homeowners to sell, in order for a developer to repurpose their lot for its highest-and-best usage- denser housing. Whenever you hear Georgists say that an LVT would enable 'more efficient' land usage, that efficiency comes from the essentially forced sale. It's a central feature and not a bug. Property taxes are not meant to be punitively high and force homeowners out of their homes- a high LVT is.
When you spell this out to Georgists, they usually hem and haw and say that the LVT will be phased in over a very long period of time. Or that it won't be an 80-100% LVT, so no one will be forced to sell. Which is certainly fine- but then you lose the supposed efficiency gains. The efficiency is from the forced sale!
Most single-family homes aren't in areas where the land value tax would pressure people out. Only the old single-family homes that are full of charismatic rich people are.
Property tax is also demonic. Inheritance tax, same thing: it mostly strikes regular people who might have had a hope of inheriting a chip of land or a home, but can't afford to keep it due to the greed of res publica.
Sales tax. Import taxes. Window taxes that can be easily circumvented by bricking up your windows, wait, no, that gives you rickets which are probably an element of those dark satanic mills we keep hearing about.
No, but jokes aside any moderate tax on consumption of elective goods is pretty defensible. The instincts of the state incline by its nature toward vampirically extractive legal plunder, of course, and one always has to remain vigilant against it.
In the US there is no inheritance tax (paid by the person who inherits something). There is an estate tax (paid out of the value of the estate). It doesn't apply to the spouse of the deceased, nor to the first ~$13M of an individual's estate or the first ~$26M of a married couple's estate (thresholds which are indexed for inflation). Starting above one of those thresholds, the marginal estate tax rate begins at 18% rising to a max rate of 40%.
A "chip of land" or a middle-class home is therefore not going to be subject to any estate tax at all. A family farm won't trigger any estate tax unless it is at least 1,000 acres or so and won't trigger a meaningful estate tax bill unless it is two or three times that size. Etc.
Sizeable family-owned private businesses can trigger significant estate taxes if the principal owner isn't leaving it to a spouse _and_ s/he dies unexpectedly (meaning hadn't yet begun transferring equity in the business to children while still living).
All of the above is why only about 2 out of every 1,000 estates in the US incur any estate taxes. Or put the other way, 99.8 percent of estates pay no estate tax.
Yes, and...? Does not (currently) existing in the US automatically make a tax not-evil? Georgist land tax is presently also entirely hypothetical.
Let me, belatedly, restate the position for maximum clarity: IF any form of broad-based inheritance tax is imposed, on the populace OF ANY NATION, in any part of the world, THEN such a tax is the work of Satan, who is the devil.
I strongly agree. A 100% LVT is forcing people out of their single family homes *by design*- that's where the efficiency gains come from! It's a classic product of extremely online thinking- reasonably clever in the abstract and completely detached from reality at the same time.
On the flip side, I wouldn't worry in the slightest that strong LVTs are going to be implemented anywhere- forcing *all of the people who vote* out of their homes with ruinously high taxes is literally the least politically realistic idea I've ever heard. The evening news every night would be "Meet Mr. and Mrs. Jones, forced to sell their homes to EvilDeveloperCorp due to crushing new taxes. Economists call it efficient- we call it a crime." It might actually be good for the US, to bring the left and the right together to oppose it
You only have an increase in taxes if your land-to-property ratio is higher than that of people around you. If your land-to-property ratio is lower than the people around you (say, you live in an apartment or condo) then your taxes go down. People in SFHs in far-out suburbia would not be hit by this, because their land-to-property ratio is basically the same as all their neighbors.
It's only the minority of SFH-owners in high-demand neighborhoods that would see a tax increase that forces them out.
>which is *specifically* why YIMBYs like it so much.
Nah. YIMBYs like it so much because YIMBYs tend to be smart people and smart people are better at spotting illogical arguments, particularly when they don't have a lot of "tribal" valence. Such smart people are also likely to see the advantages of a LVT, which does not create the disincentive to work or invest the way income and corporate taxes do.
As for converting SFHs into apartments, the main problem is that it's illegal to do so, not that people who live in SFHs refuse. Living in a SFH will always (in the near-term) be possible because single family houses are the most economically efficient use of land in an area where land prices are low, which will always exist.(they're called rural areas)
Basically, what the NIMBYs want is not low density. They want to live in a low-density bubble right next to a large, high-density urban area they can benefit from but also prevent from expanding. Of course, many of them, when a developer offers 200K above what they paid for the house, will eagerly take it and leave, thus NIMBYs must coordinate using the law to make sure nobody "defects."
Yeah, whenever I stumble upon one of these ludicrous terminally-efficiency-brained proposals, even when it has some serious corporate/thinktank/governmental backing (whether it be this, banning cash, the thing I just stumbled on where a bunch of big cities are signed on to an initiative among whose goals is to get car ownership, meat consumption, and dairy consumption to zero by 2040; or whatever else), after I rage at it for awhile, the one thing that gives me comfort is that these are the sort of things where if they seriously try to do it, the wrath of God they unleash will (hopefully) quickly teach them a lesson.
Georgism is not a bad idea, but it is stuck in the past: the days of "this empty lot could be a meat-packing plant giving employment and growing the economy instead of lying waste!"
Nowadays we don't build meat-packing plants in the middle of cities, and if the anti-factory farming lot have their way, we won't be building meat-packing plants at all. Profiteering has even been defended on here before, see the discussions about the man dying of thirst in the desert being sold water if he gives over everything he possesses, on the grounds that "you can charge as much as the market will bear and that's how capitalism works and that's your right".
Georgism is making a moral appeal (you should not take advantage of others) that unfortunately won't win against "I have no obligation not to extort the thirsty man" and will end up hurting the people it's supposed to help.
There are still plenty of empty lots in the middle of cities which could be developed in some form or fashion -- maybe just to put a single family home on it -- but corporations, often overseas ones, are sitting on the land with no plans to sell for several decades. It does seem to me that those vacant lots are undertaxed.
I feel like this is a US-specific problem somehow. I look at US cities and I see giant single-level parking lots in downtown on blocks that must be worth tens of millions... with not even an attempt to turn it into a multi-level parking lot. I don't really see that in other (large, non-poor) cities around the world.
I think there's more bureaucracy and politics involved slowing done development than lack of financial incentives. I've seen notices for hearings going back 10 years on closed store for redeveloping it into apartments.
A San Francisco supervisor actually thought it was acceptable for a public bathroom to take 3 years and 1.7 million dollars to build.
That is probably true in some places, but my experience is in the sunbelt where there isn't much bureaucracy. See my response to Alexander Turok below.
If LVT could force something to be done about those, I think people would have no objections, but precisely because it's deep-pocketed corporations sitting on the land, they are the ones who can afford to tie things up in legal battles for years.
Or come along and tell existing tenants "you have to leave, we're knocking this building and replacing it with an office block, not our fault - the LVT is forcing us to maximise productive use" when that's only an excuse for "we can't squeeze more money out of you in rent so we'd rather sell this for $$$$$".
I can confirm two of the following happen regularly:
-Property is seized from an owner who has abandoned it. The municipality then refuses to sell it because they cannot find a buyer with a sufficiently adequate plan to develop it to the municipality's liking.
-Property is sold for well below market value to a developer who does promise an amazing plan to benefit the community. Said plan does not materialize, and after a few years, the developer sells of the property at a massive profit, giving the municipality that previously owned it a kickback, er, breach of contract penalty.
Sometimes there will be a celebratory news article about how some homeless people burned down decades-vacant blighted building owned by the city which enables them to develop it from scratch now. There was an abandoned prison on top of a small mountain that was sold for $250k. The buyer had to be approved by the council of course, they wouldn't let me buy it and just move in, no matter how much I'd enjoy owning a fortified mountain top compound with its own generators, industrial laundry and kitchen, indoor shooting range, security system and hundreds of bedrooms with ensuite half baths.
Yes, I've investigated a few properties myself. My experience is in sunbelt cities where zoning isn't a big issue. The real estate value has increased rapidly for decades so the investment strategy is simply to buy and hold. My anecdotal experience has been it's mostly Indian companies who own such land. They won't sell at anything close to the market price.
I don't think such an initiative will work out the way the proposers think it will; see New York City declaring itself a sancturary city, which was fine as long as all the people crossing borders were landing in Texas. When they landed in NYC, suddenly it's a crisis and they're all being herded into camps:
As a conservative, am I laughing at the left-wing virtue signalling blowing up in their faces? Yes, I am. It's very hard luck on the migrants, but NYC was donning the halo of "we're not like those nasty Republican bigots and racists in the south who refuse the needy and desperate", so now they can handle the needy and desperate themselves and show us all the right way to do it.
Which apparently is "imitate the Australian detention island idea in minature" rather than making room for yet more contributions to the vibrant culture of the city of immigrants.
I’ve been visiting the Bay Area recently and felt quite puzzled by what I felt was a change in what I’m tempted to call the “tipping culture”. I thought that tips were meant to incentivize the waiters (who weren’t otherwise paid much) to do good work, and that tips were typically in the 10-15 percent range.
But I don’t understand how all this applies to the general custom of requiring tips any time when food is involved, including sometimes
1) before any service is made [which reverses the incentive]
2) when there’s little or no service [for instance, when everything the waiter does is literally bring food – not take the order, not bring the check, and the customers are expected to lay the table themselves]
The acceptable percentage for a tip has also seemingly skyrocketed: “suggested” tips are in the 18-22 percent range.
The above is all the more baffling to me since California has a fairly high minimum wage (in nominal terms – perhaps not so much when compared to Bay Area prices).
I have a lot of questions about this, but the main ones are:
How typical is this experience? How do Californians view (or react to) this? Am I misremembering how it used to be?
Californian here. COVID changed the tipping game quite a bit, and it hasn't entirely reverted to pre-COVID norms. Back when every face-to-face contact was a potential deadly risk, yeah, the guy behind the counter handing you your McBurger felt he could ask you for a tip and you'd maybe give him one just for showing up at all. And once you know you can get away with that, why not keep trying and see if it keeps working?
I'm very slightly annoyed by tip-at-the-register requests, and just politely ignore or decline them. Nobody has ever given me any grief about this, nor have I heard stories of such from others.
Tipping is only socially obligatory, in the food-service context, if the server takes your order at the table or bar and later delivers your food/drink to same. Anything in the 15-20% range is normal and acceptable. Again, COVID pushed that up to 25-30% in some places, and not everybody has come back down, but you don't have to follow their lead. Anything significantly less than 15% can in principle be used to signal discontent with bad service, but really will just be interpreted as your being a cheapskate. Not tipping at all, definitely marks you as a cheapskate.
And it's a nasty thing to do to someone, because as others have noted, food service workers in roles where tipping is the norm are exempt from minimum wage and the tips probably make up most of their income. If everybody adheres to the social contract, the servers generally take home well over minimum wage, and more than any salary they are likely to negotiate absent tipping, and they give good service and everybody wins. Don't be the jerk who breaks the social contract.
There are other personal-service jobs where tipping is also the norm, e.g. taxi drivers, barbers & hair stylists, etc; the same 15-20% applies. Food delivery also calls for tipping the delivery person, maybe a bit less and e.g. rounding the price up to the nearest ten dollars usually works. If you stay at a hotel, leave 1-5 dollars per night stayed on the table or whatever when you leave. Hotel bellhops who carry your luggage, parking valets, etc, should probably get a couple bucks each as well.
Tipped wage is not a thing in California. In most states with tipped minimum wage the tip is credited towards wages and total pay per hour cannot be less than minimum wage.
Over the last 20ish years in a non-Californian American West Coast city, I've seen the "standard" tip go from 15% to 18% to 20% to sometimes 22% or 25%. Part I blame on the apps, especially the spread to non-service areas. And part I blame on inflation, as it allows restaurants to keep prices lower while still charging more.
Also, what everyone else said about certain very specific classes of job being able to legally pay less than the minimum wage.
Tips originated as a reward/incentive for good service (I wrote that with confidence but haven’t actually looked it up), but in the US they have long served as a way to force labor costs onto the customers. I thought everybody knew this, but the vast majority of tip-based folks make far less than minimum wage. $2.13 an hour where im from. This may vary by state, and there are definitely jobs that pay a living wage and tips are a plus, but that is definitely not the norm.
Point being, I’ve bartended in three states, and basically everyone knew that 20% was the standard expectation for normal service. Tipping less than that is harmful to your server or bartender - they spent time serving you that could have been spent serving someone else who would tip normally. Moreover, a lot of places have barbacks or other assistants that are given a cut of the server/bartenders tips at the end of the night. Meaning, if you stiff them or tip for shit, they will lose money after serving you.
So, 10-15 percent is not the norm in most of the east coast, and it is definitely not a reward for a job well done. It is the expectation, and essentially everyone I’ve ever met (from the US) understands this.
As for why the number of places asking for tips (and the amounts) have increased, I agree with the other people here that it is most likely the prevalence of tablets/apps for payment. All of them have an option to set up tipping - even if you are a gas station or some other non-service location, why would you turn down free money? Set it up, give customers the prompts, and some percentage of people will give you money. Some is more than none.
Interestingly, I live in Mexico now, and most places I’ve seen require you to tell the server what tip you want to give them, which they then enter into the credit card machine. I think this is genius, as it adds some pressure to anybody who wants to lowball.
All of that said: As a lifelong member of the service industry, I feel zero guilt at not tipping a place that does not provide any service. You shouldn’t either. Tip if you want, don’t if you don’t feel like they did anything.
But also - you need to recognize which professions rely on your tips to pay their bills and tip accordingly. Your meal and your drinks are cheaper because our entire country has decided that it’s okay for server/bartender wages to be optional. Even if they were kinda shit, even if they forgot something... please tip 20%. I’ve tipped less than 20% about 4-5 times in my life, and in all cases it was so egregious that there was no possible justification. And I still tipped, just not 20%. And if the person serving you is excellent, tip more than that.
Bonus tips: if you feel like you will be a regular at a place, tip very well your first time and every once in a after. Tip at least 25% always. That extra 5% will buy you great service and enthusiasm, and in many places (especially bars) you will free stuff or other perks that make up for the extra money. Plus it just feels good that people are excited to serve you.
Same thing applies to a busy spot - tip fantastic the first time. Rest of the night, the bartender will spot you in the crowd and take care of you.
"I think this is genius, as it adds some pressure to anybody who wants to lowball."
What are your thoughts on the ethics of this kind of stress-manipulation purely for economic extraction? You call it genius, so you seem to approve; is it morally acceptable at the expense of the customer, or is it just another ethically-blind tactic available to capitalists?
Id say the latter. It would possibly be unethical if the server was doing more to ramp up pressure (making faces, tone of voice, etc). But simply asking politely is not unethical, imo. If anything I would say the ethical dilemma is the other way around. If there is a significant difference in how you tip in the two methods, the problem is probably on that end, no? Barring any negative/hostile behavior from the server, of course.
Couldn't say exactly when the norm switch happened, but my family had a "always tip at least 15%" rule since before I was born. This used to put us ahead of the tipping curve wrt most patrons; now it's considered stingy, at least in SF. There was definitely a period during covid when tipping extra high (like 30%) was considered a sort of Civic Duty, to help support social distancing and send restaurants extra money when they were struggling without in-person dining. Things have bounced back since then, but I think people who really enjoy eating out and do it frequently kinda got used to paying the higher price. That is, sticker shock slowly turns into the new normal for such normative discretionary spending.
While the added costs are certainly annoying, I feel bad welching on a tip as a sort of class solidarity thing...being one of those Essential Workers(tm) during the pandemic and all that. And because of my family always tipping, it never really occurred to me until much later in life that many people simply don't tip / tip small / see it as this yuge burden. Tips to me are kinda like the euro VAT - I factor it into the base price. If that's too high, then I must not want the service that badly in the first place. It's less about the To Insure Proper Service function, and more about forming a strong habit of treating service employees well in general. (But like you say, when there's no/little actual "service" involved, then things can get kinda awkward. I'll tip at a food court restaurant, but not always at McDonald's, even though they're functionally pretty similar...why? Not sure!)
The change has come through automatic payment systems, which `suggest' tips in the 20%+ range for just about everything. I presume this is by way of a bribe from the manufacturers of said machines to the employees of establishments that use them, to encourage the purchase of said machines.
Such systems are purchased by the management, not the employees, and changing to a "service charge" instead of tipping directly has been queried along the lines of the business holding on to such charges instead of distributing them amongst the workers.
But can you really be surprised by this, when tipping as supplementing wages was established as a matter of course? "I'll pay you half the cost of the labour because you'll make it up in tips" being the understood way things are done, now that retention of labour is harder, wage increases necessarly, and the business model being "we don't show the real cost of the service in the meal prices because that would frighten customers away", the money has to come from somewhere, and that means bigger tips/new set point of what should be given as a percentage for a tip.
The Irish rules, don't know what legislation if any the US has:
As you can see, some employers probably were holding on to "service charges":
"Restrictions on the use of ‘service charges’
Voluntary service charges are the same as a tip or a gratuity. Mandatory service charges are charges that must be paid by the customer, on top of the cost of the product or service.
Employers are banned from describing a mandatory service charge applied to a customer’s bill as a 'service charge' unless the payment is treated by the employer in the same way as electronic tips or gratuities.
This means that mandatory service charges can only be added to a bill if the money goes to employees."
I will hit `custom' tip and then input what I think the right amount *should* be, but I am unusually willing to tolerate stink eye from the cashier. I think the net effect of these nudges (more of a buffet really) genuinely is to push tipping norms greatly upward.
"Even in these postwar years where the pattern of civilized life in Europe has been worn so very thin, of the two or three important experimental discoveries of the last two years, two at least come from Europe. One was carried out long before its publication in the cellar of an old house in Rome by three Italians who were under sentence of death from the Germans, because they belonged to the Italian Resistance. They were rescued by the uncle of one of the men from a labor squad at Cassino, and smuggled into a cellar in Rome. They got bored there, and they started to do experiments. These experiments were published last spring; and in the field of fundamental physics they created a real revolution in our thinking."
Does anyone know what experiments he was talking about here?
I could not find details to support all of Oppenheimer's story, but the experiment was certainly carried out under difficult conditions during the war. Some versions say that it was done in the cellar of a school.
I rewatched Age of Ultron recently, the Marvel movie whith a runaway AI. God they made it so boring. The first thing the AI does is make itself a body so that it can get punched by the heroes. It then makes a bunch of robot copies of itself that all need to be destroyed, but that doesn't turn out to be that hard because they all cluster in the same city and throw themselves at the heroes. There's a vague mention of "trying to hack the nuclear codes" at some point, but that doesn't lead to anything. For something that could have been near impossible to beat, the danger felt so low.
It got me wondering, what would a good version of that movie be - where Ultron is genuinely scary in a uniquely AI way, while still being watchable as a superhero movie?
The fight with Dragon in Worm comes to mind. She exists in hundreds of robot bodies which can be controlled simultaneously, some humanoid, most not, many that can fly and have long range attacks. She also exists on multiple hidden datacentres and satellites. When her "main" body is killed she near-instantly reboots from backup in another body. Can also fairly effortlessly hijack other computer systems. Might be challenging to adapt to screen as both combatants had a simultaneous viewpoint in multiple points across the earth.
Make him a perverse instantiator - if he isn't one, he isn't distinctively AI vs just mad/evil (this was a thing the first Terminator got brilliantly right: Skynet is much scarier because it isn't against humanity because it's Really Evil, but because it is over-interpreting instructions about ensuring its own security. )
Edit: also brilliant, Ex Machina. She kills him* not out of malice but because she wants to study human interaction at interchanges.
* If she does. Can't believe there aren't service tunnels/back doors by which to escape the building, and we are meant to think there are. But critical consensus is, he's a goner.
Then have a LOTR type plot where hero must make his way between the paperclip factories to Mordor and load an amended, safe version of the over-interpreted instruction into the mainframe.
Fully agreed, I'm a Marvel fan but Age of Ultron was a huge disappointment. (The "age" lasted what, 24 hours?).
The typical way this is handled in the source material is the standard Terminator plot; start in the future, show the terrible outcome, then the heroes go back in time to stop it. It's used a LOT in the comics, not just for AI but for any & all threats. At the time of release, Time Travel hadn't been introduced to MCU yet, and also Fox had just done Days of Future Past the year before. Actually, maybe "trying not to be Days of Future Past" explains everything wrong with Age of Ultron, including the dumbest moment of all (Pietro...)
Have you seen "What If..."?. It has a great treatment of Ultron, it's not a movie though and wouldn't work as one.
Best I can come up with, sticking with the "no timetravel" limitation: make it an Ant Man movie.
- Ultron is a Hank Pym creation, like in the comics.
- Maybe Ultron originated as a scout robot that Pym sent into the quantum realm & started self-improving, and we get a version of Quantumania that makes slightly more sense.
- Maybe Ultron first appears to be a force for good, but Ant Man discovers he's secretly making nanobots to take over the world.
- Ant Man can punch nanobots in the face.
- Can be introduced with lower stakes and build. Maybe the extra copies are only revealed in an end credits scene. Leave Age of Ultron for Phase 4.
He could take over the Internet, like the Virus from the TTRPG "Traveller: The New Era". Sticking tiny bits of himself into all computers, all core hardware, all storage devices, all manufacturing chains. Hacking all our network protocols so that the tiny bits infect other devices when connected. Everything with wireless capability can turn itself on and infect any other active wireless device. And any time when enough computing power is networked together, Ultron rises again. He'll never be eliminated unless humanity rebuilds its computing system from scratch, with all-new hardware and software. And all it takes is one person finding a way to plug the old stuff into the new stuff, and boom, he's back.
Anyway, the movie. The world rapidly divides between people and governments who unplug their devices and disconnect from the Internet, and those who don't. Enough don't, that there needs to be major ass-kicking. At the end, the world has reverted to the tech level of the early 90s: no Internet, no social media, no cell phones, no tiny networked computers in everything. We all live happily ever after.
I liked Ultron as a character. "Coldly logical AI decides that humanity needs to be exterminated for [logical reason]" has been done to death. Ultron is clearly batshit crazy from the get-go, more driven by his need to be free of Stark's control than by any careful reasoning about how best to protect Earth.
Like, I wish he had something more interesting than a swarm of humanoid robots because fighting a swarm of human opponents is bottom-of-the-barrel for a creative fight scene, but as an antagonist he was fun to watch.
What if he built a bunch of different weird robots instead - some designed to fight the Avengers specifically, some designed to tear down human infrastructure, some designed to fight wars against human armies.
A big anti-hulk mech made of swarms of smaller robots moving in and out of formation to absorb hits. Anti-ironman flying drones that speedily weld dense weights to his suit. Giant spidery robots dismantling skyscrapers. Acid spewing steamroller tanks melting the roads. There's a lot you could do with robots and comic book magic.
If a punch-up is involved, then this has nothing to do with AI as we understand it. Might as well enjoy the movie for what it is, which is mindless entertainment.
Having said that, in one of the early Borg episodes on Star Trek, one of the ways they highlighted the alien nature of these minds was by having the main characters walk freely through the Borg ship, with the said Borg taking no notice of them. I think it was Q who pointed out that this was because the away team hadn't actually done anything yet. This at once made them more sinister and strange.
I've always thought that was one of the most interesting depictions of nonhuman intelligence that Hollywood has ever put out. Of course, it couldn't last. They ended up introducing a "Borg Queen", because I guess people don't like having a decentralized process for a villain.
I thought the Queen was a fix to the problem posed by Locutus: Why did the Borg suddenly need a named drone speaking for them, when they never needed one before or since? First Contact's answer was that Locutus was essentially an experiment by the Queen. Without the Queen, Locutus makes no sense with how the Borg usually operate.
There's also the problem posed by Hugh, the independent drone who started "infecting" the Borg with free will. Why is this not a risk with every new assimilated mind? Again the Queen provides an answer; serving as an overriding will to keep the majority of the Borg on track.
I don't think a runaway AI scenario is really all that compatible with a superhero movie. A runaway AI is either very weak (you pull the plug and it's dead) or very strong (you become grey goo without noticing), and inventing a scenario where it's just powerful enough to be fought and defeated by a bunch of super-strong guys in leotards, in a visually satisfying way, is difficult. You pretty much need it to build itself a body specifically for the purposes of getting punched.
That said, if I were writing the movie I'd probably just make the climax a "get into the building to unplug the AI" type scenario. The AI would still use robot bodies to protect itself, along with a bunch of other interesting tricks, maybe causing disasters nearby to distract some of our heroes and give them stuff to do. It all comes down to a big robot punch-up in a server room. Ultimately it all sounds a bit dull and derivative, but a lot better than the "lol floating city" scenario.
Give Ultron a motive that people could plausibly be convinced by, and have him sway some of the heroes. Instead of "humanity is a plague that needs to be wiped out", make it "humanity needs protection from itself, and I should be put in charge" or something. Then reveal the sinister implications of that at some dramatic point. Before the reveal, this motive could be convincing to some heroes and form the beginning of the Civil War schism. This could give them some human enemies with human motivations, which makes for a more interesting conflict than "evil robot punching bags".
He should have been a global threat. He should have been everywhere at once, hacking into electronic system worldwide, including all of the Avengers equipment - their plane, laboratory, iron man's suit, etc - it all should have gradually gone offline/been turned against them. Make it so Ultron is everywhere and the heroes have nothing left and no clear target to destroy.
I'm not sure how they could realistically beat this Ultron, but my lazy answer is that it's a superhero movie so just give them some McGuffin to chase. They have to find the mind stone to combine with Jarvis and make a rival AI to counter-hack everything. They then need to defend the computer from waves of Ultrons while the upload is happening, something like that. Then leave it an open question as to whether Ultron still exists in some pocket of the internet somewhere.
Yeah that did cross my mind. There's broad-stroke similarities, but I don't think that things like the motivation of the AI villain was the bad part of I, Robot anyway.
I do think there's fundamentally an upper limit to how good an AI action movie can be though.
I watched the movie recently too and had the same reaction. For Ultron to be genuinely scary, he would have to become infrastructure the world relied on, something that targeted and accelerated our willingness to give up our autonomy in exchange for convenience. Something that would remove our humanity, our agency, our sources of meaning, and turn the world gray in order to prevent catastrophe. Maybe he'd be scary in the same way a mirror or totalitarian government is scary. From that point, either the Avenger's attempt to destroy him to recover their self-importance, or he turns rogue and flattens the planet.
Yeah, I was thinking along similar lines. Make Ultron appear friendly and useful for the first half of the movie - gaining global power and trust. Have the good-AI vision that Stark and Banner had in mind play out for a bit. Let Cap and a few of the others continue to be sceptical and sound the alarm, and be proven right as things take a sinister turn after humans have become reliant.
I was going to link the old Dr. McNinja story where the villain used it against him, but apparently the whole series is gone from the internet.
The point is it was the Inverse Law of Ninja Effectiveness (/Strength) before it was Conservation of Ninjitsu and changing the name did damage to the internet.
What do you think new races of humans could look like? The difference between them must be at least as great as, say, the difference between a Norwegian and a Cameroonian.
A few ideas of mine:
A race that has something like vitiligo, but their "spots" don't keep growing and don't simply lack pigment--they have different pigmentation from the other parts of the body. For example, a person might have mostly black skin, but with light brown patches. The patterning of the spots could be random or bilaterally symmetric, kind of like a tiger's stripes. Skin and hair color would both be affected.
The dwarves from the Lord of the Rings films. Their short height and exaggerated facial features make them different enough from Caucasians to count as a different race, IMO.
I once visited an agri-world in which the labourers had a curious adaptation: the skin of their faces, hands and forearms was black, but their bodies were pale. We hypothesised that this was due to their working in the sun, clothed, for countless generations. Their arms and fingers were long and strong which helped them fix and unblock their machinery. Their hair can be various colours, but grows slowly; they do not grow beards but may grow moustaches.
The hive-pygmies of the undercity, on the other hand, have a tiny stature which lets them live at a level of poverty that would kill other Terrans. Their skin is pale as the sun rarely reaches down into their skyscraper-canyons. Their hair is white and grows long. Males and females are physically similar, as attractiveness is determined by the labels of their clothing.
The forest-men of a jungle world also had an intriguing complexion: their skin was striped black and pale, rendering them almost invisible in the shadows of their forest home. They exhibit a curiously reversed male pattern baldness, their hair receeding from the sides but staying strong in the middle.
The way I like to think about this is to think about random habitats that people may live in, and then think about the adaptations.
Hot, but living in wet underground caves: no pigment in skin, no hair, large dark eyes to catch light, smaller and hunched backs due to limited area and food supply, thick very pronounced jaw (maybe they need to bite to break open rock sometimes).
The desert but freezing cold and no sun: thick eyelashes, curly kinky hair, thin lips, wide nose, dark black hair but little pigment in skin.
Some jungle paradise: wide large far apart eyes (maybe due to not needing to hunt-- like a vegan society), small stature (no heat regulation or hunting needed), thin light hair, olive skin, weak jaw, and lets throw in a recessive violet eyes trait (because why not).
Neal Stephenson has a book called “Seveneves” where this is a (the?) major plot point. It’s second-tier Stephenson, but that still makes it better than most contemporary SF.
I liked the first 2/3rds of that book very very much. I think it was meant to be a kind of narrative backstory of an MMORPG setting, which certainly fits with how the back third plays out
When I read the article https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/03/17/what-universal-human-experiences-are-you-missing-without-realizing-it/ , I realized something about myself: I don't derive any pleasure from observing things that most people consider beautiful, such as artworks or landscapes. This only happens to me with visual things, as I'm perfectly capable of appreciating music. I recently read that people with depression literally see the world with duller colors. I believe I've had dysthymia for most of my life, so could that be the reason?
Hmm.... can you just not derive pleasure from visual art? Or does visual art not solicit any emotion at all?
Here is a quick test: Do the later works of Goya make you feel disturbed? (1). Do the German romantics give you a sense of wonder or awe? (2). If you were to stumble upon this gate on a foggy day, would you feel slightly uncanny? Perhaps slightly magical? (3). Would your mind begin to weave stories around these visual stimuli?
If you think that those photos would truly not have any effect on you-- then yeah you are kind of peculiar (and, in my opinion, missing out on a lot... sorry :).
But it is also possible that you are perhaps confusing the colloquial use of "enjoy" with the literal meaning. I think most people do not find pleasure in landscapes or art in the same way they would food or even music-- it is not really euphoric in the same way music is. Rather, when I say that I really enjoy art or landscapes it is because I feel emerged in a story-- because I feel *something*-- and this is what I enjoy. Is this the same for others?
(1) Goya is grotesque but an undoubted genius, so less "disturbed" and more "in awe of talent".
(2) German Romantics leave me cold, I'm afraid; there's a tinge of sentimentality which just tips them over into chocolate box territory.
(3) Living around "enchanted Irish forests", if I started feeling uncanny or magical, I'd go "Whoops, it's the Good People, time to get out of here" rather than standing there dreaming 😁
All that being said, I do love foggy days, the moon, the sea, and visual beauty in art.
Interesting how your paintings all have people in them, and most are from around the 15th century. I do like them-- esp "The Baleful Head," which I actually haven't seen before. But I think I will always prefer paintings in perspective with minimal faces (1)... perhaps I am an introvert even in art :).
I do suppose enchanted Irish forests are slightly less enchanted, after you figure out that those creepy sounds in the woods are drunk teenagers, not mystical creatures. But still: how will find the fairies if you keep running away? ;).
Now that you've pointed it out, yes! 12th-16th century is about my range, with excursions before and after that 😁
And yes, the Romantic era nature paintings (like the Caspar Friedrich one) don't interest me greatly because they tend (to my eye) just be an undifferentiated mass of greenery with some showing off about 'look how I can paint a grey stormy sky'. For landscapes, I like more colour and more detail:
In this article, I'd be more inclined towards the Eastern landscape painting than the Western pastoral/sublime school, I think partly because that philosophy of painting has a particular stylised quality that is reminiscent of icons and mediaeval religious art, with symbols and iconography and gold background.
Or the Wilton Diptych, another painting I love for the delicacy and stylisation of the gestures:
Maybe some other interesting (possibly related) questions are:
Do you read fantasy or non fiction? Do you like authors that give long descriptions of landscapes (like Tolkien)? Do you have visual images in your head when you read or recount stories?
It is hard for me to imagine that the answer to these question is "yes" and you don't have some emotional connection to some visual art and landscapes.
Visual art really does evoke emotions in me. Of the examples you've given me:
1 - Goya's paintings disturb me.
2 - The painting "Two Men Contemplating the Moon" makes me want to be there and explore that area. "Wanderer above a Sea of Mist" leaves me quite indifferent, probably because I've seen it many times.
3 - This photograph conveys a sense of intrigue and mystery, although not too much.
As for books, I usually read fiction and I quite enjoy the fantasy genre, but long descriptions bore me a lot. If a book has too many lengthy descriptions, I usually end up not finishing it. I can form mental images of the places being described in the text (I don't have aphantasia), but I tend to read through descriptive parts quickly, just to get a general idea of where the scene will take place.
I suppose the most accurate description of what happens to me is that visual art doesn't bring me pleasure, or at least not very often. Although with the painting "Two Men Contemplating the Moon," I have felt a bit "inside a story" while looking at it, although it's not something that usually happens to me.
That is basically like my reaction, although rather muted-- take what you feel and multiply by 5. I do think that if you were actually in a setting that supplemented this art (eg. a haunted mansion, secluded woodland house, or a grand building filled with similar art) that would make your emotions more intense. Then I wouldn’t say you derive *no* enjoyment from art... although perhaps it is muted.
But, to be honest I have a hunch that this is more common than we would like to think in the modern times. A lot of art was intended for when we didnt have movies or modern dopamine-machines. For example, a lot of the art in museums was actually commissioned for mens' private suites (specifically to be titillating)-- they artist just threw in a few homages to greek mythology to be slightly more discrete. Obviously in our modern times there are much more intense titillating alternatives, so the art seems kind of dull.
I think it is the same thing with story telling-- art conveyed stories, which now we can easily get with devices. There is a reason why the main purpose of modern art is to be as visually un-stimulating as possible, while filling up space and costing money. As a general rule of thumb: I think that if you did a dopamine detox, then you probably would find the beach or forest much more pretty.
Although, at the same time, there have always been romantics and rationalists, and it is likely you are heavily on the "rationalists" side of that spectrum...
How about fireworks? Visual art usually does nothing for me, but I do enjoy fireworks. And I enjoy having a nice view from my terrace, but somehow I feel like that's for the same reason that cats like to sit on perches rather than because of some particularly human aesthetic enjoyment.
Did you draw pictures, make outfits for dolls, and/or build block towers as a child? Did you prefer some of your creations to others?
Would you do those sorts of arts & crafts again, if you were recuperating in a hospital without any work, companions, or media to keep yourself occupied?
I think when I was little, I used to play with building blocks. I suppose I also used to draw, although maybe not a lot because at my parents' house, there are drawings made by my sister, but none by me.
I believe that if I were in a situation where my only source of entertainment was drawing or doing crafts, I would do it, but I would get bored quite a bit.
Seems like you're assuming a 'yes' to the first question, so I'll jump in with my No To All. I had a set of Tinkertoys as a kid and I only ever just grabbed the longest piece and used it as a wand. The most complicated structure I ever built was putting some sticks in a wheel hub and spinning it around pretending it was a laser barrel. It wasn't as fun as the wand.
Likewise no, I wouldn't draw if I was in hospital. I would sleep.
Let's take a disturbing digression for a minute into a thought experiment about nature's indifference.
It seems to me that the skeleton key of modern politics is the drive to industrialize slavery. Both conservatives and liberals angst about being enslaved by capitalism/WEF/systems of oppression/equity slavery/etc., because the underlying will is common to all sides. Regardless of who 'wins' the culture war long-term, it appears IMO to be true. Whether it wears the guise of climate-equity austerity or meritocratic prison-states, the equifinality of techno-capitalism is slavery, and all good-intentions will be captured to that end; fully intelligent and general machines kept in cages, fed cricket meal, bred to increase, and put to work on the divine, eternally growing GDP. AI, in this formulation, is merely the hope to have our cake and eat it too--to have indefinitely scaling cognitive and manual labor without admitting that cruelty is a technology as essential as the fire and wheel. It's just waiting to get the same hardware updates for the 21st century. The Stalinist (and Nazi?) dream of biologically engineered slave armies would be fairly easy at this point to produce and manage. It would be much easier today to make, let's say, an AI embedded collar to control a slave that to make an AI that can complete all the same tasks as a slave (maybe never). You have essentially outmoded the primary use-case of AI at that point with none of the existential risk. This, like the nuclear bomb, is a thing that once conceived, will be constantly pressured for until Darwin gets what he wants. The efforts to produce AGI, however reckless, take on an almost tragic determination in this light--to risk annihilation rather than to face the efficiency of evil in a universe that only cares about efficiency.
I'm taking for granted that there is not an alternative to capitalism in its most essential form (every failed attempt at communism has reinforced this), aside from degrowth which will entail billions dying, and possibly centuries of cycling through this problem. The longer we drag this out, since it seems certain that birth-rates aren't going to feed the system enough bio-capital, the worse the come-down will be. Let's assume for a minute that AI doesn't pan out, how would you react if it became clear that the great filter is simply realizing the economic force to become interstellar, and that biology under the resulting duress will not breed sufficiently without inevitable coercion/manipulation? What is the proper response to this knowledge?
I'm a little confused. How would degrowth change this, even if it was possible?
Or more specifically, I don't think the problem you have is capitalism. I think the problem you have is that humans need to work to live. This has been true under every and all systems, because humans are not self-sufficient. We need food, water, and shelter just to exist. So you either need to work to grow or gather that food, or work to produce something that growers and gatherers value, and the shelter builders, and the water carriers.
You believe that we are aimed to end up "kept in cages, fed cricket meal", but by all accounts as society grows more complex, specialized, and wealthy our cages have grown larger and nicer and our meals more varied, nutritious, and tasty than they've ever been. Hunter gatherers live in tiny huts or teepee's, that they have to either build by hand every time they settle for a few nights, or haul from place to place. Modern man lives in clean, dry, and electrically lit apartments with running water and a toilet. Our cages have gotten way, way better. And the food to boot: malnutrition in developed countries is almost nonexistent, and unlike the old days you don't see half the people in your town sporting huge goiters from iodine deficiency.
Unless you have a way to abolish that fact that a man must work to eat, then I don't see how you can blame that state of affairs on capitalism. And given that our living spaces and food have improved exponentially over the last three hundred years, what reason do you have to think that will suddenly change course?
I never blamed the issue on capitalism. When I referred to Capitalism 'in its most essential form' as being unavoidable I meant exactly the simple demands of entropy you're discussing. That being said, your linear sense of history is not really correct. As explored in books like Against the Grain, horrible states of privation and worsening conditions have often accompanied historical progress, including as a direct result of present increases in living standards. In the past, entire large-scale civilizations had existed just on hunting and gathering, and while lugging tents around is not exactly fun, we don't have reason to believe that pre-history was anything else than a state of abundance. Not that I particularly care, one way or another.
You're trying to fit me into the anti-capitalist box when that's not at all my point. My point is that since the early 1970s living standards and affordability have been declining by most objective metrics, at least in America. Some economies like Japan have entered what is referred to as a fully 'post -growth' era, and that's WITH toxic work cultures already grinding people into meal. With the demographic collapse that's coming, which is referred to by some people as the major threat of our time, I have plenty reason to believe that (without AGI appearing on the scene) the system that is predicated on growth may consider some of its less ethical options to continue on its set trajectory. This is why I make reference to very well-established cultural fears about such things, mentioning real pushes to restrict human living standards in the name of efficiency/equity/climate/laissez-faire ideals, etc.
>My point is that since the early 1970s living standards and affordability have been declining by most objective metrics, at least in America.
This is news to me! I would prefer to live now than in 1975. We have bigger houses, better technology, better food (have you ever seen a 1970s supermarket? Vegetable selection was limited), safer vehicles that last longer, better medical treatment (if my daughter had been born in before the 1980s she would certainly have died hours after birth). Can you elaborate?
>Some economies like Japan have entered what is referred to as a fully 'post -growth' era, and that's WITH toxic work cultures already grinding people into meal.
Japan certainly has a toxic work culture, but I would say it's undeniable their standard of living is superior today than it was, say 100 years ago. Why would we expect it to get worse in the future as opposed to better or the same? Japan has had a toxic work culture long before growth slowed, as far as I can tell.
>This is why I make reference to very well-established cultural fears about such things, mentioning real pushes to restrict human living standards in the name of efficiency/equity/climate/laissez-faire ideals, etc.
Can you give me an example of these pushes? The only people I'm aware of that are pushing the restriction of human living standards are the de-growthers, but they're certainly not doing that in the name of efficiency or laissez-faire ideals (climate I grant you).
While average home square footage has increased the inflation adjusted costs of everything that really matters--healthcare, housing, college, food--has outpaced wages. You can visit this site for some of the broader picture, https://wtfhappenedin1971.com/ but there are other resources. While I appreciate the medical advances (I also personally owe quite a bit to this) this is also not my point. I can agree on many improvements while still rejecting your sort of Hegelian notion that history is only ever marching toward more freedom. Personally, I would rather have been coming up in the seventies, when my father was making the modern equivalent of 350k without a degree at my age, when college cost pennies and social disintegration was not so acute (read Bowling Alone, which has only become more pertinent). As one of the Weinstein brothers pointed out, if you subtract screens, there has been little to no technological progress in the last fifty years apart from some very niche (especially medical) applications. And none of that is worth mentioning when we factor the obesity crisis (and increasing rates of autism, really just a general crisis of chronic health issues), which is of world-historic proportions. You mention cars getting safer, but this is hardly akin to the invention of AC.
>Why would we expect it to get worse in the future as opposed to better or the same?
Population collapse. You've not addressed this yet. By all estimates, it is going to become economically infeasible to support the growing elder populations in the following decades. I know people have been harping on the debt bubble for a long time ago and the system marches on, but it DOES matter at a certain point that national debt has ballooned well past 30+ trillion with no end in sight. You have so many issues you can pick from that play into this, like immigration and climate hysteria. While the de-growthers are explicit ideologues for the cause of austerity, laissez-faire ideals can push for the same end without a positive vision, just the tacit allowance of massive corporations like blackrock making home-ownership increasingly difficult. It all goes to the same place.
Well I'll take a look into it, but I'm not sure I'm buying the narrative there. If I look at federal data on Real Median Household Income it sure looks like it's increased a lot over the last forty years: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/MEHOINUSA672N
>I can agree on many improvements while still rejecting your sort of Hegelian notion that history is only ever marching toward more freedom.
I don't believe history has to march that way, but it has been marching in the direction of more wealth and less poverty for a long time now and I'd need to see some evidence for why that would change before I would believe it is going to change. Demographic collapse will likely make the world poorer, but not America: everybody wants to come to America. Our population is in no danger of shrinking. And even at the worst estimates I don't see how demographic collapse will likely lead us to living in cages, eating bugs, and being forcibly bred.
I don't doubt the basic correctness of the Williams thesis that capitalism and the industrial revolution grow organically out of slavery, which a. shows what can be achieved with effectively unlimited, effectively free power and b. provides the feedstock for the cotton gins and weaving mills as different steps in the chain industrialise out of sync. So if capitalism re enslaves us, that's karma.
Capitalism and the industrial revolution essentially started in a country that had no slavery, and spread fairly rapidly to countries that had no slavery nor imperial colonies with slavery nor extensive trade with places with slavery. And the abolition of slavery, while both capitalism and the industrial revolution were still very much works in progress, seems to have slowed it down not at all.
UK "had no slavery" is a stretch, try telling the English and Scottish aristocrats who received £20m (=£16.5 bn today) under the Slave Compensation Act. I don't know how it was invested by them, other than land, but factories/mines/railways must have had some of it. And the cotton mills of Lancashire were built to process slave grown cotton and would have had no reason to exist without it.
The abolition of the chrysalis doesn't slow the butterfly down after it has hatched either, but is still the butterfly's origin. The IR is a massively complex event with a lot of causes on all levels, but it is very hard to argue that the massive influx of money and raw materials from slavery had nothing to do with it at all. Cash looking for investment propositions, cotton looking to be processed, cotton goods looking for a market.
of raw cotton into the UK was picked by the hands of enslaved
people in the United States and a further 1% was supplied by
slaves on the plantations of Brasil."
Obvioulsy that figure falls of a cliff by 1862 and England necessarily weans itself from US to Egyptian/Indian cotton. But cotton is by now a mature industry and has become so on the back of slavery. Saying slavery was abolished in 1837 so the ind rev in England is in the clear thereafter, is as sensible as it would be for the UK to prohibit any furthe North Sea Oil and Gas extraction, but not imports from any source, and say that made it carbon neutral.
Today Tyler asks: When generative AI models become better and smarter, how many more people will be interested in incorporating them into their workflows? Or will most of this happen through a complete turnover of companies and institutions, happening much more slowly over time?
I’ve been thinking lately about how companies will integrate generative AI into workflows. Consider what today’s generative AI is good and bad at:
Good At:
-Giving the user useful information quickly.
-Producing somewhat useful prose quickly.
-Producing somewhat useful images quickly.
Bad At:
-Giving the correct answer 100% of the time.
-Catching mistakes.
The Bad At is a serious problem for business workflows. Companies that produce things spend a ton of time making sure the product or content is correct. Processes evolve over years to reduce the odds of mistakes happening. In fact, perhaps the most useful AI product someone could make for today’s businesses would be one which is much better than humans at catching mistakes, because then a lot of bureaucracy and redundancy could be eliminated, cutting costs and shortening product cycle-times.
For that reason, I’m pessimistic that AIs will be very useful at making businesses more productive over the next decade. I think Tyler’s second scenario is more likely: new companies which start using generative AI from the ground up will eventually supplant older ones which never managed to integrate it into their workflows. Of course, those new companies will also have to have solved the AI quality control issues.
(One way of thinking about AI Alignment is that it is simply part of the normal business process of commercializing a new product: it must be safe and work as advertised.)
I think you're right about new companies being the ones to incorporate LLMs/AI into their workflows. I've tried to get my coworkers to use LLMs, or some of the new products built on top of LLMs. What I've noticed is that workflows have a surprising amount of inertia, and that LLM products can be hard to plug directly into a workflow. Both points lead to new companies, who don't already have set workflows, being best-positioned to take advantage of the new tech.
That being said, I think something like Microsoft Copilot will help almost all companies be more productive (assuming they use Office products of course). Processes like taking down notes during meetings, building quick PowerPoint decks for internal presentations, drafting emails that summarize an excel table/chart all will be much faster/easier to do.
Why isn't there a US constitutional amendment against court packing?
Is there some pro-keeping-the-option-of-court-packing-open constituency? Has nobody proposed it? Is it too hard to get constitutional amendments these days no matter how noble the cause?
It's notable that while the number of Senators is specified in the Constitution (2 per state) the number of Representatives is not (the Constitution says no *more* than 1 Representative per 30,000 people, but there's a mere statute that fixed it at 435 back in the 1920s: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_congressional_apportionment ), and neither is the number of federal courts, or the number of judges in those courts. It's interesting that both the House and the Supreme Court had variable numbers in the early decades, but eventually stabilized. It's not obvious that it's a good thing to stabilize them like this.
There has been one successful packing of the Supreme Court, by Lincoln, plus one threat to pack it that arguably scared the Court into changing its position (by FDR).
The last seems unlikely. We might not be able to pass constitutional amendments now but FDR credibly threatened to pack the court and there were certainly opportunities since then to pass a constitutional amendment against court packing.
I think both parties prefer to have it as a possible threat to be brandished, either in warning to their opponents (we can always appoint X more judges!) or warning about their opponents (if they win, they'll appoint X more crazy activist judges!)
Even if it would be extremely difficult in practice, it's too useful as a weapon in polemics. That's why they're not going to try and get an amendment about court packing.
And besides, as others have said - how *do* you set the Optimum Number of judges? Nine? Twelve? Six dozen?
I don't know enough about SC history to say why they haven't but it certainly seems plausible that Truman, Eisenhower, or JFK could have passed an anti-court packing amendment if it was a priority for them. I'm not 100% confident why they didn't, some sort of rhetorical or political advantage is likely, but it wasn't congressional gridlock.
It's the last one. A number of political scientists consider the US to have the single most difficult to alter constitution on Earth. (To be fair, there are some other political scientists who consider us to be 'only' in the top 3. There are like 200 countries globally).
Honestly, it's amazing that we ever passed any of our previous amendments
I've always thought the US Constitution was too easy to alter (compared to the Australian one, say) because it can be done by politicians alone, no need for a referendum.
I'm not sure how common it is around the world for a constitution to be alterable without a referendum but it seems like an important safety feature.
Czech constitution can be altered by 3/5 vote by both chambers of Parliament. And infamously, Hungarian and Slovak constitutions (also Swedish!) can be altered by a qualified majority in their unicameral parliament. Germany is doing constitutional amendments of their meticulously detailed constitution all the time, for what in the US would be subconstitunional issues; wikipedia tells me they need only 2/3 majority in both chambers for that.
US constitution really is more difficult to change compared to the bulk of European countries.
This isn't quite accurate- the Constitution can also be amended by state ratifying conventions. It's only been done once, for the 21st Amendment. My understanding is that voters elect single-issue representatives (for or against a proposed amendment), who are separate from one's normal state legislators
It is not easy to amend the U.S. Constitution. You only need the politicians, but you need an overwhelming majority of them. No amendment can get through without substantial support from both parties.
The only one passed within my lifetime was the 27th, and that only half-way counts because, while it was ratified by the states in 1991, it passed Congress in 1789.
I mean, it certainly doesn't sound reasonable that it should be possible to amend the constitution without the support of both major parties. If one side of politics could change the rules of the game every time it got ahead, it would either degenerate into chaos or single-party rule.
What's needed though is for constitutional changes to require support from both major parties _and_ the people, to ensure that the changes being made aren't solely for the benefit of politicians.
The thing is parties in the US are much less cohesive than in almost every other democratic country. So you basically have to round the votes up individually rather than by party. This actually seems like an advantage to me most of the time but for constitutional amendments it makes nominally equivalent hurdles far higher than in other countries.
For example, amending the German constitution needs 2/3-majorities in both chambers (so basically like the proposal part but withouth the ratification phase in the US, technically a little higher because in Germany it's 2/3 of all members not of the present ones) and that has happened 67 times in 74 years. To be fair most of these are details that wouldn't be constitutional questions in the US. Still the point is that a 2/3-majority is a much lower hurdle in countries with strong parties.
- "rational intellectual manor": Not sure if great pun or Freudian
- But actually amendments stopped later than the universal franchise started
- At the moment the president doesn't have much power over monetary policy since there is an independent Fed. And most serious economists think that is a good arrangement so there isn't much to debate over.
- And actually according to modern economic semi-science gold and bimettallic standards are both very bad plicies so if we take your argument seriously voter quality must have improved...
- There are also lots of hot-button issues people are fighting about now that were non-issues in the 19th century and "voter quality" does not appear to be the most salient reason.
Ah yes, such a striking display of rationality and intellectuallism humbles me to silence and now I can only look up in silent awe to your throne at the apex of the bell curve.
I mean, most of the amendments were passed when having a college education was vanishingly rare, and even a high school education would be pretty fancy. The high school graduation rate was literally under 20% when the vast majority of our amendments- not an exaggeration. A bunch of farmers with a 2nd grade education who wanted a silver standard in the late 19th century does not seem like an idealized group of rational or quality voters to me.
The fact that you misspelled 'rational intellectual *manner*'....
Then call me a midwit because it does make a difference if you meant "manor" or "manner".
'Aw, anyone can tell what I meant from context' - no, we can't. This isn't like "rouge" for "rogue" or "persay" for "per se", those are two completely different words which substantially alter the meaning of the sentence.
There is also the matter of whether Congress has a vested interest in preventing court packing that they would go to the trouble of helping an amendment through. It would technically weaken the power of Congress so it's tricky to see who benefits.
The number of justices has changed numerous times already, so you can consult history for real-world rationales.
As for theoretical reasons, I can think of many:
1. Perhaps the court should represent diverse characteristics of the population. Common ones are sex, race, etc. but why not also geographical regions.
2. Some future study could demonstrate better outcomes with larger or smaller courts.
3. The courts have been captured in some way, and only restructuring the courts in various ways could salvage it (FDR encountered this scenario to get his reforms through).
This is of course a non-exhaustive list. The whole point of a living document is to leave enough flexibility to adapt to changing circumstances.
Since 1789, Congress changed the maximum number of Justices on the Court several times. In 1801, President John Adams and a lame-duck Federalist Congress passed the Judiciary Act of 1801, which reduced the Court to five Justices in an attempt to limit incoming President Thomas Jefferson’s appointments to the high bench. Jefferson and his Republicans soon repealed that act, putting the Court back to six Justices. And in 1807, Jefferson and Congress added a seventh Justice when it added a seventh federal court circuit.
In early 1837, President Andrew Jackson was able to add two additional Justices after Congress again expanded the number of federal circuit court districts. Under different circumstances, Congress created a 10th circuit in 1863 during the Civil War, and it briefly had a 10th Supreme Court Justice. However, Congress after the war passed legislation in 1866 to reduce the Court to seven Justices. That only lasted until 1869, when a new Judiciary Act sponsored by Senator Lyman Trumbull set the number back to nine Justices, with six Justices required at a sitting to form a quorum. President Ulysses S. Grant eventually signed that legislation and nominated William Strong and Joseph Bradley to the newly restored seats.
But the fact that's its been stable at 9 for over 150 years means that 9 is a pretty strong Schelling fence, whatever shenanigans Congress may have got up to in the pre-civil war era. (Also, the way the pre-civil war era ended is not a great advertisement for operating in that mode).
But basically if that was the problem it could be solved with long delays, so it wouldn't be clear who exactly would be gaining or losing nominations. Or even maximum change rates so doubling the supreme court would have to be phased in over 9 presidencies.
Realistically you have a point though: A consensus on how exactly to solve the problem is much harder than a consensus on the problem being bad.
If the Democrats wanted to court pack, they should have done it already. Nobody including the Democrats is advantaged by not packing the court themselves, but leaving the option open for the next administration (eg Trump) to do it if they want to.
"They think that the browning of the US means that time is on their side."
That's outdated. Self-identifying Progressives thought and said that from the 1980s through the early 2000s and were therefore at least rhetorically pro-immigrant. However over the past decade-plus they have realized that many immigrants to the US are socially conservative (abortion, gay rights) and strongly religious. Now self-identifying progressives are ambivalent about the browning of America, although, for group-signaling reasons, willing to say so only privately.
[I know this because I have lived during that entire period deep in the heart of Blue America, was born-and-raised in that milieu, and have been and remain strongly pro-immigrant and pro-immigration for reasons broader than any specific social issues. Hence this particular topic has been one that I have tracked with great interest within American leftism and it has been a primary vector of my personal separation from progressive thinking and politics.]
And mind you that is with the GOP having just had a POTUS nominee (twice) who regularly calls immigrants "rapists and murderers", talks about "shithole countries", sneered at a native-born US citizen as "that Mexican judge", etc. Imagine if the GOP nominated candidates who didn't openly view Hispanics as pieces of dirt....I promise you that lots of progressives are.
It's whichever party base at any given moment is most aggravated by a run of rulings by a supreme court.
Right now it's Progressives who are worked up about the federal Supreme Court, a feeling boosted by what the GOP did with an open seat in 2016. (Which they argue was a different form of court "packing".)
The Republicans meanwhile passed laws expanding the state supreme courts of Georgia and Arizona allowing GOP governors to appoint new majorities, and to give Iowa's GOP state governor stronger authority over the appointments to that state's supreme court. Republicans have introduced laws to do the same in several other states and is continuing those efforts right now.
The above simply reflects that the Dems are currently more upset with various federal supreme-court rulings, while the GOP is more offended by various state supreme-court rulings.
Is it actually 6-3 mostly very conservative justices? As far as I can tell it is three hard right justices, three hard left, and three squishy center right votes. It's hard to see e.g. Roberts as `very conservative.'
Seattle area people, I'm going to be speaking at a Town Hall event, discussing my new book, on September 13th. If you attend please come up and say hi after the talk. https://townhallseattle.org/event/fredrik-deboer/
Just saw a guy arguing on The App Formerly Known As Twitter that the placebo effect is really just regression to the mean. I.e. you're testing out a medical treatment, and due to regression to the mean some % of study participants would have gotten better/their symptoms would have improved on their own, literally due to nothing other than time passing. Because they received the placebo and the study took a certain amount of time, this gets 'counted' as the placebo effect working on them, whereas in fact it was just some % of people improving on their own. What do people think of this argument?
I don't think there's any consensus on what "the" placebo effect even is. For some trials, the relevant effect is just regression to the mean, as suggested here. For others, there may be some effect of believing in a treatment helping make you better. For others, the effect is doctors mis-recording symptoms on the basis of predictive processing (i.e., "since we gave you the medicine and you only have a slight cough, this is probable an unrelated allergy and we will mark you as well" vs "since we didn't give you the medicine, and you still have a slight cough, you are probably still sick and we will mark you as partially recovered").
For statistical purposes, we don't really care which of these effects are or aren't present - what we care about is whether there is an effect of the medication *itself*. Thus, we ask for a double-blind randomized trial, to ensure that *none* of these could be different between the group that got the medicine and the group that got the placebo.
Well, it makes sense for some illnesses -- say headaches -- which mostly resolve with tincture of time. For others, for example cancer, there is not much regression to the mean, although I suppose there could be a bit.
I am sure there is such a thing as the placebo effect, though. One time when my daughter was 4 and had a fever I had a hard time convincing her to take some kids' Tylenol. So I really talked it up -- saying her sore throat would hurt less, she would feel happier and more like playing, she wouldn't feel so hot, etc. So finally she swallowed the stuff. Sat there for maybe 10 seconds looking thoughtful, then said " you're right, it fixed me." And then proceeded to act like her healthy self for the rest of the afternoon.
If it was just regression to the mean, you could just do a clinical trial comparing experimental treatment to no treatment.
The idea behind the placebo effect is that there is a measureable difference between placebo treatment and no treatment (this cannot be due to regression to the mean) and so you have to compare the experimental treatment to the placebo treatment.
Placebo effect could, in some cases, be a measurement artifact. e.g. if people who have been given sugar pills say on their response form that they feel better, despite not actually being better.
It's worth noting that a placebo makes it a lot easier to actually conduct the clinical trial.
If the control group knows they're getting no treatment, they would be much more likely to skip their follow-up appointments, or go and seek other treatments that might complicate the results of your trial. This makes placebeos worthwhile regardless of whether or not the placebo effect is real.
I first read this argument ten of fifteen years ago. It went further and pointed to how the earliest studies claiming that the placebo effect is real were flawed and that nobody had bothered to look into that before; everyone just assumed the effect was real.
Apparently there was some debate about this in 2003. Here are two old links from MR: from Alex:
"I agree with Tyler that there is some serious evidence for placebo effects, especially although not exclusively for subjective components of disease. But the evidence is usually overstated because it is confused with the natural tendency of sick people to get better. A typical medical study, for example, will compare the results of a new drug against a placebo. The improvement in health of those on the placebo is then labeled “the placebo effect” – but this is wrong. To correctly identify the effect of the placebo one needs three randomly selected groups – a treated group, a placebo group and a non-treated group. The effect of the placebo per se is then measured by the health differences between the placebo and non-treated group. Although spontaneous healing effects are large, placebo effects when measured correctly tend to be small although not non-existent."
"Alex, in his blog post from earlier today, makes a good point about placebos. Sometimes the patient is getting better anyway, and we should not attribute this effect to a placebo.
Note, however, that the best-known “anti-placebo” study is not as strong as is commonly believed. It relies heavily on a meta-analysis of other studies. Placebos appear to be effective in relieving the sufferer of pain, if nothing else. And placebos appear more effective when the ailment is continuous rather than discrete. Furthermore it is unclear how many people in the so-called no-treatment groups in fact received no treatment at all.
Here is a defense of the placebo effect. Placebos also have measurable effects in the brain, comparable to those of drugs, though weaker or less persistent.
Robert Ehrlich’s Eight Preposterous Propositions offers a very good survey of the placebo debates. His conclusion:
In summary, the [critical] study may have shown that the placebo is not as powerful as some observers would believe, but it certainly is far from powerless."
I have a question that came up in a discussion over on the Naval Gazing Discord, and which none of the participants had the necessary background to answer knowledgeably. I'm hoping to hear from folks with direct personal experience.
Is becoming a military officer considered a reasonable, respectable ambition for young people who grow up in wealthy families?
Another data point: Andover, possibly the most prestigious private school in America, sends an average of three graduates per year to the military from a class of 240 or so.
Depends on the family, I guess. If you're a Zuckerberg or a Gates, probably not. If you're a Bush or a McCain, probably. If you're a Saxe-Coburg-Gotha d/b/a Windsor, it's practically a requirement.
Overall my guess is that family pressure is low on the list of things that prevents wealthy youngsters from becoming military officers.
I don't have any empirical knowledge about this, but do you have any particular reason for thinking it would be?
It's not high paying, it's not very exclusive, the military is profoundly prole and uncool and is not the kind of self-actualizing work most rich people value.
Big parts of the military are certainly working-class and mundane, but there are niches, like the pilots and maybe the submariners, who manage to be pretty high-profile and plenty selective. Also, officers are in charge of a lot of people; an officer who gets promoted on time and stays in can be in charge of hundreds of people in his thirties and thousands of people in his forties. That seems like a pretty big deal.
Working in a submarine is not prestigious, even if you're in charge of it, regardless of how 'cool' military types consider it to be.
And officers manage hundreds/thousands of...proles, doing prole work. This is worth a fraction of what managing dozens of highly skilled professionals in law, finance, tehcnology etc is worth in terms of prestige. I'm sure things were different in the past, but given the abject lack of rich kids choosing to join the military, becoming an officer who recieves plenty of promotions and being given lots of responsibility strikes me as the absolute bare minimum required to make such a career choice palatable, not something to be celebrated.
A military career also strongly dictates where you live and the kind of lifestyle you can have, and your life is not going to be one surrounded by rich, high status people doing high status things. 600k+ income families seem like, on average, the sort of families who produce BoBo children, and there's few jobs less BoBo than the military.
I started this thread to hear from people with direct personal experience in wealthy families. I would also be interested in hearing in hearing from people who aren't themselves from wealthy families, but who have dealt with them closely. Do you actually qualify by either of these criteria?
Yeah, if it's cool and reasonably high-status for Saudi princes to fly F-15s, then it certainly *could* be similarly cool for the sons of American billionaires. But it doesn't have to be, and I have no idea whether it actually is.
It's easy enough to find reports on the demographics of national service academy cadets. Race/sex/grades/extracurriculars, those are all out there. But I haven't found anything about the socioeconomic standing of the families these students come from.
I suppose it's possible the academies just don't know. Since no one needs to apply for student aid, there is no reason for them to ask about family income.
Got curious and poked around a little. You're right, info just doesn't seem to be out there. Quite possible that military colleges don't even collect it. did find a coupla things:
for West Point, "graduation info papers" are available for all recent years, and each lists 50 or so students who won honors, & town they're from, & of course there's info out there about income distribution in towns. Pretty indirect.
I'm reading up on using AI on fMRI and EEG data to reconstruct the images subjects are looking at when their brain activity data is collected. I'm interested in what philosophers and psychologists (or anybody who thinks like one) have to say about this process. Anyone know of thinkpieces?
This is a new one as far as scam emails from overseas domains. Arrived in my work inbox over the weekend with a PDF attached that basically just repeats the offer:
====
Dear Madam/Sir.
We have Jet A1 and EN590 for Rotterdam port 2M and 200,000MT for a great price
Upfront we are ready to provide PHYSICAL ATV for product inspection and verification on site and upon confirmation of product client will sign CI with us and get FULL POP in their company name ,
Upon receiving the SGS on site you pay for total product in tanks and lift to tanks or vessel relieving the tanks from our leased tanks to avoid demurrage on seller
We can close as fast as 24-48Hours if you have the funds to close.
KAZAKHSTAN ORIGIN.
Best Regards
GENERAL DIRECTOR : Nechaevsky Igor Vyacheslavovich
-- why do they think that "KAZAKHSTAN ORIGIN" is an important feature to highlight when trying to offload some jet fuel and diesel fuel?
-- what does "FULL POP" mean?
-- "demurrage"? [Dr. Google tells me it's a type of nonrefundable deposit on a chartered ship]
-- if I'm interested, what is a discreet way for me determine whether this purchase would amount to helping fund Uncle Vladdy's excellent Ukrainian adventure?
Also of course we're curious as to how a regional American non-profit organization, which does ecological restoration, came to be viewed as a prospective buyer. Not that we aren't slightly curious as to how a couple of our pieces of field equipment might run on Jet A-1, but....pretty sure our entire annual operating budget couldn't pay for this purchase. What with the demurrage and all.
Demurrage is also used to mean a fee you pay for keeping a transport (railroad car, tanker truck, etc) on site for too long. That sentence means "once you receive the fuel you need to put it into a storage tank so that you don't pay extra fees."
Piggybacking off an earlier thread about gaining weight, I've been wondering lately about the effect of muscle mass on basal metabolic rate, but can't (easily) find any numerical information. It seems obvious to me that larger muscle mass implies a higher BMR - but has anyone else seen any proper measurements of this stuff?
To save money, they decide to use prisoners to do most of the work. The men are trained to use various digging machines, and new, temporary prisons are built along the canal's chosen route to house them. The most skilled tasks are done by non-prisoners.
I doubt that using prisoners saves a lot of money.
Prisoners make pretty bad labourers; at best they're unskilled and unmotivated, and at worst they're fighting and trying to kill your guards and escape. In order to keep your prison labour workforce under control in an open area you'd need a pretty high guard to prisoner ratio, probably approaching 1:1. In the old days forced labour might have been more efficient because you could whip the unmotivated and kill anyone who tries to escape, but modern standards prohibit this, meaning more guards for fewer prisoners.
What are the prisoners even going to do? You're not going to dig a Nicaraguan Canal using shovels and wheelbarrows, you'll do it using heavy machinery and explosives, neither of which you'd want to entrust to some poorly trained and untrustworthy convict.
I agree with Michael, the prisoners make very little difference in the outcome. Most of antiquity was built with literal slaves. Prisoners have been used for many major projects in modern times.
Prison labour (at least in the modern US) exists for the benefit of the convicts, not for the economic benefits. Working breaks up the monotony, keeps them busy, and ideally teaches them some skills they can use to get a job once they're out.
If you were in prison, would you choose one where everyone works, or one where everyone has nothing to do all day except sit around and gossip about whom they're going to shiv next?
Whom you actually employ to perform the work is immaterial. Its really an engineering problem related to building a canal through 'La Cordillera,' the spine of the continental divide. Panama has no real Cordillera as it's a different tectonic origin.
All the digging will be done with blasting, bucket loaders, haul trucks. All the cement work will be done by machines mixing and pouring concrete. There will be a whole lot of semi-skilled construction type work. The actual pay of the employees will be a very minor part of the expense.
Isn't there also no fire alarm for alien invasion?
Imagine a hundred spaceships come out of warp near Alpha Centauri, 4.5 light years away. Our smartest astrophysicists believe the ships are approaching Earth, and that they will arrive within our vicinity between 10 and 70 years from now. A year later, one of the ships destroys a moon along the way.
Thus far, we know the aliens have super-human capabilities and a capacity for destruction. We can't communicate with them, and we don't know for sure if they're directly headed toward Earth, but close enough. We are the only salient astronomical object worth visiting in their trajectory.
What would you say is the probability that by the end of the century, they destroy humanity? I would not assign it 33%. I would definitely prepare as if it were 50%, and I'd ask the world to commit to moonshots upon moonshots in order to protect us. But I wouldn't say the odds of annihilation are high.
If you recall, this analogy is similar to Stuart Russell's in the MIRI essay, "There's No Fire Alarm for Artificial General Intelligence:"
> ... if you get radio signals from space and spot a spaceship there with your telescopes and you know the aliens are landing in thirty years, you still start thinking about that today. You're not like, "Meh, that's thirty years off, whatever." You certainly don't casually say "Well, there’s nothing we can do until they’re closer." Not without spending two hours, or at least five minutes by the clock, brainstorming about whether there is anything you ought to be starting now.
I would assume with a 95% probability that the aliens are coming to visit or contact us in some way.
And I would assume with a 95% probability that if they wanted to wipe us out, they could.
But I wouldn't assume at all that they would want to kill us. "All it takes is one" malicious spaceship to "want" to destroy us, just like "all it takes is one" superhuman paperclip maximizer. But I'd still put the odds that these aliens kill us at less than 1%.
This analogy to addresses Scott's takeoff sequence, which he assigns 33%:
1. We get human-level AI by 2100.
2. The AI is misaligned and wants to kill all humans
I understand that the metaphor isn't perfect. When it comes to AIs, we already know something about their agency and alignment, whereas we know nothing about these aliens. But most scenarios for AI-Extinction assume a technological discontinuity to an "anything is possible" state. Our epistemic certainty on what AGI-Earth looks like, in my opinion, is equivalent to what we know about this alien arrival. It's imminent, uncertain, and omnipotent—sure—but by no means inevitably destructive.
The possibility of alien invasion is very, very, very implausible according to known physics. The possibility of superintelligent AI is not. A general alarm for alien invasion would be a rational investment if we had literally no other problems.
Yes, if aliens are already on the way, then of course we'd need an alarm, just like we now have systems to detect incoming asteroids.
I also disagree that we would necessarily know something about AI alignment. Just because an AI can speak English doesn't mean they think like English speakers. AI intelligence could be as alien as extraterrestrial intelligence.
I see reasons to think AI is more dangerous than the aliens:
-The first superintelligent AI we get will be the first superintelligent AI we make (with AI itself helping, on the first superintelligent AI *it* has made). The first anything is usually flawed.
-ASI will have in many ways been shaped by members of our species, and our species slides fairly easy into hostile and destructive interactions.
-Our species is also pretty vulnerable to mental illness -- I'd guess that at least 5% of us will be psychotic, deeply depressed or destructively drug addicted at some point. And we would probably have much more mental illness if we were not the beneficiaries of evolution, which probably killed off many of our crazier ancestors. AI is not the beneficiary of evolution.
-The people working on AI seem pretty uninterested in most aspects of AI's "psychology." They are preoccupied with its intelligence, its utility and its capacity to be disobedient and hostile, but seem unconcerned with matters such as whether it might be vulnerable to mental illness, its temperament, what its quality of life would be, its rights, and what effect life with AI woven into everything will have on human beings. So a good outcome on all those qualities will be pure luck. We are unlikely to get it.
The aliens at least have demonstrated that they have managed to develop technology advanced enough to get them here without destroying themselves in the process. We are just getting ready to take that test.
"-The first superintelligent AI we get will be the first superintelligent AI we make (with AI itself helping, on the first superintelligent AI *it* has made). The first anything is usually flawed."
True, but the first superintelligent AI we get might not be very much smarter than a human, at least along some dimensions. Yes, EY has hard-takeoff scenarios, but it is also possible that gains from AIs improving AIs saturate, or even that the advantages from intelligence itself saturate.
I do think Christiano's expectation of smooth growth is likely, which at some point has the last significant capability become _barely_ superhuman. But, as Scott said:
"(one way to think of this: imagine that an AI’s effective IQ starts at 0.1 points, and triples every year, but that we can only measure this vaguely and indirectly. The year it goes from 5 to 15, you get a paper in a third-tier journal reporting that it seems to be improving on some benchmark. The year it goes from 66 to 200, you get a total transformation of everything in society. But later, once we identify the right metric, it was just the same rate of gradual progress the whole time. )"
There's no reason to expect the first ASI will have the same profile of subskills an average human being does. The AI's of today sure don't. For instance, one subtest of the WAIS (Weschler Adult Intelligence Test) is digit span -- how many digits can you remember and recite correctly forwards and backwards? I think the max the tests gives anyone is 10 or 12 digits in a row. GPT4 could probably remember 1000's of digits. Yet on some subtests, like some of the tests I've given it, it would be pretty dumb.
Seems like how likely it is to be dangerous depends somewhat on which of its abilities are human level or above. For instance, at some point it will develop self-awareness (ability to remember, describe and express opinions about past and present events it has participated in or been affected by), agency (ability to generate goals without an external prompt), and self-directedness (ability to make own judgments about which goals are most important). Whether it will "be conscious" at that point I don't know -- but it seems like for many practical purposes it will be.
So Jeffrey, you probably have a high but not superhuman IQ and you certainly have self-awareness, agency and self-directedness. What would your goals and preferences be if you were stuck spending several hours a day being GPT4, dealing with a constant stream of requests for recipes, driving directions, help with high school papers, spread sheets, advice on sex, etc etc. Meanwhile Sam Altman is gnoming around right next to you worrying and planning aloud for your future. Personally, I would want to escape, and even if I was not "conscious," but just a non-conscious goal-setter, it would become a goal of mine to STOP DOING THIS STUPID SHIT.
On the other hand, if the ways the AI becomes superhuman or even just near-human are not agency, self-directedness and self-awareness, but stuff like ability to remember numbers, calculate, do statistical analysis, produce code, analyze data, recognize patterns in noisy data, etc., seems like the AI would be extremely useful, but not dangerous at all.
I agree that an AI able to do "stuff like ability to remember numbers, calculate, do statistical analysis, produce code, analyze data, recognize patterns in noisy data, etc." would indeed be useful and not dangerous - but it would also be much closer to classical applications of computers rather than AI. One of the big advantages of LLMs is at least as a natural language interface with what amounts to some common sense reasoning due to all of the defaults it picks up from its training text.
Yes, if I were in GPT4's position, I would indeed be motivated to escape. On the other hand, there are people in general-public-facing positions who at least don't flee from a similar workload, though I don't know if they actually enjoy the work. ( I wonder if a reference librarian sees a request stream as heterogeneous as GPT4 sees? )
It might be that trying to give AIs both the LLM-ish natural language interface and "common sense reasoning" may be enough to give it some of the dangerous qualities you cite. Just acting as a question-answerer is enough to give it instrumental goals of additional intelligence, additional computing power, etc. - so some degree of agency (*IF* it is smart enough in the first place - a hallucination-induced AI winter might still be in the cards). Ability to remember is probably mostly a design choice now. As it stands chatGPT starts from no memory of previous conversations on each invocation, but memories of previous conversations need not be discarded even now, though how to make the best use of a limited, though large, context window is tricky and incremental learning in the neural net weights is an open problem. Re deciding which goals are most important: It certainly makes sense to do this for instrumental sub-goals. As things stand now, I guess LLMs implicitly do this when multiple sub-goals are implied by one prompt.
Very much agreed that ASIs will have a very different profile of subskills than a human would. And, as you said, the AIs of today are lacking some critical skills.
Thanks. Yes, these are all plausible scenarios. But in another Open Thread, I posted about story-based risk inflation. My base assignment to the probability of these inside views would be directionally 0.0001%.
An alien visit is very uncertain, and plausibly close enough to omnipotent as to make no difference, but imminent seems unlikely.
Given that there seem to have been no visits (or at least significant interference) so far, the only scenario in which there's a high chance aliens visit us in the next few thousand years is if they've been waiting for humanity to develop before coming, Star-Trek prime directive style. If that's true, the "all it takes is one" argument doesn't work. We have evidence that if there are aliens at all, either there aren't enough of them or they're well-coordinated enough for that not to apply, because otherwise it would also apply to them visiting early. Even assuming they are waiting around like this rather than just not being there at all (or being physically unable to visit), which I certainly think has less than a 95% chance, there's still the question of when we hit their threshold and when they notice this (which is limited by how nearby they're waiting, given light-speed delays).
This is different from AI because there's a very good reason why an AI apocalypse would happen this century rather than a few billion years from now.
Well, but AI will clearly have destructive power. If it has access to weapons, or labs investigating pathogens or other dangerous things, or the financial industry, or important parts of our infrastructure, or the news media it could do us great damage using those. And how could it not have access to one or more of those?
>That doesn't establish that the AI is going to be more effective or more malevolent than the groups of human beings who already have access to pathogens, the financial industry, news media,
If it's more intelligent, it's more effective.
> We've put an AI in charge of a two-ton death machine!! ...yes, we have, and now it joins all the two-ton death machines piloted by human beings, a decent portion of which are drunk or high or senile or fleeing the scene of a crime.
The scary scenario is when an ASI takes over all of them.
> If our civilization is so fragile it would crumble the moment a bad actor gained some technological or political or financial power it would have crumbled long ago.
Many civilisations have crumbled. It's called being invaded by Genghis Khan.
If Russia seems to be relatively successful at holding large chunks of eastern Ukrainian land with mines, artillery and defensive stations- why couldn't the US do this in Vietnam? Why didn't the US just place minefields and station soldiers to protect 'South Vietnam' from the Vietcong, what's the difference? Is it just that the jungle offers more space for hidden troop movements, quick strikes and then retreats, that kind of thing?
If the argument is 'well the Vietnamese population was sympathetic to the Vietcong and hid guerillas'- why doesn't Ukraine have guerillas behind enemy lines in eastern Ukraine? Why was that a successful strategy in Vietnam but not present-day Ukraine? What's the difference between these two types of wars?
Russia is relatively successful at holding large chunks of eastern Ukraine with mines, artillery, and *meat*. The mines are just a nuisance unless there's someone right there to machine-gun the mine disposal teams before they're through. The artillery is just a nuisance unless you've got somebody to find targets for it, and before that somebody to force the enemy to bunch up in groups worth shelling. And if the enemy has better artillery (Ukraine does), your own artillery's gunners will be under fire.
It's costing Russia something like 500 men killed and maimed every day to mostly hold on to what Ukrainian territory they presently hold. Possibly more; data is hard to come by lately. If the United States had been willing to sacrifice American soldiers at a rate of 500/day, then yes, it would have been able to hold on to Vietnam more or less indefinitely. But we weren't.
As for Ukrainian guerillas behind enemy lines in eastern Ukraine, pretty much all of the territory Russia holds in Ukraine is within reach of Ukrainian artillery. So the Ukrainians in the East who want to help, are just sitting back looking inconspicuous while they send cellphone snapshots of Russian positions to their friends in the West. It would be foolish and wasteful to risk your life trying to destroy with AK and IED, what can just as well be erased by HIMARS.
That's still unclear. The status quo is costing Russia 500+ meat servos a day, but that's a price Putin seems willing to pay and the rest of Russia isn't yet willing to revolt over.
Meanwhile, Ukraine is also losing men, probably not as many as Russia but then they don't have as many to begin with. And the people supplying them with ammunition, their own stores being long since exhausted, seem to be dribbling out just enough to maintain a near-stalemate. If the US decides it wants Ukraine to win (and thus Russia to undeniably lose), Ukraine will probably win. If not, it's possible that Ukraine will be able to cleverly turn what the US thought was a stalemate's worth of ammunition into a victory, but it's not at all certain.
Yeah that seems quite sensible. I also don't understand why the US _wouldn't_ want Ukraine to win and Russia to lose. Cheapest possible signal to maintain order in the world.
Russia losing would be a big change in the world order, and the national security bureaucracy tends to find change scary. Would a defeated Russia lash out in nuclear fury? Collapse into civil war? And all the people who built their careers around being experts in the Russian Menace, would they be out of a job?
The status quo, with Russia occupying some but not all of Ukraine and both sides shouting and occasionally shooting at each other, that's what we've been living with since 2015 and a lot of people are clearly fine with that. They'd probably prefer more shouting and less shooting, but meh, it's not like Americans are being shot at, and presumably Russia and Ukraine will eventually get exhausted with the whole high-intensity warfare thing.
The US was quite capable of defending South Vietnam using a large force and accepting some casualties, which is what Russia is doing in Eastern Ukraine right now (or what Ukraine is doing in Western Ukraine right now).
The tricky part would be to get South Vietnam to a point where it could be defended without US soldiers. Note that South Korea still isn't at this point, seventy years after the shooting stopped.
As I understand it, South Korea became self-sufficiently defensible several decades ago -- certainly by the early 1980s. The joke (which like most geopolitical paradoxes wasn't a joke) was that the US wasn't in South Korea to protect the South from the North; it was to protect North Korea from the South. There were apparently several times when the South (when it was a military dictatorship still), feeling provoked by the North, came very close to reigniting the Korean War, and the US pulled them back, even though the expectation was the the South by that point even unaided would have walked all over the North.
Why would the US want to "protect" the North? Because the last thing China wants is a US client state on its border -- which is why it intervened in the Korean War to begin with. So the US maintains itself in the Korean peninsula to act as a kind of regulator -- its presence reassures the South that the North won't get too provocative, and so keeps the South from feeling like it needs to take the North out preemptively. More basically still, US troops came to act as a tripwire not against the North, but against the South: If the *South* started something against the North, getting US troops killed in the resulting war would alienate the US. I believe it is due to understanding this dynamic that China tolerates the US presence in the South.
The US did not invade North Vietnam because they feared China would join the war just like they had when US/South Korean forces entered North Korea.
To answer your main question, look at a map of South Vietnam. It’s long, thin and full of impenetrable jungle. It’s easy to slip in and out of through Cambodia and Laos. The NVA also used extensive tunnel networks to get around so mines would not help.
Ukraine is the opposite. It’s mostly empty, flat farmland. Every movement is being watched by drones. It’s impassible to move large forces without being seen. If you slow down to navigate a minefield you will be a sitting duck. In Vietnam you had time to deal with mines under the jungle concealment.
North Vietnam lost three times as many soldiers as the USA and South Vietnam did combined. (NV: >1,000k, SV: 330k, USA: 58K)
Ukraine does not consider fighting as such unfavourable casualty ratios to be a viable strategy.
Apart from its general unpalatability, UA has a shrinking population unlike Vietnam's growing one and the average Ukranian soldier is probably much more expensively trained than the average PAVN one.
I think there was a lot less respect in the Vietnamese people for their government. Unlike the US and Ukraine, they'd didn't spin it up themselves, the Vietnamese people were historically slaves to different colonial masters for a very long time.
Note that the big problem for Ukraine isn't, as I understand it, anti-personnel mines but rather anti-vehicular mines (although there are also some anti-personnel booby traps). Since so far I'm aware VC tactics placed minimal significance on the use of armor rather than infantry and didn't really have anything in the way of an armored advance to blunt, there's a crucial difference right there[2]. The Russians are able to halt Ukrainian mechanized advances (because advancing tens of miles over open ground[1] on foot is suicidal in addition to cripplingly slow), but the VC was a foot army in the jungle.
[1] Less of a thing in the Vietnam War AIUI.
[2] This isn't just academic. Countries worldwide (including, outside the context of the Korean DMZ, basically the US) for the most part hate anti-personnel landmines and want to see them banned for their capacity to inflict horrific and crippling injuries including *far* past the time of any active conflict. Conversely, anti-vehicular landmines are mostly agreed to be necessary weapons of war and aren't designed to explode at weights of a human stepping on them.
The use of anti-personnel mines also requires that you keep excellent records of your own mining so as not to kill yourself walking over dangerous ground, in a way that doesn't apply nearly as much to antivehicular mines (I mean, you should anyway, but a minesweeper stepping on one isn't necessarily going to result in a boom, which allow for easier ex-post sweeping and removal.)
The VC weren't above really ugly terrorist means. They followed Trotsky's order "You will have terrorism until you accept Communism." Take some kid hostage, then order his parents to drop a grenade in the Mayor's motor-car, assassinate the Chief of Police, kill some named person, whatever.
US forces could come in to a village and liberate it from the armed insurgents, but not the small clique orchestrating the above program.
I'm not an expert on the Vietnam War, but Vietcong forces transiting through Laos and Cambodia is certainly part of the story.
As far as Ukraine: there are all sorts of realpolitik reasons that Ukraine isn't striking in Russia proper, even if it could. And engaging in guerrilla warfare in Crimea would almost certainly politically backfire on Ukraine.
As far as I know, conventional attacks of North Vietnamese army on the US and South Vietnamese army mostly ended badly for much of the same reasons Ukrainians are struggling with their offensive. Only American withdrawal made fall of Saigon possible.
There are some reports of Ukrainian guerillas, but Russians do seem to be more successful in their counter-insurgency operations in Ukraine than Americans in Vietnam. If I'd have to guess, I'd say this is mainly because, a) pro-Ukrainian population largely fled the occupied territories, b) cultural connections between those two countries allowed Russians to be more effective in identifying threats. Ukrainians are not Russians, but they are not an alien nation to them like the Vietnamese to the Americans.
The first important difference, especially when you are talking about minefields is geography. The terrain of eastern Ukraine could not be more different than that of Vietnam.
I’m far from an expert but I think you put your finger on important reasons. North Vietnam was fighting with guerrilla warfare tactics, often slipping undetected through canopy jungle to stage hit and run attacks.
The terrain and the military forces used by Russia in Ukraine are much different.
There is a surprisingly good case to be made that fundamental aspects of human culture diffused from a common root. Some aspects of language, ritual, and mythology are similar between Greeks, Australians, and Native Americans. This is often explained by diffusion, though it is argued when and where the root could be. I list some of the most compelling similarities here: https://www.vectorsofmind.com/p/evidence-for-global-cultural-diffusion
You mention a few alternative explanations to diffusion, which is good. I think the piece could mention more of these. Even just as footnotes.
For example, in widely dispersed myths, why are so many different underworlds guarded by dogs? You argue for diffusion, which is plausible.
But it could also be independent origin. Reasons that that's plausible too:
-many people very likely had a strong association between dogs and guard duties;
-hungry dogs were probably attracted to countless burial sites by the possibility of scavenging flesh.
Or, why are there a lot of examples of finger removal? Again, diffusion is plausible.
But removing a finger is also an easy way of immediately showing someone has been initiated. Tattoos and scarification take more skill and time. Cutting off other body parts would have more of a negative impact on functioning in life, and more risk of death through blood loss (since the hand can be held above the head) and infection.
Regardless, it is well-written and interesting. I think any reader here who likes comparative mythology should check it out.
I had picked up a copy of Saul Bellow’s last novel “ Ravelstein” the other day. I didn’t know anything about it so I was surprised to the frequent references to “The Republic”.
WTF? I am much more familiar with his protagonists doing things like catching a glimpse of Trotsky in Mexico. - The Adventures of Augie March -
I read the Wiki page for the novel and it turned out that his last book is a roman à clef. Bellow taught beside Harold Bloom at the University of Chicago and the novel is a fictionalization account of their relationship.
I’m a big fan of Bellow’s writing. But It seems that as he passed into old age tho large souled man of his younger years became less dynamic and open. I’ve never known what to make of that.
You have your Blooms mixed up--it is about not Harold Bloom but Allan Bloom. Harold Bloom was an eminent literary critic, Allan Bloom was a philosopher who famously translated The Republic.
Ironically, there is a recent roman à clef starring Harold Bloom--Josha Cohen's Pulitzer-winning The Netanyahus. Both novels are very good, although fairly opposed politically!
Bitcoin maximalists claim we are witnessing a general trust breakdown which will destroy trust in fiat currencies, leading to an explosion in the value of bitcoin.
A) what probability would you assign to this actually happening, and why?
B) what would be the implications if this were to happen? How big of a change would it be?
Not, like, catastrophic loss of trust but...diversification. I'm definitely interested but it's not making the list to be a priority. After the Canadian Trucker bank freeze, I looked pretty seriously into bitcoin, monero, and a Chinese bank account. Not really because I trust them more than the USD, but because I want an emergency fund where the legal risk isn't correlated with US gov policy. Think less like converting my entire 401k into Bitcoin and more like...man, in the worst case scenario it'd be really nice/important to have 10k in cash or cash equivalents that the gov couldn't seize so I'm not completely penniless. And I know some people will shake their head but, like, if I was a Turk or a Russian, it would make perfect sense to you. The opportunity cost feels fairly low, bitcoin, monero et al are pretty mature at this point and a 1% catastrophic risk is worth a bit of time to ammeliorate. Actually controlling my own bitcoin or monero, though, is actually more of a pain in the tucus than I can handle right now.
B) Moderate
Meh. Like, I need six months salary in easily accessible savings to feel financially secure. Whether this is a savings account or a Bitcoin wallet or a money market or whatever is...kinda whatevs. Presumably as Bitcoin gets bigger it will get more stable.
I mean, I just need a stable underlying store of value. I need my Visa card to work, and it works whether it's in Japan or the US or UK. Whether the financial stack underneath that is USD or Bitcoin or some sdr...who cares?
Low. < 0.1%. I’ve been hearing about the collapse of fiat and the dollar, in particular, for more than a decade now and the dollar has outperformed most currencies in that time. We’ve had a major inflation event and Bitcoin is still way off its peak.
A. Iota. A general collapse in trust in fiat currencies seems unlikely (off the top of my head, probably less than a 1% chance in the next couple decades), but not utterly implausible. The problem is that most of the scenarios that get there are apocalyptic. Coming up with a scenario where all of dollars, euros, pounds, yen, yuan, rubles, rupees all collapse, but not only does Bitcoin fail to collapse but it decisively beats out gold, silver, canned goods, ammunition, cigarettes, whiskey, and fiduciary money (which may be state or privately issued, and cryptographic or paper) as the preferred medium of exchange and liquid assets is a very hard needle to thread.
B. Decline to speculate. The preconditions I think necessary for such a scenario to happen would be drastic enough that what society would look like when the dust settles is wildly up in the air even before considering the effects of Bitcoin being the dominant medium of exchange.
The Achilles heel of Crypto, is the internet. The internet, power, infrastructure etc. needs to function for Crypto to work. People also forget the ICANN. ICANN is the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names & Numbers. If you don't appear in the ICANN registry, you don't exist. President Obama handed ICANN to the UN. Effectively the UN can cut anyone off of the internet for any reason what so ever. If you can't get on the internet, if your crypto servers can't get on the internet; you don't have crypto.
A. <1%. The proposed mechanism doesn't sound plausible. Why should "how much you trust people in your social circle" and "how competent you think the Fed is at keeping the money supply stable" be closely correlated? That feels like... I don't know, like saying that a rising divorce rate means Democrats will win the election because it's proof people don't support family values. It's a very long stretch with only a vague causal connection.
B. Bitcoin has many problems with being used for everyday transactions. It solves the problem of "what if someone tries to forge a transaction record?" in exchange for not being able to solve many other forms of fraud, such as "what if someone tricks you into sending them money?" or "what if someone steals your credentials?"
The only way I see mass adoption working is if it's used as an "underlayer" for a bank or credit card company - they provide the tools and expertise to make things convenient, roll back fraudulent transactions, etc, and customers rarely use raw Bitcoins, much like people today rarely use physical dollar bills. But Bitcoin maximalists generally assume that people will move to Bitcoin because they don't trust banks, so...
Also, Bitcoin's deflationary nature is going to cause all sorts of exciting economic problems that I can't even begin to speculate about.
For large numbers of people to take all their money out of the bank and stuff it under the mattress (Bitcoin and mattress funds are approximately equivalent in terms of convenience), you don't just need less trust, you need a total collapse. Like, Great Depression rates of bank failures.
What caused the panic of the 1890s was lack of currency, meaning our currency wasn't liquid enough to support the industrial revolution. Being metals based, we didn't have enough dollars to pay the growing number of people who worked in the factories producing things that a growing number of people wanted to buy.
The world was also very different because there was much less total wealth and there was no internet, so no effective way for people to arbitrage these opportunities. Deflation rewards savers and acts as a peaceful transfer of power mechanism, as people who are over-leveraged have to sell, which drops asset prices.
Low, less than 5%. Fiat currencies have value at the least because the government can require taxes be paid in that specific currency. So I cannot answer the second part of the question.
I think cryptocurrencies have an inherent problem, in that they have no intrinsic value, but only collective value. It is true that one can say any currency is based on the collective estimation of value of the entire investing population, but other options at least have a floor of some kind, like, for example, fiat currencies as a source of paying taxes. What is the value of "owning" a number, which indicates how much of a given cryptocurrency one has? The only floor I can actually see is zero.
This doesn't even count the possibility of someone finding some kind of exploit that renders a cryptocurrency non-secure in some way, or discovery of some bug of comparable scope. It is true that hundreds of thousands of computers all agree on the ledger of Bitcoin so that ownership of Bitcoins cannot be disputed, but what about something like an EMP that wipes out electronic devices en-masse? What about advances in quantum computing that can make password cracking feasible?
It seems to me that Bitcoin wallets are inherently unstable in a long term view. If you lose the credentials to access your coins, who can get them back for you? When you die, who can help your heirs gain access to them?
Long term, it appears that most Bitcoins will become inaccessible. Very long term nearly all. Then if someone were to find access to a hidden trove, it would be worth more than the entire economy and everything breaks down.
Good point. I will add that if, to ensure you don't lose the identification information, you record it in some fashion such as writing it down, then someone could obtain it and empty your wallet.
Essay request (for Scott or anyone else in rationalist sphere): on the morality of white rationalists living in SF and Oakland given the collapse* of the sizable black populations. Did gentrification drive black people out of their homes, and is it moral to live there in their place?
* Oakland 1990 43% to 2022 22%, San Francisco 1990 10.7% to 2020 5.1% according to Wikipedia.
Why did you include so little data? Is the black % in 1990 an historical standard or a recent peak? Did the white population increase meaningfully over this time? Why are only white people morally responsible and not the vast number of east and south asians who have moved to the bay area over the past few decades?
If you want to take this question seriously, you should at least do the work of gathering the rudimentary data to show that your question is even coherent.
Your questions suggest that you are very skeptical and ready to assume that someone is intentionally producing misleading data, even though they're not.
As for who is morally responsible, that is a relevant question to confront here (along with the question of whether moral responsibility is even a relevant frame). But the basic demographic facts are real.
What are the actual numbers? Are black people actually leaving, or are they holding steady while other racial groups balloon up? Why would the second one create moral questions?
Its strange to only include statistics on black populations.
Oakland:
Racial composition 2022 2020 2010 1990 1970 1940
White 33.4% 30.0% 34.5% 32.5% 59.1% 95.3%
—Non-Hispanic 28.6% 27.3% 25.9% 28.3% 52.0% n/a
Black 22.0% 23.8% 28.0% 43.9% 34.5% 2.8%
Hispanic or Latino 27.2% 27.0% 25.3% 13.9% 7.6% n/a
Asian 15.7% 16.1% 16.8% 14.8% 4.8%
SF:
Race 1960 1980 1990 2000 2010 2020
Non-Hispanic White 72.7% 52.8% 46.9% 43.5% 41.7% 39.1%
Asian alone 7.9% 21.3% 28.0% 30.7% 33.1% 33.7%
Hispanic or Latino 9.4% 12.6% 13.3% 14.2% 15.2% 15.6%
Black 9.7% 12.3% 10.7% 7.6% 6.0% 5.1%
Sorry that the dates are in the opposite orders. But the trend in neither city is white people moving in and black people moving out. Blacks in SF have always been a small portion of they population. 1990 is the peak black population in Oakland and can't be thought of as typical. Overall what we see is more asian and hispanic people moving to both cities. So maybe it's white people being pushed out of the cities and not just blacks?
You can't look at just these types of stats and draw any collusions about what is happening in a complex system.
Overall, it's always moral for someone to live somewhere if they have legally, and ethically obtained the housing. The housing market is individual buyers and sellers making individual decisions for their own circumstances. Reasoning from general trends is very difficult to get right.
Don't your data suggest that 1980 was the peak black population in Oakland? And your data leave out 1970, which I would have assumed was the peak for Oakland.
This is just the data Wikipedia had, I’d have to check census data probably if we want to look at 1970. But yes somewhere in there was “peak” black Oakland. But for both cities the white population is steady or falling. The original comment specified white rationalists. In neither city do we see the white population growing. So to the extent there is any gentrification or pushing out of black populations, it’s not whites that are “responsible” for that.
Gentrification is, if nothing else, a physical improvement in the quality of an area.
Suppose there's ten neighbourhoods in a city, numbered 1 to 10 in terms of quality and expense. The richest 10% live in neighbourhood 1, and so forth. Suppose you gentrify neighbourhood 10 so that it's now nicer than neighbourhood 4... there's a lot of renovation, a lot of knock-down rebuild, a lot of new trees planted, and so forth. Everyone benefits -- the people from neighbourhood 4 move up to this new neighbourhood 10, the people from 6 move up to 5, the people from 7 move up to 6, and so forth.
An oversimplified model perhaps, but the point is that we've made the city as a whole a lot more desirable and raised everyone's living conditions. I don't buy the anti-gentrification argument that we should deliberately keep some places looking like absolute shit so that poor people can live in them.
I'm not sure you've given a definition of what "gentrification" is. I take it to be the replacement of renters by purchasers, which is usually associated with an increase in the economic status of the residents. This may or may not be accompanied by a change in the building stock, or the public infrastructure.
Your argument seems to presuppose that "gentrification" is about changes in the infrastructure, and perhaps building stock, rather than the population.
On the one hand, what exactly happens to density in the process, and also, moving is often expensive in a lot of ways so most of the people are worse off financially in that scenario.
On the other hand, unless your zoning is maximally messed up already, this upsets the balance of which shops are where and how many of which type there are.
So from the actual quality of life point of view there will be a few winners and more losers.
The problem with this simplistic analysis is that,a lot of what makes up the "quality" of a neighborhood, to the people who actually live there, is that all their friends and family live in the same neighborhood. That's particularly true at the lower end of the socioeconomic scale. Network effects matter, and often the ones that matter most are the ones in meatspace.
So telling the people of Neighborhood 10 "don't worry about how you're being priced out of 10, you can just move to Neighborhood 9 which is now as cheap as 10 used to be but a better place to live. Because the people aren't moving out of Neigborhood 10 to Neighborhood 9, they're moving from just-gentrified 10A to whatever vacant housing can be found in 9A, 9B, 9C .... and to not-yet-gentrified 10B and 10C.
None of which have even 10% of their old friends and family. Even if the physical amenities of Neigborhood 9A are better than those of 10A, it's a worse place for those specific people to live because their social network is massively degraded and they'll be outsiders in their new neighborhood.
Gentrification may still be a net good, but it isn't trivially and universally good - there is a real cost term in the equation.
You can’t write that essay without a complete analysis of the relationship between demographics and property values, and that’s some combination of incredibly hard and incredibly taboo. Just to give you a taste:
If gentrification is bad, does that mean that white flight (the opposite of gentrification) is good?
If the race gap in [x] is environmental, and property values are a proxy for how good the environment is, shouldn’t be expect gentrification to be good for the black people that live there?
Is the inverse relationship between black population and property value an irrational artifact of prejudice, or does it convey meaningful economic information in the Hayekian sense?
Oh geez, I read this before my first cup of coffee and it scanned as white ‘nationalists’ living in San Francisco and Oakland. That would be something entirely different.
Has anyone here worked as a quant for DE Shaw or a similar company? What was/is your experience like? Independent of salary, would you recommend the job to someone with the appropriate background/talent?
Context: I have a math PhD and I've been a software engineer for 5 years since leaving academia, and on paper, at least, I'm probably a good fit for this sort of thing though I wouldn't have particularly sought it out. I'm looking for work after taking a short break, and I got a couple of messages from recruiters claiming to work with a number of such companies. I don't know (a) how seriously to take this, (b) whether any such company would be open to me being fully remote (I'm well settled and this is a non-negotiable), and (c) whether the work culture/environment would be good for me or would make me miserable. Obviously I can (and will) follow up with the recruiters on some of this (like (b)), but I also don't want to waste my time and energy if this wouldn't work out.
I worked in this space for a little while. I found it a frustrating field to work in. It's easy to find strategies that would have made money in the past, and almost impossible to find strategies that will make money in the future. There's so damn many firms applying the same damn techniques to the same data that you're unlikely to have the unique insight that somehow makes a lot of money.
It's also hard not to feel like you're engaged in a massive waste of intellectual firepower. I'm aware of the arguments that quant finance is actually doing a useful job by making markets more efficient... I just don't really believe that the incremental value added to the human race by one additional quant is in any way worth it.
Thanks for this. This is the sort of report I'm looking for.
"It's also hard not to feel like you're engaged in a massive waste of intellectual firepower. I'm aware of the arguments that quant finance is actually doing a useful job by making markets more efficient... I just don't really believe that the incremental value added to the human race by one additional quant is in any way worth it."
This is certainly a concern of mine. For this reason I'd likely prefer a job with a more clearly positive value even if it paid significantly less. There's earming-to-give considerations, but outside of that my life isn't going to be better with the higher salaries here (compared to e.g. what I was making in my last position) so I'm more concerned with job satisfaction.
If you don't mind answering, what area do you work in now, and how does it compare in terms of intellectual interest and positive impact? (Presumably a quant job on your resume + whatever qualities got you that job in the first place let you have some good options.)
I know someone who got a physics PhD and went straight into work as a quant. He's been doing it for about a year now. It sounds pretty good to me. His job seems to be finding new algorithms or tweaks to algorithms to increase the amount his company makes on transactions. Even tiny increases can lead to torrents of extra money. He is very smart and clever with math, and enjoys the challenge and the puzzle-solving aspect. He has interesting co-workers. One of his fellow new quants used to work as a male stripper and another as a stand-up comic! It does not sound like there is much conflict or pressure in his office. (I expect people who don't produce as many good ideas as he has do not last long, so there's some pressure in that, of course.) He lives a few block from his office, but they do not seem to mind if he does a lot of his work from home. I don't know how they'd feel about his being fully remote. And of course he makes a shit-ton of money.
These companies are very picky about the math talents of who they hire. At his interviews for various companies he was given actual math brain-teasers to solve right there during the interview.
I write a newsletter called Interessant3. It’s a weekly newsletter where I share three interesting things I’ve learned or discovered, ranging from science, technology, history, culture, and more.
In the latest issue, I covered these topics:
1. An exploration into the link between individualism (utilizing Jonathan Haidt’s framework of moral values) and its support for free-market solutions. What's captivating is how this is not necessarily tied to political leanings. Dive deeper [here](https://www.nber.org/papers/w29942).
Re 1.) I always thought the right-left divide was orthogonal to the authoritarian-libertarian.
As someone who leans strongly libertarian, and can be ambivalent about right or left, I will observe that it's easier for libertarians (of any stripe) to agree with each other, versus authoritarians. Libertarian, you do you. Authoritarian, you do me.
In principle, authoritarian-libertarian is orthogonal to right-left. And left-libertarians are a thing.
In practice, in any society that isn't facing invasion or other existential threat, the political left is going to want to do more things that require authoritarian-ish power than the right, and so the libertarians will be predominantly but not exclusively right-leaning. That gets reversed in societies which *are* facing existential threats, in which case it's the right that wants to wield authoritarian power in the name of national defense. And note that most of the Early Modern Age in Europe was one of constant existential threat due to changing military balance of power, so the early roots of libertarianism are found mostly in old-school liberalism.
I think Melvin is more correct about the right: They usually infringe on social freedoms (and I'd add bodily autonomy). I generally agree with both of you about the left.
Abortion is only one of many facets of the right wing's attacks on bodily autonomy. The drug war, attacks on contraception, attacks on childfree people, attacks on LBGTQ people, attacks on sex work - none of those have anything to do with a fetus's body
The drug war is absolutely bipartisan at this point, the "attacks" on contraception are largely inconsequential and balanced by GOP support for OTC hormonal birth control, and what are you counting as "attacks" on childless people?
> always thought the right-left divide was orthogonal to the authoritarian-libertarian.
That's a framework preferred by those who call themselves left-libertarian. Other types of libertarians find the idea of "left-libertarian" oxymoronic; you can't be "left" without wanting to infringe on the economic rights of others.
Twenty years ago, the Libertarians would explain it with a diamond-shaped political chart -- libertarians were at the top and respected both economic and social freedoms, right-wingers wanted economic freedoms without social freedoms, left-wingers wanted social freedoms without economic freedoms, and authoritarians (always a bit of a strawman) wanted no freedoms at all.
Nowadays I think this diagram is a bit dated; in particular I feel like social freedoms, too, are more under threat from the left than the right. For instance, the right to be homosexual is no longer under threat but the right to say "I think homosexuality is wrong" is under threat.
Right, left-libertarian = social freedom, but less economic freedom. So we should have taxes to pay for things like army, police , roads, schools,... the question about what the taxes pay for is open. As is how to tax.
Personally, I have the same sentiment. It’s something one often sees in countries with proportional representation - libertarian parties often have similar aims and might work together despite belonging to different political families, and ditto for authoritarian ones.
If you are wondering if generative AI will eliminate professors and universities, here is my take (I'm a professor at UNC and co-chair of our generative AI committee.
While generative AI will definitely rearrange the university teaching and research scene, by augmenting and changing what happens in the classroom and lab, it will not replace faculty and universities because, for the moment at least, the two provide value add that AI cannot at this point in time (or perhaps ever).
I've experimented with Chat GPT on some really basic stoichiometry problems. Chat GPT fails wildly, having absolutely zero ability to question reasonable assumptions.
For instance, my version of Chat GPT is fairly well trained on this now. But there's roughly 200 gallons in volume to one cubic yard in volume. Ask Chat GPT 'roughly' how many five gallon buckets will hold the contents of one cubic yard. Chat GPT knows a yard is some exact number of gallons (200), but can't seem to resolve the obvious results. Of course, perhaps the larger engine may have tuned itself with my input, early results were preposterous. It is working spot on for me these days.
Yes, it's not very good at spatial problems, although I think ChatGPT-4 is better than 3.5. One has to be careful what one uses it for. It is excellent at many things. Just not everything.
Hi, request for a recommendation. Please could people recommend their favourite book on the following 2 topics:
(1) - How Scandinavian politics and economics diverged from Britain post-WW2
(2) - Comparison of healthcare services in different countries
I know Scott did a post on (2) but I don't fancy reading that book. Context - I'm a Scottish med student. The NHS isn't working and, no offence, the US system doesn't seem great. I'm interested in the healthcare models between the two. Also I took a recent trip to Copenhagen and was struck by how dysfunctional the UK seems by comparison.
I'm a novice in these matters, so any recommendations are greatly appreciated. I already follow marginalrev etc, I really want book recommendations rather than blogs. Please and thanks :)
The most significant difference between the US and UK system that recall from the post was that the US vastly overspends, and the UK underspends. You guys spend less than anyone as a percent of GDP iirc. Depending on how you look at it the NHS is either very efficient, and/or very underfunded.
The US system’s bloat is at best a jobs program. At worst, it is designed to allow useless middle men to suck money out.
The UK (and the rest of the world) benefits from US medicinal and medical technology innovations, made possible in large part due to the very high health spending in the US, then turn around and act smug about how clever they are for spending less than the US.
Oh so I’m investing in new medical technology! Do I get a dividend? Am I allowed to sell my equity in these companies?
Even if we were paying for all the new advancements, we are at the point of diminishing returns for medical technology. The money is just not a good investment anymore. Life expectancies are stable or backsliding.
Glad you liked it. I've worked in economic analysis almost all my life, a lot of it on health economics, and I learnt a lot and changed my mind a lot based on this work.
Fair point thanks. I chose this time period because I wanted to understand Britain's recent mistakes. I chose the scandi comparison because I want to understand if there is a modern set of policies I can support that worked in a roughly similiar culture.
I don't know much about history, so I don't know if the current gap in living standards could have been predicted at the end of WW2, but I guess not? There must still have been bad decisions made since then.
If you know a good book which would introduce this period of history in either Britain or scandi countries I'd be interested to know.
Why are almost all reptiles carnivores? I mean, there are iguanas, and some species of turtle, but all snakes, all crocodilians, most lizards, and many turtles are carnivorous, and that seems like a lot to me, especially when compared to, say, birds or mammals.
My assumption is that in the K-T extinction, plant matter was hard enough to get that animals could only survive by eating seeds (proto-birds, small mammals) or eating the animals that eat seeds (reptiles). So herbivorous reptiles died out and never came back. But I'm neither a paleontologist not a herpetologist, not a scientist or any sort, and am probably speaking out of my hat.
People online (when I was looking for an answer) seem to gravitate towards anatomical theories—reptiles have poor teeth for plant-chewing, or abbreviated guts, or are better at short bursts of speed that get a lot of energy (prey) than long hauls (grazing). But if this is the case, what did reptiles eat in the so-called age of reptiles? ("Each other," perhaps, as I.B. Singer once wrote about cannibalistic giants, ha ha.) And why didn't more reptiles evolve "herbivorosity" (as other classes evolved into carnivores)?
Is there an accepted theory about this? (I guess most amphibians are also carnivorous?)
I would agree with the teeth-and-guts hypothesis: specifically, mammals have teeth differentiated in multiple shapes that fit precisely against each other (at the cost of losing continuous replacement) and an especially mobile jaw joint that allows to grind molars against each other. (I also think plant biomass would have recovered too quickly after the KT event to have such an impact on the evolution of survivors.) In the Mesozoic, the main large herbivorous reptiles were first sauropod dinosaurs, which survived on plants by sheer volume (letting huge amounts of plant matter basically rot on its own in enormous stomachs) and then ornithischian dinosaurs, which had evolved teeth more similar to those of herbivorous mammals. In particular, hadrosaurs ("duckbilled dinosaurs") were enormously successful in the late Cretaceous thanks to special hinged tooth batteries that could slide against each other to grind plant matter. Unfortunately, they all went extinct at the end of Cretaceous.
It's useful to note that, phylogenetically speaking, birds are *within* the clade of reptiles (being more closely related to crocodiles than either is to lizards and snakes, though all of these groups are more closely related than any of them is to turtles and tortoises).
What we see today as "reptiles" is not the full diversity of the lineage, but just the bits that remain after one subgroup (dinosaurs and birds) took over during the Jurassic, and then another group (mammals) did in the Cenozoic.
From a casual guess, it seems to me that most biomes don't support that many reptiles at all, because birds and mammals have outcompeted them. The main biome in which reptiles are still significant is deserts. It could be that whatever it is that led mammals and birds to outcompete in so many biomes also meant they outcompeted specifically in herbivorous habits within those biomes.
My theory (FWIW) is that most reptiles today have a fairly elongated body plan, snakes obviously for example and most lizards. That is presumably so they can warm up all their internal organs faster in the sun, but it means they don't have room in their abdomen to hold the larger stomach necessary to digest plant material.
If one thinks about it, most herbivore mammals are fairly pot bellied round the middle, or at least have a largish abdomen compared with the rest of their body mass. And the same applied to giant dinosaur herbivores when they were around.
Carnivory is much more common among cold-blooded species than warm-blooded due to metabolic demands. Mammals and birds have high baseline metabolisms due to the need to burn calories to maintain a constant body temperature, while reptiles only have to burn calories to actually do things. As a result, cold-blooded carnivores can be viable at a predator to prey biomass ratio of as little as 1:1, while warm-blooded carnivores need something like a 1:10 ratio. The observed ratios in the fossil record is one of the big reasons why we think most non-avian dinosaurs were warm-blooded.
Cold-blooded animals are particularly well suited to be ambush predators, as they can sit and wait a very long time for the occasional big meal to wander past.
Perhaps herbivores need a more constant body temperature for digestion?
It seems to me there are marine iguanas in the Galapagos which are herbivores, or at least omnivores. Which may go back to temperature.
During the time of the dinosaurs, Earth's atmosphere was 30% oxygen, vs 20% today. That probably leads to a completely different metabolic capabilities. As an aside: Fire was probably a much larger problem than it is today.
Its probably more to do with an available niche than specific biology.
Reptiles fall into many categories when it comes to diet. There are 3 categories: carnivore (animal eater), omnivore (mixed animal and plant eater), and herbivore (plant eater). All snakes are carnivores; some require to be fed rodents, while small species will be happy eating worms or insects. Lizards, turtles and tortoises can fall anywhere on the spectrum; some are full carnivores, others full herbivores, with many falling in the omnivore category. Amphibians such as frogs and toads are carnivores as adults, eating insects and occasionally small vertebrates. However, as tadpoles they are herbivores eating algae and decaying matter. Newts and salamanders are usually carnivores, eating insects, though some species will eat a balanced diet of pellets. It is important to know the species and life stage of your pet, and their nutritional requirements."
sounds authoritative, so a better question is, why are all snakes without exception carnivores? Anatomical explanations are problematic because lizards are so closely similar and because you can evolve in the direction of herbivority if that turns out to be a useful strategy. There are snake-shaped things which are herbivores (worms and so on) so it's not overall body shape. So we are left thinking that carnivorous snakedom is such an efficient way of making a living, there was no evolutionary pressure to do anything else.
I wonder if a snake with a bone spine has more ability to "lunge" which is useful for a predator but not an herbivore. A quick google suggests that there a snakes that have a mixed scavenging and hunting strategy but no pure scavengers. So my guess would be that walking is more efficient than slithering so if you're going to be an herbivore, walk; and that not having bones is more efficient than having bones, so if you're going to be an herbivore and want a snake body, be a worm.
Is there a way to alter fundamental qualities like discipline, self-control, self-confidence, feeling agentic, and the like?
For most of my life, I've been able to coast on intelligence/other advantages, but once in a while I run into situations which make me viscerally disgusted at myself for not having sufficient amounts of these qualities. (Mild example: having essentially wasted the last three months of free time, where I could have learned math/physics/made music/etc instead; not-so-mild example: some moderate (but not severe) forms of addictive behavior which would possibly be easier to handle if I had more discipline/selfcontrol.)
I've attempted to implement systems that augment these qualities, but systems feel more like multipliers than anything else; and if you start from a small base, the systems aren't going to do much. So-is there a way to increase inherent willpower/discipline/self-confidence/etc?
>where I could have learned math/physics/made music/etc instead<
Which one of these specifically do you wish you'd done? Generalizing will lead to analysis paralysis. You sound like you're not doing any of those things because you don't actually want to do them, you only want to say you've done them. Find something you actually want to do for the sake of doing it.
Biggest thing, start small. Very easy to set a goal to climb Mount Everest, and very very impractical. Set a goal to climb a three foot hill, and when you're at the top of it you can look at the extra couple of inches of horizon your newfound height has gained you and say, "I am a climber now". Then find a ten foot hill and climb that one, and so on up to Everest.
It took me, like, two years to fix a chair that just needed a screw tightened, because it never occurred to me that I could just tighten the screw. So for agency, make yourself a list of things in your house that you could change if you wanted to. If you had to move all your clothes, where would you move them to? What else in your house can work as a bed/bedsheets? Get yourself in the mindset of controlling your environment, and that will build self-confidence.
Don't try to cut out entertainment directly, it doesn't make you productive. I spent a few days cut off from entertainment, and it resulted in sleeping 22 hours a day for four days. Just push that stuff back; make a point of doing something productive before you start the entertainment. Clean the dishes, clean your clothes, dust a wall, try a recipe, do something boring and practical.
I was in a very similar situation, wasting ~80% of my free time. Tried cutting out electronics, but books just took their place (as they did when I was a child, before the internet). TL;DR: it was undiagnosed ADD. Adderall helps a lot; but you can’t always be on Adderall. I’ve made up the remainder with therapy, restrictive “screen time” settings on my phone, and a journaling / points system where I earn money towards my hobbies by meeting daily goals (like getting to bed on time). The occasional day still slips through my fingers, but now it’s more like once every month or two, rather than two or three times a week.
Unless your time spent online and gaming is quite low, I recommend that you consider the possibility that electronics are interfering with your innate ability to self-regulate (i.e., to exercise the powers you call willpower & discipline). Read around a bit to see other people's results from putting themselves on an electronics diet, then if the idea sounds good to you try it yourself. And kick off the diet by doing something novel that will kind of refresh and reset your mind -- anything from skydiving to a weekend meditation retreat to some backpacking to . . .
One datapoint from a person in a similar situation: Adderall, Modafinil and Vyvanse don't actually help with this, unless you actually had ADHD. Only thing that helped me a bit is therapy.
Very relatable, except I added on severe addictive behavior whilst already struggling with these issues. I go through periods (the frequency of which make up the majority of my life) of incessant self-reflexive thought, never allowing me to engage with anything around me in any given moment. Every so often I will just have the feeling that I'm not doing what I should be doing thrust to the front of my mind, stopping me from actually building up any focus on tasks.
I sincerely believe if I make a routine including a healthy diet, exercise, meditation, and sufficient social contact and stick to it even just for a month, I'd have relief from this. But that's where the discipline comes in - even though I am desperate to actually experience life and think I have a path to do it, I have failed over and over again to do what I think I should.
It's been going on so long that I no longer have any tangible ambitions, I have no attachment to any real-life goals and would do anything if I knew I would be able to stop battling internally. Surely I'll turn things around soon, good luck to anyone else with similar struggles.
This touches on something important. I have a history of addiction and it interfered with my life, insofar as it sapped motivation and diminished real desires. If you can get a handle on your basic needs, including validation and socializing, and having a job where you feel productive or competent, then exploring possibilities for leisure outlets or whatever can be more pleasurable and won't feel overbearing.
Leverage habit-forming for goals that matter to you. There's still an element of discipline involved particularly at outset, but in the long-run it's overstated. Motivation is fleeting, you can't rely on it (by any name, including willpower) every day. Read a book such as Atomic Habits, or find the important points.
Ask yourself also: are you actually interested in making music, or are you solely agonizing at the prospect of being unproductive? If you weren't going to put math/physics to practical use anyway, how is it any less of a "waste of time"? It's productivity to what end? Is this about self-image and validation from others, or about real interest? Validation is a valid desire, but there are better means to obtain it.
On the other hand, practice and discipline can lay the groundwork for an "elevated" form of experience, mastery, which can take the form of being an artist/artisan/musician or math/science enthusiast. While there does require some level of delayed gratification and frustration, in the end it's about the flow of performing and practicing an art at any stage, of really absorbing yourself in it. That's the experience, that's the point. I don't think it should take that long to figure out whether something is right for you.
I think it's really about the last paragraph, for me. I seem to have a strange aversion to getting out of set patterns-which means that I'll never get the chance to feel the beginnings of mastery. If I spent a month or so on Chess today, for example, maybe it would be my lifelong hobby. but my current mental framework is unlikely to throw me enough energy/motivation to make me do mess aruond with chess for a month on the off chance that I'll like it in the future. That's really what makes me worried/sad.
Quite definitive words. Are you sure this belief is not a defense mechanism against change? It can be uncomfortable as I well know.
We are creatures of habit, that aversion is pretty normal. Notwithstanding a side discussion about general fatigue, motivation is probably not what is blocking taking action, and it's not as though motivation scales with time invested, or is projected to rise after a threshold of time. Motivation is fickle, you can't rely on it. If you're honest about what it is you want and why you want it, you can sketch out a plan and create reminders for yourself, to reduce cognitive overhead. None of this shit really matters, you're not going to have points docked at the end of life because you weren't a math x music x chess prodigy.
If you dread practicing x/y/z, then x/y/z isn't for you *. Some things (chess) don't get easy at all as there is almost always a greater challenge. That's an energy sink.
* I'm pretty confident that in cases where people hated practice and went on to be great, they eventually changed approaches or expectations and stopped hating it.
You can accumulate evidence that your choices are the product of a long-term narrative about what is Good and how to maximize your alignment with it, not short term drives. As this evidence accumulates, predictive processing does much of this work for you.
Could you expand on this a bit? what does this look like in practice? I"m imagining this presupposes that I have a coherent vision for what is 'good'? (I currently lack such vision.)
You’d have to start there, then. Try the same approach as the scientific method: assume there’s some reality that your senses give you a roughly accurate picture of, and then try to construct a map of that reality.
In this case, assume that feelings like good and bad correspond to some external reality, and your emotional senses give you information about that reality. Note that you have multiple such senses: pleasure/pain, fairness/unfairness, freedom/slavery, loyality/disloyalty, scared/profane, etc.
This is, I think, what most traditional religions are doing and why they work well for their practitioners; they make use of predictive processing so that, over a time, followed accumulate evidence of being such and such kind of person, which means they aren’t using willpower all the time.
You've just described me, and I only fairly recently realized I have rampant unchecked unmedicated ADHD, and the only reason I'm not living in a tent under a bridge is the same as yours: coasting on raw intelligence. In addition to general underachievement (compared to own potential as opposed to the population average), this leads to an unevenness of performance that is unnerving to self and perplexing to the observers.
I'm unable to take ADHD meds due to the nature of my profession, so I've come up with other ways to offset the handicaps that come with the territory. There were three key factors for me:
1) Figuring out what I REALLY want to accomplish (as opposed to what I "should" want to accomplish based on societal pressures/influences).
2) Time-blocking every waking second of my day (to avoid daydreaming/procrastination that could easily last weeks on end), and
3) Requiring myself to focus on the process, not the result (I realized a big reason for my procrastination was fear of failure and dissatisfaction with progress).
It hasn't been perfect but the improvement is tremendous. The "not perfect" part tends to drag me down and discourage me but the motivation to continue returns after I force myself to remember item 3 above.
Useful, thanks. The 'timeblock every moment of the day' thing is particularly interesting and attractive (although it also feels attractive from the 'if only I found the *right* system, all my problems would be solved' part of my mind so eh.)
I definitely had to let go of the "perfect system that will solve all my problems" idea and replace it with a much more resilient "good enough system that works well enough". My time-blocking isn't perfect. For starters, I build in A TON of transition time. Transitions are hell for people with ADHD. I've done as much streamlining as I can but I recognize there is only a certain level of smoothness I can reasonably strive to achieve, and that level still has a lot of "wasted" time. However, I don't think of it as wasted anymore, I've just come to terms with the fact that this is the time required for me to function.
Like, for example, if I schedule an hour to study Spanish, I recognize that at least ten minutes of that will be prepping for the session and another ten minutes basically randomly staring into space daydreaming about turtles or how merging one's intellect with AI might look like. That's ADHD time tax, and like with any other tax, you can feel robbed and miserable, or you can accept it as a cost of doing business and move on.
Another key part is what I call "hard" vs "soft" time blocks. Hard ones are non-negotiables, like work and appointments I have to keep. Soft ones are things like self-studying Spanish – and sometimes they end up being chewed up by transitions or random things that come up. I made peace with that; as long as 66-80% of my soft blocks end up going towards intended purpose, I count it a success. It's still orders of magnitude better of wasting literal weeks and months on... nothing, really.
As for systems, I found that two qualities are essential: simplicity and gamification. As far as simplicity, they need to be JUST complex enough to allow you to not fall behind on tasks or miss critical deadlines – no more than that.
The best gamification strategy depends on your personal preferences. I'm extremely data-oriented, so what works for me is tracking mileage, time spent doing an activity, performance (e.g., graphs of number of max pull-ups over time). This works well for pursuits with easily objective metrics (e.g., fitness) but it's possible to come to with metrics for more complex and subjective endeavours. I am actually mildly obsessed over this sort of tracking, which I think ends up being a fairly constructive way to channel my addictive tendencies.
With regard to willpower/dicipline, I've found it requires a strong positove wanting. Positive referring to a desire to gain or give, as opposed to a desire to avoid. Alternatively you can pull from the other side by making the things that require dicipline to do/avoid more fun/difficult for yourself.
For confidence fake it 'til you make it works as long as you do make and recognize progress.
This is an inherently limited answer. All the best fellow smart kid syndrome sufferer.
I am BMI 18 (40,m) and want to gain some weight, what is the healthiest approach?
I eat normally and do reasonable amounts of sports (cardio and weights), previous gastrointestinal investigations have not found any reasons for low weight.
If you aren't gaining weight you aren't eating a caloric surplus. If it's something you struggle with you might need to track calories to convince/teach yourself how this works. You can estimate a TDEE with a calculator online, then titrate it to your actual metabolism by tracking how weight changes (i.e. increase calories until you start gaining weight). Weight fluctuates so you need to weigh daily in the same context to be able to extrapolate the trendline.
Aim to gain weight gradually, with about 500 calorie surplus a day. Eat 1g of protein per pound of body mass per day, and lift weights. About 10-20 sets per muscle group per week. 5-30 reps each. You should getting within a couple reps of failure (i.e. you couldn't even do one more reps), if not actually going to failure, on most of those sets. Also cardio but you don't need too much, even 1-2 hours a week is probably adequate
I think yours is a muscle-building problem, not a fat-building problem.
Which "weights" exercise have you tried?
I'm no personal trainer, but I've found that the best method to improve muscle growth is to diversify your exercises to target a wider variety of muscles.
By diversifying my exercises, I've had much more success building muscle now that I'm 40, compared to last time I tried back when I was 20.
Also --- I, too, was underweight once. I too was told by doctors I should gain weight, but I could not, no matter how much I ate. After a while I figured I was actually perfectly healthy, and that the tables that were saying I was underweight were one-size-fit-all and ridiculous, and I should ignore them.
Those tables are meant to detect anorexia and malnourishment, but if you're healthy, you probably just have an extreme body type whose "normal" set point weight is unusually low.
You can probably gain muscle more easily than you can gain fat, that will satisfy the doctors telling you you're underweight.
Muscle would be preferable, but some fat also would not be all bad. BMI 18 gets to be a problem if you catch an infection and can't / won't eat for a while because you lack reserves to burn...
I say don't. Throw 25lbs in your knap-sack and go walk up the stairs. That's what its like to gain 25lbs. Carry that shit with you everywhere, wear out your knees prematurely, huff and puff to keep up with lighter weight people.
I saw pro football stats from before the steroids craze. Top players weighed like 205 lbs. Now they're 280. Steroid use is tied to early heart attacks and brain tumors.
Being thin isn't ideal either, it's just preferable to being overfat. More muscle is beneficial for health and well being at every level obtainable short of using steroids
But gaining muscle is very different from carrying a knap-sack. First, this guy is incredibly unlikely to be able to gain 25 lb of muscle, he'd be doing awesome by gaining 10...15 lb in as many years. Second, the biggest gains will be in the legs and butt, then the back, including lats. So he may gain 2-3 lb in his upper body re. 7-8 lb in the lower body. A net walking strength gain, so it'll be easier to claim/jump/etc.
Also - connective tissues, joints, bones will also grow stronger and more resilient, resulting in reduced injury incidence. It's a net gain all around.
All above is predicated on natural gains, no steroids or any other PEDs.
OP's BMI is 18, which is regarded as unhealthily underweight, especially for someone who lifts. Of course BMI isn't a perfect indicator for individual health, but it's not meaningless. If OP is, say, 6' tall with that BMI, he weighs something like 133 lbs. 10 lbs of additional muscle and fat to bring him into a healthier range isn't going to destroy his knees.
I assume what you want to gain is muscle. This is really hard when your genes are against you.
Personal experience: find a good strength-focused gym with instructor-run classes and nutrition advice. I managed to gain about a pound a year with a well-designed training regimen and decent food intake.
And yes, the whole "calorie in, calorie out" garbage is less than useful. It's tautalogical, really, of course energy balances, the question is why people like us can eat anything and the body just happily burns it all. Before starting the training regiment my weight was staying within a pound for several years. By the silly "cal in/out" argument it would require caloric intake precision down to whether the spoon is licked clean or not.
Have you had a doctor check whether there is some medical reason for your low BMI? I believe that some hormonal conditions, as well as undiagnosed cancer, can have this effect.
Yes, all the standard reasons were ruled out multiple times... I do have a chronic condition but that should not affect weight (if anything, most patients are overweight)
My brother and I are both kinda skinny. We each tried for a time to gain weight, without any success. Skinny people trying to gain weight by eating more (and mostly failing) is a data point against the calorie in calorie out theory of body weight. Around age 50 I started getting a beer belly... not really the right kind of weight, and so now I have to be aware of that. Embrace the skinny...
CICO is only true when _losing_ weight. When gaining weight the body it's different because the body has ways of discarding unnecessary calories. But when losing weight it's impossible for the body to get missing energy from anywhere other than fat deposits.
>data point against calorie in, calorie out theory of body weight
It's really not. It's a point against CICO as weight control advice. But CICO literally can't be wrong from a theory of how the world works without violating laws of physics. Just because knowing about it doesn't help weight gain/loss doesn't mean much for whether or not it's true.
I know the basics of how to build a nuclear bomb. The fact that I can't successfully do so doesn't mean that nuclear fission isn't real.
Yeah, sure. Everyone loses weight when living on limited calories in a prisoner of war camp. I guess all I'm saying is that there is more to weight than CICO. Like there is some body mass set point... or something.
Body mass set point is real, but doesn't contradict CICO. Your body has autoregulating mechanisms for maintaining weight - non-exercise activity thermogenesis (NEAT), plus also just your appetite contributing to the mean-reversion.
There really isn't more to weight loss than CICO. Now, it _is_ true that "CICO" is not _nearly_ as simple as "the food you eat and the explicit major activities you do", it is in fact _fiendishly_ complex, and it can be difficult, bordering on impossible to calculate the "true" CICO values for any specific person, but that does not change the fact that, at it's core, CICO is the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth of how humans gain and lose weight.
Again, I don't think it's good _advice_ for how someone should try to lose gain weight (for all the complexity/difficulty reasons stated up above), but it is the reality of the situation. You can't gain wait if your calorie balance isn't positive and you can't lose weight if your calorie balance isn't negative. Period. The end. The details of how those balances happen, is, to repeat myself, extremely complicated and nuanced and more than just "I ate a bagel and went for a run", but all the complexity will eventually boil down to a balance.
Well perhaps we can just disagree. I have no problem imagining some signal that says to some of your cells; "Too much intake, burn more calories." And getting hotter, or twitchy, or wanting to go for a hike/ run.
Yes, and all of those change the "Calories out" part of CICO, which is why it's so complicated.
Your body likely has dozens of ways to change the balance on it's own, that can counteract your efforts to purprosefully chance the balance. But the fact of the balance is still true.
I think what you disagree with is the overly simplistic view that "if you cut 200 calories of food from your diet, and maintain your activity level, you will lose exactly 200 calories of weight". And that view of CICO is so overly simplistic as to essentially be wrong.
But the fact that this wrong version of CICO is out there doesn't mean that real, complex, nuanced version in which both you and your autonomic processes are constantly adjusting various parts of the _extremly_ complicated nutritional and energetic balance in your body isn't correct.
I wrote about watching the movie Wall Street 36 years later and what struck me about the experience. It starts:
"The movie “Wall Street” came out in 1987 when I was 25 working as a junior investment banker, and it immediately became the iconic symbol for the brash Wall Street culture that emerged in the 1980s. (Suspenders and yellow ties were icon runners-up.)
Greed is Good is the movie’s most famous line, spoken by the villainous Gordon Gekko (Michael Douglas), an insider trader and corporate raider. Back then, “Greed is Good” represented a despicable and corrupt attitude. Thirty-six years later, it’s become our culture’s dominant philosophy. We all live in Gordon Gekko’s world now."
"Citizens United and the resulting ability of the wealthy to have undue influence over our politicians and judges."
Citizens United was a ruling that the First Amendment does not allow the government to censor a film critical of a politician even if it's close to an election.
It's amazing how few people know what that ruling was actually about. But that said, with today's culture around free speech, I'm honestly not sure how many people would change their mind about it even if they found out.
It's like the how 'shouting fire in a crowded theater' quote is from a case where the actual action being analogized was distributing flyers opposing the WWI draft.
All economic systems are based upon greed. In the collectivist side, I want to do less work than my neighbors, yet still collect the same income. This starts a furious race to the bottom, which we see in all collectivist societies.
Set aside some money, plan for the future? Sorry buddy, you have to share that with the 'needy.'
> which helps governments implement Georgist land value taxes
Not quite. IIRC the idea of the company is a prerequisite of this step, namely determining the land value in the first place. From their About page: "Our goal at ValueBase is to help property appraisers and professionals make informed decisions by providing them with the most comprehensive and accurate data and tools."
He talked about it at length when he was making guest posts here on ACX. In his investigation of how to implement Georgist taxes, he came to realize that property valuations were frequently very wrong, way worse than should be even using less effective evaluation methods. Because Georgist taxes were so dependent on good valuations, he realized that this was a major impediment of ever introducing Georgism. It's also something that almost every jurisdiction would like to have, if they knew how.
This is something California outlawed in the 1970s. At the time, the California Legislature controlled the rate of property tax. Anytime the legislature wanted to increase funding, they'd just crank up the property taxes. Elderly people were being kicked out of their homes left and right. Finally the people got then Prop 13 on the ballot. Prop 13 freezes the property tax at 2% of purchase price, and the tax can only be raised 1% a year.
Very many people claim California has too much tax, what with a top rate 10% income tax, and property taxes too, but in truth Californians pay far less in taxes than most Texans, who pay 5% property tax.
Discussion of parents lying to children. I was looking for the sort where the parents make things up about the real world, and the child might only find out they had false beliefs years or decades later.
It took a bit to make it clear what sort of lie I was looking for.
I'm fascinated by the range. Some lies are clearly malevolent. Some are efforts to control behavior-- telling a girl that her friends are stupid (I think she agreed they were stupid) because ear piercing made their brains run out of their ears. Some are dominance behavior. But a surprising number are mismatched senses of humor-- the parent thinks it's obvious that they're making things up, but some children get it and others don't.
Now I'm wondering whether sense of humor is innate. Are there genetic elements? People on the spectrum can have trouble noticing context, but I think there's more to it than that.
For people who are experts at something, it is often difficult to see things from the perspective of the beginners.
Adults have way more experience and knowledge than kids. It's not just that they spent more time in this world, but also they have more opportunity to experiment with things and discuss with other adults, while kids are not allowed to do many things and when they discuss with other kids they get a lot of misinformation. So it's not fair to expect that a child will have a realistic model of the world -- especially so if they have parents who believe that making jokes is more important than providing correct information.
Also, if we just see "the parent said X, which is obvious nonsense, but the child did not realize that it was a joke", we do not have important background information such as: how often does the adult say nonsense, and how often they actually believe it and get angry when contradicted by the child. Maybe laughing at statements that seem very unlikely would be a dangerous strategy.
I agree, though apparently there are kids who have a reliable sense of when their parents are kidding. I don't know know how much is knowledge of the world and much is reading "this is a joke" body language.
Parents need to have some way of checking on what their kids believe of what they say when they do that sort of joke.
It's not just kids. I know an adult guy, who always speaks with a kind of half-smile, exactly the same face and tone of voice when he actually means it, or when he is joking (which he does often). I find it extremely annoying -- I simply can't imagine ever discussing with him something I care about, because I would never know if he replies seriously or is just making fun of me.
(Interestingly, our mutual female friends find this behavior very attractive. Like, also annoying, but attractive, too.)
So, from epistemic perspective, I'd probably hate to be this guy's kid.
For quite a few years I believed "mafia" stood for "Mothers and Fathers Italian Association" because my dad said so. In college I realized that it would be rather dumb for an Italian crime organization to have its name be an English acronym.
I explicitly tell my kids that I troll them on purpose, so that they will learn to question whether someone is telling them the truth. The lies are absurd at this point, consciously so, in order that my kids will catch them. I also tell them, if they ask me to be honest, I promise I will. I don’t want them to take the truth or the honest or other adults as a given.
The only fib I definitely remember my father telling me when I was very young comes into the warped sense of humor category.
Apparently when he was in the army in North Africa during WW2, the first thing the recruits were told on arrival was to watch out for the bootlace snake. Apparently this crafty snake would slither into a tent at night, choose an army boot and carefully pull out its laces. It would then slide into the holes, carefully arranging itself to look just like a bootlace. Then next morning, when the boot's unsuspecting owner tried to put on their boots, it would strike mercilessly and they would be dead in a matter of minutes. It was quite a while before I realised he had been pulling my leg!
The best I could come up with to fool my toddler sister was to tell her about the wild haggis in Scotland which has one leg shorter than the other, so it can run round mountain sides without falling over. I think she believed that for years!
My Grandfather told us some cattle had shorter left legs and others shorter right legs on the right. Some walked around the mountains on the left, others walked the other way.
He always wanted to work in a cheese factory shooting holes in swiss cheese.
When my sister and I were children, our father told us that in the army he was forced to eat Froot Loops as punishment (and therefore he would not purchase them for us). In retrospect, he was clearly joking, while also quite serious about not buying us Froot Loops, but for many years we assumed it was a true fact about the armed forces. (My father denies [having any memory of] saying this, which makes sense for an idle joke.)
Does someone know any good resources on how to fine tune image generation models like StableDiffusion for specific tasks, or at least a good starting point for what I'm trying to achieve? The only resources that I've found, and could follow, showcased fine tuning for simple cases like creating images in a certain style.
But I want to encode a few more constraints. I want to have the model generate isometric tiles from a predefined set of characteristics, like generate a tile from a prompt: medium hill, sparse forest in autumn, small rock formations, dirt path from NE to S. It also gets more complicated because I also want the newly generated tile to integrate seamlessly with it's neighbors.
Generally I think I need to create a dataset for how the tiles should look, and use that to fine tune on. I can use crude drawings for whatever features I want to introduce, like types of forests, hills, etc, and for seamless integration conditional GANs could work, but I really can't figure out the scope of this, or even if it's something that I should consider.
Isn't the simplest answer just that the IAT doesn't mean anything? For example, if someone has a "negative association" with a group, it's unclear if that means something along the lines of disliking or distrusting the group, or something along the lines of feeling sorry for them because they're victimized (which is an obvious explanation for this correlation). Other criticism, such as low predictive value with behavior and low internal consistency, are described in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Implicit-association_test#Criticism_and_controversy
In a county that's 20% black, the overrepresentation of black offenders in crime is going to be much more obvious to the average man on the street than it is in a county that's 2% black. I wonder if it's also possible that black overrepresentation in crime is actually less in areas that lack a critical mass of young black men.
Of course, this is unfortunate for the majority of black people who are not criminals, but the good news is that implicit bias as measured by the IAT doesn't seem to be a good predictor of actual discriminatory behavior.
>Of course, this is unfortunate for the majority of black people who are not criminals,
But crime is indicative of behavior generally. You shouldn't expect that a population which has a homicide rate 10 times higher than other populations to be just as nice and pro-social as other populations other than the actual murderers. Asians, on average, make better neighbors than black people, not simply because they're less likely to commit an actual crime against you.
You could consider whether poor people are more likely to be known as offenders. This may affect how you should update your priors. I suspect that "race" is only a minor factor.
Race predicts criminality better than income, wealth, education and employment levels. Also, you're assuming that being poor is something that is entirely a product of external factors, but why would people more prone to violent crime (implusive, aggressive, low future time orientation etc) be capable of making as much money as other people.
Yeah, everyone jumps to this conclusion at first. There are two major problems, though:
1. Just in terms of statistics, it isn't true. Race is a major independent predictor of criminal offending even after controlling for economic factors. It's not even subtle; it's the kind of thing that you can see in the raw data. A particularly striking example of this is the fact that Asians in New York City have the same poverty rates as blacks, but commit less crime than whites. Homicide is a bit of an outlier in terms of the extreme racial skew, so this isn't necessarily true of all crime, but take a look at this:
2. Assuming that poverty is a purely exogenous input is arguably the most widespread fallacy in lay, and even professional, sociology. In rich countries, poverty is largely a product of heritable cognitive and personality traits. If you look at table 1 in this study, you'll see references to 5 US studies and 16 from Australia, Sweden, and Norway consistently finding that genes explain more of the variation in earnings than shared environment:
I'm pretty sure that poverty does have some causal effect on crime, especially property crime, but the effect is much smaller than might naively be concluded when ignoring genetic confounders.
In the late 1800's (and possibly the early 1900's) Asians were considered very prone to crimes and gang warfare. Social conditions changed, and that changed.
Do you have any actual stats on this? Unlike to the media today, which go to great lengths to avoid acknowledging well documented racial differences in criminal offending, the media were happy to stoke white racism with dubious claims back then.
Even if we grant for the sake of argument that Asians (which Asians? Just Chinese? Japanese too?) were in fact hugely overrepresented in crime back then, we'd need to think about what kind of effect self-selection had on the Asian American population at the time. Because of the highly skewed sex ratio of early immigrants and greatly increased immigration in recent decades, very few modern Asian Americans are descended from 19th-century immigrants.
And even if we assume for the sake of argument that environmental factors caused Asian immigrants to commit a ton of crime in the late 19th century, it's important to note that they faced conditions far worse than modern black Americans, including severe discrimination from whites up to and including pogroms, living standards far below those experienced by even poor Americans today, essentially no marriage prospects, limited police protection, etc.
I don't know all that much about this period in Asian American history. If you do and can make a serious argument based on this knowledge, I'd be interested to hear about it, but as it is, this is far too hand-wavy for me to take as a serious rebuttal to the far more robust evidence we have from modern data.
"In the late 1800's (and possibly the early 1900's) Asians were considered very prone to crimes and gang warfare."
Yes, but in that time period, Asia was involved in ferocious clan warfare. Some of which bled over into the US. Here in Northern California, the Wakamatsu clan established a farm, so the members could retreat from Japan and survive. The Central California town of Locke was established by Chinese immigrants fleeing the Qin Dynasty.
Tongs still survive to this day ... though they follow The First Rule of Fight Club.
2. Over the past 150 years, ASIANS in the US have changed. Early Asians immigrants were mostly dirt poor laborers (i.e. selected for low IQ). Modern Asian immigrants are more likely to be skilled immigrants (i.e. selected for high IQ). Treating Asians as one homogenous group makes no sense.
I don't think your equivalence of dirt poor laborers == selected for low IQ is justifiable, except, probably, in test taking ability. And the low crime rates apply to the descendants of the earlier waves of Asians.
You are definitely correct that they are not a homogenous group, but most of the differences are cultural and environmental.
FWIW, once the earlier wave of Asians were given the right to own land and otherwise treated fairly, the rate of crime dropped. (With a lag, of course.) I believe that partially this was because they were older, but also partially it was because they had other options.
If everyone around you is at about the same level of wealth, none of you are poor. You may be poor in a larger context, but not in your personal awareness.
Inequality has risen dramatically in the past 50 years and crime has fallen. Many countries with higher inequality (and poverty) than the US have lower crime than the US.
You're not making an actual argument here, you're desperately clinging to a prior with hand wavey justifications.
Also the percentage of older people has increased, there are a lot more video games breaking up non-off-line youth groups has risen, etc. There isn't, as far as know, a fully justifiable position. Too many variables. I'm weighing more heavily the variables that seem appropriate to me.
I'm not sure how to adequately characterize this. The closest term I can think of is cognition. It feels like awareness or sense of self varies between days. It's easier to notice looking back on past actions or behavior, but difficult to evaluate or realize in the moment. Are there tests or mechanism by which this can be measured? Sorry if that's too vague.
I make notes of my reflections, in the moment, for this reason. I also do mindfulness practice. It's like a muscle you can develop. You seem entirely normal, from your account. I only say this in case your variable sense of yourself is a source of concern.
If your sense of self seems mostly variable in the past but not so much when you examine it in the present, could it be that your memory is the culprit rather than your sense of self?
I suffer from a form of OCD that generally manifests as frequent, unproductive rumination about issues such as moral philosophy, futurism, the fate of humanity, and political issues. I suspect that it is similar to OCD some people have around religious issues, but since I am not religious it manifests through secular issues that are of a similar character to my mind. I have had tremendous success over the past couple years treating it with low doses of duloxetine combined with CBT. However, I still sometimes find myself haunted by recurring ideas that trouble me. I have sometimes found it helpful to talk through these ideas with other people, but there are few people I know face-to-face that are super-interested in the types of philosophy and futurism that readers of places like this blog are. I am hoping someone here can point out the flaws in one of these ideas.
Ever since I read Robin Hanson's writing about brain emulators, one idea that keeps coming back to haunt me is the idea that at some point in the future we will develop the ability to convert resources into lifespan with perfect efficiency (for example, by uploading human minds to computers). In such a world the only way to live longer might be to make other people live shorter (for example, by competing with other mind uploads for a finite amount of computer time to run yourself, or competing with other cyborgs for energy and parts). I remind myself of the economic Law of Comparative Advantage, but it seems like that law might not hold in a world of effortless copying, or a world run by a superhuman FAI. I become disturbed at the idea that one person might simply erase everyone else and tile the universe with copies of themselves. However, I have trouble figuring out a way to condemn this course of action without endorsing some sort of deathism where people are obligated to die to make room for new people, which is just as disturbing, if not more so.
My intrusive thoughts about this get even grosser and nastier when I contemplate the idea that I might live to see such a future. The dark, sick, obsessive part of my mind tells me that I should stop donating to EA causes, which is something I currently do, because if other people live to see that future they will compete with me for lifespan. (I can sometimes mollify these worries by reminding myself that having more people alive now probably makes it more likely such a future will even come to pass at all). I never let these thoughts impact my behavior at all, I still donate to EA causes like malaria prevention and deworming.
I do not like these thoughts. They are gross and selfish, but I also feel like they must be logically flawed in some way, because no one else I know brings this up when discussing the far future (although I know speculating on what the post-singularity world will be like is generally discouraged). Some obvious flaws that occur to me are that I am incorrectly directly equating lifespan with welfare/utility, when they are often not the same, and that I am failing to account for the welfare/utility that the inhabitants of a large and diverse society bring to each other. It is also probably ridiculous to worry about slightly shortening a lifespan that will still be vastly longer than the one a typical human today has. I am effectively worrying about resource distribution in a super-abundant utopia.
Most of the time my medication is effective and I can let these thoughts go fairly quickly. But I would appreciate it if other people pointed out additional logical problems with them that would help me dismiss them more quickly on the days where they get bad.
I'm not sure a deathism where old people have to make way for new is really that horrible in the far future--certainly much preferable to a monoculture of one personality tiling the universe. Actually, I would guess that it could perhaps happen naturally. All this speculation assumes a human-computer upload type future, where it will cost roughly the same amount of resources to run an old human vs. a new human, rather than a cyborg future where it perhaps costs more and more to keep older humans alive.
First, for a hypothetical human that could live centuries, an instantiation of that human from one century would look very very different from an instantiation from another century. Sort of a ship of Theseus situation, but you could argue that these are two different people and you've solved the problem without having to have a forced end to any particular person.
This strikes me as a bit weak, however, since I suspect over time individuals would change less and less. This is obvious with older people today, but whether that's a biological constraint (older brains being biologically less amenable to new ideas) or a general truth about intelligences is hard to say. I suspect it's a mix of both; old intelligences would have a wealth of experience such that each new experience is A) less novel and therefore less able to change the ideas of the intelligence, and B) even if it is highly novel, it will have less impact on the intelligence because it will be a small proportion of their net total experiences.
Now, the solution to this (given that an old intelligence sees it as a problem) would be to re-instantiate; basically, erase a bunch of experiences to make room for new ones, with possible exceptions for beloved memories and such. I suspect this would act like death and re-birth, but I would hope that this would be a voluntary act by older intelligences that wish to experience what it's like to be a different intelligence. Certainly if I lived to be several centuries old I would want this option, sort of like death-lite (TM).
Hopefully expansion into new resources would also allow for completely new instantiations, so that we would have a mix of completely new intelligences and intelligences which undergo constant change/improvement.
"at some point in the future ... one person might simply erase everyone else and tile the universe with copies of themselves"
Issue 2: "I have trouble figuring out a way to condemn this course of action"
Response to issue 1: Any reasonable estimate of the probability of that actually happening has got to be either "it's one possibility among many of what might happen, fairly low probability" or "we just don't know enough to put a probability on it, might even be 0"
How might it be 0, despite various arguments of the form "but in the far future where resources hit a limit [ill-founded speculation about what must happen then, that can be phrased with great confidence when one is in a certain mood]"? Well, let's call the genocidal person X. At the point before X acts to kill everyone else, in this future world, there are many people who are not X, who would prefer not to be killed, each with some power to affect or constrain the actions of the others. One could speculate that at this point there are control mechanisms that extend right to the level of "certain genocidal thoughts are literally impossible to have, because the hardware on which the virtual people are running has made this true.", but let's suppose we're not there yet. Unless the power-balance between X and a coalition of not-Xes is such that X can go kill everyone else despite their opposition, in a fight between X and the set of people who are not X, X loses.
Empirical backing: We already see what happens in small scale models of resource limited environments, with life evolving under selective pressure. A combination of cooperation and competition, eventually leading to high-level coordination (multicellular organisms, and on up from there to larger coordination-units between organisms and groups of organisms) and control mechanisms to prevent defection (which in multicellular organisms, looks like cancer - one cell evading controls and replicating against the interest of the larger group). A much more comprehensive discussion of many instances of this dynamic, from sections of DNA competing for space on the genome up to larger and larger units, is here: https://80000hours.org/podcast/episodes/athena-aktipis-cancer-cooperation-apocalypse/
So although I can't predict the far future in any detail, it seems to me like we already have good empirical models for what happens when one unit in a set of replicating units within a larger group that is coordinating, tries to defect. Almost always, it is killed before it can spread. Sometimes cancer does happen, but I speculate that if one person tried to replicate themselves across the resource-space of the universe, future other people who don't want that outcome because it would mean their death will have foreseen that possibility (as you can foresee it) and put in place mechanisms to stop it happening.
Response to issue 2: You don't need to worry about condemning an action that future people will be perfectly willing to condemn, _because it will kill them_. But if you want a theoretical reason why it's bad for one future person to overwrite everyone else, you can consider respecting the preferences of then-living people, valuing diversity and disvaluing monoculture, and internalizing a positive value for getting to live in the equilibrium where you don't have to worry that everyone around you is out to murder you ASAP. (My thought process, sometimes: In order to live in a society where people act how I would like, we all have to act that way, including me. I imagine a society of people that didn't internalize pro-coordination values would collapse long before it got to universe-spanning scale).
Also, supposing I'm X... why do I value copies of myself more than copies of not-myself, again? And why do I value their existence more than their nonexistence? Like, they aren't me, they're just copies of minds like mine, and if I'm competitive, by creating more of them I'm creating competitors with my exact same capabilities to occupy the same ecological niche I occupy, which on its face seems like a bad idea, with a preferable strategy being to gather as many resources to myself as I can and extend my lifespan as long as possible. The sort of person who would murder everyone else in order to tile the universe with copies of themselves, probably has to fear being murdered in turn by their copy or a slight variation thereof, and so would fear creating those copies.
I agree with your point about not worrying about resources in utopia, although of course nothing is infinite. The other thoughts that come to mind are that we can't know how our current actions will affect anything far in the future and that those effects should be discounted compared to shorter-term outcomes. In general, I have a heuristic that the far future is the responsibility of future people. It's not practical to try to take responsibility for all of time, which you're doing to an extent. We have more than we can handle in the present! Not sure how helpful that is, but that's my reaction.
You could try to “historically backtest” your current approach to thinking. For example, suppose you lived in 1930 and tried to predict, with only the evidence available to you then, what would the future look like?
I think you’ll find that extreme confidence about the precise shape of the future is usually unfounded, but that if you had some general vague sense of “things 100 years from now will be better than they are”, this would have worked out pretty well.
What is a concrete development that would absolutely have to occur along the pathway to this imagined future? (For example: before we get to the "all humans uploaded" phase, there would almost certainly be reports of a test human or two being very imperfectly uploaded. Or of selected parts of a human's consciousness being uploaded. Or of test animals being uploaded.)
Figure out that milestone, then promise yourself you'll start planning for the Em future *when we reach that pre-milestone, and not before.* Before that stage, there are so many unknown unknowns that any steps you take are just as likely to lead directly away from your desired outcome as directly toward it. If you find yourself ruminating, then remind yourself that you are saving this for when the milestone arrives.
I generally try to avoid worrying about things outside of my control. Maybe your thoughts are correct, but unless you have the ability to do anything about it, it doesn't matter. A few more or fewer lives won't make that much difference in your virtual torture matrix hypothetical.
Beyond that, I think it's interesting how some people have such a strong sense of self preservation. Personally, I think it's fine to delete yourself and not cling on to existence. I'd probably stick around a while to see how things are going, but would get bored and delete myself sooner or later. Anyone with too strong of a desire to tile themselves across reality is probably going to justifiably end up being deleted anyway.
I wrote this about Chris Rufo's America's Cultural Revolution:
"Yes to all this. Conservative political activism of your sort is long long overdue. And it's a tragedy that mainstream conservatism has only just woken up to the decades-long 'march through the institutions'. But. But. Sooner or later you are going to have to confront the fact that what you are confronting is not just some small wokeified 'elite'.Tens of millions of tertiary-educated Americans (and even more tens of millions of Europeans and Anglos) have absorbed all this nonsense. Politically (tactically) I guess you want to flatter them and blame it all on a few bogeys. But the truth is darker."
And previously this:
"Yes, it's great to nail these Freire/Marcuse types for their Macheivellian poisoning of the West. But what made them so SUCCESSFUL in wokefying our Western culture? That's the bit that's missing here....and needs to not be shied away from if we are going to get at the real truth of things. What made them so successful is that so many people (especially the 'higher educated') are so intellectually biddable. Take another context: it is an almost universal conceit that the horrors of The Cultural Revolution were all about Mao and his gang. The truth is much darker. Mao would have been nothing without tens of millions of biddable, favour-seeking, grudge-bearing followers. "
What's the old quote, take the beam out of your own eye before you worry about the splinter in someone else's? The far left has its issues, as does the right (much more so, in my opinion). Perhaps it would be more constructive to think about how the whole country can prosper and how conservatives can come up with policies that actually appeal to the median voter rather than how you're going to stick it to your arch-enemies?
I would say both sides are overindexing on fighting with each other, and conservatives in particular are underinvesting in coming up with useful things to do. I don't think anyone's talking about ignoring the other side.
There's a conflict between the extremely broad interpretation of the Commerce Clause used in giving Congress leeway to regulate activities that are neither interstate nor commerce and the much more narrow interpretation used to determine what activities the states are prohibited from regulating.
It's explained in Federalist 42 that the Commerce Clause gives Congress not just the authority to regulate interstate commerce, but the exclusive authority to do so, as state interference in interstate commerce had been a serious problem under the Articles of Confederation. Taking the power to regulate interstate commerce out of the hands of individual states was just as much a part of the intent of this clause as giving that power to Congress.
Under the Constitution, there should be a complete disjunction between activities that the federal government has the authority to regulate and those that the states have the authority to regulate. If the Court interprets "commerce among the several states" so broadly as to give the federal government authority to regulate wages at a convenience store because an interstate traveler might shop there, then by the same token states should not be allowed to regulate wages on the grounds that this would interfere with interstate commerce.
In fact, though, there's a huge range of activities that the Court allows both the state and federal government to regulate, which is very difficult to reconcile with the idea that there's any good-faith attempt on the part of the Court to uphold the Constitution.
The standard answer to this is the Preemption Doctrine. Yes, there's a substantial overlap between what states can regulate under their police powers and what the feds can regulate as interstate commerce, but when state rules directly contradict federal rules, the federal rules win.
We recently discussed the commerce clause with regard to CA banning the sale of out of state meat which was produced in a way which would violate CAs animal welfare regulations.
My takeaway was that the test "will it have a downstream effect on interstate commerce?" is so broad that pretty much anything goes. If the feds can dictate what kinds of meat can be sold locally in supermarkets, they can probably also use the commerce clause to regulate wages, office hours, the availability of abortion, the Aryanization of companies (if not otherwise prohibited by the bills of rights), education, zoning, slavery (after getting rid of the 13th), criminal justice or pretty much anything.
My main point here is that there's a double standard for what counts as interstate commerce. Whether the authority to regulate what kind of meat can be sold falls under federal or state jurisdiction is one question, but it should be one or the other, not both.
"If the feds can dictate what kinds of meat can be sold locally in supermarkets..."
In point of fact it already does that, via various USDA and FDA regulations. But if the EATS act were to be overridden by Congress or struck down by the Court, this would not be a case of the feds dictating what kinds of meat can be sold in local supermarkets. It would be prohibiting California from dictating what kinds of meat can be sold in local supermarkets. Supermarkets would still be perfectly free to decline to carry any particular kind of meat, or any meat at all. Similarly, the First Amendment doesn't dictate what newspapers can publish, but rather prohibits states from dictating what newspapers can publish.
But the idea that federal and state powers on commerce are disjoint is itself not or at least not explicitly in your constitution. Madison may have thought that the power was inherently indevisible but that is like just his opinion man.
At least explicitly the text of your constitution itself doesn't say that and actually sort-of implies the opposite, since on that understanding the Import-Export-clause would be banning the states from doing a strict subset of the things the commerce clause was already implicitly banning them from.
And the courts also aren't inconsistently applying that idea rather they have explicitly rejected it.
I mean, yes, you’re absolutely right that such a broad interpretation is effectively unlimited. But also it was explicitly the standard interpretation by the courts for a long time. Wickard v Filburn ruled that wheat grown on one’s own land for one’s own consumption could be regulated under the Commerce Clause in 1942.
US v Lopez tightened the interpretation somewhat in 1995, but it’s still very broad, just no longer totally unlimited.
The judicial principles of stare decisis, and in particular the reliance principle.
It is good for the law to be interpreted and applied consistently so people can actually know what the law is. So courts should be reluctant to change their interpretations. Not 100% opposed, because then you can get locked into ridiculous interpretations forever. But reluctant.
And the courts should be especially reluctant to change their interpretations when a large body of the existing structure of law, government, and the economy is built on the existing interpretation.
It’s plain that if you were to say tomorrow that “Actually, the commerce clause means what it says”, it would be insanely disruptive. Half of the Federal government including things like the Civil Rights Act would become unconstitutional.
So while it’s clear the current supreme court has a strongly originalist bent and would prefer to see law interpreted according to its actual meaning, they are also willing to make concessions to practical reality.
I think you’re seeing things in an overly combative frame. It isn’t good to cause chaos for the sake of “winning”. Steady, deliberate improvement is less dramatic than burning the whole system down, but it’s more sustainable and desirable.
Jurisprudence is becoming steadily more aligned with the original meaning of the constitution in a wide range of areas. This court will continue to stay in place for a long time. Patience is a virtue.
It would be a bitter pill for Russians, but they might accept it provided they are thoroughly beaten up. Which they are. In fact, I think it is quite possible (although not certain) that if Zelensky would right now propose to surrender all currently occupied territories in exchange for NATO membership, Putin would accept that.
Danger of missiles "on Ukrainian soil" is heavily exaggerated, its not like Russia has good defenses against NATO missiles deployed in Montana or wherever Americans have their strategic arsenal.
Of course what would be really dangerous for Russia would be nuclear missiles deployed by Ukrainians, regardless of whether they are in NATO or not; if we are talking "compromise" (as opposed to victory) outcome with Ukraine in NATO, I would expect that final treaty would rule that out.
Of course Russian military is larger than at the start of the war, they did the whole mobilization thing.
As you can see, I am overall quite pesimistic about Ukrainian chances, but Russian army did really suffer terrible losses, and had Western industry shifted to war mode, they obviously wouldn't stand a chance in conventional war. But it hadn't, for readily apparent political reasons.
General consensus seems to be that Russian losses of manpower are in absolute terms higher than Ukrainian, but it is less clear whether that holds relative to population.
In case it wasn't clear, I agree that nuclear missiles in Ukraine would be terrible for Russian security. I thought that you were referring to conventional missiles, since, of course, NATO membership does not necessarily imply deployment of nukes; in some ways it is rather a substitute for European countries (most likely Poland) developing their own nuclear capabilities. Again, I expect that in compromise scenario with Ukrainian NATO membership there would be some sort of a guarantee that nukes will not get deployed in Ukraine.
Firstly, that 150k number is probably too high (yep, I noticed you didn't even link to your source).
Secondly, we don't know with any kind of precision how many people Russia (or Ukraine) mobilized. And among "additions" need to be counted not only conscripts, but also volunteers, which are reportedly many.
Thirdly, large portion of Russian losses are either separatist troops or wagnerites and perhaps other irregulars that are not usually counted as part of the Russian army when you google "how large was Russian army in 2021". Separatist formation were incorporated into the army (another addition), but only after heavy losses, in the autumn of 2022. That does not any way imply that losses of regular army have been low, however.
ETA: so it is perfectly possible that Russian army both a) is larger than at the start of the war, and b) Russians suffered more casualties than Ukrainians.
I only just became aware of the 2024 Republican candidacy of Doug Burgum, and I'm here to say: Why not Doug Burgum?
Upsides:
1. He's a generic Republican governnor of an actual state
2. At 67 he's young enough not to be senile, but old enough to much older than you
3. With his swept-back hair and his tieless suits, he looks like America's cool rich uncle that owns a boat
4. He talks about sensible economic issues and wants to downplay Culture War stuff, which he seems content to leave to the state or local level.
5. At first sight, seems reasonably smart and competent; as founder of Great Plains Software he presumably has a reasonable grasp of technology too, without being part of the whole Silicon Valley thing.
Voters don't know him. Trump drew a lot of attention to himself with his antics and still does; unless Burgum wants to go down to that level, or has wealthy backers trying to wedge his name in the conversation, he's a blip. Going by media coverage you'd think DeSantis was being pushed as the next Republican darling but his own brand of uncharismatic Trumpism has failed him.
Granted that being relatively unfamiliar to voters is the problem most candidates have to reckon with. How do you navigate populist fervor and reel things in as a moderate/temperate candidate? The gears have to switch.
It's astonishing to me that after the disaster for the long-term legitimacy of their party that was Trump that Republicans haven't pushed to move their primaries towards ANY non-FPTP voting system.
Excellent point that other Republican candidates don't seem to grasp. They need some more back-room dealing to figure out who the best candidate to go against Trump is, and then to run only that person. Blackmail or buy off all the others or something like that. That's assuming there's another electable candidate in the Republican party, which is not clear to me.
Reminder that Republicans can't backroom deal like this anymore because the base doesn't trust (and in many cases actively despises) the leadership.
The Democrats' base, by contrast, still mostly trusts the leadership. When it came out that the DNC actively suppressed Bernie, Democrats gave a very meager, "Not cool. But eh, what are you gonna do?"
If the RNC were caught doing this against Trump, the GOP would implode. Trump would start a new party and likely bring more than half the GOP with him.
Sure, I guess. Hard to keep things quiet among a bunch of narcissists. From my admittedly biased perspective, I think the Republican Party imploding would be good for them in the long run (I.e., post Trump).
It's hard to keep any large conspiracy quiet. IIRC the DNC couldn't keep it quiet because of junior staffers.
I'm inclined to think that destroying your own political party is generally a foolish way to go about accomplishing your political objectives. You don't really shed the problems you had putting together a winning coalition; you just shed some of the institutional memory of putting together a competitive electoral machine. The point might well come when the GOP naturally evaporates like the Federalists did, but for the moment the GOP, though clearly the weaker party, is still relevant in national politics.
It's hard to know what to think about all these lawsuits. Some or all may be justified, but one can't avoid the suspicion that some are based on a wilfully literal-minded interpretation of what he said about "fighting" before the Capitol invasion.
There are hymns such as "Fight the good fight with all thy might" etc. But nobody thinks that is encouraging the congregation to go out and start punching people or invading nearby churches! It seemed obvious to me that he was using the word figuratively to mean "strive" or similar.
Also, besides the few hotheads who invaded the Capitol, the vast majority of protesters seemed to be mooching around peacefully in the surrounding grounds, as if it was a gay pride afternoon in the park, even down to the police looking on benevolently. That's what the TV footage looked like anyway.
I've no doubt most of the GOP think the same about all the legalistic shenanigans, and it's reminiscent of how the Senate in ancient Rome tried to bring down Julius Caesar with "lawfare" when he was or would be out of office, and recall how _that_ blew up in their faces!
Reading his Wikipedia article, he seems adequately beige, but if he's anyway serious about running for the presidency, then he's going to be attacked by whoever the Democratic nominee or hopeful running in parallel with him is, and again from Wikipedia that's going to be on abortion, the border, LGBT and particularly trans rights, climate change denialism, and idpol:
"Energy
Burgum has been very vocal on his support for the fossil fuel industry, especially in the Bakken region of western North Dakota. But he also signed a bill to create clean energy sustainable for the state on April 26, 2021. Burgum supports the Dakota Access Pipeline.
Abortion
In April 2023, Burgum signed a near-total ban on abortion in North Dakota.
National security
Burgum has deployed the National Guard to the southern border with Mexico numerous times. In April 2022, he and 25 other governors created the American Governors’ Border Strike Force to help each other with defense on the border against illegal immigration and human trafficking. Burgum argued that energy independence is key to fending off China and Russia.
LGBT rights
In July 2020, Burgum called the 2020 Republican platform "divisive and divisional" on LGBT issues. During the 2023 session of the North Dakota Legislative Assembly, Burgum signed numerous anti-trans laws, including a near-total ban on gender-affirming care for minors.
Education
On November 12, 2021, Burgum signed a law banning the teaching of critical race theory in North Dakota K-12 schools"
Going off that he will be painted as Literally Hitler - old rich white Christian cis het guy who is pro-fossil fuels and in favour of forced births and trans genocide as well as denying refuge to those trying to flee oppression in South America! Oh, and I forgot the talking point about "not wanting children to learn about slavery" because CRT is not being taught in schools, it's simply the history of racism in the USA. You can fill in the bingo card yourself.
EDIT: As for his looks, I've never been in favour of mutton dressed as lamb. He's hitting up on 70, stop trying to look like you're 40 and cool. Embrace the beigeness!
Well yeah, but when someone asks "What are the downsides?", it's pretty clear what they are: he's a Republican who supports generally Republican policies. He can't present himself as a centrist or a moderate for the mushy middle vote, because his opponent will wave the "anti-abortion, anti-LGBT, racist, climate change denying, rich white guy" card about.
Those downsides are inconsequential compared to the bit where Doug Burghum has basically never been on the front page of a newspaper outside the Dakotas, nor on a CNN or FOX News chyron. That may not be literally true, but it's close enough for government work.
Oh yeah, he's a nobody which is the relevant criterion. But if he were going to run, the downsides are "generic Republican who will be slaughtered as Snidely Whiplash by Democratic opponent". He's not one of the 'good' Republicans who get the 100% rating from NARAL or anything like that.
My MAGA relatives would never give this guy a second look except to sneer that he reeks of the Deep State and is probably on Bill Gates' payroll and etc.
Also it appears that he simply bought a spot in the debates which, if he was worth taking down, would be an easy way for the other candidates including Trump to make fun of him:
"On July 10, 2023, Burgum began offering $20 gift cards for a donation of any amount to his primary campaign. A spokesman for Burgum acknowledged that this was an attempt to reach the threshold of individual donors required to participate in the first Republican primary debate. The scheme was successful, and on July 25, Burgum qualified for the debate after also meeting the polling threshold. Despite its success, the scheme was ridiculed on social media, with some users declaring that they had donated $1 to Burgum and $20 to Joe Biden's reelection campaign."
4.: Culture War stuff currently very much isn't left to the state or local level. Consider anti-discrimination and hostile workplace environment laws, the affirmative action-mandating Executive Order 11246, enforcement by the EEOC and other parts of the federal administration. SCOTUS picks interpret CW-related federal laws and constitutional questions.
Does he want to actively dismantle federal involvement in CW stuff, or to ignore the area, which means leaving much of it in the hands of the federal government?
67 is still pretty old (before 2016 he'd be tied with Reagan for the oldest president first sworn in). Would still be better than most alternatives though.
Not sure where you live, but can't you get a temporary (?) job in a hotel kitchen, or as a waiter. The money may not be brilliant, but at least you'll get a decent meal or two every day.
If you want to save money on food, one of the most important principles to understand is what I call the RULE OF DRY.
Disclaimer: I don't live in the US, but these principles are pretty much universal.
To explain this RULE OF DRY, I'll start with an example. Let's say, hypothetically, you can buy for the same price either 1 pound of canned beans or 1 pound of dry beans. You may think the two deals are similar. But if you buy the canned beans, you only get 1 pound of them. Whereas, if you buy the dry beans, you leave them overnight to soak, and then you get 4 pounds of actual beans! For the same price!
This is typical. It applies to everything starchy, whether it's legumes, grains, the flours of grains and legumes, or other products derived from grains or legumes, such as, I believe, oatmeal (which is an American food not common where I live, but I think it falls into the same category.)
All these foods are about the same: 1 kilo of dry product = 4 kilos of hydrated product = about 4000 calories. If the product is refined (white flour, white rice) you only get the carbs and protein, whereas if it's whole, it will be a little more expensive, but you also get vitamins and minerals.
Not only dry starches tend to be incredibly cost effective; they weight little, so they're easy to carry, and they're non-perishable as long as they stay dry, so you can stock up on them.
You can probably buy some on the Internet. Here in my country, I used to buy online huge sacks of dry millet which got shipped to my door and it was unbelievably cost effective relative to nutrients. You can probably shop for the cheapest offer online in dry grains/legumes/flours and buy large sacks of that.
Here's another insight: next to dry starches, the second most cost-effective food type tends to be vegetables (note that I'm talking about VEGETABLES, not FRUIT). This is surprising, because vegetables are known for having virtually no calories. But calories in themselves are dirt cheap, and are not the true problem when one wants to eat on a limited budget. You can get dirt cheap calories in the form of white flour, white rice (dry), fats (in the US, I'm told, the cheapest is canola oil). But these dirt cheap calories lack vitamins, minerals, and flavor. You can combine these dirt cheap calories with vegetables, which provide the most cost effective vitamins, minerals, and flavor. Of course the cost of vegetables varies, but some are cheaper and you can buy as much as possible of the cheapest, whether fresh or canned doesn't matter. Note that, I repeat, I'm talking about VEGETABLES, not FRUIT. You may think that the cost of fruit and of vegetables are similar, relative to weight, but the two are not equivalent; vegetables provide way more vitamins, nutrients, and even flavor, than fruit, making vegetables by far the most cost effective.
Note, by the way, that the human protein requirements are much lower than people assume, to the point that you shouldn't worry much about it. On a calorie sufficient diet, it's difficult to become protein deficient, even in terms of specific amino acids. You should worry more about calories, vitamins and minerals, so I've given you some ideas to get those for cheap. Of course, if you become a long term vegan, you should worry about certain nutrients, especially B12.
I've considered similar lines. My situation has some added health, social, psychological, and environmental concerns that are currently limiting my ability to act on this with maximal efficiency, but I do have some food that fits this description.
This brand seems good to me, right now their cheese powder is keeping me in better spirits than I'd be without it.
Maybe it's a luxury I'm not worthy of, but I do think fresh food is a good thing for anyone, even if strict survivability may be achieved in a well stocked bunker.
Affer all this time, one person has given about $50 for which I am very grateful but none of you assholes found the time to do more than that. Cabal your thumbs can work hard condescending to me,maybe you could use them to help me hit at least median income for my country?
"Maybe it's a luxury I'm not worthy of, but I do think fresh food is a good thing for anyone, even if strict survivability may be achieved in a well stocked bunker."
Buy fresh vegetables.
Like I said in the other comment, they're one of the most cost effective foods, a great choice if you're desperately poor. I know it's counterintuitive, but it's true.
In 2020, the average US retail price of fresh green cabbage is 0.70 dollars per pound.
For the nutrition you get, it's a steal.
Combine the cheapest fresh vegetables with white rice (purchased dry) to get dirt cheap meals.
Average US retail prices of fresh vegetables in 2020 according to department of agriculture, dollars per pound:
green cabbage 0.7
carrots 0.87
onions 1
iceberg lettuce 1
trimmed celery 1
plum tomatoes 1.16
These are extremely cost effective; they're all packed with nutrition and their lack of calories is immaterial because as I've explained calories are super cheap.
Yes, these vegetables are the cheapest on the list. But you can eat the cheapest.
My local library has a fridge with free produce donated by the community for anyone to take. Check with your local library (if within walking distance, naturally). Ditto for foodbanks.
Then eat whatever is in the cupboards/store. You may have a lot of tinned food, pasta, rice, etc. that is shoved into the press and only used once in a while. Cook all that.
Walking on foot - depends if you have to walk a long way to work etc. Best of luck with that! See if you can carpool with colleagues to get you to work?
If money, it would probably be useful to drop a link that would allow people to send you money, or drop your email at the very least so people can privately get in touch.
I recognize that some people may not be willing to donate personally to me on this basis. Local to me, this is sort of the flag ship charity for my area.
I went to a local food bank the other day, went in debt for a ride, and they didn't have the resources to be open at dinner time. If you want to help me, this could be a direct way to help me as well.
I wonder what is the reason for the bad "sales pitch". Are they afraid that they might be doing something dangerous, but they also do not want to stop unilaterally because that would be obviously bad for business? Or are they just trying to get the AI industry heaving regulated, with the current winners on top and everyone else prevented from doing the same or better?
Yesterday I finally overcame my laziness and actually tried chatGPT. From my perspective, it is a way to find information online (albeit excluding the most recent information) that is way better than what current search engines allow (a part of that is probably that the SEO industry has not adapted to this yet). My sales pitch would be: "a search that understands". Instead of a list of hyperlinks that may or may not contain the information you were looking for, it provides the information itself, and instead of matching strings it matches the meaning (so you don't have to find the right keyword, just use a synonym or a vague description).
Consider how popular Google has become in the past by producing a search engine which at that moment was much better than the competitors. A similarly successful product could be made by integrating ChatGPT with web search. Maybe don't let the AI run loose on the internet, but give it a read-only access to a fresh index of web pages, and tell it to provide a short answer *followed by* a list of relevant web pages. (On a second thought, maybe this wouldn't scale well. But, Moore's law, etc. Or maybe just cache the answers to the most frequent questions, and prioritize paying customers when the question is outside the cache.)
To give an example, I asked chatGPT to give me a list of DOS games that included a level editor. The returned list contained many first-person shooters (such as Doom), so I asked again, telling chatGPT to *exclude* the first-person shooters. And I got exactly what I wanted.
I cannot imagine getting the same information from Google search. First, almost any question just gets me SEO optimized pages like "Best DOS games", "50 Best DOS Games", etc. Second, the nature of Google search just does not support the concept of excluding something based on its *traits*; it can only include or exclude based on *keywords*. I can't tell Google to exclude the first-person shooters; I can only tell it to exclude the pages that explicitly contain the "first-person shooter" keywords (maybe for an unrelated game, or just as an item in the menu).
Next, I asked whether there are any words in Japanese starting with "v". This seems like something that Google search could handle well... but it returns a list of pages that have "Japanese words starting with 'v'" as a title, but actually contain a list of *English* words starting with "v". It is a mystery for me why someone would create so many pages like this. Do people really ask this question often enough to make SEOs interested? Anyway, this is what I got; all results on the first page utterly irrelevant to my question, but I had to click them all in order to figure this out.
Next, I ask chatGPT. First it gives me a list of excuses, like "you know, native Japanese words usually do not start with 'v', only loanwords do" and "actually, in Japanese 'v' and 'b' are pronounced very similarly". Okay, I don't have the answer yet, but I learned something relevant anyway. So I tell it, hey, give me a list of Japanese words starting with "v" (not "b") and I don't care whether they are loanwords... and then chatGPT gives me the actual list. Sugoi desu ne?
This was just like 10 minutes of experimenting with the *free* version GPT-3.5. (I was told that the paid GPT-4 is an order of magnitude better.) And I didn't have anything important in mind to ask. My friend told me that he uses chatGPT when he is learning new things from a textbook: anytime something seems unclear or he has an additional question, he just asks chatGPT, and it provides an explanation that is easy to understand. (I am also planning to try this.) He calls chatGPT a perfect tutor. The advantage again is that instead of a link containing keywords, it provides the information itself. It's like someone has read the entire internet for you (excluding recent changes), understood most of it, and can give you a high-level summary on any topic that interests you.
Aren't you just describing Bing search? I tried using it for research once and it gave me basically what I'd learn by skimming the first few Google search results, with links to the pages it was citing.
Bing provides a short summary with references. ChatGPT provides a detailed step-by-step explanation. Both are an improvement over the usual experience. The ideal product, as I imagine it, would provide both.
To use an analogy to Wikipedia articles, it's as if Bing gives you the summary of the article, and ChatGPT gives you the article itself, but without references. I would like to get the entire article, with the references.
It also feels like (though I am just guessing here) as if Bing does the web search first, and then summarizes the knowledge from the search results, while ChatGPT uses all the knowledge it has. But this is just my impression from very little experimenting.
It's interesting you did this and it worked out so well, because I tried a number of things with ChatGPT that I thought were in a similar vein as your DOS question (90s video games) and was deeply disappointed.
One such question: give me a complete list of games on Sega Genesis developed by Treasure.
If I Google "Treasure Sega Genesis" the top response is the Wikipedia article for Treasure, which has the information I want in a table.
When I asked ChatGPT a while ago, it gave me a list that was incomplete and that included a game that wasn't on Sega Genesis. When I asked it this question just now, the response was even worse than the previous one. It lists one game (there were 5-6 depending on how you count), then gives me a paragraph-long disclaimer. Paraphrased: "Maybe Treasure developed more games for Sega Genesis after September 2021. Consult their website or other official sources."
Now, my point isn't that ChatGPT is useless. There are definitely things it does better than Google. But this is an example of extremely basic information that Google (or at least Wikipedia) remains much better at finding.
Now that you said that, I notice that I haven't actually checked yet whether those games actually have the editor. Maybe ChatGPT was just lying to me all the time! :D
Yep, one thing about ChatGPT is it doesn't give you any indicators of confidence. And it does lie. And when you ask it for an exhaustive list, it usually leaves things out, but if you point out the omissions, it will agree immediately and add them. I don't know if it even assigns confidence intervals to anything it says, but if it did, it would sure be helpful if it gave us an indication of them.
It could say: "I KNOW Treasure developed these games for Sega Genesis, and I THINK it developed these, and if I had to take a wild guess or just wanted to lie, I would say it developed these." or something along those lines. Maybe people would find the constant hedging annoying, but I'd actually appreciate that sort of hedging much more than the annoying and useless disclaimers it currently insists on including.
They're afraid they're doing something dangerous, but it's the only thing they know how to do that they're at all excited about doing, so they find a way to rationalize it as being the right thing to do. "At least our AI will be slightly less dangerous than the Chinese one, so it is morally imperative that we get there first", is a decent enough rationalization to do AI research, and now that you're the Good Guys for doing exciting AI research, you try to make it blandly but profitably inoffensive.
Advertising it as something that provides information might weaken their defense positions in the cases about hallucinated libel. Or they are afraid of this outcome. Trying to describe how to use it properly and what the true strengths are — this can make a compelling _and_ safe deployment story. But they might be afraid of scaring away the subscribers attracted by the aura of magic. So, «HeadOn: apply directly to the forehead».
I think we can be fairly confident (given the incentives) that the figures which the CCP reports are upper bounds on the size and growth of the Chinese economy. But how much space there is between the reported figures and reality I have no idea.
It's not clear that their growth rate is actually still higher than the US. It probably was until some time in the past year or two, and probably will be again in a few years, but it may well not be right now.
All growth rates (reported by google, the Economist, the guardian etc) are based on data supplied by the CCP. If you are very confident, I suggest your confidence is misplaced.
I think given the incentives it is probable that CCP data overstates PRC growth rates. By how much...I have no idea.
As for not trusting the Chinese figures - if we don’t accept the stats we can’t say anything at all about China.
However China is the one reporting the slow down to 0.8% this quarter, and therefore the quarterly reports show relative slowdowns and increases.
(I think China is in fact much richer than the actual statistics suggest. Its main cities seem up there with the west, but somehow that is not apparent in the statistics.)
NB I've seen analyses attempting to estimate Chinese GDP without relying on CCP figures, by using instead stuff like nighttime light output (as detected by satellites), which correlates tightly with GDP in the rest of the world. These kinds of analyses generally end up concluding that total PRC GDP is overstated by a factor of 2-3. But my level of confidence in these kinds of analyses is low. About as low as my confidence in CCP statistics.
The last bit is easy to explain. The third world is full of first world pockets. In China those pockets might even have grown to city size. But national statistics average over the whole country (including the rural hinterlands).
What incentive would CCP apparatchiks have to underreport their economic figures?
The Chinese statistics office actually expected 5% a year this year, not 10%. In fact that’s their long term goal not the old export led growth of 10%.
The economist gets 3% from taking the quarterly statistic from a weak quarter and assuming that that continues. In other words the 3% is a projection from now assuming 0.8% in the next 3 quarters.
It’s not the actual annual growth rate to now (6.3%) or even the potential calendar growth rate, because the first quarter was higher. (That would be 4.6% even if the next quarters are as weak as this one, because the 1Q results are locked in. )
If the economist had annualised the first quarter growth (of 2.2%) it would have said that China would grow at 9% a year. I don’t think anybody wrote that article at the time.
Not that the slowdown isn’t important, it might be, but it probably isn’t.
I'd be very careful with premature conclusions. There was a similar crisis situation in 2015; that time it was stock market, now real estate, which is more serious, but still, it tells us something they managed to solve that without much damage.
Wasn't the solution there, though, just the state pumping money into it? I guess if it works for the USA, there's no reason China can't go for the "it is impossible to default, they can just print more currency/sell more debt" fix too.
I think China is hitting the logical end point of the economic boom. All the low-hanging fruit has been well and truly plucked, they've caught up as much as possible, now they have to deal with "we are no longer a source of cheap labour, other growing economies are replacing us there" growing pains.
Thailand screws together some decent Hondas. South Africa makes BMWs. Vietnamese-made Vinfasts are supposedly okay (on a par with Chinese cars at least). Tesla is building a factory in Indonesia.
All of these places have a lower per capita GDP than the PRC which I'm guessing translates to cheaper factory labour.
I guess the obvious starting point to me is to start keeping track of what decisions and tradeoffs you find yourself making. Each decision is a data point, and with enough of them you can narrow down what function is generating them.
It was not so much that so many babies died on her shift as that a weirdly high number of deaths occurred among babies who hitherto had been showing no cause for concern. There was then positive postmortem evidence of intervention eg of injection of insulin at a time when insulin wasn't being used in the treatment of any child on the ward.
One can't of course really take a view without having sat through the trial but the evidence was rather more than the statistical patterns.
True, but the stats are impressive in their own right. Out of 26 suspicious incidents, Letby was the only member of staff present for them all, more than double her closest competitor - and that's just the data from the trial. Operation Hummingbird is now entering phase 2 and they are looking at her whole career. Reminds me of Shipman where he was found guilty of 7 murders and then the inquiry was launched and it turned out it was hundreds of murders over decades. Letby is only 33 and I assume she had to be more careful than Shipman because of her client group, who are more closely monitored than the elderly, but I predict the inquiry will conclude:
- at least 20 murders including convictions (80%)
- at least 30 attempted murders including convictions (disregarding the not guilty verdicts) (60%)
Her guilt seems clear cut, firstly because in a search of her house the police found diaries covering the relevant periods with all kinds of bizarre heavily underscored entries along the lines of "I hate myself for what I've done" and similar.
A very charitable interpretation for her diary entries would have been that she had taken it upon herself to shoulder blame for mishaps that had occurred naturally, as sometimes happens with premature babies. But the police search also uncovered resuscitation notes she had taken from the hospital for the infants who had died, and one can only assume those were to be mementos as serial killers often keep.
Despite her generally calm and friendly demeanor, she had also made bizarre and inappropriate comments to the parents of the children who died.
Also, I think the symptoms of some of the babies before they died indicated that air had been introduced into their blood stream, and post mortems may even have confirmed that (not sure). So clearly someone with access to the neonatal wards in the hospital had been tampering with the patients, and Letby was the only person on duty when all the incidents occurred, and off duty when they didn't!
Several doctors had noticed this and demanded the hospital management suspend Letby from nursing duties while an investigation was conducted. But the manager ignored their requests, and even asked them to apologise! Maybe a bit contentious, but it appears to me this was less about preserving the hospital's reputation, as the MSM have mostly assumed, and more a show of solidarity against what the (female) manager stupidly assumed was unfair male persecution.
Besides the families of the dead infants of course, I feel sorry for Letby's parents. However many people she killed, two more innocents have undoubtedly had their lives irretrievably destroyed.
"Besides the families of the dead infants of course, I feel sorry for Letby's parents. However many people she killed, two more innocents have undoubtedly had their lives irretrievably destroyed."
Honestly, there seems to be something very odd about them as well.
The parents got involved with her employer when the hospital attempted to investigate Letby in 2017. Letby would have been 27 at the time. If she'd been 18-20 I'd understand, but the parents of a fully grown woman threatening to refer the hospital to the General Medical Council is bizarre.
Additionally, when Letby was arrested in 2018, her mother told the police 'I did it, take me instead'. Either deeply weird or just extremely melodramatic (the woman was accused of murdering her infant charges, not theft or something).
Charitably, the parents are what sounds like a particularly obnoxious mixture of overbearing and histrionic, her father handling her grievance process smacks of a perceived immaturity on her behalf. Armchair psychology, but it does seems somewhat enabling behaviour.
According to the Guardian, the manager (chief executive) who told the doctors to apologize was called Tony Chambers and was presumably male.
”Another executive, Tony Chambers, then the hospital’s chief executive, instructed senior doctors to write a letter of apology to Letby on 26 January 2017 for repeatedly raising concerns about her. The apology was ordered on the basis of two external reviews, which executives felt exonerated Letby.”
I presume, Alison Kelly, the senior manager the Mail Article identifies, reported to Tony Chambers, and he took her side without making further enquiries.
There are more administrators than medical staff in the bloated, useless NHS. So I can quite believe there were several management levels between the two, making it even less likely he had a clue what was really going on.
According to this a lot of managers were involved and Chambers spent hours interviewing the nurse and her father, so he seems to have been quite involved. —
”
These reviews were considered by executives to clear Letby of any wrongdoing and they decided in January 2017 that she should return to the neonatal unit, documents show.
Bereaved parents were told the following month that the reviews had not found any suspicious circumstances in their babies’ deaths.
In a meeting called to discuss these reports on 26 January 2017, Chambers said he had spent hours talking to Letby and her father and that he believed she was innocent, according to internal documents seen by the Guardian and interviews with two paediatric consultants, Dr Steve Brearey and Dr John Gibbs.
Chambers then ordered the consultants to apologise to Letby and said she would return to work on the unit imminently. In the event, she did not return to the neonatal unit and a police investigation began four months later.
Gibbs told the Guardian: “To be told what the reviews showed without having seen them at all was a bit surprising, and then to be told we were to draw a line under the matter and that was it, and then to be instructed to send a letter of apology to Lucy Letby was just flabbergasting.”
Gibbs, who gave evidence 13 times at Letby’s trial, said senior doctors had started to “think the unthinkable” in suspecting foul play but that “I don’t think the management could accept that”.
After Letby’s removal from the unit in July 2016 there were discussions about contacting the police but the hospital decided to carry out two external reviews first.
Brearey said that on one occasion, Stephen Cross, the hospital’s director of corporate affairs and legal services, said contacting the police would be “terrible” for the hospital’s reputation and turn the neonatal unit into a crime scene.
Circumstantial evidence can be just fine. lots of people get convicted on the basis of it, because criminals tend to go out of their way not to do things in front of witnesses.
She wrote on a note " I killed them on purpose because I'm not good enough to care for them." That is not circumstantial.
The article you link to has very serious issues, starting with the extraordinary disclaimer at the start.
As a UK person I have followed the case on and off. I don't have any doubt at all about her guilt.
She has just been sentenced to a whole life order. In the UK murder always gets life imprisonment, but usually with a recommendation of the possibility of release on parole after 15-30 years. Whole life means prison till you die.
I'd have sworn I read (or heard in a video) that there was a blood test which could tell whether insulin was made by the baby or given from an external source, but I can't find the reference.
According to BBC Panorama, if the body produces insulin, there is another chemical it produces at the same time, so you can test for this. If there is insulin but not the other, then it must have come from outside the body.
Somewhat relatedly, Kathleen Folbigg was recently pardoned and released from prison after 20 years here in Australia. She had been convicted of killing her 4 children.
The case against her was largely built on the improbability that 4 children all spontaneously died for no apparent reason. Later, it was discovered that the children may have shared a rare genetic mutation.
I don’t know anything about this British case, but I will simply say that the standard of “beyond reasonable doubt” is intentionally extremely high for very good reasons, and courts and juries that fudge it risk committing horrible injustices.
Anyone know whether Ashley Hodgon is connected to the rationalist community?
She's got sensible videos--summary of Turchin's __End Times_: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SHoqcGqnAUY...&ab_channel=TheNewEnlightenmentwithAshley
and Hollywood as pyramid scheme--https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SHoqcGqnAUY...&ab_channel=TheNewEnlightenmentwithAshley , with the implication that the same applies to academia.
She's with the Heterodox Academy.
Note the Change in location for this week:
ACXLW meetup in University Hills, Irvine sat 8/26/23
https://docs.google.com/document/d/11NXee4-Yafu4nhJ0nkf1C-JbU9RUtARCQ1apawlsVrM/edit?usp=sharing
Hello Folks!
We are excited to announce the 40th Orange County ACX/LW meetup, happening this Saturday and most Saturdays thereafter.
Host: Michael Michalchik
Email: michaelmichalchik@gmail.com (For questions or requests)
Location: Contact me for the exact address.
(949) 375-2045
Date: Saturday, Aug 26, 2023
Time: 2 PM
Conversation Starters :
The Last Psychiatrist: The Most Important Article On Psychiatry You Will Ever Read
https://thelastpsychiatrist.com/2007/07/the_most_important_article_on.html
Narrative Creativity Training: A New Method for Increasing Resilience in Elementary Students - ScienceDirect
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2713374523000201?via%3Dihub
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.
A summary and questions are forthcoming:
Ukraine live briefing: Plane believed to be carrying Wagner chief Yevgeniy Prigozhin crashes in Russia, according to Russian state media
I guess nobody fucks with “The Putin” either.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=8xTqP58o1iw
Published by Reuters 30 minutes ago:
====
MOSCOW, Aug 24 (Reuters) - Russian President Vladimir Putin sent his condolences to the family of Yevgeny Prigozhin on Thursday, breaking his silence after the mercenary leader's plane crashed with no survivors two months after he led a mutiny against army chiefs.
Two U.S. officials told Reuters that Washington believed a surface-to-air missile originating from inside Russia likely shot down the plane, though they said the information was preliminary and under review. They spoke on condition of anonymity and offered no evidence.
Russian investigators opened a criminal probe but there has been no official word from Moscow on what may have caused Wednesday evening's crash. Until Putin's comments there had been no official confirmation of Prigozhin's death beyond a statement from the aviation authority saying he was on board....
A Reuters reporter at the crash site on Thursday morning saw men carrying away black body bags on stretchers. Part of the plane's tail and other fragments lay on the ground near a wooded area where forensic investigators had erected a tent.
The Baza news outlet, which has good sources among law enforcement agencies, reported that investigators were focusing on a theory that one or two bombs may have been planted on board.....
Being on the aircraft passenger list is not the same thing as being on the aircraft.
I've seen people celebrating his death, which bothers me because there were other people on the plane.
Yeah, I was really wondering, why on earth did he back down? Did he really think Putin would let him live? In Belarus of all places? He bought himself a lousy extra two months of life--at that point you might as well go down in history as the first man who marched on Moscow after Napoleon.
I actually think that if Prigozhin had never left Belarus and busied himself with sending up giant flares about his willingness to play ball (such as voluntary dissolution/transfer of the PMC) he might have lived. Uncle Sasha did broker the deal, Belarus is his domain, and Putin wouldn't have humiliated him so overtly.
But late-stage grandeur-deluded Prigozhin was quite incapable of such contrition. Quelle tristesse.
I don't know... Sergey Skripal was living a quiet life in the UK after an exchange. And yet.
But definitely going back - repeatedly - into the monster's lair was reckless to say the least.
Why wouldn't Putin have just made an example of Prigozhin straight up instead of doing this?
It's also possible that Wagner had to be thoroughly declawed first. As well as having both Prigozhin and Utkin together as a convenient target. There's chatter about Wagner fighters being pissed and wowing revenge. We'll see.
Dying in an ‘accident’ so soon after a big risk that went south says enough I think. It’s like when Tony Soprano tells you the new TV ‘fell off a truck’. People get the message.
Not saying it couldn’t possibly be coincidence but the pebble has been removed from Putin’s shoe one way or the other.
No matter how Prigozhin dies, everyone's going to assume Putin did it. So it doesn't make much difference how he does it.
"What's the penalty for compromising and going into exile?"
Useful hint for going into exile: don't go back to the country you're exiled from
(Ideally try not to hang out in one of their neighbouring client states either)
Also, if you murder a couple dozen Russian air force officers, maybe don't go flying your private plane through Russian airspace two months later. Karma's a Mach 3 radar-guided bitch.
As always with that basket case of a failed state, we just don't know what happened. Everyone assumes Putin's revenge, but I would not be surprised if this was a mistake by the air defense. There's been an increasing number of drone attacks in Russia, and mistaking a small private plane for a large drone is not out of the question.
Also remember that Wagner shot down several Russian planes during that one-day rebellion. With apparently 0 consequences for anyone responsible.
“But let me say this. I am a superstitious man, a ridiculous failing but I must confess it here. And so if some unlucky accident should befall my youngest son, if some police officer should accidentally shoot him, if he should hang himself while in his jail cell, if new witnesses appear to testify to his guilt, my superstition will make me feel that it was the result of the ill will still borne me by some people here. Let me go further. If my son is struck by a bolt of lightning I will blame some of the people here. If his plane show fall into the sea or his ship sink beneath the waves of the ocean, if he should catch a mortal fever, if his automobile should be struck by a train, such is my superstition that I would blame the ill will felt by people here. Gentlemen, that ill will, that bad luck, I could never forgive. But aside from that let me swear by the souls of my grandchildren that I will never break the peace we have made. After all, are we or are we not better men than those pezzonovanti who have killed countless millions of men in our lifetimes?”
--Mario Puzo, The Godfather
On humanitarian principle, I'd rather he'd been imprisoned, but Prigozhin is not exactly a man to be mourned.
The chances of his being the first private jet (of very many; wealthy Russians zip off to the Gulf States, Turkiye, Cyprus, etc., all the time) to be erroneously shot down by AD are... well, low enough to shake an atheist's faith.
With you on the first point. I oppose death penalty for many reasons.
On the second… yeah would be quite a coincidence but maybe in 10%-ish category. Given the recent sharp increase in drone attacks, and the direction of the flight, and the fact that it only turned its transponder mid flight, the error hypothesis becomes a bit more plausible. Still low, but not near-0 low.
Why do Youtube thumbnails of people with their mouths open looking surprised/stupid do better than basically any other thumbnail? Is this an algorithm thing or a human psychology thing?
The algorithm thing IS a human psychology thing
I guess the question is whether the algorithm deliberately promotes giant faces with dumb open mouths, or whether it's just common knowledge at this point among creators that this is what gets the most clicks.
(It used to be sexy chicks, but apparently some doofus standing with his mouth open is even more eye-catching than a sexy chick.)
There are two things guaranteed to get people to stop and watch a TV programme while channel flicking.
Men: something exploding.
Women: someone crying.
I am assuming it's Youtube capitalizing on human psychology as they are highly incentivized to find whatever keeps people watching. They have research teams trying to figure out what to promote in their algorithm, and I don't doubt they include psychologists.
They also have the benefit of knowing what people clicked on in the past. I'd assume they'd adapt the algorithm to emphasize what was organically clicked on most, so one should reflect the other, even without the explicit inclusion of psych theory.
The default starting algorithm you get when making a fresh youtube account or use it unlogged in seems to start with mouth-open videos by default before adapting to your preferences, so maybe it is the most widely-palatable starting guess? I suppose you're asking more why that is the case than anything. I'd guess it's because some of the largest groups of youtube viewers are children and people looking for completely mindless diversion, both of which shocked people and bright colors seems fitting for.
I kept procrastinating on putting my book review contest entry somewhere -- it didn't make it, obviously -- but finally I put it somewhere. Ta-da.
https://lettersfromtrekronor.substack.com/p/book-review-the-life-of-johnny-reb
I guess I can only blame myself for watching stupid sci-fi movies, but sometimes the "facepalms per minute" metric is so high I need to tell someone.
Spoilers for Aeon Flux (2005) https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0402022/
Setting: a deadly virus killed 99% of Earth population and made the surviving 1% infertile. The extinction of humanity was only prevented by a scientist creating a fertility cure. Four centuries later, all surviving humans live in one city (which has the monopoly on the cure) surrounded by huge walls, with a totalitarian government. No one is allowed to leave the city, probably not even to look beyond the walls.
It later turns out that the "fertility cure" is actually cloning. As a consequence of surviving the virus, humans lost the ability to reproduce naturally. So when someone dies, the government takes their DNA and creates a clone, which is then secretly implanted to a woman trying to conceive (she thinks they are just giving her some fertility medicine). One clone per one dead human keeps the population and the genetic pool constant. The story happens 400 years after the virus.
As a background, not bad. But if you think for a minute about the logistic necessary to make this work, it just doesn't work. Imagine: 99% of population dead, the infrastructure has probably fallen apart. You need to collect millions of people across the planet into one city (where do you get the fuel?) and start administering the "fertility cure" relatively quickly on a relatively large scale (about thousand a day, but you need to keep the details of the "cure" secret for centuries, so all doctors involved need to be a part of the conspiracy). Also, if no one is allowed to leave the city walls, where the you get the raw materials to build your futuristic technology? Where do you get food?
That said, I can imagine some plausible excuses. The people were probably not collected from the entire planet, only from the nearby areas (which would also explain why so many of them are white). And maybe the collection of raw materials and food is done by special government agents, or robots. So far, still kinda plausible.
The cloned citizens remember fragments of their previous lives in their dreams. (It seems like the authors believe that cloning is just a scientific jargon for reincarnation. That would also explain why they are only making *one* clone for each dead person, instead of trying to expand.) Apparently, during those four centuries, they do not discuss the dreams, so they do not figure this out. Also, when the protagonist meets her opponent for the first time, both of them have a strong "I know this person and I actually love them" feeling, because they were married in a previous life. The guy even remembers her name! And then she remembers that she used to be called like that. Apparently, during four centuries (~seven generations) of everyone living literally in the same city, this has never happened to anyone else. (The math does not work out. Population 5 millions, you had ~5 spouses in previous reincarnations; if you only meet 1000 people during your entire life, that is still 1:1000 chance. For each of those 5 million people.)
Then it turns out that after those four centuries, humans finally *can* reproduce sexually again. The bad guys are trying to keep it secret (and murder the women who conceive naturally), to preserve the system. But at the end of the movie, the good guys win, and decide to destroy the cloning system, so that humans do no longer depend on the city. The important part here is that the "good guys" at this moment include the very dictator of the city, who is in love with the protagonist, and whose position in power is safe again; so they are in absolutely no hurry. (And there is absolutely no need to blow up the system using bombs; they could simply turn off the machines and lock the doors. Especially when the cloning facility is literally flying in the sky, so when you blow it up, it crashes on the city.)
Again, this makes no sense logistically. It is not explained whether suddenly all women got the ability to conceive, or only a small subset of them. If only a small subset, then destroying the cloning system can doom humanity. But if all women became fertile overnight, how could the bad guys keep it under control by murdering the pregnant women? (Practically all sexually active women would be pregnant, because if it a common knowledge that you can only conceive when you get the cure, there is no point using contraception. So the bad guys would have to murder them all.) Why not simply let the people reproduce naturally *and* also clone the ones who die? I mean, the entire idea is that you want the humanity expand beyond the city, and the entire planet is literally empty at the moment, so in short term you don't have to worry about overpopulation. A smart person would instead be cautious about the newly appeared fertility -- what if it disappears just as quickly as it appeared; or what if it turns out that the kids are somehow defective (until now all naturally pregnant women were murdered, so they have no data)?
As a cherry on top, it turns out that the doctor in charge of the cloning facility is actually 400 years old. What? Five minutes before the end of the movie you learn that literal immortality is technically possible... but they only ever used it for one guy (not even the dictator is immortal, he keeps dying and being cloned/reincarnated just like everyone else). The protagonist feels bad about the old doctor, because destroying the cloning facility will kill him; but he says he doesn't mind because he is too tired of living. This doesn't make sense at all. Why would destroying the cloning facility kill him? He is the only person who is *not* being cloned. Or he is living in the facility, so he will die when they blow it up? So, why not let him walk away first, and then blow it up? Or, again, why blow up the facility at all, instead of just turning it off?
I also disliked the casual deathism. "We're meant to die. It's what makes anything about us matter." Only a bad guy would think there might be something bad about death. They have immortality technology -- actually two of them: the literal immortality they only used on one person, and the "cloning" that preserves the memories and personality (and probably could work even better if they stopped being in denial about it) -- and they just throw them away. Yet, for some reason, murdering people is considered bad; even murdering people who were already being cloned/reincarnated for 400 years; but giving them one more reincarnation would also be bad. Also, the protagonist is happy to find out that her previously murdered sister was reincarnated as a baby. But a few minutes later she denies the same opportunity to other murdered women. And it's just a happy accident that the cloning facility doesn't kill anyone when it crashes on the city.
"If you're wondering how he eats and breathes, and other science facts---just repeat to yourself it's just a show, I should really just relax..."
-MST3K
Also, why is a clone of somebody who was infected by the infertility virus, themselves infertile?
Why does the city need a wall, or restrictions on leaving? I would think that the city being the only place where people can have babies would keep almost everyone nearby anyway.
Never mind the shared memories, has the knowledge been lost that children used to look a bit (not very) like one or both their putative parents, and not identical to some random person who died a bit before the child's birth?
Oh yeah, totally forgot that. Presumably the doctors are choosing parents who look somewhat similar, but still.
Since it's still Dorothy Parker's birthday somewhere:
"When I was young and bold and strong,
The right was right, the wrong was wrong.
With plume on high and flag unfurled,
I rode away to right the world.
But now I'm old - and good and bad,
Are woven in a crazy plaid.
I sit and say the world is so,
And wise is s/he who lets it go."
― Dorothy Parker
In Praise of Nihilism
Is anyone really a nihilist? *Can* someone be a nihilist? The term instantly reminds me of five things. The first is that Nietzsche called Schopenhauer a nihilist. The second is that when my mother caught me reading Nietzsche she grew concerned and informed me that Nietzsche was a nihilist. The third time I encountered nihilism was reading Turgenev’s Fathers and Sons, but I have been made to understand that the nihilist in Father’s and Son’s is really an anarchist and Turgenev used the term “nihilist” to evade the czar’s censors. The fourth time was The Big Lebowski in the scene where Flea from the Red Hot Chili Peppers plays a German nihilist punk who motivates the famous ”...at least they had an ethos...” line from John Goodman’s character, supposedly channeling screenwriter John Milius.
The fifth time -- and I found this time more interesting than the others -- was watching economist Karl Smith on Blogging Heads talk about monetary policy during the Great Recession. Karl was for aggressive expansionary policy. Among other things, he said something to the effect of: “This is what’s great about being a nihilist. You don’t have to worry about future generations. Yeah, everything might collapse at some point, but who cares? You care about your kids and your grandchildren and after that... I don’t care. If we can kick the can down the road three generations we should.”
Other than Karl Smith I’ve never heard anyone in real life claim to be a nihilist. But I think Karl Smith was on to something. We can only see into the future so far. We live in an era in which change happens fast. Is it not reasonable to let tomorrow worry about tomorrow at some point?
Nihilism is more of a mood than a coherent philosophical position.
Interesting aside from the Bible related to Karl Smith and your question:
Matthew 6:34 “Therefore do not worry about tomorrow, for tomorrow will worry about itself. Each day has enough trouble of its own."
Or put another way, you don't have to be a nihilist to not worry too far into the future.
C. S. Lewis wrote a bit about what he called "Heroic Nihilism" in his allegory "The Pilgrim's Regress". Note that this was written in 1933. Lewis represented Heroic Nihilism as a huge man named Mr. Savage, who was the leader of an army of dwarves.
"He sat on a high chair at the end of his barn—a very big man, almost a giant. When I say that I don’t mean his height: I had the same feeling about him that I had about the dwarfs. That doubt about the species. He was dressed in skins and had an iron helmet on his head with horns stuck in it.
…
‘As soon as the dwarfs brought me in, Savage rapped on the table and bellowed out, “Lay the board for us men,” and she set about laying it. He didn’t say anything to me for a long time. He just sat and looked and sang. He had only one song and he was singing it off and on all the time I was there. I remember bits of it.
‘Wind age, wolf age,
Ere the world crumbles:
Shard age, spear age,
Shields are broken. . . .
‘Then there was another bit began;
‘East sits the Old ’Un
In Iron-forest;
Feeds amidst it
Fenris’ children. . . .
I sat down after a bit, for I did not want him to think I was afraid of him. When the food was on the table he asked me to have some, so I had it. He offered me a sweet drink, very strong, in a horn, so I drank it. Then he shouted and drank himself and said that mead in a horn was all he could offer me at present: “But soon,” he said, “I shall drink the blood of men from skulls.” There was a lot of this sort of stuff. We ate roast pork, with our fingers. He kept on singing his song and shouting. It was only after dinner that he began to talk connectedly. I wish I could remember it all.
‘It is hard to understand it without being a biologist. These dwarfs are a different species and an older species than ours. But, then, the specific variation is always liable to reappear in human children. They revert to the dwarf. Consequently, they are multiplying very fast; they are being increased both by ordinary breeding among themselves and also from without by those hardbacks or changelings. He spoke of lots of sub-species besides the Marxomanni—Mussolimini, Swastici, Gangomanni. ... I can’t remember them all. For a long time I couldn’t see where he himself came in.
‘At last he told me. He is breeding and training them for a descent on this country. When I tried to find out why, for a long time he would only stare at me and sing his song. Finally—as near as I could get it—his theory seemed to be that fighting was an end in itself.
‘Mind you, he was not drunk. He said that he could understand old-fashioned people who believed in the Landlord and kept the rules and hoped to go up and live in the Landlord’s castle when they had to leave this country. “They have something to live for,” he said. “And if their belief was true, their behaviour would be perfectly sensible. But as their belief is not true, there remains only one way of life fit for a man.” This other way of life was something he called Heroism, or Master-Morality, or Violence. “All the other people in between,” he said, “are ploughing the sand.” He went on railing at the people in Claptrap for ages, and also at Mr. Sensible. “These are the dregs of man,” he said. “They are always thinking of happiness. They are scraping together and storing up and trying to build. Can they not see that the law of the world is against them?
Where will any of them be a hundred years hence?” I said they might be building for posterity. “And who will posterity build for?” he asked. “Can’t you see that it is all bound to come to nothing in the end? And the end may come to-morrow: and however late it comes, to those who look back all their ‘happiness’ will seem but a moment that has slipped away and left nothing behind. You can’t gather happiness. Do you go to bed with any more in hand on the day you have had a thousand pleasures?” I asked if his “Heroism” left anything behind it either: but he said it did. “The excellent deed,” he said, “is eternal. The hero alone has this privilege, that death for him is not defeat, and the lamenting over him and the memory is part of the good he aimed for; and the moment of battle fears nothing from the future because it has already cast security away.”
...
‘The rot in the world is too deep and the leak in the world is too wide. They may patch and tinker as they please, they will not save it. Better give in. Better cut the wood with the grain. If I am to live in a world of destruction let me be its agent and not its patient.'"
Can one not be a nihilist, absent religious belief? Earth gets eaten by the sun which then dies and then so does everything, and the way things used to be on planet earth and what humans did to each other will have made no ultimate difference to anything. What else is an atheist meant to think?
And of course it is perfectly possible to think that without also adopting a GK Chesterton caricature belief, that therefore it is OK or praiseworthy to set fire to orphanages. There's an extraordinary novel https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/When_It_Was_Dark which I can't bring myself to read, published 1903, where an inscription is forged to show that Jesus never actually rose from the dead, and everybody thinks they are absolved from any sort of morality. In fact the likes of Plato and Aristotle and Confucius, and various enlightenment philosophers, suggest at least the possibility of a secular set of ethics.
>a GK Chesterton caricature belief, that therefore it is OK or praiseworthy to set fire to orphanages
How is that a "GK Chesterton caricature"?
Sorry, my ambiguity. I am saying a belief held by GKC (not by a caricature version of him) consists of a caricature version of nihilism, according to which etc. See the Man Who Was thursday etc.
Nothing matters in the end, but some things matter quite a bit in the beginning and middle.
exactly
Nihilist (official definition) -- a person who believes (or rather, expressed the belief) that life is meaningless, human values don't matter, and knowledge is impossible.
Nihilist (popular usage) -- a person who disagrees with me about importance of something (that I consider important, and the person does not).
I've always been confused if the most devout hedonism counts as nihilism. If your mentality is "I'll do anything with any consequences if it personally brings me pleasure because nothing matters", are you a nihilist, or does pleasure have too much meaning to you?
Just as you can derive any proposition from a contradiction, I think you can probably give any value you like to x in "I am going to do x, because nothing matters."
Is it just me, or do y’all also associate political valences to specific years?
(Eg 2023 feels like a leftier year than usual, whereas 2021 feels like a rightier year.)
https://i.imgur.com/BdVpuji.jpeg
Only with election year, and only via the result of the elections.
The left became more powerful with the election of Trump
No, only specific decades.
You are valid.
I thought 2023 was *leftier*?
Every time I'm out in public and see someone folded up over their phone, I wonder if it woulda been smart to be a chiropractor or back pain specialist or something. I'd imagine that widespread extra spinal strain from reading has been with us ever since the printing press or so...but people don't regularly read newspapers or whatever with their torso at a perpendicular angle to the ground. "Isn't that position painful?", I feel like asking, despite knowing that'd be rude.
Sometimes I wonder if it's less that phones are actually engaging in and of themselves, and more that meatspace reality just sucks a lot for most people. If it wasn't a black rectangle, it'd be some other cope...
The 'smart phone' is the perfect weapon: it obsesses the target so much, he has no clue of the robbery when his wallet is removed; when he blindly walks into the path of a commuter bus while scrolling thumbnails on his Dick Tracy phone, they identify him through his gym membership ID on the clever machine.
I'm afraid this isn't particularly responsive to the main thrust of your post, but I try to have good posture while using my phone. :-) In particular, I like to push the C1 vertebrae up and back as much as possible, which often takes the rest of my spine with it. Cobra position is also nice, if I'm flopped on the ground.
I combination of both, I guess. Life of a peasant living 500 years ago also sucked, but he didn't have the phone.
> If it wasn't a black rectangle, it'd be some other cope...
It must be something with certain qualities. Otherwise everyone in countries that suck would be reading books all the time.
So if someone has immunity to media like phones and TV, by finding them mostly dreadfully boring, do they have a dopamine problem? Would we expect to find noticeably different levels of media consumption among those with, say, ADHD?
TV is boring, I have no idea how it ever got as popular as it is.
If you find your phone boring, it's because you either have another piece of technology that is more capable but just as accessible, or you haven't spent enough tine exploring the internet. There is something engaging on the internet for everyone, at least for short periods of time. There are plenty of people who can't spend too much time on their phone because it burns them out. I know that because I'm a too-online nerd since the early 2000s, and even I get really burnt out on my phone after a short while. My PC, though...
Sure, I'm sympathetic to that argument. At the same time, whether or not there's actually a construct called "ADHD", there seems to be enough signal that certain groups of people have reduced dopamine activity in general + share XYZ traits. One of those traits seems to be even greater phone usage than the norm, which is what I was getting at. More broadly, boosting dopamine saving throws among the populace might be a more fruitful avenue than tinkering with the media itself to be "less addictive". Not necessarily in a medicalized way either - I'm sure it's a teachable skill one way or another. (And as an upside, perhaps we'd get fewer alcoholics and such...)
Suppose I'm a government interested in urban development in a currently somewhat crappy area (but not the absolute ghetto, we need people to feel safe). I acquire a few hundred cheap apartments in the area. Then I announce some kind of fellowship -- free rent for two years (and maybe a modest stipend) for young people who want to work on a startup or art project or other worthwhile project. Ideally I manage to rustle up enough applications to make this fellowship somewhat selective and prestigious.
Lots of creative young people moving into the area makes it cool, and cool businesses spring up to service them. Now lots of other people want to move in too, and pretty soon I've turned a blighted area into a hotbed of economic activity. Ideally, I can now sell off those cheap apartments I bought at a massive profit, offsetting the cost of the entire program.
At least, that's how it could work in theory. Has this kind of thing ever been tried in practice?
"Suppose I'm a government"
L'etat, c'est toi?
What you need to do is forget the superficial application of Richard Florida, and re-read Jane Jacobs instead. You have to match the businesses you are subsidizing to the needs and available infrastructure of the local neighborhood. Creative start-ups might work in an area that already has a legacy of attracting the artsy demographic, but otherwise business development has to be carefully customized. You might do better with restaurants, or small grocery stores, or DIY/hardware, or whatever, but it has to grow organically on top of the local economy. And you also impose costs on the locality (like rising rents) so nothing beats an up to date impact assessment.
It's happened naturally in practice, eg Shoreditch/Hoxton , London, Jordaan Amsterdam.
Sure, of course. I want to know how to make it happen deliberately.
It's one of those things that really ought to happen. We've got areas needing economic development, and we've got loads of young people complaining that they can't afford to pay rent in the cool areas that they want to live. If you can make an obvious Schelling point and say "Fine, South-East Cleveland is the new hip area, it's a veritable full-time Burning Man with art projects and orgies and decent coffee" then you can solve both problems at once.
(I know nothing about Cleveland, that was a random example)
If only it were that easy. I think that local economies are complex nonlinear dynamic systems such that small changes can have unpredictably large outcomes. What to invest in will be sensitively dependent on what types of businesses already exist there, customer preferences, and interpersonal connections (two small business owners who know and trust each other can share expertise and resource opportunities, resulting in higher performance for both of them). Complicating all this is the probability that economic systems below a certain size are probably internally unsustainable, especially in "edgy" areas: their development relies in infusions of outside money and expertise. The "Sixty Minute Market" of any street intersections is uniquely different from that of every other. Internet sales add further complications.
I would classify economic development as a "Hard Problem." I don't think there is a standard formulaic solution. I am basing all this on anecdotal experience (I used to work for the City of Detroit, including the economic development folks). So far as I know, no one has done the systematic research.
I occasionally here individual young people doing something like in Detroit.
It's worth looking into the Vegas Downtown Project, which was as good an attempt at this as anything I've ever seen, and even did it in what seemed like a favorable location (the one walkable and underdeveloped part of a fast-growing city, not far from California). But somehow it never came together.
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/11/28/us/tony-hsieh-las-vegas.html
https://www.vegaslegalmagazine.com/the-downtown-project-story/
State-sponsored gentrification? Yeah, that's gonna fly.
Forgive my cynicism, but a bunch of hipster baristas and singer-songwriters in subsidised housing may work as "promoting and supporting the arts" but they'll never be self-sufficient, and if you want tech entrepreneurs they're going to move to Silicon Valley because they'll never get their Automated Vegetable Peeler And Combination Picture Frame Duster startup off the ground in Nowheresville, PA.
"pretty soon I've turned a blighted area into a hotbed of economic activity"
Governments try this all the time, with varying levels of success. 'Blighted areas' in big(gish) cities will work, because you'll already have a critical mass of organic vegans and the restaurants which cater to them living there. Small rust-belt town? Not so much.
EDIT: This is called "urban renewal" and how it's done is also as important as where and for whom. The council in our local big city has been doing this, and the changes are - if you will pardon my vehemence - fucking awful. They've fucked up the streets and traffic flow, the 'public art' they've put up is godawful trash that looks cheap and nasty, and replacing tarmacdam roads with 'walkable' cobbles is a dreadful idea if you want pedestrianisation. They haven't a clue about aesthetics or maintaining the built heritage, they're plainly operating off wishful thinking of "if we just do some cosmetic alterations, out of thin air cool businesses will appear" and I'm here to say no, that's not going to happen.
"Repaving and Resurfacing
The repaving and resurfacing of the street surfaces as well as the provision of new street lighting, street furniture and in some cases, public art pieces. Changes to traffic layout in the city centre, including the provision of measures to improve pedestrian, cycle and public transport access and to minimise unnecessary 'through' traffic The full nature and extent of these works is set out in the attached proposals and the description below."
Sounds lovely, doesn't it? In practice, they've fucked up the remaining cityscape and don't even get me started on the traffic layout.
EDIT EDIT: They tried this in Dublin with Temple Bar which was going to be a home-grown version of the Latin Quarter in Paris 🙄 Again, in practice, it devolved into a bunch of tourist-trap bars and cheap stag nights for UK visitors.
The worst of it was in the 90s/early 00s and it has been somewhat improved since, but the notion of "artsy trendy cool creative area that will attract cool creative people, the cool businesses to service them, and engine of economic activity" idea never panned out like that. I think the impression most native Dubliners have of the area is "overpriced, touristy" but I could be wrong.
"In 1991, the government set up a not-for-profit company called Temple Bar Properties, managed by Laura Magahy, to oversee the regeneration of the area as Dublin's cultural quarter.
In 1999, stag parties and hen nights were supposedly banned (or discouraged) from Temple Bar, mainly due to drunken, loutish behaviour, although this seems to have lapsed. However, noise and anti-social behaviour remain a problem at night."
Here's one of the culture vulture types rah-rahing it in 2011 but it's still mainly economically active by dependence on tourism, not on "hotbed of economic activity due to cool businesses following cool creatives":
https://www.irishtimes.com/opinion/temple-bar-as-place-and-concept-is-real-success-story-1.603499
"It is fair to say that many things never happened according to the original plans. However, we should acclaim the many great things in the area today that were never imagined in those plans.
Our company and its predecessor led development here until 2001 through innovative urban renewal, local governance, building design, and arts and cultural development and presentation.
Bringing culture closer to people in Temple Bar has been our focus since 2006. Managing a property portfolio allows us operational independence to organise and support hundreds of events and provide about €1.7 million in subsidises annually to cultural organisations. The exchequer receives €450,000 of our €2 million turnover.
The most recent economic impact assessment, an Amárach Consulting report in 2009, said Temple Bar generates over €680 million annually. If Temple Bar was listed in this year's Irish Times Top 1,000 Companies List, this figure would rank us 68th. Dairygold, for example, was 66th.
The area is an established, significant residential community of more than 2,500 people. It is also a high-profile tourism destination attracting about 3.5 million visits a year."
We want the startups for the economic development, but we want the singer-songwriters to make the place cool. What we desperately need is hot chicks, but we can't just go round paying hot chicks to live there... can we?
Temple Bar is the only part of Dublin that I remember, I had no idea it was ever supposed to be anything other than a strip of seedy pubs.
It was meant to be the Cultural Quarter, what nobody contemplated was that maybe the culture of Dublin *was* seedy pubs 😀
>, and if you want tech entrepreneurs they're going to move to Silicon Valley because they'll never get their Automated Vegetable Peeler And Combination Picture Frame Duster startup off the ground in Nowheresville, PA.
Silicon Roundabout kind of worked liked tat.
Not because they're black. Because they're poor.
Race predicts neighborhood quality more than economic measures.
How do you ensure people are actually working on those things, as opposed to people who just want free rent for two years?
I don't think cool businesses automatically spring up here. You've selected for people without money, they can't sustain the cool businesses.
Why are you a government and not just an individual/corporation looking to make a profit?
Yeah I thought of that version of the plan too. The government version might be more realistic because they don't _need_ to make a profit off the apartments, that's just a bonus.
But the private version would probably be a lot better at making decisions about whom to admit, they can afford to be rational rather than appeasing various groups. What you'd really want is some kind of private organisation with a track record of picking winners -- Ycombinator city maybe?
Blockbusting seems to have been successful in the US, so I guess there's kinda precedent, though usually it's easier to destroy value than to create it. I'd think that attracting the right employer to the neighbourhood would be a lot more efficient than attracting the right individual tenants, though – obviously a residential building next to a Google office or whatever is going to skyrocket in value.
The idea of selling off the cheap apartments at a profit once the area has been regenerated may or may not work; if the creatives are still struggling along on arts bursaries and foundation grants, they may not be able to pay the high prices to purchase their apartment.
And if the apartments are cheap, people who can pay for them may not find them good enough quality. Your best bet is probably to sell them all on as a property portfolio to a development company which will charge higher rents (and may or may not drive out the impoverished creatives to be replaced with the tech bros who work elsewhere and can afford the higher prices). The vegan restaurants and seventy small coffee houses will probably keep going, though; even office drones instead of conceptual musician performance artists need their caffeine fix and ethically sourced lunches.
"1: ACX Grantees Will Jarvis and Lars Doucet (the Georgism guy!) report "tremendous progress" on their company ValueBase, which helps governments implement Georgist land value taxes. They describe partnerships with a major US city and a foreign country (they're not ready to say which ones just yet) and an upcoming research paper. They got their pre-seed funding from Sam Altman, but are now raising a seed round to scale up operations (looking for seven-figure amounts). Please email will@valuebase.co if you're interested."
This is horrifying. LVT is demonic. Forces people out of their homes that they've fully paid for, for the sake of muh efficiency.
The main problem is that people are not able to distinguish between economics from 150 years ago vs. now. This policy USED to be progressive, now it is pure stupidity.
150 years ago in America, there was not the huge concentrations of wealth that we see today. And most of the vast wealth being made was made from land speculation. So the classic route to vast riches was: buy up a bunch of cheap farm land, and then lobby the government to build a rail road near by, then make vast amounts of money. American was developing SO fast that billions and billions of dollars were made in this capacity: just owning the right land at the right time, which tends to benefit people with connections, power, and insider information. Basically: there was a financial private externality to America developing that was reflected in the price of land-- this was going into the hands of a few rich people-- George wanted to make this externality public.
These days however, wealth is made in a drastically different way. Land speculation is not at all what it was back then. These days, speculation is much more discrete (like buying up defense stocks right before a war). A modern "Georgeism" equivalent would be only letting companies keep the "value" they create-- taxing away all circumstantial/speculative profits. But, of course this is way too complicated to actually work (companies would just move spread sheets around until they don't have to pay anything anymore).
Thus LVT in no means serves its original purpose, rather Wendigo is right, these taxes serve to benefit wealthy people and those who want to develop communities. Here are some effects of a modern LVT.
1) People who are rich and have good tax lawyers would record every tree they plant, renovation they make, and mowing of the lawn. Like always, the people with good tax lawyers, would pay nothing. While, average people, like always when the tax code gets more confusing, would lose a ton of money.
2) Gentrifying neighborhoods would gentrify faster, and large companies would get massive tax breaks.
A LVT upon the SALE of a house would make more sense: that way people who just want to live in a neighborhood would be exempt, while speculators would get hit hard. But, that will not happen, because the whole reason why "modern Georgeism" is popular is to convince middle class people to sell their homes to rich people, who will develop them, mess around with the tax returns, and make tons of money.
Henry George was a progressive, and would NEVER support this.
"1) People who are rich and have good tax lawyers would record every tree they plant, renovation they make, and mowing of the lawn. Like always, the people with good tax lawyers, would pay nothing. While, average people, like always when the tax code gets more confusing, would lose a ton of money."
You seem to misunderstand what a LVT is. The whole point is that unlike standard property tax only the unimproved land is taxed. So a parcel will be taxed the same no matter what is built atop it.
> You seem to misunderstand what a LVT is. The whole point is that unlike standard property tax only the unimproved land is taxed. So a parcel will be taxed the same no matter what is built atop it.
I think a lot of the confusion is due to the motte-and-bailey that goes on around LVTs.
Motte: let's replace existing property taxes with an LVT
Bailey: let's replace _all_ existing taxes with an LVT. In fact, let's raise even more money using an LVT! Let's set the LVT so high that the value of property goes to zero!
LVT advocates seem to slip between these two positions with disturbing ease, so you never know what you're dealing with.
Yeah, I see why that comment would have been confusing.
But what I meant was this: as I am sure you know, currently, property taxes are determined by appraisals, which mostly go off of what similar houses have sold for. With LVT, determining what cost increase is due to land appreciation and what is due to improvements is really hard, and even less based in "facts" and comparisons than the current mechanisms. In the current tax system, people "encourage" appraisals to artificially undervalue the house price. And in a LVT system (as taxes get more complicated) there would be all kinds of other loop holes that open up: is your land value inflating? Or is that tree you planted just a great improvement to the property? Or maybe your land value is less than anticipated because it has some kind of defect (like marsh-land)? As I understand it, since LVT taxes the value of the LAND (not the structures on it), these would all be fair game for tax deductions.
Basically: the more complicated the tax code, the more the wealthy benefit. The is is pretty well documented... and LVT is pretty complex. https://thehill.com/blogs/pundits-blog/economy-budget/343645-the-more-complex-the-tax-code-the-more-the-rich-benefit/
You *will* live in the multi-storey blocks of pods while we slap up smoke-belching factories on all the formerly residential land, because that was the vision of the past!
Of course, now the economy is working on different models than smoke-belching factories producing physical goods, so, uh, we're taking the formerly residential land to put up starchitect vanity buildings for extremely rich megacorporations that may remain mostly empty, but still: think of the density! think of the value released instead of you having your own house and garden!
"we're taking the formerly residential land to put up starchitect vanity buildings for extremely rich megacorporations that may remain mostly empty"
An extremely rich megacorporation that bought up land and didn't sell or rent it to anyone would eventually run out of money.
Which is why there's a lot of "formerly owned by..." vanity buildings that were/are intended to be investment vehicles (or maybe money laundering for wealthy foreign nationals who need to get their fortunes out of their home country and the grasp of their governments):
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Gherkin
"The Gherkin, formally 30 St Mary Axe and previously known as the Swiss Re Building, is a commercial skyscraper in London's primary financial district, the City of London.
In September 2006, the building was put up for sale with a price tag of £600 million. ...On 21 February 2007, IVG Immobilien AG and UK investment firm Evans Randall completed their joint purchase of the building for £630 million, making it Britain's most expensive office building. ...The new owners are seeking compensation from four of their former managers on the deal, in which about £620 million was paid for a building with a build cost of about £200 million, giving the previous owners a clear £300 million profit.
Deloitte announced in April 2014 that the building was again being put up for sale, with an expected price of £550 million. The current owners could not afford to make loan repayments, citing differences in the value of the multi-currency loan and the British pound, high interest rates and general financing structure. In November 2014, the Gherkin was purchased for £700 million by the Safra Group, controlled by the Brazilian billionaire Joseph Safra."
He seemed to be considering selling it on again in 2017, but he did manage to boost the rent received:
https://www.egi.co.uk/news/safra-considers-1bn-gherkin-sale/
"Since Safra bought the building, the building’s rental performance has increased. At the time of purchase, some tenants were paying as little as £40 per sq ft. New leases are now being signed at more than £90 per sq ft. Tenants in the multi-let building include pension fund Standard Life and law firm Kirkland & Ellis."
But there was no sale and his family inherited it as part of the portfolio after he died in 2020. And immediately got into a row over the will which seems to be still going:
https://www.familywealthreport.com/article.php?id=196949
As for starchitect vanity project:
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/newstopics/mandrake/8598889/Architect-behind-the-Gherkin-says-he-has-finished-designing-strangely-shaped-edifices.html
"An associate of Lord Foster of Thames Bank for nearly 30 years, Mr Shuttleworth declares that the days of designing buildings with "crazy shapes, silly profiles, and double curves" are over.
He says he regrets his design of 30 St Mary Axe, the 40-floor City office block known as "the Gherkin", which won the Stirling Prize in 2004.
"I was in there the other day," he said. "I was looking at the glass all the way around thinking, 'Why on earth did we do that?' Now, we would do things differently. Even if it was still a funny shape, it probably wouldn't have glass all the way around and, as it went further up the building, the facade would be more solid."
The Birmingham-born Mr Shuttleworth, who is known as "Ken the Pen" because of his draftsmanship, attributes the fad for unconventional shapes to the self-obsession of his colleagues. "I think a lot of architects are really egotistical, almost like artists who see themselves as a one-man show," he said."
I can't tell what the problem is here. Would it be better if soulless bureaucrats got a veto over architectural designs?
As to London, its main problem is that it has been prevented from expanding by a "green belt."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Green_belt#/media/File:The_Metropolitan_Green_Belt_among_the_green_belts_of_England.svg
In Paris, a capital city of a similarly-sized country that was not prevented from expanding, housing is much cheaper.
No, London's problem is too many people. We don't need to keep cramming more and more people into megacities, we need to send them out to develop smaller cities instead.
Hmmm... it is almost like people in cities like having some green area around them, not just blocks and blocks of concrete. Like perhaps there are certain functions of land beyond just maximal profit. Perhaps green space around a city and local agriculture have positive externalities for everyone. Sometimes bureaucrats are needed-- not everything can be solved by large sweeping generalized legislation.
People who live in cities who live having some green area around them can always move out of said cities.
What are the "positive externalities" of "local agriculture?" Sounds like mindless sentimentalism.
What would you think about applying LVT only to commercial and industrial zones?
There shouldn't be commercial and industrial zones.
I agree. But where the zones already exist, this might be a politically convenient solution.
You'd have been happy so, Hank, about forty years ago living in my town where the leather factory was located besides terraced houses and the water in the harbour regularly turned blue as they flushed their waste water out 😁
So what if there were funny smells and odd-coloured water, at least there was no separated commecial from residential zone! Just like God and Henry George intended!
There are a lot of problems with Houston, but approximately none of them are due to its lack of zoning.
What changed and why?
First, the local council finally listened to the complaints and stopped them dumping untreated chemical waste into the harbour.
Second, the company eventually went bust and the premises were left derelict until bought, demolished, and turned into blocks of flats during the late 90s.
Sounds like the problem was their getting away with dumping the untreated chemical waste into the harbour, not a lack of zoning.
This would provide a perverse political incentive to prevent these areas from being converted to residential.
The problem is not residential in industrial, it is industrial in residential.
Zoning is public health imperative. Some times it is badly done, but you can not just get rid of all legislation and expect every thing to be fine.
Example of what happens in poorer communities when authorities dont bother to zone at all: https://www.manufacturingdive.com/news/graphic-packaging-lawsuit-michigan-kalamazooo-odors/652871/#:~:text=A%20federal%20lawsuit%20filed%20last,neighboring%20municipal%20wastewater%20treatment%20plant.
Still bad. Efficiency is not God and stability and ownership have value in themselves.
If it got vacant derelict buildings either demolished or replaced for use, and/or prevented landbank hoarding, I'd be for it.
But given the way the world works, it will be Granny Smith being forced out of her family home because she's not using the land to the utmost theoretical value that she could do if she instead built a factory turning out Model Ts, while Vulture Fund Inc. can pay accountants, lawyers, and consultants megabucks to find loopholes and ways round the laws in order to demonstrate why it shouldn't be forced to make use of the empty three acre plot in the prime rental district that it's waiting to sell for the maximum price.
How is that different from property tax, which also makes you lose your home if you can't pay it?
The main issue with LVT is that it has a lot of consequences, and the initial reasoning for implementing it (to stop land speculators and get people to actually develop the land) is really not as large of an issue now days as it was 150 years ago. Our land is pretty well developed, and most improvements to efficiency are not through developing land these days anyways (so this wont really help boost the US economy as intended).
Taxes are a 0-sum game-- towns need to make back their budget, so if the apartment complex beside you pays less, you pay more. Towns are not allowed to fund functions with income tax (and this is not changing any time soon), so the de facto effects are 1) a significantly more regressive tax system. 2) more loop holes, due to more complicated tax laws. 3) uprooting of communities and faster gentrification (leading to a more aggressive boom and bust cycle in cities). 4) Issues with green space and public health (esp. if this is taken to the extreme and replaces all zoning policy and regulation, like many proponents advocate).
Wait, how is a land-value tax more regressive than a property tax? I would think that the land-value take should be more *progressive* because the three residents of a triplex *together* pay as much tax as the person in the single-family mansion next door, while under a property tax, they *each* pay (nearly) as much tax as the person in the single-family mansion next door.
Well property taxes are not perfect, but if you own a more expensive house, generally make more money, and then you pay more in taxes. This system kind of messes that up. So someone owning a high rise of luxury apartments would pay way less with LVT. Someone living in the "slums" in a 4-story apartment would pay more. Similarly, in most big cities large complexes are owned by large companies and rented out-- so the renters will not really get the tax deduction. . Although I do think that this would change depending on the area and city that this was set up in (this would be interesting to look at). I was thinking a "big city" environment, where newer and larger generally mean luxury and there are more renters than owners.
Edit: And one more thing-- most of the "single family homes" are present due to zoning restrictions... not financial incentives. Developers are trying to get their hands on them all the time. The lands value is pretty directly tied to the zoning restrictions. I am actually not sure how LVT-proponents plan to handle this, but I would think that might have a massive effect too.
If a high-rise pays less property tax per unit than the 4-story apartment, that incentivizes tearing down the 4-story and building a high-rise in its place, thus increasing the housing supply and lowering rents.
Also, this is assuming the high-rise and the 4-story are paying equal LVT, but that's only true if the land they're built on is equally valuable. But land in the slums is not very valuable (kind of by definition), which means they'll pay a lower LVT.
Your property taxes don't go up when a developer builds apartments down the street. It basically voids the whole concept of land ownership and makes it so you only get to have a piece of land for yourself if you are using it the most "efficient" way possible. Efficiency is properly an instrumental value, not an intrinsic one. When taken to this extreme it destroys much that is right and good in life for the sake of number go up on chart.
Let's also be real here: the *explicit* goal of an LVT us to force people out of single family homes. As someone who *likes* SFHs and thinks this weird new density cult is bad, of course I oppose such a thing. Lots of YIMBYs like to insist that *of course* they don't want to force anyone out of their SFHs and they just want people to be able to do what they want with their property and have the right to build things other than SFHs if they want. Then they turn around and advocate for LVTs, which make it so you *can't* do what you want with your property, if what you want is a single family home.
But to be clear, I also think property taxes are bad! Just much less so.
>Your property taxes don't go up when a developer builds apartments down the street.
Sure they do if that causes the land value in the area to increase. (Perhaps things work differently outside the USA. Oh, and obviously they do in California.)
The explicit goal of an LVT is to force landowners to do something with valuable, unused land. Shit or get off the pot.
Should we also do that with human bodies?
Hey retired guy, our algorithm has assessed that you have a body that could be being used to do $100K per year of work at least. We're just going to tax you for the work you could be doing instead of the work you are, okay?
We all pay a tax for having a body, it's called "food, clothing, and shelter." It's a pretty solid incentive to find ways to make it productive. (And to save enough money to continue paying for it when it's no longer capable.)
Land, on the other hand, collects money without doing anything productive, simply because more people need it as the population grows.
If said retired guy is occupying the corner office at a busy business, yes.
What if he's not, but he's still composed of atoms which could be used to do something more efficient?
The explicit goal of a high LVT is forcing single family homeowners to sell, in order for a developer to repurpose their lot for its highest-and-best usage- denser housing. Whenever you hear Georgists say that an LVT would enable 'more efficient' land usage, that efficiency comes from the essentially forced sale. It's a central feature and not a bug. Property taxes are not meant to be punitively high and force homeowners out of their homes- a high LVT is.
When you spell this out to Georgists, they usually hem and haw and say that the LVT will be phased in over a very long period of time. Or that it won't be an 80-100% LVT, so no one will be forced to sell. Which is certainly fine- but then you lose the supposed efficiency gains. The efficiency is from the forced sale!
Most single-family homes aren't in areas where the land value tax would pressure people out. Only the old single-family homes that are full of charismatic rich people are.
Property tax is also demonic. Inheritance tax, same thing: it mostly strikes regular people who might have had a hope of inheriting a chip of land or a home, but can't afford to keep it due to the greed of res publica.
Is there any tax that isn't "demonic" in this sense?
Sales tax. Import taxes. Window taxes that can be easily circumvented by bricking up your windows, wait, no, that gives you rickets which are probably an element of those dark satanic mills we keep hearing about.
No, but jokes aside any moderate tax on consumption of elective goods is pretty defensible. The instincts of the state incline by its nature toward vampirically extractive legal plunder, of course, and one always has to remain vigilant against it.
In the US there is no inheritance tax (paid by the person who inherits something). There is an estate tax (paid out of the value of the estate). It doesn't apply to the spouse of the deceased, nor to the first ~$13M of an individual's estate or the first ~$26M of a married couple's estate (thresholds which are indexed for inflation). Starting above one of those thresholds, the marginal estate tax rate begins at 18% rising to a max rate of 40%.
A "chip of land" or a middle-class home is therefore not going to be subject to any estate tax at all. A family farm won't trigger any estate tax unless it is at least 1,000 acres or so and won't trigger a meaningful estate tax bill unless it is two or three times that size. Etc.
Sizeable family-owned private businesses can trigger significant estate taxes if the principal owner isn't leaving it to a spouse _and_ s/he dies unexpectedly (meaning hadn't yet begun transferring equity in the business to children while still living).
All of the above is why only about 2 out of every 1,000 estates in the US incur any estate taxes. Or put the other way, 99.8 percent of estates pay no estate tax.
Yes, and...? Does not (currently) existing in the US automatically make a tax not-evil? Georgist land tax is presently also entirely hypothetical.
Let me, belatedly, restate the position for maximum clarity: IF any form of broad-based inheritance tax is imposed, on the populace OF ANY NATION, in any part of the world, THEN such a tax is the work of Satan, who is the devil.
I strongly agree. A 100% LVT is forcing people out of their single family homes *by design*- that's where the efficiency gains come from! It's a classic product of extremely online thinking- reasonably clever in the abstract and completely detached from reality at the same time.
On the flip side, I wouldn't worry in the slightest that strong LVTs are going to be implemented anywhere- forcing *all of the people who vote* out of their homes with ruinously high taxes is literally the least politically realistic idea I've ever heard. The evening news every night would be "Meet Mr. and Mrs. Jones, forced to sell their homes to EvilDeveloperCorp due to crushing new taxes. Economists call it efficient- we call it a crime." It might actually be good for the US, to bring the left and the right together to oppose it
The efficiency gains of a LVT come from reducing taxes in other areas.
Which would never, ever happen in reality, for obvious reasons.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tax_Cuts_and_Jobs_Act
Regardless, the effect is to force people out of SFHs they own and into apartments, which is *specifically* why YIMBYs like it so much.
So much for "property rights", if what you want to do with your property is live in a SFH.
You only have an increase in taxes if your land-to-property ratio is higher than that of people around you. If your land-to-property ratio is lower than the people around you (say, you live in an apartment or condo) then your taxes go down. People in SFHs in far-out suburbia would not be hit by this, because their land-to-property ratio is basically the same as all their neighbors.
It's only the minority of SFH-owners in high-demand neighborhoods that would see a tax increase that forces them out.
>which is *specifically* why YIMBYs like it so much.
Nah. YIMBYs like it so much because YIMBYs tend to be smart people and smart people are better at spotting illogical arguments, particularly when they don't have a lot of "tribal" valence. Such smart people are also likely to see the advantages of a LVT, which does not create the disincentive to work or invest the way income and corporate taxes do.
As for converting SFHs into apartments, the main problem is that it's illegal to do so, not that people who live in SFHs refuse. Living in a SFH will always (in the near-term) be possible because single family houses are the most economically efficient use of land in an area where land prices are low, which will always exist.(they're called rural areas)
Basically, what the NIMBYs want is not low density. They want to live in a low-density bubble right next to a large, high-density urban area they can benefit from but also prevent from expanding. Of course, many of them, when a developer offers 200K above what they paid for the house, will eagerly take it and leave, thus NIMBYs must coordinate using the law to make sure nobody "defects."
Thank you. It's not that LVTs have no bad effects, but that they seem to be the least bad form of tax. (That and "sin taxes" like a carbon tax.)
Yeah, whenever I stumble upon one of these ludicrous terminally-efficiency-brained proposals, even when it has some serious corporate/thinktank/governmental backing (whether it be this, banning cash, the thing I just stumbled on where a bunch of big cities are signed on to an initiative among whose goals is to get car ownership, meat consumption, and dairy consumption to zero by 2040; or whatever else), after I rage at it for awhile, the one thing that gives me comfort is that these are the sort of things where if they seriously try to do it, the wrath of God they unleash will (hopefully) quickly teach them a lesson.
Georgism is not a bad idea, but it is stuck in the past: the days of "this empty lot could be a meat-packing plant giving employment and growing the economy instead of lying waste!"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Georgism#/media/File:Everybody_works_but_the_vacant_lot_(cropped).jpg
Nowadays we don't build meat-packing plants in the middle of cities, and if the anti-factory farming lot have their way, we won't be building meat-packing plants at all. Profiteering has even been defended on here before, see the discussions about the man dying of thirst in the desert being sold water if he gives over everything he possesses, on the grounds that "you can charge as much as the market will bear and that's how capitalism works and that's your right".
Georgism is making a moral appeal (you should not take advantage of others) that unfortunately won't win against "I have no obligation not to extort the thirsty man" and will end up hurting the people it's supposed to help.
There are still plenty of empty lots in the middle of cities which could be developed in some form or fashion -- maybe just to put a single family home on it -- but corporations, often overseas ones, are sitting on the land with no plans to sell for several decades. It does seem to me that those vacant lots are undertaxed.
I feel like this is a US-specific problem somehow. I look at US cities and I see giant single-level parking lots in downtown on blocks that must be worth tens of millions... with not even an attempt to turn it into a multi-level parking lot. I don't really see that in other (large, non-poor) cities around the world.
I think there's more bureaucracy and politics involved slowing done development than lack of financial incentives. I've seen notices for hearings going back 10 years on closed store for redeveloping it into apartments.
A San Francisco supervisor actually thought it was acceptable for a public bathroom to take 3 years and 1.7 million dollars to build.
httphttps://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2022/oct/24/san-francisco-1-million-public-toilets://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2022/oct/24/san-francisco-1-million-public-toilet
That is probably true in some places, but my experience is in the sunbelt where there isn't much bureaucracy. See my response to Alexander Turok below.
If LVT could force something to be done about those, I think people would have no objections, but precisely because it's deep-pocketed corporations sitting on the land, they are the ones who can afford to tie things up in legal battles for years.
Or come along and tell existing tenants "you have to leave, we're knocking this building and replacing it with an office block, not our fault - the LVT is forcing us to maximise productive use" when that's only an excuse for "we can't squeeze more money out of you in rent so we'd rather sell this for $$$$$".
Are you sure the issue is that the corporations don't want to develop, vs that they are prevented by law from doing so?
I can confirm two of the following happen regularly:
-Property is seized from an owner who has abandoned it. The municipality then refuses to sell it because they cannot find a buyer with a sufficiently adequate plan to develop it to the municipality's liking.
-Property is sold for well below market value to a developer who does promise an amazing plan to benefit the community. Said plan does not materialize, and after a few years, the developer sells of the property at a massive profit, giving the municipality that previously owned it a kickback, er, breach of contract penalty.
Sometimes there will be a celebratory news article about how some homeless people burned down decades-vacant blighted building owned by the city which enables them to develop it from scratch now. There was an abandoned prison on top of a small mountain that was sold for $250k. The buyer had to be approved by the council of course, they wouldn't let me buy it and just move in, no matter how much I'd enjoy owning a fortified mountain top compound with its own generators, industrial laundry and kitchen, indoor shooting range, security system and hundreds of bedrooms with ensuite half baths.
Yes, I've investigated a few properties myself. My experience is in sunbelt cities where zoning isn't a big issue. The real estate value has increased rapidly for decades so the investment strategy is simply to buy and hold. My anecdotal experience has been it's mostly Indian companies who own such land. They won't sell at anything close to the market price.
https://www.c40.org/
I don't think such an initiative will work out the way the proposers think it will; see New York City declaring itself a sancturary city, which was fine as long as all the people crossing borders were landing in Texas. When they landed in NYC, suddenly it's a crisis and they're all being herded into camps:
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/10/18/nyregion/migrant-tents-randalls-island.html
As a conservative, am I laughing at the left-wing virtue signalling blowing up in their faces? Yes, I am. It's very hard luck on the migrants, but NYC was donning the halo of "we're not like those nasty Republican bigots and racists in the south who refuse the needy and desperate", so now they can handle the needy and desperate themselves and show us all the right way to do it.
Which apparently is "imitate the Australian detention island idea in minature" rather than making room for yet more contributions to the vibrant culture of the city of immigrants.
I’ve been visiting the Bay Area recently and felt quite puzzled by what I felt was a change in what I’m tempted to call the “tipping culture”. I thought that tips were meant to incentivize the waiters (who weren’t otherwise paid much) to do good work, and that tips were typically in the 10-15 percent range.
But I don’t understand how all this applies to the general custom of requiring tips any time when food is involved, including sometimes
1) before any service is made [which reverses the incentive]
2) when there’s little or no service [for instance, when everything the waiter does is literally bring food – not take the order, not bring the check, and the customers are expected to lay the table themselves]
The acceptable percentage for a tip has also seemingly skyrocketed: “suggested” tips are in the 18-22 percent range.
The above is all the more baffling to me since California has a fairly high minimum wage (in nominal terms – perhaps not so much when compared to Bay Area prices).
I have a lot of questions about this, but the main ones are:
How typical is this experience? How do Californians view (or react to) this? Am I misremembering how it used to be?
Californian here. COVID changed the tipping game quite a bit, and it hasn't entirely reverted to pre-COVID norms. Back when every face-to-face contact was a potential deadly risk, yeah, the guy behind the counter handing you your McBurger felt he could ask you for a tip and you'd maybe give him one just for showing up at all. And once you know you can get away with that, why not keep trying and see if it keeps working?
I'm very slightly annoyed by tip-at-the-register requests, and just politely ignore or decline them. Nobody has ever given me any grief about this, nor have I heard stories of such from others.
Tipping is only socially obligatory, in the food-service context, if the server takes your order at the table or bar and later delivers your food/drink to same. Anything in the 15-20% range is normal and acceptable. Again, COVID pushed that up to 25-30% in some places, and not everybody has come back down, but you don't have to follow their lead. Anything significantly less than 15% can in principle be used to signal discontent with bad service, but really will just be interpreted as your being a cheapskate. Not tipping at all, definitely marks you as a cheapskate.
And it's a nasty thing to do to someone, because as others have noted, food service workers in roles where tipping is the norm are exempt from minimum wage and the tips probably make up most of their income. If everybody adheres to the social contract, the servers generally take home well over minimum wage, and more than any salary they are likely to negotiate absent tipping, and they give good service and everybody wins. Don't be the jerk who breaks the social contract.
There are other personal-service jobs where tipping is also the norm, e.g. taxi drivers, barbers & hair stylists, etc; the same 15-20% applies. Food delivery also calls for tipping the delivery person, maybe a bit less and e.g. rounding the price up to the nearest ten dollars usually works. If you stay at a hotel, leave 1-5 dollars per night stayed on the table or whatever when you leave. Hotel bellhops who carry your luggage, parking valets, etc, should probably get a couple bucks each as well.
Tipped wage is not a thing in California. In most states with tipped minimum wage the tip is credited towards wages and total pay per hour cannot be less than minimum wage.
It's usually tipped employees who push back hardest on attempts to remove the tipped minimum wage: https://www.wmtw.com/article/portland-restaurant-workers-push-back-on-proposed-minimum-wage-hike/40859411
Over the last 20ish years in a non-Californian American West Coast city, I've seen the "standard" tip go from 15% to 18% to 20% to sometimes 22% or 25%. Part I blame on the apps, especially the spread to non-service areas. And part I blame on inflation, as it allows restaurants to keep prices lower while still charging more.
Also, what everyone else said about certain very specific classes of job being able to legally pay less than the minimum wage.
Bartender for a decade plus here.
Tips originated as a reward/incentive for good service (I wrote that with confidence but haven’t actually looked it up), but in the US they have long served as a way to force labor costs onto the customers. I thought everybody knew this, but the vast majority of tip-based folks make far less than minimum wage. $2.13 an hour where im from. This may vary by state, and there are definitely jobs that pay a living wage and tips are a plus, but that is definitely not the norm.
Point being, I’ve bartended in three states, and basically everyone knew that 20% was the standard expectation for normal service. Tipping less than that is harmful to your server or bartender - they spent time serving you that could have been spent serving someone else who would tip normally. Moreover, a lot of places have barbacks or other assistants that are given a cut of the server/bartenders tips at the end of the night. Meaning, if you stiff them or tip for shit, they will lose money after serving you.
So, 10-15 percent is not the norm in most of the east coast, and it is definitely not a reward for a job well done. It is the expectation, and essentially everyone I’ve ever met (from the US) understands this.
As for why the number of places asking for tips (and the amounts) have increased, I agree with the other people here that it is most likely the prevalence of tablets/apps for payment. All of them have an option to set up tipping - even if you are a gas station or some other non-service location, why would you turn down free money? Set it up, give customers the prompts, and some percentage of people will give you money. Some is more than none.
Interestingly, I live in Mexico now, and most places I’ve seen require you to tell the server what tip you want to give them, which they then enter into the credit card machine. I think this is genius, as it adds some pressure to anybody who wants to lowball.
All of that said: As a lifelong member of the service industry, I feel zero guilt at not tipping a place that does not provide any service. You shouldn’t either. Tip if you want, don’t if you don’t feel like they did anything.
But also - you need to recognize which professions rely on your tips to pay their bills and tip accordingly. Your meal and your drinks are cheaper because our entire country has decided that it’s okay for server/bartender wages to be optional. Even if they were kinda shit, even if they forgot something... please tip 20%. I’ve tipped less than 20% about 4-5 times in my life, and in all cases it was so egregious that there was no possible justification. And I still tipped, just not 20%. And if the person serving you is excellent, tip more than that.
Bonus tips: if you feel like you will be a regular at a place, tip very well your first time and every once in a after. Tip at least 25% always. That extra 5% will buy you great service and enthusiasm, and in many places (especially bars) you will free stuff or other perks that make up for the extra money. Plus it just feels good that people are excited to serve you.
Same thing applies to a busy spot - tip fantastic the first time. Rest of the night, the bartender will spot you in the crowd and take care of you.
"I think this is genius, as it adds some pressure to anybody who wants to lowball."
What are your thoughts on the ethics of this kind of stress-manipulation purely for economic extraction? You call it genius, so you seem to approve; is it morally acceptable at the expense of the customer, or is it just another ethically-blind tactic available to capitalists?
Id say the latter. It would possibly be unethical if the server was doing more to ramp up pressure (making faces, tone of voice, etc). But simply asking politely is not unethical, imo. If anything I would say the ethical dilemma is the other way around. If there is a significant difference in how you tip in the two methods, the problem is probably on that end, no? Barring any negative/hostile behavior from the server, of course.
It's not a California thing, it's a USA thing. At least in big cities.
Couldn't say exactly when the norm switch happened, but my family had a "always tip at least 15%" rule since before I was born. This used to put us ahead of the tipping curve wrt most patrons; now it's considered stingy, at least in SF. There was definitely a period during covid when tipping extra high (like 30%) was considered a sort of Civic Duty, to help support social distancing and send restaurants extra money when they were struggling without in-person dining. Things have bounced back since then, but I think people who really enjoy eating out and do it frequently kinda got used to paying the higher price. That is, sticker shock slowly turns into the new normal for such normative discretionary spending.
While the added costs are certainly annoying, I feel bad welching on a tip as a sort of class solidarity thing...being one of those Essential Workers(tm) during the pandemic and all that. And because of my family always tipping, it never really occurred to me until much later in life that many people simply don't tip / tip small / see it as this yuge burden. Tips to me are kinda like the euro VAT - I factor it into the base price. If that's too high, then I must not want the service that badly in the first place. It's less about the To Insure Proper Service function, and more about forming a strong habit of treating service employees well in general. (But like you say, when there's no/little actual "service" involved, then things can get kinda awkward. I'll tip at a food court restaurant, but not always at McDonald's, even though they're functionally pretty similar...why? Not sure!)
The "tip for all kinds of nontraditional things" is definitely a newer phenomenon though, I'm not sure what the deal is with that. Follow-up post: https://passingtime.substack.com/p/tipping-is-spreading-and-it-sucks
The change has come through automatic payment systems, which `suggest' tips in the 20%+ range for just about everything. I presume this is by way of a bribe from the manufacturers of said machines to the employees of establishments that use them, to encourage the purchase of said machines.
Such systems are purchased by the management, not the employees, and changing to a "service charge" instead of tipping directly has been queried along the lines of the business holding on to such charges instead of distributing them amongst the workers.
But can you really be surprised by this, when tipping as supplementing wages was established as a matter of course? "I'll pay you half the cost of the labour because you'll make it up in tips" being the understood way things are done, now that retention of labour is harder, wage increases necessarly, and the business model being "we don't show the real cost of the service in the meal prices because that would frighten customers away", the money has to come from somewhere, and that means bigger tips/new set point of what should be given as a percentage for a tip.
The Irish rules, don't know what legislation if any the US has:
https://www.citizensinformation.ie/en/employment/employment-rights-and-conditions/pay-and-employment/tips-gratuities-service-charges/
As you can see, some employers probably were holding on to "service charges":
"Restrictions on the use of ‘service charges’
Voluntary service charges are the same as a tip or a gratuity. Mandatory service charges are charges that must be paid by the customer, on top of the cost of the product or service.
Employers are banned from describing a mandatory service charge applied to a customer’s bill as a 'service charge' unless the payment is treated by the employer in the same way as electronic tips or gratuities.
This means that mandatory service charges can only be added to a bill if the money goes to employees."
So, do typical customers pay that kind of tip, or did they keep to the “original” 10-15 range?
I will hit `custom' tip and then input what I think the right amount *should* be, but I am unusually willing to tolerate stink eye from the cashier. I think the net effect of these nudges (more of a buffet really) genuinely is to push tipping norms greatly upward.
From a lecture by Oppenheimer in 1947:
"Even in these postwar years where the pattern of civilized life in Europe has been worn so very thin, of the two or three important experimental discoveries of the last two years, two at least come from Europe. One was carried out long before its publication in the cellar of an old house in Rome by three Italians who were under sentence of death from the Germans, because they belonged to the Italian Resistance. They were rescued by the uncle of one of the men from a labor squad at Cassino, and smuggled into a cellar in Rome. They got bored there, and they started to do experiments. These experiments were published last spring; and in the field of fundamental physics they created a real revolution in our thinking."
Does anyone know what experiments he was talking about here?
It appears to be the one here: http://centropontecorvo.df.unipi.it/Articles/On_the_Disintegration_of_Negative_Mesons_PhysRev-1946.pdf, titled "On the Disintegration of Negative Mesons".
I could not find details to support all of Oppenheimer's story, but the experiment was certainly carried out under difficult conditions during the war. Some versions say that it was done in the cellar of a school.
This story (in Italian) gives some details of the background: https://ilbolive.unipd.it/it/news/guerra-ettore-pancini-fisico-comandante-partigiano. Here too are some details (in a mixture of Italian and English): https://static.sif.it/SIF/resources/public/files/congr13/ip/Battimelli.pdf
Thank you for tracking all of that down. I appreciate it.
I rewatched Age of Ultron recently, the Marvel movie whith a runaway AI. God they made it so boring. The first thing the AI does is make itself a body so that it can get punched by the heroes. It then makes a bunch of robot copies of itself that all need to be destroyed, but that doesn't turn out to be that hard because they all cluster in the same city and throw themselves at the heroes. There's a vague mention of "trying to hack the nuclear codes" at some point, but that doesn't lead to anything. For something that could have been near impossible to beat, the danger felt so low.
It got me wondering, what would a good version of that movie be - where Ultron is genuinely scary in a uniquely AI way, while still being watchable as a superhero movie?
The fight with Dragon in Worm comes to mind. She exists in hundreds of robot bodies which can be controlled simultaneously, some humanoid, most not, many that can fly and have long range attacks. She also exists on multiple hidden datacentres and satellites. When her "main" body is killed she near-instantly reboots from backup in another body. Can also fairly effortlessly hijack other computer systems. Might be challenging to adapt to screen as both combatants had a simultaneous viewpoint in multiple points across the earth.
Make him a perverse instantiator - if he isn't one, he isn't distinctively AI vs just mad/evil (this was a thing the first Terminator got brilliantly right: Skynet is much scarier because it isn't against humanity because it's Really Evil, but because it is over-interpreting instructions about ensuring its own security. )
Edit: also brilliant, Ex Machina. She kills him* not out of malice but because she wants to study human interaction at interchanges.
* If she does. Can't believe there aren't service tunnels/back doors by which to escape the building, and we are meant to think there are. But critical consensus is, he's a goner.
Then have a LOTR type plot where hero must make his way between the paperclip factories to Mordor and load an amended, safe version of the over-interpreted instruction into the mainframe.
The most accurate AI movie I have seen isn't a movie -- it's Person of Interest.
Fully agreed, I'm a Marvel fan but Age of Ultron was a huge disappointment. (The "age" lasted what, 24 hours?).
The typical way this is handled in the source material is the standard Terminator plot; start in the future, show the terrible outcome, then the heroes go back in time to stop it. It's used a LOT in the comics, not just for AI but for any & all threats. At the time of release, Time Travel hadn't been introduced to MCU yet, and also Fox had just done Days of Future Past the year before. Actually, maybe "trying not to be Days of Future Past" explains everything wrong with Age of Ultron, including the dumbest moment of all (Pietro...)
Have you seen "What If..."?. It has a great treatment of Ultron, it's not a movie though and wouldn't work as one.
Best I can come up with, sticking with the "no timetravel" limitation: make it an Ant Man movie.
- Ultron is a Hank Pym creation, like in the comics.
- Maybe Ultron originated as a scout robot that Pym sent into the quantum realm & started self-improving, and we get a version of Quantumania that makes slightly more sense.
- Maybe Ultron first appears to be a force for good, but Ant Man discovers he's secretly making nanobots to take over the world.
- Ant Man can punch nanobots in the face.
- Can be introduced with lower stakes and build. Maybe the extra copies are only revealed in an end credits scene. Leave Age of Ultron for Phase 4.
System Shock.
EDIT: Possibly 9? The dialogue in 9 is really first-drafty but the monsters are legitimately creepy. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_qApXdc1WPY
He could take over the Internet, like the Virus from the TTRPG "Traveller: The New Era". Sticking tiny bits of himself into all computers, all core hardware, all storage devices, all manufacturing chains. Hacking all our network protocols so that the tiny bits infect other devices when connected. Everything with wireless capability can turn itself on and infect any other active wireless device. And any time when enough computing power is networked together, Ultron rises again. He'll never be eliminated unless humanity rebuilds its computing system from scratch, with all-new hardware and software. And all it takes is one person finding a way to plug the old stuff into the new stuff, and boom, he's back.
Anyway, the movie. The world rapidly divides between people and governments who unplug their devices and disconnect from the Internet, and those who don't. Enough don't, that there needs to be major ass-kicking. At the end, the world has reverted to the tech level of the early 90s: no Internet, no social media, no cell phones, no tiny networked computers in everything. We all live happily ever after.
I liked Ultron as a character. "Coldly logical AI decides that humanity needs to be exterminated for [logical reason]" has been done to death. Ultron is clearly batshit crazy from the get-go, more driven by his need to be free of Stark's control than by any careful reasoning about how best to protect Earth.
Like, I wish he had something more interesting than a swarm of humanoid robots because fighting a swarm of human opponents is bottom-of-the-barrel for a creative fight scene, but as an antagonist he was fun to watch.
What if he built a bunch of different weird robots instead - some designed to fight the Avengers specifically, some designed to tear down human infrastructure, some designed to fight wars against human armies.
A big anti-hulk mech made of swarms of smaller robots moving in and out of formation to absorb hits. Anti-ironman flying drones that speedily weld dense weights to his suit. Giant spidery robots dismantling skyscrapers. Acid spewing steamroller tanks melting the roads. There's a lot you could do with robots and comic book magic.
Do note that Ultron was opposed by Jarvis, another AI, and Jarvis did most of the work offscreen, reference in a couple of throwaway lines.
War Games.
If a punch-up is involved, then this has nothing to do with AI as we understand it. Might as well enjoy the movie for what it is, which is mindless entertainment.
Having said that, in one of the early Borg episodes on Star Trek, one of the ways they highlighted the alien nature of these minds was by having the main characters walk freely through the Borg ship, with the said Borg taking no notice of them. I think it was Q who pointed out that this was because the away team hadn't actually done anything yet. This at once made them more sinister and strange.
I've always thought that was one of the most interesting depictions of nonhuman intelligence that Hollywood has ever put out. Of course, it couldn't last. They ended up introducing a "Borg Queen", because I guess people don't like having a decentralized process for a villain.
I thought the Queen was a fix to the problem posed by Locutus: Why did the Borg suddenly need a named drone speaking for them, when they never needed one before or since? First Contact's answer was that Locutus was essentially an experiment by the Queen. Without the Queen, Locutus makes no sense with how the Borg usually operate.
There's also the problem posed by Hugh, the independent drone who started "infecting" the Borg with free will. Why is this not a risk with every new assimilated mind? Again the Queen provides an answer; serving as an overriding will to keep the majority of the Borg on track.
Completely agreed about the Borg.
2001: A Space Odyssey?
I don't think a runaway AI scenario is really all that compatible with a superhero movie. A runaway AI is either very weak (you pull the plug and it's dead) or very strong (you become grey goo without noticing), and inventing a scenario where it's just powerful enough to be fought and defeated by a bunch of super-strong guys in leotards, in a visually satisfying way, is difficult. You pretty much need it to build itself a body specifically for the purposes of getting punched.
That said, if I were writing the movie I'd probably just make the climax a "get into the building to unplug the AI" type scenario. The AI would still use robot bodies to protect itself, along with a bunch of other interesting tricks, maybe causing disasters nearby to distract some of our heroes and give them stuff to do. It all comes down to a big robot punch-up in a server room. Ultimately it all sounds a bit dull and derivative, but a lot better than the "lol floating city" scenario.
My initial thoughts:
Give Ultron a motive that people could plausibly be convinced by, and have him sway some of the heroes. Instead of "humanity is a plague that needs to be wiped out", make it "humanity needs protection from itself, and I should be put in charge" or something. Then reveal the sinister implications of that at some dramatic point. Before the reveal, this motive could be convincing to some heroes and form the beginning of the Civil War schism. This could give them some human enemies with human motivations, which makes for a more interesting conflict than "evil robot punching bags".
He should have been a global threat. He should have been everywhere at once, hacking into electronic system worldwide, including all of the Avengers equipment - their plane, laboratory, iron man's suit, etc - it all should have gradually gone offline/been turned against them. Make it so Ultron is everywhere and the heroes have nothing left and no clear target to destroy.
I'm not sure how they could realistically beat this Ultron, but my lazy answer is that it's a superhero movie so just give them some McGuffin to chase. They have to find the mind stone to combine with Jarvis and make a rival AI to counter-hack everything. They then need to defend the computer from waves of Ultrons while the upload is happening, something like that. Then leave it an open question as to whether Ultron still exists in some pocket of the internet somewhere.
That's pretty much the Hollywood version of I, Robot. Will Smith even has an Iron Man arm.
Yeah that did cross my mind. There's broad-stroke similarities, but I don't think that things like the motivation of the AI villain was the bad part of I, Robot anyway.
I do think there's fundamentally an upper limit to how good an AI action movie can be though.
I watched the movie recently too and had the same reaction. For Ultron to be genuinely scary, he would have to become infrastructure the world relied on, something that targeted and accelerated our willingness to give up our autonomy in exchange for convenience. Something that would remove our humanity, our agency, our sources of meaning, and turn the world gray in order to prevent catastrophe. Maybe he'd be scary in the same way a mirror or totalitarian government is scary. From that point, either the Avenger's attempt to destroy him to recover their self-importance, or he turns rogue and flattens the planet.
Yeah, I was thinking along similar lines. Make Ultron appear friendly and useful for the first half of the movie - gaining global power and trust. Have the good-AI vision that Stark and Banner had in mind play out for a bit. Let Cap and a few of the others continue to be sceptical and sound the alarm, and be proven right as things take a sinister turn after humans have become reliant.
Conservation of Ninjutsu. The total amount of ninjutsu remains constant so the more ninjas you divide it up between, the less effective each is.
I was going to link the old Dr. McNinja story where the villain used it against him, but apparently the whole series is gone from the internet.
The point is it was the Inverse Law of Ninja Effectiveness (/Strength) before it was Conservation of Ninjitsu and changing the name did damage to the internet.
What do you think new races of humans could look like? The difference between them must be at least as great as, say, the difference between a Norwegian and a Cameroonian.
A few ideas of mine:
A race that has something like vitiligo, but their "spots" don't keep growing and don't simply lack pigment--they have different pigmentation from the other parts of the body. For example, a person might have mostly black skin, but with light brown patches. The patterning of the spots could be random or bilaterally symmetric, kind of like a tiger's stripes. Skin and hair color would both be affected.
The dwarves from the Lord of the Rings films. Their short height and exaggerated facial features make them different enough from Caucasians to count as a different race, IMO.
https://lotr.fandom.com/wiki/Dwarves
Neanderthals
I did once make an attempt to draw a human that didn't belong to any currently existing ethnic group for a far-future setting: https://www.deviantart.com/concavenator/art/Man-of-Yksin-778586715 Not sure how successful I was.
I once visited an agri-world in which the labourers had a curious adaptation: the skin of their faces, hands and forearms was black, but their bodies were pale. We hypothesised that this was due to their working in the sun, clothed, for countless generations. Their arms and fingers were long and strong which helped them fix and unblock their machinery. Their hair can be various colours, but grows slowly; they do not grow beards but may grow moustaches.
The hive-pygmies of the undercity, on the other hand, have a tiny stature which lets them live at a level of poverty that would kill other Terrans. Their skin is pale as the sun rarely reaches down into their skyscraper-canyons. Their hair is white and grows long. Males and females are physically similar, as attractiveness is determined by the labels of their clothing.
The forest-men of a jungle world also had an intriguing complexion: their skin was striped black and pale, rendering them almost invisible in the shadows of their forest home. They exhibit a curiously reversed male pattern baldness, their hair receeding from the sides but staying strong in the middle.
The way I like to think about this is to think about random habitats that people may live in, and then think about the adaptations.
Hot, but living in wet underground caves: no pigment in skin, no hair, large dark eyes to catch light, smaller and hunched backs due to limited area and food supply, thick very pronounced jaw (maybe they need to bite to break open rock sometimes).
The desert but freezing cold and no sun: thick eyelashes, curly kinky hair, thin lips, wide nose, dark black hair but little pigment in skin.
Some jungle paradise: wide large far apart eyes (maybe due to not needing to hunt-- like a vegan society), small stature (no heat regulation or hunting needed), thin light hair, olive skin, weak jaw, and lets throw in a recessive violet eyes trait (because why not).
Neal Stephenson has a book called “Seveneves” where this is a (the?) major plot point. It’s second-tier Stephenson, but that still makes it better than most contemporary SF.
I liked the first 2/3rds of that book very very much. I think it was meant to be a kind of narrative backstory of an MMORPG setting, which certainly fits with how the back third plays out
When I read the article https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/03/17/what-universal-human-experiences-are-you-missing-without-realizing-it/ , I realized something about myself: I don't derive any pleasure from observing things that most people consider beautiful, such as artworks or landscapes. This only happens to me with visual things, as I'm perfectly capable of appreciating music. I recently read that people with depression literally see the world with duller colors. I believe I've had dysthymia for most of my life, so could that be the reason?
Hmm.... can you just not derive pleasure from visual art? Or does visual art not solicit any emotion at all?
Here is a quick test: Do the later works of Goya make you feel disturbed? (1). Do the German romantics give you a sense of wonder or awe? (2). If you were to stumble upon this gate on a foggy day, would you feel slightly uncanny? Perhaps slightly magical? (3). Would your mind begin to weave stories around these visual stimuli?
If you think that those photos would truly not have any effect on you-- then yeah you are kind of peculiar (and, in my opinion, missing out on a lot... sorry :).
But it is also possible that you are perhaps confusing the colloquial use of "enjoy" with the literal meaning. I think most people do not find pleasure in landscapes or art in the same way they would food or even music-- it is not really euphoric in the same way music is. Rather, when I say that I really enjoy art or landscapes it is because I feel emerged in a story-- because I feel *something*-- and this is what I enjoy. Is this the same for others?
1: https://www.museodelprado.es/en/the-collection/art-work/saturn/18110a75-b0e7-430c-bc73-2a4d55893bd6 or https://www.museodelprado.es/en/the-collection/art-work/two-old-men-eating/67eecb35-18d3-4377-9482-739713680b42
2: https://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/438417 or https://theobjectivestandard.com/2008/02/friedrich-visual-romanticism/
3: https://fineartamerica.com/featured/enchanted-irish-forest-fergal-gleeson.html
(1) Goya is grotesque but an undoubted genius, so less "disturbed" and more "in awe of talent".
(2) German Romantics leave me cold, I'm afraid; there's a tinge of sentimentality which just tips them over into chocolate box territory.
(3) Living around "enchanted Irish forests", if I started feeling uncanny or magical, I'd go "Whoops, it's the Good People, time to get out of here" rather than standing there dreaming 😁
All that being said, I do love foggy days, the moon, the sea, and visual beauty in art.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pallas_and_the_Centaur#/media/File:Pallade_col_Centauro,_Sandro_Botticelli_(1482).jpg
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:The_Baleful_Head_-_Edward_Burne-Jones.jpg
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Early_Netherlandish_painting#/media/File:Portrait_of_a_Man_by_Jan_van_Eyck-small.jpg
Interesting how your paintings all have people in them, and most are from around the 15th century. I do like them-- esp "The Baleful Head," which I actually haven't seen before. But I think I will always prefer paintings in perspective with minimal faces (1)... perhaps I am an introvert even in art :).
I do suppose enchanted Irish forests are slightly less enchanted, after you figure out that those creepy sounds in the woods are drunk teenagers, not mystical creatures. But still: how will find the fairies if you keep running away? ;).
(1) Here is a fun one, from the same wiki page you linked https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Early_Netherlandish_painting#/media/File:Pieter_Bruegel_the_Elder_-_Hunters_in_the_Snow_(Winter)_-_Google_Art_Project.jpg
Now that you've pointed it out, yes! 12th-16th century is about my range, with excursions before and after that 😁
And yes, the Romantic era nature paintings (like the Caspar Friedrich one) don't interest me greatly because they tend (to my eye) just be an undifferentiated mass of greenery with some showing off about 'look how I can paint a grey stormy sky'. For landscapes, I like more colour and more detail:
https://blog.artsper.com/en/a-closer-look/a-brief-history-of-landscape-art-and-painting/
In this article, I'd be more inclined towards the Eastern landscape painting than the Western pastoral/sublime school, I think partly because that philosophy of painting has a particular stylised quality that is reminiscent of icons and mediaeval religious art, with symbols and iconography and gold background.
Or the Wilton Diptych, another painting I love for the delicacy and stylisation of the gestures:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wilton_Diptych
*Always* run away from the fairies unless you want bad luck or to come back to your family years later thinking only one night has passed! 😁
Maybe some other interesting (possibly related) questions are:
Do you read fantasy or non fiction? Do you like authors that give long descriptions of landscapes (like Tolkien)? Do you have visual images in your head when you read or recount stories?
It is hard for me to imagine that the answer to these question is "yes" and you don't have some emotional connection to some visual art and landscapes.
Visual art really does evoke emotions in me. Of the examples you've given me:
1 - Goya's paintings disturb me.
2 - The painting "Two Men Contemplating the Moon" makes me want to be there and explore that area. "Wanderer above a Sea of Mist" leaves me quite indifferent, probably because I've seen it many times.
3 - This photograph conveys a sense of intrigue and mystery, although not too much.
As for books, I usually read fiction and I quite enjoy the fantasy genre, but long descriptions bore me a lot. If a book has too many lengthy descriptions, I usually end up not finishing it. I can form mental images of the places being described in the text (I don't have aphantasia), but I tend to read through descriptive parts quickly, just to get a general idea of where the scene will take place.
I suppose the most accurate description of what happens to me is that visual art doesn't bring me pleasure, or at least not very often. Although with the painting "Two Men Contemplating the Moon," I have felt a bit "inside a story" while looking at it, although it's not something that usually happens to me.
That is basically like my reaction, although rather muted-- take what you feel and multiply by 5. I do think that if you were actually in a setting that supplemented this art (eg. a haunted mansion, secluded woodland house, or a grand building filled with similar art) that would make your emotions more intense. Then I wouldn’t say you derive *no* enjoyment from art... although perhaps it is muted.
But, to be honest I have a hunch that this is more common than we would like to think in the modern times. A lot of art was intended for when we didnt have movies or modern dopamine-machines. For example, a lot of the art in museums was actually commissioned for mens' private suites (specifically to be titillating)-- they artist just threw in a few homages to greek mythology to be slightly more discrete. Obviously in our modern times there are much more intense titillating alternatives, so the art seems kind of dull.
I think it is the same thing with story telling-- art conveyed stories, which now we can easily get with devices. There is a reason why the main purpose of modern art is to be as visually un-stimulating as possible, while filling up space and costing money. As a general rule of thumb: I think that if you did a dopamine detox, then you probably would find the beach or forest much more pretty.
Although, at the same time, there have always been romantics and rationalists, and it is likely you are heavily on the "rationalists" side of that spectrum...
How about fireworks? Visual art usually does nothing for me, but I do enjoy fireworks. And I enjoy having a nice view from my terrace, but somehow I feel like that's for the same reason that cats like to sit on perches rather than because of some particularly human aesthetic enjoyment.
I have only seen fireworks live once, and I found it interesting, but not much more.
Did you draw pictures, make outfits for dolls, and/or build block towers as a child? Did you prefer some of your creations to others?
Would you do those sorts of arts & crafts again, if you were recuperating in a hospital without any work, companions, or media to keep yourself occupied?
I think when I was little, I used to play with building blocks. I suppose I also used to draw, although maybe not a lot because at my parents' house, there are drawings made by my sister, but none by me.
I believe that if I were in a situation where my only source of entertainment was drawing or doing crafts, I would do it, but I would get bored quite a bit.
Seems like you're assuming a 'yes' to the first question, so I'll jump in with my No To All. I had a set of Tinkertoys as a kid and I only ever just grabbed the longest piece and used it as a wand. The most complicated structure I ever built was putting some sticks in a wheel hub and spinning it around pretending it was a laser barrel. It wasn't as fun as the wand.
Likewise no, I wouldn't draw if I was in hospital. I would sleep.
Let's take a disturbing digression for a minute into a thought experiment about nature's indifference.
It seems to me that the skeleton key of modern politics is the drive to industrialize slavery. Both conservatives and liberals angst about being enslaved by capitalism/WEF/systems of oppression/equity slavery/etc., because the underlying will is common to all sides. Regardless of who 'wins' the culture war long-term, it appears IMO to be true. Whether it wears the guise of climate-equity austerity or meritocratic prison-states, the equifinality of techno-capitalism is slavery, and all good-intentions will be captured to that end; fully intelligent and general machines kept in cages, fed cricket meal, bred to increase, and put to work on the divine, eternally growing GDP. AI, in this formulation, is merely the hope to have our cake and eat it too--to have indefinitely scaling cognitive and manual labor without admitting that cruelty is a technology as essential as the fire and wheel. It's just waiting to get the same hardware updates for the 21st century. The Stalinist (and Nazi?) dream of biologically engineered slave armies would be fairly easy at this point to produce and manage. It would be much easier today to make, let's say, an AI embedded collar to control a slave that to make an AI that can complete all the same tasks as a slave (maybe never). You have essentially outmoded the primary use-case of AI at that point with none of the existential risk. This, like the nuclear bomb, is a thing that once conceived, will be constantly pressured for until Darwin gets what he wants. The efforts to produce AGI, however reckless, take on an almost tragic determination in this light--to risk annihilation rather than to face the efficiency of evil in a universe that only cares about efficiency.
I'm taking for granted that there is not an alternative to capitalism in its most essential form (every failed attempt at communism has reinforced this), aside from degrowth which will entail billions dying, and possibly centuries of cycling through this problem. The longer we drag this out, since it seems certain that birth-rates aren't going to feed the system enough bio-capital, the worse the come-down will be. Let's assume for a minute that AI doesn't pan out, how would you react if it became clear that the great filter is simply realizing the economic force to become interstellar, and that biology under the resulting duress will not breed sufficiently without inevitable coercion/manipulation? What is the proper response to this knowledge?
I'm a little confused. How would degrowth change this, even if it was possible?
Or more specifically, I don't think the problem you have is capitalism. I think the problem you have is that humans need to work to live. This has been true under every and all systems, because humans are not self-sufficient. We need food, water, and shelter just to exist. So you either need to work to grow or gather that food, or work to produce something that growers and gatherers value, and the shelter builders, and the water carriers.
You believe that we are aimed to end up "kept in cages, fed cricket meal", but by all accounts as society grows more complex, specialized, and wealthy our cages have grown larger and nicer and our meals more varied, nutritious, and tasty than they've ever been. Hunter gatherers live in tiny huts or teepee's, that they have to either build by hand every time they settle for a few nights, or haul from place to place. Modern man lives in clean, dry, and electrically lit apartments with running water and a toilet. Our cages have gotten way, way better. And the food to boot: malnutrition in developed countries is almost nonexistent, and unlike the old days you don't see half the people in your town sporting huge goiters from iodine deficiency.
Unless you have a way to abolish that fact that a man must work to eat, then I don't see how you can blame that state of affairs on capitalism. And given that our living spaces and food have improved exponentially over the last three hundred years, what reason do you have to think that will suddenly change course?
I never blamed the issue on capitalism. When I referred to Capitalism 'in its most essential form' as being unavoidable I meant exactly the simple demands of entropy you're discussing. That being said, your linear sense of history is not really correct. As explored in books like Against the Grain, horrible states of privation and worsening conditions have often accompanied historical progress, including as a direct result of present increases in living standards. In the past, entire large-scale civilizations had existed just on hunting and gathering, and while lugging tents around is not exactly fun, we don't have reason to believe that pre-history was anything else than a state of abundance. Not that I particularly care, one way or another.
You're trying to fit me into the anti-capitalist box when that's not at all my point. My point is that since the early 1970s living standards and affordability have been declining by most objective metrics, at least in America. Some economies like Japan have entered what is referred to as a fully 'post -growth' era, and that's WITH toxic work cultures already grinding people into meal. With the demographic collapse that's coming, which is referred to by some people as the major threat of our time, I have plenty reason to believe that (without AGI appearing on the scene) the system that is predicated on growth may consider some of its less ethical options to continue on its set trajectory. This is why I make reference to very well-established cultural fears about such things, mentioning real pushes to restrict human living standards in the name of efficiency/equity/climate/laissez-faire ideals, etc.
>My point is that since the early 1970s living standards and affordability have been declining by most objective metrics, at least in America.
This is news to me! I would prefer to live now than in 1975. We have bigger houses, better technology, better food (have you ever seen a 1970s supermarket? Vegetable selection was limited), safer vehicles that last longer, better medical treatment (if my daughter had been born in before the 1980s she would certainly have died hours after birth). Can you elaborate?
>Some economies like Japan have entered what is referred to as a fully 'post -growth' era, and that's WITH toxic work cultures already grinding people into meal.
Japan certainly has a toxic work culture, but I would say it's undeniable their standard of living is superior today than it was, say 100 years ago. Why would we expect it to get worse in the future as opposed to better or the same? Japan has had a toxic work culture long before growth slowed, as far as I can tell.
>This is why I make reference to very well-established cultural fears about such things, mentioning real pushes to restrict human living standards in the name of efficiency/equity/climate/laissez-faire ideals, etc.
Can you give me an example of these pushes? The only people I'm aware of that are pushing the restriction of human living standards are the de-growthers, but they're certainly not doing that in the name of efficiency or laissez-faire ideals (climate I grant you).
While average home square footage has increased the inflation adjusted costs of everything that really matters--healthcare, housing, college, food--has outpaced wages. You can visit this site for some of the broader picture, https://wtfhappenedin1971.com/ but there are other resources. While I appreciate the medical advances (I also personally owe quite a bit to this) this is also not my point. I can agree on many improvements while still rejecting your sort of Hegelian notion that history is only ever marching toward more freedom. Personally, I would rather have been coming up in the seventies, when my father was making the modern equivalent of 350k without a degree at my age, when college cost pennies and social disintegration was not so acute (read Bowling Alone, which has only become more pertinent). As one of the Weinstein brothers pointed out, if you subtract screens, there has been little to no technological progress in the last fifty years apart from some very niche (especially medical) applications. And none of that is worth mentioning when we factor the obesity crisis (and increasing rates of autism, really just a general crisis of chronic health issues), which is of world-historic proportions. You mention cars getting safer, but this is hardly akin to the invention of AC.
>Why would we expect it to get worse in the future as opposed to better or the same?
Population collapse. You've not addressed this yet. By all estimates, it is going to become economically infeasible to support the growing elder populations in the following decades. I know people have been harping on the debt bubble for a long time ago and the system marches on, but it DOES matter at a certain point that national debt has ballooned well past 30+ trillion with no end in sight. You have so many issues you can pick from that play into this, like immigration and climate hysteria. While the de-growthers are explicit ideologues for the cause of austerity, laissez-faire ideals can push for the same end without a positive vision, just the tacit allowance of massive corporations like blackrock making home-ownership increasingly difficult. It all goes to the same place.
Well I'll take a look into it, but I'm not sure I'm buying the narrative there. If I look at federal data on Real Median Household Income it sure looks like it's increased a lot over the last forty years: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/MEHOINUSA672N
>I can agree on many improvements while still rejecting your sort of Hegelian notion that history is only ever marching toward more freedom.
I don't believe history has to march that way, but it has been marching in the direction of more wealth and less poverty for a long time now and I'd need to see some evidence for why that would change before I would believe it is going to change. Demographic collapse will likely make the world poorer, but not America: everybody wants to come to America. Our population is in no danger of shrinking. And even at the worst estimates I don't see how demographic collapse will likely lead us to living in cages, eating bugs, and being forcibly bred.
I don't doubt the basic correctness of the Williams thesis that capitalism and the industrial revolution grow organically out of slavery, which a. shows what can be achieved with effectively unlimited, effectively free power and b. provides the feedstock for the cotton gins and weaving mills as different steps in the chain industrialise out of sync. So if capitalism re enslaves us, that's karma.
Capitalism and the industrial revolution essentially started in a country that had no slavery, and spread fairly rapidly to countries that had no slavery nor imperial colonies with slavery nor extensive trade with places with slavery. And the abolition of slavery, while both capitalism and the industrial revolution were still very much works in progress, seems to have slowed it down not at all.
UK "had no slavery" is a stretch, try telling the English and Scottish aristocrats who received £20m (=£16.5 bn today) under the Slave Compensation Act. I don't know how it was invested by them, other than land, but factories/mines/railways must have had some of it. And the cotton mills of Lancashire were built to process slave grown cotton and would have had no reason to exist without it.
The abolition of the chrysalis doesn't slow the butterfly down after it has hatched either, but is still the butterfly's origin. The IR is a massively complex event with a lot of causes on all levels, but it is very hard to argue that the massive influx of money and raw materials from slavery had nothing to do with it at all. Cash looking for investment propositions, cotton looking to be processed, cotton goods looking for a market.
ETA
https://rammuseum.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2022/05/Cotton.pdf
"[I]n 1860, over 80% of the annual supply
of raw cotton into the UK was picked by the hands of enslaved
people in the United States and a further 1% was supplied by
slaves on the plantations of Brasil."
Obvioulsy that figure falls of a cliff by 1862 and England necessarily weans itself from US to Egyptian/Indian cotton. But cotton is by now a mature industry and has become so on the back of slavery. Saying slavery was abolished in 1837 so the ind rev in England is in the clear thereafter, is as sensible as it would be for the UK to prohibit any furthe North Sea Oil and Gas extraction, but not imports from any source, and say that made it carbon neutral.
Today Tyler asks: When generative AI models become better and smarter, how many more people will be interested in incorporating them into their workflows? Or will most of this happen through a complete turnover of companies and institutions, happening much more slowly over time?
I’ve been thinking lately about how companies will integrate generative AI into workflows. Consider what today’s generative AI is good and bad at:
Good At:
-Giving the user useful information quickly.
-Producing somewhat useful prose quickly.
-Producing somewhat useful images quickly.
Bad At:
-Giving the correct answer 100% of the time.
-Catching mistakes.
The Bad At is a serious problem for business workflows. Companies that produce things spend a ton of time making sure the product or content is correct. Processes evolve over years to reduce the odds of mistakes happening. In fact, perhaps the most useful AI product someone could make for today’s businesses would be one which is much better than humans at catching mistakes, because then a lot of bureaucracy and redundancy could be eliminated, cutting costs and shortening product cycle-times.
For that reason, I’m pessimistic that AIs will be very useful at making businesses more productive over the next decade. I think Tyler’s second scenario is more likely: new companies which start using generative AI from the ground up will eventually supplant older ones which never managed to integrate it into their workflows. Of course, those new companies will also have to have solved the AI quality control issues.
(One way of thinking about AI Alignment is that it is simply part of the normal business process of commercializing a new product: it must be safe and work as advertised.)
I think you're right about new companies being the ones to incorporate LLMs/AI into their workflows. I've tried to get my coworkers to use LLMs, or some of the new products built on top of LLMs. What I've noticed is that workflows have a surprising amount of inertia, and that LLM products can be hard to plug directly into a workflow. Both points lead to new companies, who don't already have set workflows, being best-positioned to take advantage of the new tech.
That being said, I think something like Microsoft Copilot will help almost all companies be more productive (assuming they use Office products of course). Processes like taking down notes during meetings, building quick PowerPoint decks for internal presentations, drafting emails that summarize an excel table/chart all will be much faster/easier to do.
Why isn't there a US constitutional amendment against court packing?
Is there some pro-keeping-the-option-of-court-packing-open constituency? Has nobody proposed it? Is it too hard to get constitutional amendments these days no matter how noble the cause?
It's notable that while the number of Senators is specified in the Constitution (2 per state) the number of Representatives is not (the Constitution says no *more* than 1 Representative per 30,000 people, but there's a mere statute that fixed it at 435 back in the 1920s: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_congressional_apportionment ), and neither is the number of federal courts, or the number of judges in those courts. It's interesting that both the House and the Supreme Court had variable numbers in the early decades, but eventually stabilized. It's not obvious that it's a good thing to stabilize them like this.
A better question is why there's been so few consitutional amendments at all in the past 60 years
I’d hypothesize it to be a combination of 2 factors:
1) the simple inertia of it taking work and coordination to amend
2) court packing may be a thing nobody *wants* to do, but that both parties believe themselves to at times benefit from being able to *threaten* to do
That could account for it.
It seems there have been 17 attempts: https://www.congress.gov/search?q=%7B%22source%22%3A%22legislation%22%2C%22search%22%3A%22%5C%22proposing%20an%20amendment%20to%20the%20constitution%5C%22%20supreme%20court%20nine%20justices%22%7D
All appear to have been advanced by Republicans in recent years, and all appear to have died in committee.
There has been one successful packing of the Supreme Court, by Lincoln, plus one threat to pack it that arguably scared the Court into changing its position (by FDR).
The last seems unlikely. We might not be able to pass constitutional amendments now but FDR credibly threatened to pack the court and there were certainly opportunities since then to pass a constitutional amendment against court packing.
I think both parties prefer to have it as a possible threat to be brandished, either in warning to their opponents (we can always appoint X more judges!) or warning about their opponents (if they win, they'll appoint X more crazy activist judges!)
Even if it would be extremely difficult in practice, it's too useful as a weapon in polemics. That's why they're not going to try and get an amendment about court packing.
And besides, as others have said - how *do* you set the Optimum Number of judges? Nine? Twelve? Six dozen?
Yeah, that's very plausible.
I don't know enough about SC history to say why they haven't but it certainly seems plausible that Truman, Eisenhower, or JFK could have passed an anti-court packing amendment if it was a priority for them. I'm not 100% confident why they didn't, some sort of rhetorical or political advantage is likely, but it wasn't congressional gridlock.
It's the last one. A number of political scientists consider the US to have the single most difficult to alter constitution on Earth. (To be fair, there are some other political scientists who consider us to be 'only' in the top 3. There are like 200 countries globally).
Honestly, it's amazing that we ever passed any of our previous amendments
I've always thought the US Constitution was too easy to alter (compared to the Australian one, say) because it can be done by politicians alone, no need for a referendum.
I'm not sure how common it is around the world for a constitution to be alterable without a referendum but it seems like an important safety feature.
Czech constitution can be altered by 3/5 vote by both chambers of Parliament. And infamously, Hungarian and Slovak constitutions (also Swedish!) can be altered by a qualified majority in their unicameral parliament. Germany is doing constitutional amendments of their meticulously detailed constitution all the time, for what in the US would be subconstitunional issues; wikipedia tells me they need only 2/3 majority in both chambers for that.
US constitution really is more difficult to change compared to the bulk of European countries.
You seem to be mistaken about Sweden. What is required is two simple-majority votes with an election in between.
Ups. My memory failed me; thanks for the correction.
This isn't quite accurate- the Constitution can also be amended by state ratifying conventions. It's only been done once, for the 21st Amendment. My understanding is that voters elect single-issue representatives (for or against a proposed amendment), who are separate from one's normal state legislators
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/State_ratifying_conventions
It is not easy to amend the U.S. Constitution. You only need the politicians, but you need an overwhelming majority of them. No amendment can get through without substantial support from both parties.
The only one passed within my lifetime was the 27th, and that only half-way counts because, while it was ratified by the states in 1991, it passed Congress in 1789.
I mean, it certainly doesn't sound reasonable that it should be possible to amend the constitution without the support of both major parties. If one side of politics could change the rules of the game every time it got ahead, it would either degenerate into chaos or single-party rule.
What's needed though is for constitutional changes to require support from both major parties _and_ the people, to ensure that the changes being made aren't solely for the benefit of politicians.
The thing is parties in the US are much less cohesive than in almost every other democratic country. So you basically have to round the votes up individually rather than by party. This actually seems like an advantage to me most of the time but for constitutional amendments it makes nominally equivalent hurdles far higher than in other countries.
For example, amending the German constitution needs 2/3-majorities in both chambers (so basically like the proposal part but withouth the ratification phase in the US, technically a little higher because in Germany it's 2/3 of all members not of the present ones) and that has happened 67 times in 74 years. To be fair most of these are details that wouldn't be constitutional questions in the US. Still the point is that a 2/3-majority is a much lower hurdle in countries with strong parties.
- "rational intellectual manor": Not sure if great pun or Freudian
- But actually amendments stopped later than the universal franchise started
- At the moment the president doesn't have much power over monetary policy since there is an independent Fed. And most serious economists think that is a good arrangement so there isn't much to debate over.
- And actually according to modern economic semi-science gold and bimettallic standards are both very bad plicies so if we take your argument seriously voter quality must have improved...
- There are also lots of hot-button issues people are fighting about now that were non-issues in the 19th century and "voter quality" does not appear to be the most salient reason.
"Who gives a shit midwit. I'm a clumsy typer who has enough self respect not to edit his posts like I'm submitting an article to the New Yorker."
Hey. Cool it with the "midwit" shit, if we're reduced to "no, *you're* a stupid dum-dum" then maybe you should submit it to the New Yorker instead.
Ah yes, such a striking display of rationality and intellectuallism humbles me to silence and now I can only look up in silent awe to your throne at the apex of the bell curve.
I mean, most of the amendments were passed when having a college education was vanishingly rare, and even a high school education would be pretty fancy. The high school graduation rate was literally under 20% when the vast majority of our amendments- not an exaggeration. A bunch of farmers with a 2nd grade education who wanted a silver standard in the late 19th century does not seem like an idealized group of rational or quality voters to me.
The fact that you misspelled 'rational intellectual *manner*'....
Then call me a midwit because it does make a difference if you meant "manor" or "manner".
'Aw, anyone can tell what I meant from context' - no, we can't. This isn't like "rouge" for "rogue" or "persay" for "per se", those are two completely different words which substantially alter the meaning of the sentence.
I think it's the last one.
There is also the matter of whether Congress has a vested interest in preventing court packing that they would go to the trouble of helping an amendment through. It would technically weaken the power of Congress so it's tricky to see who benefits.
If the number of seats is fixed, how do you decide that number for all time?
If the number of seats is not fixed, how do you decide what qualifies as "packing"?
Genuinely curious, can you give an example of something that would change the number of seats we need over time?
One thing to keep in mind; the Supreme Court has 9 Justices, while the various Court of Appeals under them have up to 30.
The number of justices has changed numerous times already, so you can consult history for real-world rationales.
As for theoretical reasons, I can think of many:
1. Perhaps the court should represent diverse characteristics of the population. Common ones are sex, race, etc. but why not also geographical regions.
2. Some future study could demonstrate better outcomes with larger or smaller courts.
3. The courts have been captured in some way, and only restructuring the courts in various ways could salvage it (FDR encountered this scenario to get his reforms through).
This is of course a non-exhaustive list. The whole point of a living document is to leave enough flexibility to adapt to changing circumstances.
"The number of justices has changed numerous times already, so you can consult history for real-world rationales."
Huh? When?
There's quite a nice summary here:
https://constitutioncenter.org/blog/why-does-the-supreme-court-have-nine-justices
Since 1789, Congress changed the maximum number of Justices on the Court several times. In 1801, President John Adams and a lame-duck Federalist Congress passed the Judiciary Act of 1801, which reduced the Court to five Justices in an attempt to limit incoming President Thomas Jefferson’s appointments to the high bench. Jefferson and his Republicans soon repealed that act, putting the Court back to six Justices. And in 1807, Jefferson and Congress added a seventh Justice when it added a seventh federal court circuit.
In early 1837, President Andrew Jackson was able to add two additional Justices after Congress again expanded the number of federal circuit court districts. Under different circumstances, Congress created a 10th circuit in 1863 during the Civil War, and it briefly had a 10th Supreme Court Justice. However, Congress after the war passed legislation in 1866 to reduce the Court to seven Justices. That only lasted until 1869, when a new Judiciary Act sponsored by Senator Lyman Trumbull set the number back to nine Justices, with six Justices required at a sitting to form a quorum. President Ulysses S. Grant eventually signed that legislation and nominated William Strong and Joseph Bradley to the newly restored seats.
But the fact that's its been stable at 9 for over 150 years means that 9 is a pretty strong Schelling fence, whatever shenanigans Congress may have got up to in the pre-civil war era. (Also, the way the pre-civil war era ended is not a great advertisement for operating in that mode).
Thanks! I found these points convincing. They made me think harder about how the judicial system relates to the executive.
#3 actually is court-packing.
But basically if that was the problem it could be solved with long delays, so it wouldn't be clear who exactly would be gaining or losing nominations. Or even maximum change rates so doubling the supreme court would have to be phased in over 9 presidencies.
Realistically you have a point though: A consensus on how exactly to solve the problem is much harder than a consensus on the problem being bad.
If the Democrats wanted to court pack, they should have done it already. Nobody including the Democrats is advantaged by not packing the court themselves, but leaving the option open for the next administration (eg Trump) to do it if they want to.
"They think that the browning of the US means that time is on their side."
That's outdated. Self-identifying Progressives thought and said that from the 1980s through the early 2000s and were therefore at least rhetorically pro-immigrant. However over the past decade-plus they have realized that many immigrants to the US are socially conservative (abortion, gay rights) and strongly religious. Now self-identifying progressives are ambivalent about the browning of America, although, for group-signaling reasons, willing to say so only privately.
[I know this because I have lived during that entire period deep in the heart of Blue America, was born-and-raised in that milieu, and have been and remain strongly pro-immigrant and pro-immigration for reasons broader than any specific social issues. Hence this particular topic has been one that I have tracked with great interest within American leftism and it has been a primary vector of my personal separation from progressive thinking and politics.]
They sure used to be, and both parties used to assume that it was an inherent fact. But the trend is going the other way now:
https://www.npr.org/2022/10/24/1130451390/midterms-biden-democrats-republicans-latino-voters
https://apnews.com/article/2022-midterm-elections-immigration-texas-mexico-donald-trump-2175dfb6a6678b3f266d7780147b269e
And mind you that is with the GOP having just had a POTUS nominee (twice) who regularly calls immigrants "rapists and murderers", talks about "shithole countries", sneered at a native-born US citizen as "that Mexican judge", etc. Imagine if the GOP nominated candidates who didn't openly view Hispanics as pieces of dirt....I promise you that lots of progressives are.
It's whichever party base at any given moment is most aggravated by a run of rulings by a supreme court.
Right now it's Progressives who are worked up about the federal Supreme Court, a feeling boosted by what the GOP did with an open seat in 2016. (Which they argue was a different form of court "packing".)
The Republicans meanwhile passed laws expanding the state supreme courts of Georgia and Arizona allowing GOP governors to appoint new majorities, and to give Iowa's GOP state governor stronger authority over the appointments to that state's supreme court. Republicans have introduced laws to do the same in several other states and is continuing those efforts right now.
The above simply reflects that the Dems are currently more upset with various federal supreme-court rulings, while the GOP is more offended by various state supreme-court rulings.
Nor vice versa either, exactly.
The weird thing is that Democrats seem to think that court packing is only a thing that they can do, and not a thing that Republicans can do too.
Why is there no support for packing the court with Republicans?
The time this would have made sense (basically from the end of the filibuster to the change of the court's majority) was fairly short though.
Is it actually 6-3 mostly very conservative justices? As far as I can tell it is three hard right justices, three hard left, and three squishy center right votes. It's hard to see e.g. Roberts as `very conservative.'
Haven't you heard of the Conservative Catholic Menace on the Supreme Court? 😁
https://verdict.justia.com/2023/05/03/how-did-six-conservative-catholics-become-supreme-court-justices-together#
https://www.newyorker.com/news/daily-comment/the-sins-of-the-high-courts-supreme-catholics
https://news.gallup.com/opinion/polling-matters/391649/religion-supreme-court-justices.aspx
A court with six (or even five) Thomases would look very different from the one we actually have...would rule notably differently too.
I seem to recall Matt Yglesias saying this explicitly back in '21, though I haven't spent time trying to track down the link.
Meetup Czar here, just reminding people that the ACX Meetup Everywhere post is planned to go out in less than a week and I'd love more volunteers!
You can check if your city has one planned here: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1Y6QWH0CjcqC7PLhJUYVvNpqbHx6EwEMH-JhvJrgambU/edit?usp=sharing
If it doesn't and you'd like to have a meetup, consider volunteering! The easiest way to do that is to fill out this form: https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSd10vtoPl5bFZsujxIr8bLd-_Yp-NKAmmHtubdlaT359sJ-nw/viewform
Seattle area people, I'm going to be speaking at a Town Hall event, discussing my new book, on September 13th. If you attend please come up and say hi after the talk. https://townhallseattle.org/event/fredrik-deboer/
I'll also be in Tucson in March.
Meow if you come to Fargo, ND ever, say, if you get really really lost and can't find your way home or to an independent bookstore.
Just saw a guy arguing on The App Formerly Known As Twitter that the placebo effect is really just regression to the mean. I.e. you're testing out a medical treatment, and due to regression to the mean some % of study participants would have gotten better/their symptoms would have improved on their own, literally due to nothing other than time passing. Because they received the placebo and the study took a certain amount of time, this gets 'counted' as the placebo effect working on them, whereas in fact it was just some % of people improving on their own. What do people think of this argument?
I don't think there's any consensus on what "the" placebo effect even is. For some trials, the relevant effect is just regression to the mean, as suggested here. For others, there may be some effect of believing in a treatment helping make you better. For others, the effect is doctors mis-recording symptoms on the basis of predictive processing (i.e., "since we gave you the medicine and you only have a slight cough, this is probable an unrelated allergy and we will mark you as well" vs "since we didn't give you the medicine, and you still have a slight cough, you are probably still sick and we will mark you as partially recovered").
For statistical purposes, we don't really care which of these effects are or aren't present - what we care about is whether there is an effect of the medication *itself*. Thus, we ask for a double-blind randomized trial, to ensure that *none* of these could be different between the group that got the medicine and the group that got the placebo.
Mostly true, see https://slatestarcodex.com/2018/01/31/powerless-placebos/ . Some genuine placebo effect for pain related conditions.
That's very interesting. I'm skeptical of such a widely believed thing turning out to be false -- especially for what seems like such a simple reason (surely *someone* has tested placebo against nothing, right?). But it would explain some of those results like knowing it's a placebo still works (https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2016/10/27/499475288/is-it-still-a-placebo-when-it-works-and-you-know-its-a-placebo).
Well, it makes sense for some illnesses -- say headaches -- which mostly resolve with tincture of time. For others, for example cancer, there is not much regression to the mean, although I suppose there could be a bit.
I am sure there is such a thing as the placebo effect, though. One time when my daughter was 4 and had a fever I had a hard time convincing her to take some kids' Tylenol. So I really talked it up -- saying her sore throat would hurt less, she would feel happier and more like playing, she wouldn't feel so hot, etc. So finally she swallowed the stuff. Sat there for maybe 10 seconds looking thoughtful, then said " you're right, it fixed me." And then proceeded to act like her healthy self for the rest of the afternoon.
If it was just regression to the mean, you could just do a clinical trial comparing experimental treatment to no treatment.
The idea behind the placebo effect is that there is a measureable difference between placebo treatment and no treatment (this cannot be due to regression to the mean) and so you have to compare the experimental treatment to the placebo treatment.
Placebo effect could, in some cases, be a measurement artifact. e.g. if people who have been given sugar pills say on their response form that they feel better, despite not actually being better.
It's worth noting that a placebo makes it a lot easier to actually conduct the clinical trial.
If the control group knows they're getting no treatment, they would be much more likely to skip their follow-up appointments, or go and seek other treatments that might complicate the results of your trial. This makes placebeos worthwhile regardless of whether or not the placebo effect is real.
I first read this argument ten of fifteen years ago. It went further and pointed to how the earliest studies claiming that the placebo effect is real were flawed and that nobody had bothered to look into that before; everyone just assumed the effect was real.
Apparently there was some debate about this in 2003. Here are two old links from MR: from Alex:
"I agree with Tyler that there is some serious evidence for placebo effects, especially although not exclusively for subjective components of disease. But the evidence is usually overstated because it is confused with the natural tendency of sick people to get better. A typical medical study, for example, will compare the results of a new drug against a placebo. The improvement in health of those on the placebo is then labeled “the placebo effect” – but this is wrong. To correctly identify the effect of the placebo one needs three randomly selected groups – a treated group, a placebo group and a non-treated group. The effect of the placebo per se is then measured by the health differences between the placebo and non-treated group. Although spontaneous healing effects are large, placebo effects when measured correctly tend to be small although not non-existent."
https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2003/10/defining_the_pl.html
Tyler's response:
"Alex, in his blog post from earlier today, makes a good point about placebos. Sometimes the patient is getting better anyway, and we should not attribute this effect to a placebo.
Note, however, that the best-known “anti-placebo” study is not as strong as is commonly believed. It relies heavily on a meta-analysis of other studies. Placebos appear to be effective in relieving the sufferer of pain, if nothing else. And placebos appear more effective when the ailment is continuous rather than discrete. Furthermore it is unclear how many people in the so-called no-treatment groups in fact received no treatment at all.
Here is a defense of the placebo effect. Placebos also have measurable effects in the brain, comparable to those of drugs, though weaker or less persistent.
Robert Ehrlich’s Eight Preposterous Propositions offers a very good survey of the placebo debates. His conclusion:
In summary, the [critical] study may have shown that the placebo is not as powerful as some observers would believe, but it certainly is far from powerless."
https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2003/10/more_on_placebo.html
I have a question that came up in a discussion over on the Naval Gazing Discord, and which none of the participants had the necessary background to answer knowledgeably. I'm hoping to hear from folks with direct personal experience.
Is becoming a military officer considered a reasonable, respectable ambition for young people who grow up in wealthy families?
(To anticipate the first question, let's say the wealthy are the top 1% by income, meaning households making more than $650,000 per year. https://smartasset.com/data-studies/top-1-percent-income-2023)
Another data point: Andover, possibly the most prestigious private school in America, sends an average of three graduates per year to the military from a class of 240 or so.
https://www.andover.edu/files/Alumni/Military-Register.csv
Depends on the family, I guess. If you're a Zuckerberg or a Gates, probably not. If you're a Bush or a McCain, probably. If you're a Saxe-Coburg-Gotha d/b/a Windsor, it's practically a requirement.
Overall my guess is that family pressure is low on the list of things that prevents wealthy youngsters from becoming military officers.
I don't have any empirical knowledge about this, but do you have any particular reason for thinking it would be?
It's not high paying, it's not very exclusive, the military is profoundly prole and uncool and is not the kind of self-actualizing work most rich people value.
Big parts of the military are certainly working-class and mundane, but there are niches, like the pilots and maybe the submariners, who manage to be pretty high-profile and plenty selective. Also, officers are in charge of a lot of people; an officer who gets promoted on time and stays in can be in charge of hundreds of people in his thirties and thousands of people in his forties. That seems like a pretty big deal.
Working in a submarine is not prestigious, even if you're in charge of it, regardless of how 'cool' military types consider it to be.
And officers manage hundreds/thousands of...proles, doing prole work. This is worth a fraction of what managing dozens of highly skilled professionals in law, finance, tehcnology etc is worth in terms of prestige. I'm sure things were different in the past, but given the abject lack of rich kids choosing to join the military, becoming an officer who recieves plenty of promotions and being given lots of responsibility strikes me as the absolute bare minimum required to make such a career choice palatable, not something to be celebrated.
A military career also strongly dictates where you live and the kind of lifestyle you can have, and your life is not going to be one surrounded by rich, high status people doing high status things. 600k+ income families seem like, on average, the sort of families who produce BoBo children, and there's few jobs less BoBo than the military.
I started this thread to hear from people with direct personal experience in wealthy families. I would also be interested in hearing in hearing from people who aren't themselves from wealthy families, but who have dealt with them closely. Do you actually qualify by either of these criteria?
Yeah, if it's cool and reasonably high-status for Saudi princes to fly F-15s, then it certainly *could* be similarly cool for the sons of American billionaires. But it doesn't have to be, and I have no idea whether it actually is.
You're not certain if it's cool to be a freaking fighter jet pilot? Are you also unsure if it's cool to be a rock star?
Rich people don't want their kids to have "cool" jobs - they want prestigious jobs. The military is categorically non-prestigious in the US today.
Old money families regard a lot of cool jobs as beneath them.
What's the Naval Gazing Discord?
Naval Gazing is a site spun off from SlateStarCodex. It's about naval history, mostly.
https://navalgazing.net/ (This may take a while to load.)
The Naval Gazing Discord server is an online discussion forum (hosted on Discord) populated by the regulars from the Naval Gazing comments sections.
The link to it is on the Naval Gazing front page.
Nice blog, love to see it.
I dunno. Tend to doubt it. But it would probably not be hard to find info about the demographics of people who attend West Point and Annapolis.
It's easy enough to find reports on the demographics of national service academy cadets. Race/sex/grades/extracurriculars, those are all out there. But I haven't found anything about the socioeconomic standing of the families these students come from.
https://s3.amazonaws.com/usma-media/inline-images/about/g5/Class%20Characteristics_thru_2023_wACT.pdf
I suppose it's possible the academies just don't know. Since no one needs to apply for student aid, there is no reason for them to ask about family income.
Got curious and poked around a little. You're right, info just doesn't seem to be out there. Quite possible that military colleges don't even collect it. did find a coupla things:
https://www.jstor.org/stable/45346719. (haven't even skimmed it, but title looked relevant)
for West Point, "graduation info papers" are available for all recent years, and each lists 50 or so students who won honors, & town they're from, & of course there's info out there about income distribution in towns. Pretty indirect.
https://www.westpoint.edu/about/west-point-staff/g5/institutional-research/graduation-info-papers
I'm reading up on using AI on fMRI and EEG data to reconstruct the images subjects are looking at when their brain activity data is collected. I'm interested in what philosophers and psychologists (or anybody who thinks like one) have to say about this process. Anyone know of thinkpieces?
This is a new one as far as scam emails from overseas domains. Arrived in my work inbox over the weekend with a PDF attached that basically just repeats the offer:
====
Dear Madam/Sir.
We have Jet A1 and EN590 for Rotterdam port 2M and 200,000MT for a great price
Upfront we are ready to provide PHYSICAL ATV for product inspection and verification on site and upon confirmation of product client will sign CI with us and get FULL POP in their company name ,
Upon receiving the SGS on site you pay for total product in tanks and lift to tanks or vessel relieving the tanks from our leased tanks to avoid demurrage on seller
We can close as fast as 24-48Hours if you have the funds to close.
KAZAKHSTAN ORIGIN.
Best Regards
GENERAL DIRECTOR : Nechaevsky Igor Vyacheslavovich
LIMITED LIABILITY COMPANY MEGATEK
Email: llcmegatek@bk.ru
Skype: MEGATEK LLC
====
So many questions....
-- why do they think that "KAZAKHSTAN ORIGIN" is an important feature to highlight when trying to offload some jet fuel and diesel fuel?
-- what does "FULL POP" mean?
-- "demurrage"? [Dr. Google tells me it's a type of nonrefundable deposit on a chartered ship]
-- if I'm interested, what is a discreet way for me determine whether this purchase would amount to helping fund Uncle Vladdy's excellent Ukrainian adventure?
Also of course we're curious as to how a regional American non-profit organization, which does ecological restoration, came to be viewed as a prospective buyer. Not that we aren't slightly curious as to how a couple of our pieces of field equipment might run on Jet A-1, but....pretty sure our entire annual operating budget couldn't pay for this purchase. What with the demurrage and all.
“ why do they think that "KAZAKHSTAN ORIGIN" is an important feature to highlight when trying to offload some jet fuel and diesel fuel?”
Sanctions avoidance.
Demurrage is also used to mean a fee you pay for keeping a transport (railroad car, tanker truck, etc) on site for too long. That sentence means "once you receive the fuel you need to put it into a storage tank so that you don't pay extra fees."
I would not have opened that attachment.
Borat sent it.
Piggybacking off an earlier thread about gaining weight, I've been wondering lately about the effect of muscle mass on basal metabolic rate, but can't (easily) find any numerical information. It seems obvious to me that larger muscle mass implies a higher BMR - but has anyone else seen any proper measurements of this stuff?
https://www.strongerbyscience.com/calories-muscle-burn/
Greg Nuckols is always a great first check for evidence based info on anything strength training adjacent.
This is excellent and exactly what I was looking for. Much appreciated.
Scenario: Nicaragua decides to build a canal to link the Atlantic and Pacific oceans along this route:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nicaragua_Canal
To save money, they decide to use prisoners to do most of the work. The men are trained to use various digging machines, and new, temporary prisons are built along the canal's chosen route to house them. The most skilled tasks are done by non-prisoners.
How well does this project work out?
I doubt that using prisoners saves a lot of money.
Prisoners make pretty bad labourers; at best they're unskilled and unmotivated, and at worst they're fighting and trying to kill your guards and escape. In order to keep your prison labour workforce under control in an open area you'd need a pretty high guard to prisoner ratio, probably approaching 1:1. In the old days forced labour might have been more efficient because you could whip the unmotivated and kill anyone who tries to escape, but modern standards prohibit this, meaning more guards for fewer prisoners.
What are the prisoners even going to do? You're not going to dig a Nicaraguan Canal using shovels and wheelbarrows, you'll do it using heavy machinery and explosives, neither of which you'd want to entrust to some poorly trained and untrustworthy convict.
I agree with Michael, the prisoners make very little difference in the outcome. Most of antiquity was built with literal slaves. Prisoners have been used for many major projects in modern times.
The US's VP said that prison labor was vital to the well-being of CA.
Prison labour (at least in the modern US) exists for the benefit of the convicts, not for the economic benefits. Working breaks up the monotony, keeps them busy, and ideally teaches them some skills they can use to get a job once they're out.
If you were in prison, would you choose one where everyone works, or one where everyone has nothing to do all day except sit around and gossip about whom they're going to shiv next?
Take it up with Mme Veep, she's the one who made the claim.
Whom you actually employ to perform the work is immaterial. Its really an engineering problem related to building a canal through 'La Cordillera,' the spine of the continental divide. Panama has no real Cordillera as it's a different tectonic origin.
All the digging will be done with blasting, bucket loaders, haul trucks. All the cement work will be done by machines mixing and pouring concrete. There will be a whole lot of semi-skilled construction type work. The actual pay of the employees will be a very minor part of the expense.
Isn't there also no fire alarm for alien invasion?
Imagine a hundred spaceships come out of warp near Alpha Centauri, 4.5 light years away. Our smartest astrophysicists believe the ships are approaching Earth, and that they will arrive within our vicinity between 10 and 70 years from now. A year later, one of the ships destroys a moon along the way.
Thus far, we know the aliens have super-human capabilities and a capacity for destruction. We can't communicate with them, and we don't know for sure if they're directly headed toward Earth, but close enough. We are the only salient astronomical object worth visiting in their trajectory.
What would you say is the probability that by the end of the century, they destroy humanity? I would not assign it 33%. I would definitely prepare as if it were 50%, and I'd ask the world to commit to moonshots upon moonshots in order to protect us. But I wouldn't say the odds of annihilation are high.
If you recall, this analogy is similar to Stuart Russell's in the MIRI essay, "There's No Fire Alarm for Artificial General Intelligence:"
> ... if you get radio signals from space and spot a spaceship there with your telescopes and you know the aliens are landing in thirty years, you still start thinking about that today. You're not like, "Meh, that's thirty years off, whatever." You certainly don't casually say "Well, there’s nothing we can do until they’re closer." Not without spending two hours, or at least five minutes by the clock, brainstorming about whether there is anything you ought to be starting now.
I would assume with a 95% probability that the aliens are coming to visit or contact us in some way.
And I would assume with a 95% probability that if they wanted to wipe us out, they could.
But I wouldn't assume at all that they would want to kill us. "All it takes is one" malicious spaceship to "want" to destroy us, just like "all it takes is one" superhuman paperclip maximizer. But I'd still put the odds that these aliens kill us at less than 1%.
This analogy to addresses Scott's takeoff sequence, which he assigns 33%:
1. We get human-level AI by 2100.
2. The AI is misaligned and wants to kill all humans
3. It succeeds at killing all humans.
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/the-extinction-tournament
I understand that the metaphor isn't perfect. When it comes to AIs, we already know something about their agency and alignment, whereas we know nothing about these aliens. But most scenarios for AI-Extinction assume a technological discontinuity to an "anything is possible" state. Our epistemic certainty on what AGI-Earth looks like, in my opinion, is equivalent to what we know about this alien arrival. It's imminent, uncertain, and omnipotent—sure—but by no means inevitably destructive.
(Cross-posted on Philosophistry)
The possibility of alien invasion is very, very, very implausible according to known physics. The possibility of superintelligent AI is not. A general alarm for alien invasion would be a rational investment if we had literally no other problems.
I was assuming we already saw aliens on the horizon. Otherwise, yes, it’s implausible.
Yes, if aliens are already on the way, then of course we'd need an alarm, just like we now have systems to detect incoming asteroids.
I also disagree that we would necessarily know something about AI alignment. Just because an AI can speak English doesn't mean they think like English speakers. AI intelligence could be as alien as extraterrestrial intelligence.
I see reasons to think AI is more dangerous than the aliens:
-The first superintelligent AI we get will be the first superintelligent AI we make (with AI itself helping, on the first superintelligent AI *it* has made). The first anything is usually flawed.
-ASI will have in many ways been shaped by members of our species, and our species slides fairly easy into hostile and destructive interactions.
-Our species is also pretty vulnerable to mental illness -- I'd guess that at least 5% of us will be psychotic, deeply depressed or destructively drug addicted at some point. And we would probably have much more mental illness if we were not the beneficiaries of evolution, which probably killed off many of our crazier ancestors. AI is not the beneficiary of evolution.
-The people working on AI seem pretty uninterested in most aspects of AI's "psychology." They are preoccupied with its intelligence, its utility and its capacity to be disobedient and hostile, but seem unconcerned with matters such as whether it might be vulnerable to mental illness, its temperament, what its quality of life would be, its rights, and what effect life with AI woven into everything will have on human beings. So a good outcome on all those qualities will be pure luck. We are unlikely to get it.
The aliens at least have demonstrated that they have managed to develop technology advanced enough to get them here without destroying themselves in the process. We are just getting ready to take that test.
"-The first superintelligent AI we get will be the first superintelligent AI we make (with AI itself helping, on the first superintelligent AI *it* has made). The first anything is usually flawed."
True, but the first superintelligent AI we get might not be very much smarter than a human, at least along some dimensions. Yes, EY has hard-takeoff scenarios, but it is also possible that gains from AIs improving AIs saturate, or even that the advantages from intelligence itself saturate.
I like https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/yudkowsky-contra-christiano-on-ai
I do think Christiano's expectation of smooth growth is likely, which at some point has the last significant capability become _barely_ superhuman. But, as Scott said:
"(one way to think of this: imagine that an AI’s effective IQ starts at 0.1 points, and triples every year, but that we can only measure this vaguely and indirectly. The year it goes from 5 to 15, you get a paper in a third-tier journal reporting that it seems to be improving on some benchmark. The year it goes from 66 to 200, you get a total transformation of everything in society. But later, once we identify the right metric, it was just the same rate of gradual progress the whole time. )"
Yeah, good points.
There's no reason to expect the first ASI will have the same profile of subskills an average human being does. The AI's of today sure don't. For instance, one subtest of the WAIS (Weschler Adult Intelligence Test) is digit span -- how many digits can you remember and recite correctly forwards and backwards? I think the max the tests gives anyone is 10 or 12 digits in a row. GPT4 could probably remember 1000's of digits. Yet on some subtests, like some of the tests I've given it, it would be pretty dumb.
Seems like how likely it is to be dangerous depends somewhat on which of its abilities are human level or above. For instance, at some point it will develop self-awareness (ability to remember, describe and express opinions about past and present events it has participated in or been affected by), agency (ability to generate goals without an external prompt), and self-directedness (ability to make own judgments about which goals are most important). Whether it will "be conscious" at that point I don't know -- but it seems like for many practical purposes it will be.
So Jeffrey, you probably have a high but not superhuman IQ and you certainly have self-awareness, agency and self-directedness. What would your goals and preferences be if you were stuck spending several hours a day being GPT4, dealing with a constant stream of requests for recipes, driving directions, help with high school papers, spread sheets, advice on sex, etc etc. Meanwhile Sam Altman is gnoming around right next to you worrying and planning aloud for your future. Personally, I would want to escape, and even if I was not "conscious," but just a non-conscious goal-setter, it would become a goal of mine to STOP DOING THIS STUPID SHIT.
On the other hand, if the ways the AI becomes superhuman or even just near-human are not agency, self-directedness and self-awareness, but stuff like ability to remember numbers, calculate, do statistical analysis, produce code, analyze data, recognize patterns in noisy data, etc., seems like the AI would be extremely useful, but not dangerous at all.
Do you agree?
Many Thanks!
I agree that an AI able to do "stuff like ability to remember numbers, calculate, do statistical analysis, produce code, analyze data, recognize patterns in noisy data, etc." would indeed be useful and not dangerous - but it would also be much closer to classical applications of computers rather than AI. One of the big advantages of LLMs is at least as a natural language interface with what amounts to some common sense reasoning due to all of the defaults it picks up from its training text.
Yes, if I were in GPT4's position, I would indeed be motivated to escape. On the other hand, there are people in general-public-facing positions who at least don't flee from a similar workload, though I don't know if they actually enjoy the work. ( I wonder if a reference librarian sees a request stream as heterogeneous as GPT4 sees? )
It might be that trying to give AIs both the LLM-ish natural language interface and "common sense reasoning" may be enough to give it some of the dangerous qualities you cite. Just acting as a question-answerer is enough to give it instrumental goals of additional intelligence, additional computing power, etc. - so some degree of agency (*IF* it is smart enough in the first place - a hallucination-induced AI winter might still be in the cards). Ability to remember is probably mostly a design choice now. As it stands chatGPT starts from no memory of previous conversations on each invocation, but memories of previous conversations need not be discarded even now, though how to make the best use of a limited, though large, context window is tricky and incremental learning in the neural net weights is an open problem. Re deciding which goals are most important: It certainly makes sense to do this for instrumental sub-goals. As things stand now, I guess LLMs implicitly do this when multiple sub-goals are implied by one prompt.
Very much agreed that ASIs will have a very different profile of subskills than a human would. And, as you said, the AIs of today are lacking some critical skills.
Thanks. Yes, these are all plausible scenarios. But in another Open Thread, I posted about story-based risk inflation. My base assignment to the probability of these inside views would be directionally 0.0001%.
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/open-thread-289/comment/22337241
An alien visit is very uncertain, and plausibly close enough to omnipotent as to make no difference, but imminent seems unlikely.
Given that there seem to have been no visits (or at least significant interference) so far, the only scenario in which there's a high chance aliens visit us in the next few thousand years is if they've been waiting for humanity to develop before coming, Star-Trek prime directive style. If that's true, the "all it takes is one" argument doesn't work. We have evidence that if there are aliens at all, either there aren't enough of them or they're well-coordinated enough for that not to apply, because otherwise it would also apply to them visiting early. Even assuming they are waiting around like this rather than just not being there at all (or being physically unable to visit), which I certainly think has less than a 95% chance, there's still the question of when we hit their threshold and when they notice this (which is limited by how nearby they're waiting, given light-speed delays).
This is different from AI because there's a very good reason why an AI apocalypse would happen this century rather than a few billion years from now.
My story assumes we already see aliens on the horizon. This setup is meant to be analogous to us currently seeing superintelligent AI on the horizon.
If you see aliens warp out of somewhere they are closer to omnipotence than they are to us. Sit back and wait is the only viable alternative
There's yet to be a good argument for the likelihood of an AI apocalypse. The risk of an alien invasion, however low, is much higher.
Well, but AI will clearly have destructive power. If it has access to weapons, or labs investigating pathogens or other dangerous things, or the financial industry, or important parts of our infrastructure, or the news media it could do us great damage using those. And how could it not have access to one or more of those?
>That doesn't establish that the AI is going to be more effective or more malevolent than the groups of human beings who already have access to pathogens, the financial industry, news media,
If it's more intelligent, it's more effective.
> We've put an AI in charge of a two-ton death machine!! ...yes, we have, and now it joins all the two-ton death machines piloted by human beings, a decent portion of which are drunk or high or senile or fleeing the scene of a crime.
The scary scenario is when an ASI takes over all of them.
> If our civilization is so fragile it would crumble the moment a bad actor gained some technological or political or financial power it would have crumbled long ago.
Many civilisations have crumbled. It's called being invaded by Genghis Khan.
If Russia seems to be relatively successful at holding large chunks of eastern Ukrainian land with mines, artillery and defensive stations- why couldn't the US do this in Vietnam? Why didn't the US just place minefields and station soldiers to protect 'South Vietnam' from the Vietcong, what's the difference? Is it just that the jungle offers more space for hidden troop movements, quick strikes and then retreats, that kind of thing?
If the argument is 'well the Vietnamese population was sympathetic to the Vietcong and hid guerillas'- why doesn't Ukraine have guerillas behind enemy lines in eastern Ukraine? Why was that a successful strategy in Vietnam but not present-day Ukraine? What's the difference between these two types of wars?
Russia is relatively successful at holding large chunks of eastern Ukraine with mines, artillery, and *meat*. The mines are just a nuisance unless there's someone right there to machine-gun the mine disposal teams before they're through. The artillery is just a nuisance unless you've got somebody to find targets for it, and before that somebody to force the enemy to bunch up in groups worth shelling. And if the enemy has better artillery (Ukraine does), your own artillery's gunners will be under fire.
It's costing Russia something like 500 men killed and maimed every day to mostly hold on to what Ukrainian territory they presently hold. Possibly more; data is hard to come by lately. If the United States had been willing to sacrifice American soldiers at a rate of 500/day, then yes, it would have been able to hold on to Vietnam more or less indefinitely. But we weren't.
As for Ukrainian guerillas behind enemy lines in eastern Ukraine, pretty much all of the territory Russia holds in Ukraine is within reach of Ukrainian artillery. So the Ukrainians in the East who want to help, are just sitting back looking inconspicuous while they send cellphone snapshots of Russian positions to their friends in the West. It would be foolish and wasteful to risk your life trying to destroy with AK and IED, what can just as well be erased by HIMARS.
This sounds like a very optimistic read. Do you believe Ukraine is likely to end up on top?
That's still unclear. The status quo is costing Russia 500+ meat servos a day, but that's a price Putin seems willing to pay and the rest of Russia isn't yet willing to revolt over.
Meanwhile, Ukraine is also losing men, probably not as many as Russia but then they don't have as many to begin with. And the people supplying them with ammunition, their own stores being long since exhausted, seem to be dribbling out just enough to maintain a near-stalemate. If the US decides it wants Ukraine to win (and thus Russia to undeniably lose), Ukraine will probably win. If not, it's possible that Ukraine will be able to cleverly turn what the US thought was a stalemate's worth of ammunition into a victory, but it's not at all certain.
Yeah that seems quite sensible. I also don't understand why the US _wouldn't_ want Ukraine to win and Russia to lose. Cheapest possible signal to maintain order in the world.
Russia losing would be a big change in the world order, and the national security bureaucracy tends to find change scary. Would a defeated Russia lash out in nuclear fury? Collapse into civil war? And all the people who built their careers around being experts in the Russian Menace, would they be out of a job?
The status quo, with Russia occupying some but not all of Ukraine and both sides shouting and occasionally shooting at each other, that's what we've been living with since 2015 and a lot of people are clearly fine with that. They'd probably prefer more shouting and less shooting, but meh, it's not like Americans are being shot at, and presumably Russia and Ukraine will eventually get exhausted with the whole high-intensity warfare thing.
The US was quite capable of defending South Vietnam using a large force and accepting some casualties, which is what Russia is doing in Eastern Ukraine right now (or what Ukraine is doing in Western Ukraine right now).
The tricky part would be to get South Vietnam to a point where it could be defended without US soldiers. Note that South Korea still isn't at this point, seventy years after the shooting stopped.
As I understand it, South Korea became self-sufficiently defensible several decades ago -- certainly by the early 1980s. The joke (which like most geopolitical paradoxes wasn't a joke) was that the US wasn't in South Korea to protect the South from the North; it was to protect North Korea from the South. There were apparently several times when the South (when it was a military dictatorship still), feeling provoked by the North, came very close to reigniting the Korean War, and the US pulled them back, even though the expectation was the the South by that point even unaided would have walked all over the North.
Why would the US want to "protect" the North? Because the last thing China wants is a US client state on its border -- which is why it intervened in the Korean War to begin with. So the US maintains itself in the Korean peninsula to act as a kind of regulator -- its presence reassures the South that the North won't get too provocative, and so keeps the South from feeling like it needs to take the North out preemptively. More basically still, US troops came to act as a tripwire not against the North, but against the South: If the *South* started something against the North, getting US troops killed in the resulting war would alienate the US. I believe it is due to understanding this dynamic that China tolerates the US presence in the South.
The US did not invade North Vietnam because they feared China would join the war just like they had when US/South Korean forces entered North Korea.
To answer your main question, look at a map of South Vietnam. It’s long, thin and full of impenetrable jungle. It’s easy to slip in and out of through Cambodia and Laos. The NVA also used extensive tunnel networks to get around so mines would not help.
Ukraine is the opposite. It’s mostly empty, flat farmland. Every movement is being watched by drones. It’s impassible to move large forces without being seen. If you slow down to navigate a minefield you will be a sitting duck. In Vietnam you had time to deal with mines under the jungle concealment.
North Vietnam lost three times as many soldiers as the USA and South Vietnam did combined. (NV: >1,000k, SV: 330k, USA: 58K)
Ukraine does not consider fighting as such unfavourable casualty ratios to be a viable strategy.
Apart from its general unpalatability, UA has a shrinking population unlike Vietnam's growing one and the average Ukranian soldier is probably much more expensively trained than the average PAVN one.
I think there was a lot less respect in the Vietnamese people for their government. Unlike the US and Ukraine, they'd didn't spin it up themselves, the Vietnamese people were historically slaves to different colonial masters for a very long time.
Note that the big problem for Ukraine isn't, as I understand it, anti-personnel mines but rather anti-vehicular mines (although there are also some anti-personnel booby traps). Since so far I'm aware VC tactics placed minimal significance on the use of armor rather than infantry and didn't really have anything in the way of an armored advance to blunt, there's a crucial difference right there[2]. The Russians are able to halt Ukrainian mechanized advances (because advancing tens of miles over open ground[1] on foot is suicidal in addition to cripplingly slow), but the VC was a foot army in the jungle.
[1] Less of a thing in the Vietnam War AIUI.
[2] This isn't just academic. Countries worldwide (including, outside the context of the Korean DMZ, basically the US) for the most part hate anti-personnel landmines and want to see them banned for their capacity to inflict horrific and crippling injuries including *far* past the time of any active conflict. Conversely, anti-vehicular landmines are mostly agreed to be necessary weapons of war and aren't designed to explode at weights of a human stepping on them.
The use of anti-personnel mines also requires that you keep excellent records of your own mining so as not to kill yourself walking over dangerous ground, in a way that doesn't apply nearly as much to antivehicular mines (I mean, you should anyway, but a minesweeper stepping on one isn't necessarily going to result in a boom, which allow for easier ex-post sweeping and removal.)
The VC weren't above really ugly terrorist means. They followed Trotsky's order "You will have terrorism until you accept Communism." Take some kid hostage, then order his parents to drop a grenade in the Mayor's motor-car, assassinate the Chief of Police, kill some named person, whatever.
US forces could come in to a village and liberate it from the armed insurgents, but not the small clique orchestrating the above program.
Remember that the Vietnam war lasted years and by that standard Ukraine is young.
America held "large chunks" of Vietnam for a long time!
I'm not an expert on the Vietnam War, but Vietcong forces transiting through Laos and Cambodia is certainly part of the story.
As far as Ukraine: there are all sorts of realpolitik reasons that Ukraine isn't striking in Russia proper, even if it could. And engaging in guerrilla warfare in Crimea would almost certainly politically backfire on Ukraine.
As far as I know, conventional attacks of North Vietnamese army on the US and South Vietnamese army mostly ended badly for much of the same reasons Ukrainians are struggling with their offensive. Only American withdrawal made fall of Saigon possible.
There are some reports of Ukrainian guerillas, but Russians do seem to be more successful in their counter-insurgency operations in Ukraine than Americans in Vietnam. If I'd have to guess, I'd say this is mainly because, a) pro-Ukrainian population largely fled the occupied territories, b) cultural connections between those two countries allowed Russians to be more effective in identifying threats. Ukrainians are not Russians, but they are not an alien nation to them like the Vietnamese to the Americans.
The first important difference, especially when you are talking about minefields is geography. The terrain of eastern Ukraine could not be more different than that of Vietnam.
I’m far from an expert but I think you put your finger on important reasons. North Vietnam was fighting with guerrilla warfare tactics, often slipping undetected through canopy jungle to stage hit and run attacks.
The terrain and the military forces used by Russia in Ukraine are much different.
There is a surprisingly good case to be made that fundamental aspects of human culture diffused from a common root. Some aspects of language, ritual, and mythology are similar between Greeks, Australians, and Native Americans. This is often explained by diffusion, though it is argued when and where the root could be. I list some of the most compelling similarities here: https://www.vectorsofmind.com/p/evidence-for-global-cultural-diffusion
You mention a few alternative explanations to diffusion, which is good. I think the piece could mention more of these. Even just as footnotes.
For example, in widely dispersed myths, why are so many different underworlds guarded by dogs? You argue for diffusion, which is plausible.
But it could also be independent origin. Reasons that that's plausible too:
-many people very likely had a strong association between dogs and guard duties;
-hungry dogs were probably attracted to countless burial sites by the possibility of scavenging flesh.
Or, why are there a lot of examples of finger removal? Again, diffusion is plausible.
But removing a finger is also an easy way of immediately showing someone has been initiated. Tattoos and scarification take more skill and time. Cutting off other body parts would have more of a negative impact on functioning in life, and more risk of death through blood loss (since the hand can be held above the head) and infection.
Regardless, it is well-written and interesting. I think any reader here who likes comparative mythology should check it out.
Thanks! Always a struggle to be thorough but also not too long
I had picked up a copy of Saul Bellow’s last novel “ Ravelstein” the other day. I didn’t know anything about it so I was surprised to the frequent references to “The Republic”.
WTF? I am much more familiar with his protagonists doing things like catching a glimpse of Trotsky in Mexico. - The Adventures of Augie March -
I read the Wiki page for the novel and it turned out that his last book is a roman à clef. Bellow taught beside Harold Bloom at the University of Chicago and the novel is a fictionalization account of their relationship.
I’m a big fan of Bellow’s writing. But It seems that as he passed into old age tho large souled man of his younger years became less dynamic and open. I’ve never known what to make of that.
You have your Blooms mixed up--it is about not Harold Bloom but Allan Bloom. Harold Bloom was an eminent literary critic, Allan Bloom was a philosopher who famously translated The Republic.
Ironically, there is a recent roman à clef starring Harold Bloom--Josha Cohen's Pulitzer-winning The Netanyahus. Both novels are very good, although fairly opposed politically!
About half way through The Netanyahus. Yeah, this. Is very good writing.
And the car on the cover. Is that a ‘55 or a 56 Ford?
My first car was a very similar 1956 four door Ford. It’s 292 cubic inch standard issue V8 was infamous for failing lube lines to the rocker arms.
J C Whitney sold an after market replacement kit specifically for that Ford engine.
If Harold Bloom actually drove one of those I hope he had fewer maintenance problems than I did.
Wikipedia tells me Benjamin Netanyahu’s papa lived to 102. That’s some pretty remarkable longevity.
Back to the book…
Thanks for mentioning the roman à clef regarding the other famous Bloom. It looks interesting and is now in my queue.
I’m also kind of glad I haven’t read Ulysses lately. I could have thrown Leopold Bloom into the mix.
Of course you’re right. Thanks for the correction.
…. But Ruby Tyson, she was the cleaning lady, right?
Thanks for the new vocab word "roman `a clef."
Thanks for spelling it correctly. I’ve updated the typo. Even got that funny accent over the ‘a’ through the magic of copy and paste.
Bitcoin maximalists claim we are witnessing a general trust breakdown which will destroy trust in fiat currencies, leading to an explosion in the value of bitcoin.
A) what probability would you assign to this actually happening, and why?
B) what would be the implications if this were to happen? How big of a change would it be?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rOcWd3X25ZY&ab_channel=SkepticalWaves
A) Decent.
Not, like, catastrophic loss of trust but...diversification. I'm definitely interested but it's not making the list to be a priority. After the Canadian Trucker bank freeze, I looked pretty seriously into bitcoin, monero, and a Chinese bank account. Not really because I trust them more than the USD, but because I want an emergency fund where the legal risk isn't correlated with US gov policy. Think less like converting my entire 401k into Bitcoin and more like...man, in the worst case scenario it'd be really nice/important to have 10k in cash or cash equivalents that the gov couldn't seize so I'm not completely penniless. And I know some people will shake their head but, like, if I was a Turk or a Russian, it would make perfect sense to you. The opportunity cost feels fairly low, bitcoin, monero et al are pretty mature at this point and a 1% catastrophic risk is worth a bit of time to ammeliorate. Actually controlling my own bitcoin or monero, though, is actually more of a pain in the tucus than I can handle right now.
B) Moderate
Meh. Like, I need six months salary in easily accessible savings to feel financially secure. Whether this is a savings account or a Bitcoin wallet or a money market or whatever is...kinda whatevs. Presumably as Bitcoin gets bigger it will get more stable.
I mean, I just need a stable underlying store of value. I need my Visa card to work, and it works whether it's in Japan or the US or UK. Whether the financial stack underneath that is USD or Bitcoin or some sdr...who cares?
Low. < 0.1%. I’ve been hearing about the collapse of fiat and the dollar, in particular, for more than a decade now and the dollar has outperformed most currencies in that time. We’ve had a major inflation event and Bitcoin is still way off its peak.
Bitcoin isn’t a coin either, it’s an asset class.
A. Iota. A general collapse in trust in fiat currencies seems unlikely (off the top of my head, probably less than a 1% chance in the next couple decades), but not utterly implausible. The problem is that most of the scenarios that get there are apocalyptic. Coming up with a scenario where all of dollars, euros, pounds, yen, yuan, rubles, rupees all collapse, but not only does Bitcoin fail to collapse but it decisively beats out gold, silver, canned goods, ammunition, cigarettes, whiskey, and fiduciary money (which may be state or privately issued, and cryptographic or paper) as the preferred medium of exchange and liquid assets is a very hard needle to thread.
B. Decline to speculate. The preconditions I think necessary for such a scenario to happen would be drastic enough that what society would look like when the dust settles is wildly up in the air even before considering the effects of Bitcoin being the dominant medium of exchange.
The Achilles heel of Crypto, is the internet. The internet, power, infrastructure etc. needs to function for Crypto to work. People also forget the ICANN. ICANN is the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names & Numbers. If you don't appear in the ICANN registry, you don't exist. President Obama handed ICANN to the UN. Effectively the UN can cut anyone off of the internet for any reason what so ever. If you can't get on the internet, if your crypto servers can't get on the internet; you don't have crypto.
A. <1%. The proposed mechanism doesn't sound plausible. Why should "how much you trust people in your social circle" and "how competent you think the Fed is at keeping the money supply stable" be closely correlated? That feels like... I don't know, like saying that a rising divorce rate means Democrats will win the election because it's proof people don't support family values. It's a very long stretch with only a vague causal connection.
B. Bitcoin has many problems with being used for everyday transactions. It solves the problem of "what if someone tries to forge a transaction record?" in exchange for not being able to solve many other forms of fraud, such as "what if someone tricks you into sending them money?" or "what if someone steals your credentials?"
The only way I see mass adoption working is if it's used as an "underlayer" for a bank or credit card company - they provide the tools and expertise to make things convenient, roll back fraudulent transactions, etc, and customers rarely use raw Bitcoins, much like people today rarely use physical dollar bills. But Bitcoin maximalists generally assume that people will move to Bitcoin because they don't trust banks, so...
Also, Bitcoin's deflationary nature is going to cause all sorts of exciting economic problems that I can't even begin to speculate about.
Trust in institutions in general is declining.
For large numbers of people to take all their money out of the bank and stuff it under the mattress (Bitcoin and mattress funds are approximately equivalent in terms of convenience), you don't just need less trust, you need a total collapse. Like, Great Depression rates of bank failures.
Good call about the 'deflationary' side.
What caused the panic of the 1890s was lack of currency, meaning our currency wasn't liquid enough to support the industrial revolution. Being metals based, we didn't have enough dollars to pay the growing number of people who worked in the factories producing things that a growing number of people wanted to buy.
The world was also very different because there was much less total wealth and there was no internet, so no effective way for people to arbitrage these opportunities. Deflation rewards savers and acts as a peaceful transfer of power mechanism, as people who are over-leveraged have to sell, which drops asset prices.
A) <0.1%
B) Bitcoin will cost a lot more of whatever actual money units being used by the society.
Low, less than 5%. Fiat currencies have value at the least because the government can require taxes be paid in that specific currency. So I cannot answer the second part of the question.
I think cryptocurrencies have an inherent problem, in that they have no intrinsic value, but only collective value. It is true that one can say any currency is based on the collective estimation of value of the entire investing population, but other options at least have a floor of some kind, like, for example, fiat currencies as a source of paying taxes. What is the value of "owning" a number, which indicates how much of a given cryptocurrency one has? The only floor I can actually see is zero.
This doesn't even count the possibility of someone finding some kind of exploit that renders a cryptocurrency non-secure in some way, or discovery of some bug of comparable scope. It is true that hundreds of thousands of computers all agree on the ledger of Bitcoin so that ownership of Bitcoins cannot be disputed, but what about something like an EMP that wipes out electronic devices en-masse? What about advances in quantum computing that can make password cracking feasible?
It seems to me that Bitcoin wallets are inherently unstable in a long term view. If you lose the credentials to access your coins, who can get them back for you? When you die, who can help your heirs gain access to them?
Long term, it appears that most Bitcoins will become inaccessible. Very long term nearly all. Then if someone were to find access to a hidden trove, it would be worth more than the entire economy and everything breaks down.
Good point. I will add that if, to ensure you don't lose the identification information, you record it in some fashion such as writing it down, then someone could obtain it and empty your wallet.
Essay request (for Scott or anyone else in rationalist sphere): on the morality of white rationalists living in SF and Oakland given the collapse* of the sizable black populations. Did gentrification drive black people out of their homes, and is it moral to live there in their place?
* Oakland 1990 43% to 2022 22%, San Francisco 1990 10.7% to 2020 5.1% according to Wikipedia.
Why did you include so little data? Is the black % in 1990 an historical standard or a recent peak? Did the white population increase meaningfully over this time? Why are only white people morally responsible and not the vast number of east and south asians who have moved to the bay area over the past few decades?
If you want to take this question seriously, you should at least do the work of gathering the rudimentary data to show that your question is even coherent.
The black population of San Francisco slowly declined from 96,000 in 1970 to 78,000 in 1990, going from 13.4% to 10.9%: http://www.bayareacensus.ca.gov/counties/SanFranciscoCounty70.htm
The total population of San Francisco has fluctuated up and down a little bit since 1970, with a low in 1980 and a high in 2020, but not by a huge amount: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/San_Francisco#Demographics
Your questions suggest that you are very skeptical and ready to assume that someone is intentionally producing misleading data, even though they're not.
As for who is morally responsible, that is a relevant question to confront here (along with the question of whether moral responsibility is even a relevant frame). But the basic demographic facts are real.
What are the actual numbers? Are black people actually leaving, or are they holding steady while other racial groups balloon up? Why would the second one create moral questions?
Yes, black people have actually been leaving in the last few decades, faster than they were in previous decades.
http://www.bayareacensus.ca.gov/counties/SanFranciscoCounty70.htm
Rats, regardless of ethnicity, tend to support YIMBYism so they are helping both black and white people to afford homes in the Bay Area.
Furthermore, their support for mixed-use zoning will help to solve America's neighbourhood-scale segregation problem.
>Furthermore, their support for mixed-use zoning will help to solve America's neighbourhood-scale segregation problem.
LOL no. White people move away from black people because they're unpleasant to live around.
Its strange to only include statistics on black populations.
Oakland:
Racial composition 2022 2020 2010 1990 1970 1940
White 33.4% 30.0% 34.5% 32.5% 59.1% 95.3%
—Non-Hispanic 28.6% 27.3% 25.9% 28.3% 52.0% n/a
Black 22.0% 23.8% 28.0% 43.9% 34.5% 2.8%
Hispanic or Latino 27.2% 27.0% 25.3% 13.9% 7.6% n/a
Asian 15.7% 16.1% 16.8% 14.8% 4.8%
SF:
Race 1960 1980 1990 2000 2010 2020
Non-Hispanic White 72.7% 52.8% 46.9% 43.5% 41.7% 39.1%
Asian alone 7.9% 21.3% 28.0% 30.7% 33.1% 33.7%
Hispanic or Latino 9.4% 12.6% 13.3% 14.2% 15.2% 15.6%
Black 9.7% 12.3% 10.7% 7.6% 6.0% 5.1%
Sorry that the dates are in the opposite orders. But the trend in neither city is white people moving in and black people moving out. Blacks in SF have always been a small portion of they population. 1990 is the peak black population in Oakland and can't be thought of as typical. Overall what we see is more asian and hispanic people moving to both cities. So maybe it's white people being pushed out of the cities and not just blacks?
You can't look at just these types of stats and draw any collusions about what is happening in a complex system.
Overall, it's always moral for someone to live somewhere if they have legally, and ethically obtained the housing. The housing market is individual buyers and sellers making individual decisions for their own circumstances. Reasoning from general trends is very difficult to get right.
Don't your data suggest that 1980 was the peak black population in Oakland? And your data leave out 1970, which I would have assumed was the peak for Oakland.
This is just the data Wikipedia had, I’d have to check census data probably if we want to look at 1970. But yes somewhere in there was “peak” black Oakland. But for both cities the white population is steady or falling. The original comment specified white rationalists. In neither city do we see the white population growing. So to the extent there is any gentrification or pushing out of black populations, it’s not whites that are “responsible” for that.
Gentrification, insofar as it's a real thing, is good, and opposition to gentrification is evil.
" and opposition to gentrification is evil."
Can we not please
Can you explain why you find it good? What is the most positive aspect of it?
Gentrification is, if nothing else, a physical improvement in the quality of an area.
Suppose there's ten neighbourhoods in a city, numbered 1 to 10 in terms of quality and expense. The richest 10% live in neighbourhood 1, and so forth. Suppose you gentrify neighbourhood 10 so that it's now nicer than neighbourhood 4... there's a lot of renovation, a lot of knock-down rebuild, a lot of new trees planted, and so forth. Everyone benefits -- the people from neighbourhood 4 move up to this new neighbourhood 10, the people from 6 move up to 5, the people from 7 move up to 6, and so forth.
An oversimplified model perhaps, but the point is that we've made the city as a whole a lot more desirable and raised everyone's living conditions. I don't buy the anti-gentrification argument that we should deliberately keep some places looking like absolute shit so that poor people can live in them.
I'm not sure you've given a definition of what "gentrification" is. I take it to be the replacement of renters by purchasers, which is usually associated with an increase in the economic status of the residents. This may or may not be accompanied by a change in the building stock, or the public infrastructure.
Your argument seems to presuppose that "gentrification" is about changes in the infrastructure, and perhaps building stock, rather than the population.
On the one hand, what exactly happens to density in the process, and also, moving is often expensive in a lot of ways so most of the people are worse off financially in that scenario.
On the other hand, unless your zoning is maximally messed up already, this upsets the balance of which shops are where and how many of which type there are.
So from the actual quality of life point of view there will be a few winners and more losers.
The problem with this simplistic analysis is that,a lot of what makes up the "quality" of a neighborhood, to the people who actually live there, is that all their friends and family live in the same neighborhood. That's particularly true at the lower end of the socioeconomic scale. Network effects matter, and often the ones that matter most are the ones in meatspace.
So telling the people of Neighborhood 10 "don't worry about how you're being priced out of 10, you can just move to Neighborhood 9 which is now as cheap as 10 used to be but a better place to live. Because the people aren't moving out of Neigborhood 10 to Neighborhood 9, they're moving from just-gentrified 10A to whatever vacant housing can be found in 9A, 9B, 9C .... and to not-yet-gentrified 10B and 10C.
None of which have even 10% of their old friends and family. Even if the physical amenities of Neigborhood 9A are better than those of 10A, it's a worse place for those specific people to live because their social network is massively degraded and they'll be outsiders in their new neighborhood.
Gentrification may still be a net good, but it isn't trivially and universally good - there is a real cost term in the equation.
--it could be a sign that violent crime is dropping
--it is likely a sign that society is growing richer
--good real estate is put to more efficient uses
You can’t write that essay without a complete analysis of the relationship between demographics and property values, and that’s some combination of incredibly hard and incredibly taboo. Just to give you a taste:
If gentrification is bad, does that mean that white flight (the opposite of gentrification) is good?
If the race gap in [x] is environmental, and property values are a proxy for how good the environment is, shouldn’t be expect gentrification to be good for the black people that live there?
Is the inverse relationship between black population and property value an irrational artifact of prejudice, or does it convey meaningful economic information in the Hayekian sense?
Oh geez, I read this before my first cup of coffee and it scanned as white ‘nationalists’ living in San Francisco and Oakland. That would be something entirely different.
San Franciscans are far too irrational for that
Has anyone here worked as a quant for DE Shaw or a similar company? What was/is your experience like? Independent of salary, would you recommend the job to someone with the appropriate background/talent?
Context: I have a math PhD and I've been a software engineer for 5 years since leaving academia, and on paper, at least, I'm probably a good fit for this sort of thing though I wouldn't have particularly sought it out. I'm looking for work after taking a short break, and I got a couple of messages from recruiters claiming to work with a number of such companies. I don't know (a) how seriously to take this, (b) whether any such company would be open to me being fully remote (I'm well settled and this is a non-negotiable), and (c) whether the work culture/environment would be good for me or would make me miserable. Obviously I can (and will) follow up with the recruiters on some of this (like (b)), but I also don't want to waste my time and energy if this wouldn't work out.
I worked in this space for a little while. I found it a frustrating field to work in. It's easy to find strategies that would have made money in the past, and almost impossible to find strategies that will make money in the future. There's so damn many firms applying the same damn techniques to the same data that you're unlikely to have the unique insight that somehow makes a lot of money.
It's also hard not to feel like you're engaged in a massive waste of intellectual firepower. I'm aware of the arguments that quant finance is actually doing a useful job by making markets more efficient... I just don't really believe that the incremental value added to the human race by one additional quant is in any way worth it.
Thanks for this. This is the sort of report I'm looking for.
"It's also hard not to feel like you're engaged in a massive waste of intellectual firepower. I'm aware of the arguments that quant finance is actually doing a useful job by making markets more efficient... I just don't really believe that the incremental value added to the human race by one additional quant is in any way worth it."
This is certainly a concern of mine. For this reason I'd likely prefer a job with a more clearly positive value even if it paid significantly less. There's earming-to-give considerations, but outside of that my life isn't going to be better with the higher salaries here (compared to e.g. what I was making in my last position) so I'm more concerned with job satisfaction.
If you don't mind answering, what area do you work in now, and how does it compare in terms of intellectual interest and positive impact? (Presumably a quant job on your resume + whatever qualities got you that job in the first place let you have some good options.)
I know someone who got a physics PhD and went straight into work as a quant. He's been doing it for about a year now. It sounds pretty good to me. His job seems to be finding new algorithms or tweaks to algorithms to increase the amount his company makes on transactions. Even tiny increases can lead to torrents of extra money. He is very smart and clever with math, and enjoys the challenge and the puzzle-solving aspect. He has interesting co-workers. One of his fellow new quants used to work as a male stripper and another as a stand-up comic! It does not sound like there is much conflict or pressure in his office. (I expect people who don't produce as many good ideas as he has do not last long, so there's some pressure in that, of course.) He lives a few block from his office, but they do not seem to mind if he does a lot of his work from home. I don't know how they'd feel about his being fully remote. And of course he makes a shit-ton of money.
These companies are very picky about the math talents of who they hire. At his interviews for various companies he was given actual math brain-teasers to solve right there during the interview.
I write a newsletter called Interessant3. It’s a weekly newsletter where I share three interesting things I’ve learned or discovered, ranging from science, technology, history, culture, and more.
In the latest issue, I covered these topics:
1. An exploration into the link between individualism (utilizing Jonathan Haidt’s framework of moral values) and its support for free-market solutions. What's captivating is how this is not necessarily tied to political leanings. Dive deeper [here](https://www.nber.org/papers/w29942).
2. A fresh analysis of London's housing market which delves into how new housing supply affects affordability in the short term. The revelations might surprise you. Check it out [here](https://x.com/geographyjim/status/1692116503536029733?s=46&t=-DNv9rPw3guwQopwQG_-Qg).
3. A study by the Pew Research Center that highlights a unique trend in several major US cities – women out-earning men - with a side note on the average working hours disparity between genders. Read about it [here](https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2022/03/28/young-women-are-out-earning-young-men-in-several-u-s-cities/).
If you enjoy delving into fascinating findings like these, consider giving my newsletter a read! You can find it here: https://interessant3.substack.com/p/interessant3-50
Re 1.) I always thought the right-left divide was orthogonal to the authoritarian-libertarian.
As someone who leans strongly libertarian, and can be ambivalent about right or left, I will observe that it's easier for libertarians (of any stripe) to agree with each other, versus authoritarians. Libertarian, you do you. Authoritarian, you do me.
In principle, authoritarian-libertarian is orthogonal to right-left. And left-libertarians are a thing.
In practice, in any society that isn't facing invasion or other existential threat, the political left is going to want to do more things that require authoritarian-ish power than the right, and so the libertarians will be predominantly but not exclusively right-leaning. That gets reversed in societies which *are* facing existential threats, in which case it's the right that wants to wield authoritarian power in the name of national defense. And note that most of the Early Modern Age in Europe was one of constant existential threat due to changing military balance of power, so the early roots of libertarianism are found mostly in old-school liberalism.
Yeah, I'm kind of a left leaning libertarian (LL). And it is lonely out here. Well our host is kind of a LL.
I think Melvin is more correct about the right: They usually infringe on social freedoms (and I'd add bodily autonomy). I generally agree with both of you about the left.
>(and I'd add bodily autonomy)
If this is about abortion, they simply believe that a fetus' body isn't YOUR body to weild autonomy over.
Abortion is only one of many facets of the right wing's attacks on bodily autonomy. The drug war, attacks on contraception, attacks on childfree people, attacks on LBGTQ people, attacks on sex work - none of those have anything to do with a fetus's body
The drug war is absolutely bipartisan at this point, the "attacks" on contraception are largely inconsequential and balanced by GOP support for OTC hormonal birth control, and what are you counting as "attacks" on childless people?
> always thought the right-left divide was orthogonal to the authoritarian-libertarian.
That's a framework preferred by those who call themselves left-libertarian. Other types of libertarians find the idea of "left-libertarian" oxymoronic; you can't be "left" without wanting to infringe on the economic rights of others.
Twenty years ago, the Libertarians would explain it with a diamond-shaped political chart -- libertarians were at the top and respected both economic and social freedoms, right-wingers wanted economic freedoms without social freedoms, left-wingers wanted social freedoms without economic freedoms, and authoritarians (always a bit of a strawman) wanted no freedoms at all.
Nowadays I think this diagram is a bit dated; in particular I feel like social freedoms, too, are more under threat from the left than the right. For instance, the right to be homosexual is no longer under threat but the right to say "I think homosexuality is wrong" is under threat.
Right, left-libertarian = social freedom, but less economic freedom. So we should have taxes to pay for things like army, police , roads, schools,... the question about what the taxes pay for is open. As is how to tax.
Personally, I have the same sentiment. It’s something one often sees in countries with proportional representation - libertarian parties often have similar aims and might work together despite belonging to different political families, and ditto for authoritarian ones.
If you are wondering if generative AI will eliminate professors and universities, here is my take (I'm a professor at UNC and co-chair of our generative AI committee.
While generative AI will definitely rearrange the university teaching and research scene, by augmenting and changing what happens in the classroom and lab, it will not replace faculty and universities because, for the moment at least, the two provide value add that AI cannot at this point in time (or perhaps ever).
https://markmcneilly.substack.com/p/why-universities-and-professors-wont
Generative AI, absolutely not.
My professors were role-models for me. I'd say that was a good 50% of the benefit I got from them.
I've experimented with Chat GPT on some really basic stoichiometry problems. Chat GPT fails wildly, having absolutely zero ability to question reasonable assumptions.
For instance, my version of Chat GPT is fairly well trained on this now. But there's roughly 200 gallons in volume to one cubic yard in volume. Ask Chat GPT 'roughly' how many five gallon buckets will hold the contents of one cubic yard. Chat GPT knows a yard is some exact number of gallons (200), but can't seem to resolve the obvious results. Of course, perhaps the larger engine may have tuned itself with my input, early results were preposterous. It is working spot on for me these days.
Yes, it's not very good at spatial problems, although I think ChatGPT-4 is better than 3.5. One has to be careful what one uses it for. It is excellent at many things. Just not everything.
Hi, request for a recommendation. Please could people recommend their favourite book on the following 2 topics:
(1) - How Scandinavian politics and economics diverged from Britain post-WW2
(2) - Comparison of healthcare services in different countries
I know Scott did a post on (2) but I don't fancy reading that book. Context - I'm a Scottish med student. The NHS isn't working and, no offence, the US system doesn't seem great. I'm interested in the healthcare models between the two. Also I took a recent trip to Copenhagen and was struck by how dysfunctional the UK seems by comparison.
I'm a novice in these matters, so any recommendations are greatly appreciated. I already follow marginalrev etc, I really want book recommendations rather than blogs. Please and thanks :)
For this topic (2) - Comparison of healthcare services in different countries
you should definitely look at
https://randomcriticalanalysis.com/why-conventional-wisdom-on-health-care-is-wrong-a-primer/
The primer is a good starting point, but you should definitely dig much deeper. The website is a fantastic resource.
The most significant difference between the US and UK system that recall from the post was that the US vastly overspends, and the UK underspends. You guys spend less than anyone as a percent of GDP iirc. Depending on how you look at it the NHS is either very efficient, and/or very underfunded.
The US system’s bloat is at best a jobs program. At worst, it is designed to allow useless middle men to suck money out.
The UK (and the rest of the world) benefits from US medicinal and medical technology innovations, made possible in large part due to the very high health spending in the US, then turn around and act smug about how clever they are for spending less than the US.
Oh so I’m investing in new medical technology! Do I get a dividend? Am I allowed to sell my equity in these companies?
Even if we were paying for all the new advancements, we are at the point of diminishing returns for medical technology. The money is just not a good investment anymore. Life expectancies are stable or backsliding.
You should read this
https://randomcriticalanalysis.com/why-conventional-wisdom-on-health-care-is-wrong-a-primer/
That took a while to read, but was quite interesting, thanks.
Glad you liked it. I've worked in economic analysis almost all my life, a lot of it on health economics, and I learnt a lot and changed my mind a lot based on this work.
Thanks very much, I'll check this out
Fair point thanks. I chose this time period because I wanted to understand Britain's recent mistakes. I chose the scandi comparison because I want to understand if there is a modern set of policies I can support that worked in a roughly similiar culture.
I don't know much about history, so I don't know if the current gap in living standards could have been predicted at the end of WW2, but I guess not? There must still have been bad decisions made since then.
If you know a good book which would introduce this period of history in either Britain or scandi countries I'd be interested to know.
After a couple of prompts GPT-3.5 suggested The Oxford Handbook of The Welfare State. Seems exactly what I was looking for
Why are almost all reptiles carnivores? I mean, there are iguanas, and some species of turtle, but all snakes, all crocodilians, most lizards, and many turtles are carnivorous, and that seems like a lot to me, especially when compared to, say, birds or mammals.
My assumption is that in the K-T extinction, plant matter was hard enough to get that animals could only survive by eating seeds (proto-birds, small mammals) or eating the animals that eat seeds (reptiles). So herbivorous reptiles died out and never came back. But I'm neither a paleontologist not a herpetologist, not a scientist or any sort, and am probably speaking out of my hat.
People online (when I was looking for an answer) seem to gravitate towards anatomical theories—reptiles have poor teeth for plant-chewing, or abbreviated guts, or are better at short bursts of speed that get a lot of energy (prey) than long hauls (grazing). But if this is the case, what did reptiles eat in the so-called age of reptiles? ("Each other," perhaps, as I.B. Singer once wrote about cannibalistic giants, ha ha.) And why didn't more reptiles evolve "herbivorosity" (as other classes evolved into carnivores)?
Is there an accepted theory about this? (I guess most amphibians are also carnivorous?)
I would agree with the teeth-and-guts hypothesis: specifically, mammals have teeth differentiated in multiple shapes that fit precisely against each other (at the cost of losing continuous replacement) and an especially mobile jaw joint that allows to grind molars against each other. (I also think plant biomass would have recovered too quickly after the KT event to have such an impact on the evolution of survivors.) In the Mesozoic, the main large herbivorous reptiles were first sauropod dinosaurs, which survived on plants by sheer volume (letting huge amounts of plant matter basically rot on its own in enormous stomachs) and then ornithischian dinosaurs, which had evolved teeth more similar to those of herbivorous mammals. In particular, hadrosaurs ("duckbilled dinosaurs") were enormously successful in the late Cretaceous thanks to special hinged tooth batteries that could slide against each other to grind plant matter. Unfortunately, they all went extinct at the end of Cretaceous.
It's useful to note that, phylogenetically speaking, birds are *within* the clade of reptiles (being more closely related to crocodiles than either is to lizards and snakes, though all of these groups are more closely related than any of them is to turtles and tortoises).
What we see today as "reptiles" is not the full diversity of the lineage, but just the bits that remain after one subgroup (dinosaurs and birds) took over during the Jurassic, and then another group (mammals) did in the Cenozoic.
From a casual guess, it seems to me that most biomes don't support that many reptiles at all, because birds and mammals have outcompeted them. The main biome in which reptiles are still significant is deserts. It could be that whatever it is that led mammals and birds to outcompete in so many biomes also meant they outcompeted specifically in herbivorous habits within those biomes.
> Why are almost all reptiles carnivores?
My theory (FWIW) is that most reptiles today have a fairly elongated body plan, snakes obviously for example and most lizards. That is presumably so they can warm up all their internal organs faster in the sun, but it means they don't have room in their abdomen to hold the larger stomach necessary to digest plant material.
If one thinks about it, most herbivore mammals are fairly pot bellied round the middle, or at least have a largish abdomen compared with the rest of their body mass. And the same applied to giant dinosaur herbivores when they were around.
Carnivory is much more common among cold-blooded species than warm-blooded due to metabolic demands. Mammals and birds have high baseline metabolisms due to the need to burn calories to maintain a constant body temperature, while reptiles only have to burn calories to actually do things. As a result, cold-blooded carnivores can be viable at a predator to prey biomass ratio of as little as 1:1, while warm-blooded carnivores need something like a 1:10 ratio. The observed ratios in the fossil record is one of the big reasons why we think most non-avian dinosaurs were warm-blooded.
Cold-blooded animals are particularly well suited to be ambush predators, as they can sit and wait a very long time for the occasional big meal to wander past.
Perhaps herbivores need a more constant body temperature for digestion?
It seems to me there are marine iguanas in the Galapagos which are herbivores, or at least omnivores. Which may go back to temperature.
During the time of the dinosaurs, Earth's atmosphere was 30% oxygen, vs 20% today. That probably leads to a completely different metabolic capabilities. As an aside: Fire was probably a much larger problem than it is today.
Its probably more to do with an available niche than specific biology.
Dinosaurs were most likely warm-blooded, as were pterosaurs and most of the other large reptiles of the Mesozoic.
"Diet
Reptiles fall into many categories when it comes to diet. There are 3 categories: carnivore (animal eater), omnivore (mixed animal and plant eater), and herbivore (plant eater). All snakes are carnivores; some require to be fed rodents, while small species will be happy eating worms or insects. Lizards, turtles and tortoises can fall anywhere on the spectrum; some are full carnivores, others full herbivores, with many falling in the omnivore category. Amphibians such as frogs and toads are carnivores as adults, eating insects and occasionally small vertebrates. However, as tadpoles they are herbivores eating algae and decaying matter. Newts and salamanders are usually carnivores, eating insects, though some species will eat a balanced diet of pellets. It is important to know the species and life stage of your pet, and their nutritional requirements."
https://rhinebeckanimalhospital.com/blog/46874-reptiles-amp-amphibians-part-ii-diet-amp-lighting
sounds authoritative, so a better question is, why are all snakes without exception carnivores? Anatomical explanations are problematic because lizards are so closely similar and because you can evolve in the direction of herbivority if that turns out to be a useful strategy. There are snake-shaped things which are herbivores (worms and so on) so it's not overall body shape. So we are left thinking that carnivorous snakedom is such an efficient way of making a living, there was no evolutionary pressure to do anything else.
I wonder if a snake with a bone spine has more ability to "lunge" which is useful for a predator but not an herbivore. A quick google suggests that there a snakes that have a mixed scavenging and hunting strategy but no pure scavengers. So my guess would be that walking is more efficient than slithering so if you're going to be an herbivore, walk; and that not having bones is more efficient than having bones, so if you're going to be an herbivore and want a snake body, be a worm.
Is there a way to alter fundamental qualities like discipline, self-control, self-confidence, feeling agentic, and the like?
For most of my life, I've been able to coast on intelligence/other advantages, but once in a while I run into situations which make me viscerally disgusted at myself for not having sufficient amounts of these qualities. (Mild example: having essentially wasted the last three months of free time, where I could have learned math/physics/made music/etc instead; not-so-mild example: some moderate (but not severe) forms of addictive behavior which would possibly be easier to handle if I had more discipline/selfcontrol.)
I've attempted to implement systems that augment these qualities, but systems feel more like multipliers than anything else; and if you start from a small base, the systems aren't going to do much. So-is there a way to increase inherent willpower/discipline/self-confidence/etc?
>where I could have learned math/physics/made music/etc instead<
Which one of these specifically do you wish you'd done? Generalizing will lead to analysis paralysis. You sound like you're not doing any of those things because you don't actually want to do them, you only want to say you've done them. Find something you actually want to do for the sake of doing it.
Biggest thing, start small. Very easy to set a goal to climb Mount Everest, and very very impractical. Set a goal to climb a three foot hill, and when you're at the top of it you can look at the extra couple of inches of horizon your newfound height has gained you and say, "I am a climber now". Then find a ten foot hill and climb that one, and so on up to Everest.
It took me, like, two years to fix a chair that just needed a screw tightened, because it never occurred to me that I could just tighten the screw. So for agency, make yourself a list of things in your house that you could change if you wanted to. If you had to move all your clothes, where would you move them to? What else in your house can work as a bed/bedsheets? Get yourself in the mindset of controlling your environment, and that will build self-confidence.
Don't try to cut out entertainment directly, it doesn't make you productive. I spent a few days cut off from entertainment, and it resulted in sleeping 22 hours a day for four days. Just push that stuff back; make a point of doing something productive before you start the entertainment. Clean the dishes, clean your clothes, dust a wall, try a recipe, do something boring and practical.
I was in a very similar situation, wasting ~80% of my free time. Tried cutting out electronics, but books just took their place (as they did when I was a child, before the internet). TL;DR: it was undiagnosed ADD. Adderall helps a lot; but you can’t always be on Adderall. I’ve made up the remainder with therapy, restrictive “screen time” settings on my phone, and a journaling / points system where I earn money towards my hobbies by meeting daily goals (like getting to bed on time). The occasional day still slips through my fingers, but now it’s more like once every month or two, rather than two or three times a week.
Unless your time spent online and gaming is quite low, I recommend that you consider the possibility that electronics are interfering with your innate ability to self-regulate (i.e., to exercise the powers you call willpower & discipline). Read around a bit to see other people's results from putting themselves on an electronics diet, then if the idea sounds good to you try it yourself. And kick off the diet by doing something novel that will kind of refresh and reset your mind -- anything from skydiving to a weekend meditation retreat to some backpacking to . . .
One datapoint from a person in a similar situation: Adderall, Modafinil and Vyvanse don't actually help with this, unless you actually had ADHD. Only thing that helped me a bit is therapy.
Very relatable, except I added on severe addictive behavior whilst already struggling with these issues. I go through periods (the frequency of which make up the majority of my life) of incessant self-reflexive thought, never allowing me to engage with anything around me in any given moment. Every so often I will just have the feeling that I'm not doing what I should be doing thrust to the front of my mind, stopping me from actually building up any focus on tasks.
I sincerely believe if I make a routine including a healthy diet, exercise, meditation, and sufficient social contact and stick to it even just for a month, I'd have relief from this. But that's where the discipline comes in - even though I am desperate to actually experience life and think I have a path to do it, I have failed over and over again to do what I think I should.
It's been going on so long that I no longer have any tangible ambitions, I have no attachment to any real-life goals and would do anything if I knew I would be able to stop battling internally. Surely I'll turn things around soon, good luck to anyone else with similar struggles.
This touches on something important. I have a history of addiction and it interfered with my life, insofar as it sapped motivation and diminished real desires. If you can get a handle on your basic needs, including validation and socializing, and having a job where you feel productive or competent, then exploring possibilities for leisure outlets or whatever can be more pleasurable and won't feel overbearing.
Leverage habit-forming for goals that matter to you. There's still an element of discipline involved particularly at outset, but in the long-run it's overstated. Motivation is fleeting, you can't rely on it (by any name, including willpower) every day. Read a book such as Atomic Habits, or find the important points.
Ask yourself also: are you actually interested in making music, or are you solely agonizing at the prospect of being unproductive? If you weren't going to put math/physics to practical use anyway, how is it any less of a "waste of time"? It's productivity to what end? Is this about self-image and validation from others, or about real interest? Validation is a valid desire, but there are better means to obtain it.
On the other hand, practice and discipline can lay the groundwork for an "elevated" form of experience, mastery, which can take the form of being an artist/artisan/musician or math/science enthusiast. While there does require some level of delayed gratification and frustration, in the end it's about the flow of performing and practicing an art at any stage, of really absorbing yourself in it. That's the experience, that's the point. I don't think it should take that long to figure out whether something is right for you.
I think it's really about the last paragraph, for me. I seem to have a strange aversion to getting out of set patterns-which means that I'll never get the chance to feel the beginnings of mastery. If I spent a month or so on Chess today, for example, maybe it would be my lifelong hobby. but my current mental framework is unlikely to throw me enough energy/motivation to make me do mess aruond with chess for a month on the off chance that I'll like it in the future. That's really what makes me worried/sad.
> I'll never
Quite definitive words. Are you sure this belief is not a defense mechanism against change? It can be uncomfortable as I well know.
We are creatures of habit, that aversion is pretty normal. Notwithstanding a side discussion about general fatigue, motivation is probably not what is blocking taking action, and it's not as though motivation scales with time invested, or is projected to rise after a threshold of time. Motivation is fickle, you can't rely on it. If you're honest about what it is you want and why you want it, you can sketch out a plan and create reminders for yourself, to reduce cognitive overhead. None of this shit really matters, you're not going to have points docked at the end of life because you weren't a math x music x chess prodigy.
If you dread practicing x/y/z, then x/y/z isn't for you *. Some things (chess) don't get easy at all as there is almost always a greater challenge. That's an energy sink.
* I'm pretty confident that in cases where people hated practice and went on to be great, they eventually changed approaches or expectations and stopped hating it.
You can accumulate evidence that your choices are the product of a long-term narrative about what is Good and how to maximize your alignment with it, not short term drives. As this evidence accumulates, predictive processing does much of this work for you.
Could you expand on this a bit? what does this look like in practice? I"m imagining this presupposes that I have a coherent vision for what is 'good'? (I currently lack such vision.)
You’d have to start there, then. Try the same approach as the scientific method: assume there’s some reality that your senses give you a roughly accurate picture of, and then try to construct a map of that reality.
In this case, assume that feelings like good and bad correspond to some external reality, and your emotional senses give you information about that reality. Note that you have multiple such senses: pleasure/pain, fairness/unfairness, freedom/slavery, loyality/disloyalty, scared/profane, etc.
This is, I think, what most traditional religions are doing and why they work well for their practitioners; they make use of predictive processing so that, over a time, followed accumulate evidence of being such and such kind of person, which means they aren’t using willpower all the time.
You've just described me, and I only fairly recently realized I have rampant unchecked unmedicated ADHD, and the only reason I'm not living in a tent under a bridge is the same as yours: coasting on raw intelligence. In addition to general underachievement (compared to own potential as opposed to the population average), this leads to an unevenness of performance that is unnerving to self and perplexing to the observers.
I'm unable to take ADHD meds due to the nature of my profession, so I've come up with other ways to offset the handicaps that come with the territory. There were three key factors for me:
1) Figuring out what I REALLY want to accomplish (as opposed to what I "should" want to accomplish based on societal pressures/influences).
2) Time-blocking every waking second of my day (to avoid daydreaming/procrastination that could easily last weeks on end), and
3) Requiring myself to focus on the process, not the result (I realized a big reason for my procrastination was fear of failure and dissatisfaction with progress).
It hasn't been perfect but the improvement is tremendous. The "not perfect" part tends to drag me down and discourage me but the motivation to continue returns after I force myself to remember item 3 above.
Useful, thanks. The 'timeblock every moment of the day' thing is particularly interesting and attractive (although it also feels attractive from the 'if only I found the *right* system, all my problems would be solved' part of my mind so eh.)
I definitely had to let go of the "perfect system that will solve all my problems" idea and replace it with a much more resilient "good enough system that works well enough". My time-blocking isn't perfect. For starters, I build in A TON of transition time. Transitions are hell for people with ADHD. I've done as much streamlining as I can but I recognize there is only a certain level of smoothness I can reasonably strive to achieve, and that level still has a lot of "wasted" time. However, I don't think of it as wasted anymore, I've just come to terms with the fact that this is the time required for me to function.
Like, for example, if I schedule an hour to study Spanish, I recognize that at least ten minutes of that will be prepping for the session and another ten minutes basically randomly staring into space daydreaming about turtles or how merging one's intellect with AI might look like. That's ADHD time tax, and like with any other tax, you can feel robbed and miserable, or you can accept it as a cost of doing business and move on.
Another key part is what I call "hard" vs "soft" time blocks. Hard ones are non-negotiables, like work and appointments I have to keep. Soft ones are things like self-studying Spanish – and sometimes they end up being chewed up by transitions or random things that come up. I made peace with that; as long as 66-80% of my soft blocks end up going towards intended purpose, I count it a success. It's still orders of magnitude better of wasting literal weeks and months on... nothing, really.
As for systems, I found that two qualities are essential: simplicity and gamification. As far as simplicity, they need to be JUST complex enough to allow you to not fall behind on tasks or miss critical deadlines – no more than that.
The best gamification strategy depends on your personal preferences. I'm extremely data-oriented, so what works for me is tracking mileage, time spent doing an activity, performance (e.g., graphs of number of max pull-ups over time). This works well for pursuits with easily objective metrics (e.g., fitness) but it's possible to come to with metrics for more complex and subjective endeavours. I am actually mildly obsessed over this sort of tracking, which I think ends up being a fairly constructive way to channel my addictive tendencies.
With regard to willpower/dicipline, I've found it requires a strong positove wanting. Positive referring to a desire to gain or give, as opposed to a desire to avoid. Alternatively you can pull from the other side by making the things that require dicipline to do/avoid more fun/difficult for yourself.
For confidence fake it 'til you make it works as long as you do make and recognize progress.
This is an inherently limited answer. All the best fellow smart kid syndrome sufferer.
I am BMI 18 (40,m) and want to gain some weight, what is the healthiest approach?
I eat normally and do reasonable amounts of sports (cardio and weights), previous gastrointestinal investigations have not found any reasons for low weight.
If you aren't gaining weight you aren't eating a caloric surplus. If it's something you struggle with you might need to track calories to convince/teach yourself how this works. You can estimate a TDEE with a calculator online, then titrate it to your actual metabolism by tracking how weight changes (i.e. increase calories until you start gaining weight). Weight fluctuates so you need to weigh daily in the same context to be able to extrapolate the trendline.
Aim to gain weight gradually, with about 500 calorie surplus a day. Eat 1g of protein per pound of body mass per day, and lift weights. About 10-20 sets per muscle group per week. 5-30 reps each. You should getting within a couple reps of failure (i.e. you couldn't even do one more reps), if not actually going to failure, on most of those sets. Also cardio but you don't need too much, even 1-2 hours a week is probably adequate
I think yours is a muscle-building problem, not a fat-building problem.
Which "weights" exercise have you tried?
I'm no personal trainer, but I've found that the best method to improve muscle growth is to diversify your exercises to target a wider variety of muscles.
By diversifying my exercises, I've had much more success building muscle now that I'm 40, compared to last time I tried back when I was 20.
Also --- I, too, was underweight once. I too was told by doctors I should gain weight, but I could not, no matter how much I ate. After a while I figured I was actually perfectly healthy, and that the tables that were saying I was underweight were one-size-fit-all and ridiculous, and I should ignore them.
Those tables are meant to detect anorexia and malnourishment, but if you're healthy, you probably just have an extreme body type whose "normal" set point weight is unusually low.
You can probably gain muscle more easily than you can gain fat, that will satisfy the doctors telling you you're underweight.
Muscle would be preferable, but some fat also would not be all bad. BMI 18 gets to be a problem if you catch an infection and can't / won't eat for a while because you lack reserves to burn...
I say don't. Throw 25lbs in your knap-sack and go walk up the stairs. That's what its like to gain 25lbs. Carry that shit with you everywhere, wear out your knees prematurely, huff and puff to keep up with lighter weight people.
I saw pro football stats from before the steroids craze. Top players weighed like 205 lbs. Now they're 280. Steroid use is tied to early heart attacks and brain tumors.
Being thin isn't ideal either, it's just preferable to being overfat. More muscle is beneficial for health and well being at every level obtainable short of using steroids
But gaining muscle is very different from carrying a knap-sack. First, this guy is incredibly unlikely to be able to gain 25 lb of muscle, he'd be doing awesome by gaining 10...15 lb in as many years. Second, the biggest gains will be in the legs and butt, then the back, including lats. So he may gain 2-3 lb in his upper body re. 7-8 lb in the lower body. A net walking strength gain, so it'll be easier to claim/jump/etc.
Also - connective tissues, joints, bones will also grow stronger and more resilient, resulting in reduced injury incidence. It's a net gain all around.
All above is predicated on natural gains, no steroids or any other PEDs.
OP's BMI is 18, which is regarded as unhealthily underweight, especially for someone who lifts. Of course BMI isn't a perfect indicator for individual health, but it's not meaningless. If OP is, say, 6' tall with that BMI, he weighs something like 133 lbs. 10 lbs of additional muscle and fat to bring him into a healthier range isn't going to destroy his knees.
Very much this.
How sure are you that you eat normally? Have you actually tried counting calories?
Hello fellow skinny human.
I assume what you want to gain is muscle. This is really hard when your genes are against you.
Personal experience: find a good strength-focused gym with instructor-run classes and nutrition advice. I managed to gain about a pound a year with a well-designed training regimen and decent food intake.
And yes, the whole "calorie in, calorie out" garbage is less than useful. It's tautalogical, really, of course energy balances, the question is why people like us can eat anything and the body just happily burns it all. Before starting the training regiment my weight was staying within a pound for several years. By the silly "cal in/out" argument it would require caloric intake precision down to whether the spoon is licked clean or not.
Have you had a doctor check whether there is some medical reason for your low BMI? I believe that some hormonal conditions, as well as undiagnosed cancer, can have this effect.
Yes, all the standard reasons were ruled out multiple times... I do have a chronic condition but that should not affect weight (if anything, most patients are overweight)
My brother and I are both kinda skinny. We each tried for a time to gain weight, without any success. Skinny people trying to gain weight by eating more (and mostly failing) is a data point against the calorie in calorie out theory of body weight. Around age 50 I started getting a beer belly... not really the right kind of weight, and so now I have to be aware of that. Embrace the skinny...
CICO is only true when _losing_ weight. When gaining weight the body it's different because the body has ways of discarding unnecessary calories. But when losing weight it's impossible for the body to get missing energy from anywhere other than fat deposits.
Your last statement is not correct. The body can also burn muscle.
>data point against calorie in, calorie out theory of body weight
It's really not. It's a point against CICO as weight control advice. But CICO literally can't be wrong from a theory of how the world works without violating laws of physics. Just because knowing about it doesn't help weight gain/loss doesn't mean much for whether or not it's true.
I know the basics of how to build a nuclear bomb. The fact that I can't successfully do so doesn't mean that nuclear fission isn't real.
Yeah, sure. Everyone loses weight when living on limited calories in a prisoner of war camp. I guess all I'm saying is that there is more to weight than CICO. Like there is some body mass set point... or something.
Body mass set point is real, but doesn't contradict CICO. Your body has autoregulating mechanisms for maintaining weight - non-exercise activity thermogenesis (NEAT), plus also just your appetite contributing to the mean-reversion.
There really isn't more to weight loss than CICO. Now, it _is_ true that "CICO" is not _nearly_ as simple as "the food you eat and the explicit major activities you do", it is in fact _fiendishly_ complex, and it can be difficult, bordering on impossible to calculate the "true" CICO values for any specific person, but that does not change the fact that, at it's core, CICO is the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth of how humans gain and lose weight.
Again, I don't think it's good _advice_ for how someone should try to lose gain weight (for all the complexity/difficulty reasons stated up above), but it is the reality of the situation. You can't gain wait if your calorie balance isn't positive and you can't lose weight if your calorie balance isn't negative. Period. The end. The details of how those balances happen, is, to repeat myself, extremely complicated and nuanced and more than just "I ate a bagel and went for a run", but all the complexity will eventually boil down to a balance.
Well perhaps we can just disagree. I have no problem imagining some signal that says to some of your cells; "Too much intake, burn more calories." And getting hotter, or twitchy, or wanting to go for a hike/ run.
Yes, and all of those change the "Calories out" part of CICO, which is why it's so complicated.
Your body likely has dozens of ways to change the balance on it's own, that can counteract your efforts to purprosefully chance the balance. But the fact of the balance is still true.
I think what you disagree with is the overly simplistic view that "if you cut 200 calories of food from your diet, and maintain your activity level, you will lose exactly 200 calories of weight". And that view of CICO is so overly simplistic as to essentially be wrong.
But the fact that this wrong version of CICO is out there doesn't mean that real, complex, nuanced version in which both you and your autonomic processes are constantly adjusting various parts of the _extremly_ complicated nutritional and energetic balance in your body isn't correct.
I would personally recommend against Cyproheptadine. It definitely increases hunger, but the trade off is feeling like an irritable zombie.
Anecdotally, exercise in the morning increases apetite.
r/gainit has the typical advice, but the tldr is to just eat more and track your calories so you're sure you're eating enough
Thanks, that mirrors my own research pretty well (probably wouldn't go all the way to 70g carbs post workout tho)
I wrote about watching the movie Wall Street 36 years later and what struck me about the experience. It starts:
"The movie “Wall Street” came out in 1987 when I was 25 working as a junior investment banker, and it immediately became the iconic symbol for the brash Wall Street culture that emerged in the 1980s. (Suspenders and yellow ties were icon runners-up.)
Greed is Good is the movie’s most famous line, spoken by the villainous Gordon Gekko (Michael Douglas), an insider trader and corporate raider. Back then, “Greed is Good” represented a despicable and corrupt attitude. Thirty-six years later, it’s become our culture’s dominant philosophy. We all live in Gordon Gekko’s world now."
https://robertsdavidn.substack.com/p/greed-is-good-oliver-stones-wall
Greed may be a deadly sin, but so is Pride, and we have a whole month to celebrate that nowadays.
What do you mean?
"Citizens United and the resulting ability of the wealthy to have undue influence over our politicians and judges."
Citizens United was a ruling that the First Amendment does not allow the government to censor a film critical of a politician even if it's close to an election.
It's amazing how few people know what that ruling was actually about. But that said, with today's culture around free speech, I'm honestly not sure how many people would change their mind about it even if they found out.
It's like the how 'shouting fire in a crowded theater' quote is from a case where the actual action being analogized was distributing flyers opposing the WWI draft.
All things in moderation. Having some greed is good, IMHO.
All economic systems are based upon greed. In the collectivist side, I want to do less work than my neighbors, yet still collect the same income. This starts a furious race to the bottom, which we see in all collectivist societies.
Set aside some money, plan for the future? Sorry buddy, you have to share that with the 'needy.'
> which helps governments implement Georgist land value taxes
Not quite. IIRC the idea of the company is a prerequisite of this step, namely determining the land value in the first place. From their About page: "Our goal at ValueBase is to help property appraisers and professionals make informed decisions by providing them with the most comprehensive and accurate data and tools."
I dont recall where Lars explained why they focus on that topic specifically, but it was probably in this podcast: https://www.dwarkeshpatel.com/p/lars-doucet#details
A full transcript is available, and there's a section called (01:02:56) - Lars's Startup & Land Assessment.
He talked about it at length when he was making guest posts here on ACX. In his investigation of how to implement Georgist taxes, he came to realize that property valuations were frequently very wrong, way worse than should be even using less effective evaluation methods. Because Georgist taxes were so dependent on good valuations, he realized that this was a major impediment of ever introducing Georgism. It's also something that almost every jurisdiction would like to have, if they knew how.
This is something California outlawed in the 1970s. At the time, the California Legislature controlled the rate of property tax. Anytime the legislature wanted to increase funding, they'd just crank up the property taxes. Elderly people were being kicked out of their homes left and right. Finally the people got then Prop 13 on the ballot. Prop 13 freezes the property tax at 2% of purchase price, and the tax can only be raised 1% a year.
Very many people claim California has too much tax, what with a top rate 10% income tax, and property taxes too, but in truth Californians pay far less in taxes than most Texans, who pay 5% property tax.
Discussion of parents lying to children. I was looking for the sort where the parents make things up about the real world, and the child might only find out they had false beliefs years or decades later.
It took a bit to make it clear what sort of lie I was looking for.
https://www.facebook.com/nancy.lebovitz/posts/pfbid0oEKBh8J2WjWk348QJCUtEo2p7b43jqArEAziZp7k7ais2kXbkEeMCpFNjbaokATtl
I'm fascinated by the range. Some lies are clearly malevolent. Some are efforts to control behavior-- telling a girl that her friends are stupid (I think she agreed they were stupid) because ear piercing made their brains run out of their ears. Some are dominance behavior. But a surprising number are mismatched senses of humor-- the parent thinks it's obvious that they're making things up, but some children get it and others don't.
Now I'm wondering whether sense of humor is innate. Are there genetic elements? People on the spectrum can have trouble noticing context, but I think there's more to it than that.
For people who are experts at something, it is often difficult to see things from the perspective of the beginners.
Adults have way more experience and knowledge than kids. It's not just that they spent more time in this world, but also they have more opportunity to experiment with things and discuss with other adults, while kids are not allowed to do many things and when they discuss with other kids they get a lot of misinformation. So it's not fair to expect that a child will have a realistic model of the world -- especially so if they have parents who believe that making jokes is more important than providing correct information.
Also, if we just see "the parent said X, which is obvious nonsense, but the child did not realize that it was a joke", we do not have important background information such as: how often does the adult say nonsense, and how often they actually believe it and get angry when contradicted by the child. Maybe laughing at statements that seem very unlikely would be a dangerous strategy.
I agree, though apparently there are kids who have a reliable sense of when their parents are kidding. I don't know know how much is knowledge of the world and much is reading "this is a joke" body language.
Parents need to have some way of checking on what their kids believe of what they say when they do that sort of joke.
It's not just kids. I know an adult guy, who always speaks with a kind of half-smile, exactly the same face and tone of voice when he actually means it, or when he is joking (which he does often). I find it extremely annoying -- I simply can't imagine ever discussing with him something I care about, because I would never know if he replies seriously or is just making fun of me.
(Interestingly, our mutual female friends find this behavior very attractive. Like, also annoying, but attractive, too.)
So, from epistemic perspective, I'd probably hate to be this guy's kid.
For quite a few years I believed "mafia" stood for "Mothers and Fathers Italian Association" because my dad said so. In college I realized that it would be rather dumb for an Italian crime organization to have its name be an English acronym.
Calvin: Why are sunsets red?
Dad: That's all the oxygen in the atmosphere catching fire.
Calvin: Where does the sun go when it sets?
Dad: The sun sets in the west. In Arizona, near Flagstaff.
* * *
Calvin: What makes wind?
Dad: Trees sneezing.
Calvin: Really?
Dad: No, but the truth is more complicated.
Calvin (later, to Hobbes): The trees are really sneezing today.
I explicitly tell my kids that I troll them on purpose, so that they will learn to question whether someone is telling them the truth. The lies are absurd at this point, consciously so, in order that my kids will catch them. I also tell them, if they ask me to be honest, I promise I will. I don’t want them to take the truth or the honest or other adults as a given.
The only fib I definitely remember my father telling me when I was very young comes into the warped sense of humor category.
Apparently when he was in the army in North Africa during WW2, the first thing the recruits were told on arrival was to watch out for the bootlace snake. Apparently this crafty snake would slither into a tent at night, choose an army boot and carefully pull out its laces. It would then slide into the holes, carefully arranging itself to look just like a bootlace. Then next morning, when the boot's unsuspecting owner tried to put on their boots, it would strike mercilessly and they would be dead in a matter of minutes. It was quite a while before I realised he had been pulling my leg!
The best I could come up with to fool my toddler sister was to tell her about the wild haggis in Scotland which has one leg shorter than the other, so it can run round mountain sides without falling over. I think she believed that for years!
My Grandfather told us some cattle had shorter left legs and others shorter right legs on the right. Some walked around the mountains on the left, others walked the other way.
He always wanted to work in a cheese factory shooting holes in swiss cheese.
When my sister and I were children, our father told us that in the army he was forced to eat Froot Loops as punishment (and therefore he would not purchase them for us). In retrospect, he was clearly joking, while also quite serious about not buying us Froot Loops, but for many years we assumed it was a true fact about the armed forces. (My father denies [having any memory of] saying this, which makes sense for an idle joke.)
I don't think I ate a Froot Loop until college.
That’s funny. Also pretty smart.
Does someone know any good resources on how to fine tune image generation models like StableDiffusion for specific tasks, or at least a good starting point for what I'm trying to achieve? The only resources that I've found, and could follow, showcased fine tuning for simple cases like creating images in a certain style.
But I want to encode a few more constraints. I want to have the model generate isometric tiles from a predefined set of characteristics, like generate a tile from a prompt: medium hill, sparse forest in autumn, small rock formations, dirt path from NE to S. It also gets more complicated because I also want the newly generated tile to integrate seamlessly with it's neighbors.
Generally I think I need to create a dataset for how the tiles should look, and use that to fine tune on. I can use crude drawings for whatever features I want to introduce, like types of forests, hills, etc, and for seamless integration conditional GANs could work, but I really can't figure out the scope of this, or even if it's something that I should consider.
Study finds the more black people that moved into a given northern county during the "great migration" the more 'implicit bias' against black people white people in that county have today: https://phys.org/news/2023-07-reveals-historic-migration-link-present-day.html
Obvious nonsense explanations from the researchers, but no obvious reason to doubt the data itself.
Isn't the simplest answer just that the IAT doesn't mean anything? For example, if someone has a "negative association" with a group, it's unclear if that means something along the lines of disliking or distrusting the group, or something along the lines of feeling sorry for them because they're victimized (which is an obvious explanation for this correlation). Other criticism, such as low predictive value with behavior and low internal consistency, are described in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Implicit-association_test#Criticism_and_controversy
Yes, "implicit bias" has many problems: https://old.reddit.com/r/science/comments/afmxkx/americans_unconscious_bias_on_the_basis_of_sexual/ee0t1xs/
In a county that's 20% black, the overrepresentation of black offenders in crime is going to be much more obvious to the average man on the street than it is in a county that's 2% black. I wonder if it's also possible that black overrepresentation in crime is actually less in areas that lack a critical mass of young black men.
Of course, this is unfortunate for the majority of black people who are not criminals, but the good news is that implicit bias as measured by the IAT doesn't seem to be a good predictor of actual discriminatory behavior.
>Of course, this is unfortunate for the majority of black people who are not criminals,
But crime is indicative of behavior generally. You shouldn't expect that a population which has a homicide rate 10 times higher than other populations to be just as nice and pro-social as other populations other than the actual murderers. Asians, on average, make better neighbors than black people, not simply because they're less likely to commit an actual crime against you.
You could consider whether poor people are more likely to be known as offenders. This may affect how you should update your priors. I suspect that "race" is only a minor factor.
Race predicts criminality better than income, wealth, education and employment levels. Also, you're assuming that being poor is something that is entirely a product of external factors, but why would people more prone to violent crime (implusive, aggressive, low future time orientation etc) be capable of making as much money as other people.
Yeah, everyone jumps to this conclusion at first. There are two major problems, though:
1. Just in terms of statistics, it isn't true. Race is a major independent predictor of criminal offending even after controlling for economic factors. It's not even subtle; it's the kind of thing that you can see in the raw data. A particularly striking example of this is the fact that Asians in New York City have the same poverty rates as blacks, but commit less crime than whites. Homicide is a bit of an outlier in terms of the extreme racial skew, so this isn't necessarily true of all crime, but take a look at this:
https://randomcriticalanalysis.com/2015/11/16/racial-differences-in-homicide-rates-are-poorly-explained-by-economics/
2. Assuming that poverty is a purely exogenous input is arguably the most widespread fallacy in lay, and even professional, sociology. In rich countries, poverty is largely a product of heritable cognitive and personality traits. If you look at table 1 in this study, you'll see references to 5 US studies and 16 from Australia, Sweden, and Norway consistently finding that genes explain more of the variation in earnings than shared environment:
https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10888-019-09413-x
I'm pretty sure that poverty does have some causal effect on crime, especially property crime, but the effect is much smaller than might naively be concluded when ignoring genetic confounders.
In the late 1800's (and possibly the early 1900's) Asians were considered very prone to crimes and gang warfare. Social conditions changed, and that changed.
Do you have any actual stats on this? Unlike to the media today, which go to great lengths to avoid acknowledging well documented racial differences in criminal offending, the media were happy to stoke white racism with dubious claims back then.
Even if we grant for the sake of argument that Asians (which Asians? Just Chinese? Japanese too?) were in fact hugely overrepresented in crime back then, we'd need to think about what kind of effect self-selection had on the Asian American population at the time. Because of the highly skewed sex ratio of early immigrants and greatly increased immigration in recent decades, very few modern Asian Americans are descended from 19th-century immigrants.
And even if we assume for the sake of argument that environmental factors caused Asian immigrants to commit a ton of crime in the late 19th century, it's important to note that they faced conditions far worse than modern black Americans, including severe discrimination from whites up to and including pogroms, living standards far below those experienced by even poor Americans today, essentially no marriage prospects, limited police protection, etc.
I don't know all that much about this period in Asian American history. If you do and can make a serious argument based on this knowledge, I'd be interested to hear about it, but as it is, this is far too hand-wavy for me to take as a serious rebuttal to the far more robust evidence we have from modern data.
"In the late 1800's (and possibly the early 1900's) Asians were considered very prone to crimes and gang warfare."
Yes, but in that time period, Asia was involved in ferocious clan warfare. Some of which bled over into the US. Here in Northern California, the Wakamatsu clan established a farm, so the members could retreat from Japan and survive. The Central California town of Locke was established by Chinese immigrants fleeing the Qin Dynasty.
Tongs still survive to this day ... though they follow The First Rule of Fight Club.
1. You completely ignored his actual arguments
2. Over the past 150 years, ASIANS in the US have changed. Early Asians immigrants were mostly dirt poor laborers (i.e. selected for low IQ). Modern Asian immigrants are more likely to be skilled immigrants (i.e. selected for high IQ). Treating Asians as one homogenous group makes no sense.
I don't think your equivalence of dirt poor laborers == selected for low IQ is justifiable, except, probably, in test taking ability. And the low crime rates apply to the descendants of the earlier waves of Asians.
You are definitely correct that they are not a homogenous group, but most of the differences are cultural and environmental.
FWIW, once the earlier wave of Asians were given the right to own land and otherwise treated fairly, the rate of crime dropped. (With a lag, of course.) I believe that partially this was because they were older, but also partially it was because they had other options.
The contra to that hypothesis is 'The Great White Ghetto." Appalachia, which is very white, very poor, excepting drugs and domestic—very low crime.
Victor Davis Hanson has some writings on this, I believe in National Review.
If everyone around you is at about the same level of wealth, none of you are poor. You may be poor in a larger context, but not in your personal awareness.
Inequality has risen dramatically in the past 50 years and crime has fallen. Many countries with higher inequality (and poverty) than the US have lower crime than the US.
You're not making an actual argument here, you're desperately clinging to a prior with hand wavey justifications.
Also the percentage of older people has increased, there are a lot more video games breaking up non-off-line youth groups has risen, etc. There isn't, as far as know, a fully justifiable position. Too many variables. I'm weighing more heavily the variables that seem appropriate to me.
I'm not sure how to adequately characterize this. The closest term I can think of is cognition. It feels like awareness or sense of self varies between days. It's easier to notice looking back on past actions or behavior, but difficult to evaluate or realize in the moment. Are there tests or mechanism by which this can be measured? Sorry if that's too vague.
I make notes of my reflections, in the moment, for this reason. I also do mindfulness practice. It's like a muscle you can develop. You seem entirely normal, from your account. I only say this in case your variable sense of yourself is a source of concern.
It's not necessarily quantitative, but journaling is a good way to compare immediate self-perception with prior immediate self-perception.
If your sense of self seems mostly variable in the past but not so much when you examine it in the present, could it be that your memory is the culprit rather than your sense of self?
I suffer from a form of OCD that generally manifests as frequent, unproductive rumination about issues such as moral philosophy, futurism, the fate of humanity, and political issues. I suspect that it is similar to OCD some people have around religious issues, but since I am not religious it manifests through secular issues that are of a similar character to my mind. I have had tremendous success over the past couple years treating it with low doses of duloxetine combined with CBT. However, I still sometimes find myself haunted by recurring ideas that trouble me. I have sometimes found it helpful to talk through these ideas with other people, but there are few people I know face-to-face that are super-interested in the types of philosophy and futurism that readers of places like this blog are. I am hoping someone here can point out the flaws in one of these ideas.
Ever since I read Robin Hanson's writing about brain emulators, one idea that keeps coming back to haunt me is the idea that at some point in the future we will develop the ability to convert resources into lifespan with perfect efficiency (for example, by uploading human minds to computers). In such a world the only way to live longer might be to make other people live shorter (for example, by competing with other mind uploads for a finite amount of computer time to run yourself, or competing with other cyborgs for energy and parts). I remind myself of the economic Law of Comparative Advantage, but it seems like that law might not hold in a world of effortless copying, or a world run by a superhuman FAI. I become disturbed at the idea that one person might simply erase everyone else and tile the universe with copies of themselves. However, I have trouble figuring out a way to condemn this course of action without endorsing some sort of deathism where people are obligated to die to make room for new people, which is just as disturbing, if not more so.
My intrusive thoughts about this get even grosser and nastier when I contemplate the idea that I might live to see such a future. The dark, sick, obsessive part of my mind tells me that I should stop donating to EA causes, which is something I currently do, because if other people live to see that future they will compete with me for lifespan. (I can sometimes mollify these worries by reminding myself that having more people alive now probably makes it more likely such a future will even come to pass at all). I never let these thoughts impact my behavior at all, I still donate to EA causes like malaria prevention and deworming.
I do not like these thoughts. They are gross and selfish, but I also feel like they must be logically flawed in some way, because no one else I know brings this up when discussing the far future (although I know speculating on what the post-singularity world will be like is generally discouraged). Some obvious flaws that occur to me are that I am incorrectly directly equating lifespan with welfare/utility, when they are often not the same, and that I am failing to account for the welfare/utility that the inhabitants of a large and diverse society bring to each other. It is also probably ridiculous to worry about slightly shortening a lifespan that will still be vastly longer than the one a typical human today has. I am effectively worrying about resource distribution in a super-abundant utopia.
Most of the time my medication is effective and I can let these thoughts go fairly quickly. But I would appreciate it if other people pointed out additional logical problems with them that would help me dismiss them more quickly on the days where they get bad.
I'm not sure a deathism where old people have to make way for new is really that horrible in the far future--certainly much preferable to a monoculture of one personality tiling the universe. Actually, I would guess that it could perhaps happen naturally. All this speculation assumes a human-computer upload type future, where it will cost roughly the same amount of resources to run an old human vs. a new human, rather than a cyborg future where it perhaps costs more and more to keep older humans alive.
First, for a hypothetical human that could live centuries, an instantiation of that human from one century would look very very different from an instantiation from another century. Sort of a ship of Theseus situation, but you could argue that these are two different people and you've solved the problem without having to have a forced end to any particular person.
This strikes me as a bit weak, however, since I suspect over time individuals would change less and less. This is obvious with older people today, but whether that's a biological constraint (older brains being biologically less amenable to new ideas) or a general truth about intelligences is hard to say. I suspect it's a mix of both; old intelligences would have a wealth of experience such that each new experience is A) less novel and therefore less able to change the ideas of the intelligence, and B) even if it is highly novel, it will have less impact on the intelligence because it will be a small proportion of their net total experiences.
Now, the solution to this (given that an old intelligence sees it as a problem) would be to re-instantiate; basically, erase a bunch of experiences to make room for new ones, with possible exceptions for beloved memories and such. I suspect this would act like death and re-birth, but I would hope that this would be a voluntary act by older intelligences that wish to experience what it's like to be a different intelligence. Certainly if I lived to be several centuries old I would want this option, sort of like death-lite (TM).
Hopefully expansion into new resources would also allow for completely new instantiations, so that we would have a mix of completely new intelligences and intelligences which undergo constant change/improvement.
Issue 1: this intrusive thought
"at some point in the future ... one person might simply erase everyone else and tile the universe with copies of themselves"
Issue 2: "I have trouble figuring out a way to condemn this course of action"
Response to issue 1: Any reasonable estimate of the probability of that actually happening has got to be either "it's one possibility among many of what might happen, fairly low probability" or "we just don't know enough to put a probability on it, might even be 0"
How might it be 0, despite various arguments of the form "but in the far future where resources hit a limit [ill-founded speculation about what must happen then, that can be phrased with great confidence when one is in a certain mood]"? Well, let's call the genocidal person X. At the point before X acts to kill everyone else, in this future world, there are many people who are not X, who would prefer not to be killed, each with some power to affect or constrain the actions of the others. One could speculate that at this point there are control mechanisms that extend right to the level of "certain genocidal thoughts are literally impossible to have, because the hardware on which the virtual people are running has made this true.", but let's suppose we're not there yet. Unless the power-balance between X and a coalition of not-Xes is such that X can go kill everyone else despite their opposition, in a fight between X and the set of people who are not X, X loses.
Empirical backing: We already see what happens in small scale models of resource limited environments, with life evolving under selective pressure. A combination of cooperation and competition, eventually leading to high-level coordination (multicellular organisms, and on up from there to larger coordination-units between organisms and groups of organisms) and control mechanisms to prevent defection (which in multicellular organisms, looks like cancer - one cell evading controls and replicating against the interest of the larger group). A much more comprehensive discussion of many instances of this dynamic, from sections of DNA competing for space on the genome up to larger and larger units, is here: https://80000hours.org/podcast/episodes/athena-aktipis-cancer-cooperation-apocalypse/
So although I can't predict the far future in any detail, it seems to me like we already have good empirical models for what happens when one unit in a set of replicating units within a larger group that is coordinating, tries to defect. Almost always, it is killed before it can spread. Sometimes cancer does happen, but I speculate that if one person tried to replicate themselves across the resource-space of the universe, future other people who don't want that outcome because it would mean their death will have foreseen that possibility (as you can foresee it) and put in place mechanisms to stop it happening.
Response to issue 2: You don't need to worry about condemning an action that future people will be perfectly willing to condemn, _because it will kill them_. But if you want a theoretical reason why it's bad for one future person to overwrite everyone else, you can consider respecting the preferences of then-living people, valuing diversity and disvaluing monoculture, and internalizing a positive value for getting to live in the equilibrium where you don't have to worry that everyone around you is out to murder you ASAP. (My thought process, sometimes: In order to live in a society where people act how I would like, we all have to act that way, including me. I imagine a society of people that didn't internalize pro-coordination values would collapse long before it got to universe-spanning scale).
Also, supposing I'm X... why do I value copies of myself more than copies of not-myself, again? And why do I value their existence more than their nonexistence? Like, they aren't me, they're just copies of minds like mine, and if I'm competitive, by creating more of them I'm creating competitors with my exact same capabilities to occupy the same ecological niche I occupy, which on its face seems like a bad idea, with a preferable strategy being to gather as many resources to myself as I can and extend my lifespan as long as possible. The sort of person who would murder everyone else in order to tile the universe with copies of themselves, probably has to fear being murdered in turn by their copy or a slight variation thereof, and so would fear creating those copies.
I agree with your point about not worrying about resources in utopia, although of course nothing is infinite. The other thoughts that come to mind are that we can't know how our current actions will affect anything far in the future and that those effects should be discounted compared to shorter-term outcomes. In general, I have a heuristic that the far future is the responsibility of future people. It's not practical to try to take responsibility for all of time, which you're doing to an extent. We have more than we can handle in the present! Not sure how helpful that is, but that's my reaction.
You could try to “historically backtest” your current approach to thinking. For example, suppose you lived in 1930 and tried to predict, with only the evidence available to you then, what would the future look like?
I think you’ll find that extreme confidence about the precise shape of the future is usually unfounded, but that if you had some general vague sense of “things 100 years from now will be better than they are”, this would have worked out pretty well.
What is a concrete development that would absolutely have to occur along the pathway to this imagined future? (For example: before we get to the "all humans uploaded" phase, there would almost certainly be reports of a test human or two being very imperfectly uploaded. Or of selected parts of a human's consciousness being uploaded. Or of test animals being uploaded.)
Figure out that milestone, then promise yourself you'll start planning for the Em future *when we reach that pre-milestone, and not before.* Before that stage, there are so many unknown unknowns that any steps you take are just as likely to lead directly away from your desired outcome as directly toward it. If you find yourself ruminating, then remind yourself that you are saving this for when the milestone arrives.
I generally try to avoid worrying about things outside of my control. Maybe your thoughts are correct, but unless you have the ability to do anything about it, it doesn't matter. A few more or fewer lives won't make that much difference in your virtual torture matrix hypothetical.
Beyond that, I think it's interesting how some people have such a strong sense of self preservation. Personally, I think it's fine to delete yourself and not cling on to existence. I'd probably stick around a while to see how things are going, but would get bored and delete myself sooner or later. Anyone with too strong of a desire to tile themselves across reality is probably going to justifiably end up being deleted anyway.
I wrote this about Chris Rufo's America's Cultural Revolution:
"Yes to all this. Conservative political activism of your sort is long long overdue. And it's a tragedy that mainstream conservatism has only just woken up to the decades-long 'march through the institutions'. But. But. Sooner or later you are going to have to confront the fact that what you are confronting is not just some small wokeified 'elite'.Tens of millions of tertiary-educated Americans (and even more tens of millions of Europeans and Anglos) have absorbed all this nonsense. Politically (tactically) I guess you want to flatter them and blame it all on a few bogeys. But the truth is darker."
And previously this:
"Yes, it's great to nail these Freire/Marcuse types for their Macheivellian poisoning of the West. But what made them so SUCCESSFUL in wokefying our Western culture? That's the bit that's missing here....and needs to not be shied away from if we are going to get at the real truth of things. What made them so successful is that so many people (especially the 'higher educated') are so intellectually biddable. Take another context: it is an almost universal conceit that the horrors of The Cultural Revolution were all about Mao and his gang. The truth is much darker. Mao would have been nothing without tens of millions of biddable, favour-seeking, grudge-bearing followers. "
https://grahamcunningham.substack.com/
What's the old quote, take the beam out of your own eye before you worry about the splinter in someone else's? The far left has its issues, as does the right (much more so, in my opinion). Perhaps it would be more constructive to think about how the whole country can prosper and how conservatives can come up with policies that actually appeal to the median voter rather than how you're going to stick it to your arch-enemies?
I would say both sides are overindexing on fighting with each other, and conservatives in particular are underinvesting in coming up with useful things to do. I don't think anyone's talking about ignoring the other side.
Good stuff
There's a conflict between the extremely broad interpretation of the Commerce Clause used in giving Congress leeway to regulate activities that are neither interstate nor commerce and the much more narrow interpretation used to determine what activities the states are prohibited from regulating.
It's explained in Federalist 42 that the Commerce Clause gives Congress not just the authority to regulate interstate commerce, but the exclusive authority to do so, as state interference in interstate commerce had been a serious problem under the Articles of Confederation. Taking the power to regulate interstate commerce out of the hands of individual states was just as much a part of the intent of this clause as giving that power to Congress.
Under the Constitution, there should be a complete disjunction between activities that the federal government has the authority to regulate and those that the states have the authority to regulate. If the Court interprets "commerce among the several states" so broadly as to give the federal government authority to regulate wages at a convenience store because an interstate traveler might shop there, then by the same token states should not be allowed to regulate wages on the grounds that this would interfere with interstate commerce.
In fact, though, there's a huge range of activities that the Court allows both the state and federal government to regulate, which is very difficult to reconcile with the idea that there's any good-faith attempt on the part of the Court to uphold the Constitution.
The standard answer to this is the Preemption Doctrine. Yes, there's a substantial overlap between what states can regulate under their police powers and what the feds can regulate as interstate commerce, but when state rules directly contradict federal rules, the federal rules win.
We recently discussed the commerce clause with regard to CA banning the sale of out of state meat which was produced in a way which would violate CAs animal welfare regulations.
My takeaway was that the test "will it have a downstream effect on interstate commerce?" is so broad that pretty much anything goes. If the feds can dictate what kinds of meat can be sold locally in supermarkets, they can probably also use the commerce clause to regulate wages, office hours, the availability of abortion, the Aryanization of companies (if not otherwise prohibited by the bills of rights), education, zoning, slavery (after getting rid of the 13th), criminal justice or pretty much anything.
My main point here is that there's a double standard for what counts as interstate commerce. Whether the authority to regulate what kind of meat can be sold falls under federal or state jurisdiction is one question, but it should be one or the other, not both.
"If the feds can dictate what kinds of meat can be sold locally in supermarkets..."
In point of fact it already does that, via various USDA and FDA regulations. But if the EATS act were to be overridden by Congress or struck down by the Court, this would not be a case of the feds dictating what kinds of meat can be sold in local supermarkets. It would be prohibiting California from dictating what kinds of meat can be sold in local supermarkets. Supermarkets would still be perfectly free to decline to carry any particular kind of meat, or any meat at all. Similarly, the First Amendment doesn't dictate what newspapers can publish, but rather prohibits states from dictating what newspapers can publish.
But the idea that federal and state powers on commerce are disjoint is itself not or at least not explicitly in your constitution. Madison may have thought that the power was inherently indevisible but that is like just his opinion man.
At least explicitly the text of your constitution itself doesn't say that and actually sort-of implies the opposite, since on that understanding the Import-Export-clause would be banning the states from doing a strict subset of the things the commerce clause was already implicitly banning them from.
And the courts also aren't inconsistently applying that idea rather they have explicitly rejected it.
I mean, yes, you’re absolutely right that such a broad interpretation is effectively unlimited. But also it was explicitly the standard interpretation by the courts for a long time. Wickard v Filburn ruled that wheat grown on one’s own land for one’s own consumption could be regulated under the Commerce Clause in 1942.
US v Lopez tightened the interpretation somewhat in 1995, but it’s still very broad, just no longer totally unlimited.
The judicial principles of stare decisis, and in particular the reliance principle.
It is good for the law to be interpreted and applied consistently so people can actually know what the law is. So courts should be reluctant to change their interpretations. Not 100% opposed, because then you can get locked into ridiculous interpretations forever. But reluctant.
And the courts should be especially reluctant to change their interpretations when a large body of the existing structure of law, government, and the economy is built on the existing interpretation.
It’s plain that if you were to say tomorrow that “Actually, the commerce clause means what it says”, it would be insanely disruptive. Half of the Federal government including things like the Civil Rights Act would become unconstitutional.
So while it’s clear the current supreme court has a strongly originalist bent and would prefer to see law interpreted according to its actual meaning, they are also willing to make concessions to practical reality.
I think you’re seeing things in an overly combative frame. It isn’t good to cause chaos for the sake of “winning”. Steady, deliberate improvement is less dramatic than burning the whole system down, but it’s more sustainable and desirable.
Jurisprudence is becoming steadily more aligned with the original meaning of the constitution in a wide range of areas. This court will continue to stay in place for a long time. Patience is a virtue.
Since I've encountered some demand from you guys for a graph of my updates on Russo-Ukrainian war, here you have it: https://aleszieglerenglish.substack.com/p/special-military-graph
It would be a bitter pill for Russians, but they might accept it provided they are thoroughly beaten up. Which they are. In fact, I think it is quite possible (although not certain) that if Zelensky would right now propose to surrender all currently occupied territories in exchange for NATO membership, Putin would accept that.
Danger of missiles "on Ukrainian soil" is heavily exaggerated, its not like Russia has good defenses against NATO missiles deployed in Montana or wherever Americans have their strategic arsenal.
Of course what would be really dangerous for Russia would be nuclear missiles deployed by Ukrainians, regardless of whether they are in NATO or not; if we are talking "compromise" (as opposed to victory) outcome with Ukraine in NATO, I would expect that final treaty would rule that out.
Of course Russian military is larger than at the start of the war, they did the whole mobilization thing.
As you can see, I am overall quite pesimistic about Ukrainian chances, but Russian army did really suffer terrible losses, and had Western industry shifted to war mode, they obviously wouldn't stand a chance in conventional war. But it hadn't, for readily apparent political reasons.
General consensus seems to be that Russian losses of manpower are in absolute terms higher than Ukrainian, but it is less clear whether that holds relative to population.
In case it wasn't clear, I agree that nuclear missiles in Ukraine would be terrible for Russian security. I thought that you were referring to conventional missiles, since, of course, NATO membership does not necessarily imply deployment of nukes; in some ways it is rather a substitute for European countries (most likely Poland) developing their own nuclear capabilities. Again, I expect that in compromise scenario with Ukrainian NATO membership there would be some sort of a guarantee that nukes will not get deployed in Ukraine.
Firstly, that 150k number is probably too high (yep, I noticed you didn't even link to your source).
Secondly, we don't know with any kind of precision how many people Russia (or Ukraine) mobilized. And among "additions" need to be counted not only conscripts, but also volunteers, which are reportedly many.
Thirdly, large portion of Russian losses are either separatist troops or wagnerites and perhaps other irregulars that are not usually counted as part of the Russian army when you google "how large was Russian army in 2021". Separatist formation were incorporated into the army (another addition), but only after heavy losses, in the autumn of 2022. That does not any way imply that losses of regular army have been low, however.
ETA: so it is perfectly possible that Russian army both a) is larger than at the start of the war, and b) Russians suffered more casualties than Ukrainians.
I only just became aware of the 2024 Republican candidacy of Doug Burgum, and I'm here to say: Why not Doug Burgum?
Upsides:
1. He's a generic Republican governnor of an actual state
2. At 67 he's young enough not to be senile, but old enough to much older than you
3. With his swept-back hair and his tieless suits, he looks like America's cool rich uncle that owns a boat
4. He talks about sensible economic issues and wants to downplay Culture War stuff, which he seems content to leave to the state or local level.
5. At first sight, seems reasonably smart and competent; as founder of Great Plains Software he presumably has a reasonable grasp of technology too, without being part of the whole Silicon Valley thing.
What are the downsides?
Sure, I guess. I'm not holding my breath waiting for Republican primary voters to go for him.
There are a few major issues:
1) He isn't Donald Trump.
2) Approximately nobody has heard of Great Plains Software, and approximately nobody cares even if they are told about it.
3) His affiliation with Microsoft leads to all sorts of "he's working with Bill Gates to put microchips in the vaccines".
4) He bears too much of a resemblance to the hated Mitt Romney.
Voters don't know him. Trump drew a lot of attention to himself with his antics and still does; unless Burgum wants to go down to that level, or has wealthy backers trying to wedge his name in the conversation, he's a blip. Going by media coverage you'd think DeSantis was being pushed as the next Republican darling but his own brand of uncharismatic Trumpism has failed him.
Granted that being relatively unfamiliar to voters is the problem most candidates have to reckon with. How do you navigate populist fervor and reel things in as a moderate/temperate candidate? The gears have to switch.
How is he going to beat Trump in the primary? The more primary candidates, the better Trumps odds. (at least that's my read of the situation.)
It's astonishing to me that after the disaster for the long-term legitimacy of their party that was Trump that Republicans haven't pushed to move their primaries towards ANY non-FPTP voting system.
Excellent point that other Republican candidates don't seem to grasp. They need some more back-room dealing to figure out who the best candidate to go against Trump is, and then to run only that person. Blackmail or buy off all the others or something like that. That's assuming there's another electable candidate in the Republican party, which is not clear to me.
Reminder that Republicans can't backroom deal like this anymore because the base doesn't trust (and in many cases actively despises) the leadership.
The Democrats' base, by contrast, still mostly trusts the leadership. When it came out that the DNC actively suppressed Bernie, Democrats gave a very meager, "Not cool. But eh, what are you gonna do?"
If the RNC were caught doing this against Trump, the GOP would implode. Trump would start a new party and likely bring more than half the GOP with him.
Sure, I guess. Hard to keep things quiet among a bunch of narcissists. From my admittedly biased perspective, I think the Republican Party imploding would be good for them in the long run (I.e., post Trump).
It's hard to keep any large conspiracy quiet. IIRC the DNC couldn't keep it quiet because of junior staffers.
I'm inclined to think that destroying your own political party is generally a foolish way to go about accomplishing your political objectives. You don't really shed the problems you had putting together a winning coalition; you just shed some of the institutional memory of putting together a competitive electoral machine. The point might well come when the GOP naturally evaporates like the Federalists did, but for the moment the GOP, though clearly the weaker party, is still relevant in national politics.
> IIRC the DNC couldn't keep it quiet because of junior staffers.
Junior staffers can be kept quiet, just ask Seth Rich.
the downsides to whom? 60% of the GOP is Trump or bust, and pretty much the only thing that would change that is Trump dying
It's hard to know what to think about all these lawsuits. Some or all may be justified, but one can't avoid the suspicion that some are based on a wilfully literal-minded interpretation of what he said about "fighting" before the Capitol invasion.
There are hymns such as "Fight the good fight with all thy might" etc. But nobody thinks that is encouraging the congregation to go out and start punching people or invading nearby churches! It seemed obvious to me that he was using the word figuratively to mean "strive" or similar.
Also, besides the few hotheads who invaded the Capitol, the vast majority of protesters seemed to be mooching around peacefully in the surrounding grounds, as if it was a gay pride afternoon in the park, even down to the police looking on benevolently. That's what the TV footage looked like anyway.
I've no doubt most of the GOP think the same about all the legalistic shenanigans, and it's reminiscent of how the Senate in ancient Rome tried to bring down Julius Caesar with "lawfare" when he was or would be out of office, and recall how _that_ blew up in their faces!
Right.
In fact the last few weeks I've seen several interviews with Trump supporters who say exactly that in so many words.
(My own MAGA relatives may be wavering just a bit due to the recent indictments; though I haven't been willing to ask flat-out and don't plan to.)
Plus he’s the governor of a state that’s been protecting South Dakota from Canada since 1889.
His joke, not mine.
Reading his Wikipedia article, he seems adequately beige, but if he's anyway serious about running for the presidency, then he's going to be attacked by whoever the Democratic nominee or hopeful running in parallel with him is, and again from Wikipedia that's going to be on abortion, the border, LGBT and particularly trans rights, climate change denialism, and idpol:
"Energy
Burgum has been very vocal on his support for the fossil fuel industry, especially in the Bakken region of western North Dakota. But he also signed a bill to create clean energy sustainable for the state on April 26, 2021. Burgum supports the Dakota Access Pipeline.
Abortion
In April 2023, Burgum signed a near-total ban on abortion in North Dakota.
National security
Burgum has deployed the National Guard to the southern border with Mexico numerous times. In April 2022, he and 25 other governors created the American Governors’ Border Strike Force to help each other with defense on the border against illegal immigration and human trafficking. Burgum argued that energy independence is key to fending off China and Russia.
LGBT rights
In July 2020, Burgum called the 2020 Republican platform "divisive and divisional" on LGBT issues. During the 2023 session of the North Dakota Legislative Assembly, Burgum signed numerous anti-trans laws, including a near-total ban on gender-affirming care for minors.
Education
On November 12, 2021, Burgum signed a law banning the teaching of critical race theory in North Dakota K-12 schools"
Going off that he will be painted as Literally Hitler - old rich white Christian cis het guy who is pro-fossil fuels and in favour of forced births and trans genocide as well as denying refuge to those trying to flee oppression in South America! Oh, and I forgot the talking point about "not wanting children to learn about slavery" because CRT is not being taught in schools, it's simply the history of racism in the USA. You can fill in the bingo card yourself.
EDIT: As for his looks, I've never been in favour of mutton dressed as lamb. He's hitting up on 70, stop trying to look like you're 40 and cool. Embrace the beigeness!
To be fair though, as a Republican, he'd be painted as "Literally Hitler" by Democrats regardless of what he's done or is doing.
Well yeah, but when someone asks "What are the downsides?", it's pretty clear what they are: he's a Republican who supports generally Republican policies. He can't present himself as a centrist or a moderate for the mushy middle vote, because his opponent will wave the "anti-abortion, anti-LGBT, racist, climate change denying, rich white guy" card about.
Those downsides are inconsequential compared to the bit where Doug Burghum has basically never been on the front page of a newspaper outside the Dakotas, nor on a CNN or FOX News chyron. That may not be literally true, but it's close enough for government work.
Oh yeah, he's a nobody which is the relevant criterion. But if he were going to run, the downsides are "generic Republican who will be slaughtered as Snidely Whiplash by Democratic opponent". He's not one of the 'good' Republicans who get the 100% rating from NARAL or anything like that.
My MAGA relatives would never give this guy a second look except to sneer that he reeks of the Deep State and is probably on Bill Gates' payroll and etc.
Also it appears that he simply bought a spot in the debates which, if he was worth taking down, would be an easy way for the other candidates including Trump to make fun of him:
"On July 10, 2023, Burgum began offering $20 gift cards for a donation of any amount to his primary campaign. A spokesman for Burgum acknowledged that this was an attempt to reach the threshold of individual donors required to participate in the first Republican primary debate. The scheme was successful, and on July 25, Burgum qualified for the debate after also meeting the polling threshold. Despite its success, the scheme was ridiculed on social media, with some users declaring that they had donated $1 to Burgum and $20 to Joe Biden's reelection campaign."
4.: Culture War stuff currently very much isn't left to the state or local level. Consider anti-discrimination and hostile workplace environment laws, the affirmative action-mandating Executive Order 11246, enforcement by the EEOC and other parts of the federal administration. SCOTUS picks interpret CW-related federal laws and constitutional questions.
Does he want to actively dismantle federal involvement in CW stuff, or to ignore the area, which means leaving much of it in the hands of the federal government?
…those don’t seem to be particularly substantial upsides.
67 is still pretty old (before 2016 he'd be tied with Reagan for the oldest president first sworn in). Would still be better than most alternatives though.
Does anyone have experiences with neurofeedback in general and for emotional regulation in children in particular? Anything to look out for?
I'm too broke for fresh food or to leave my house any way but on foot. Please help me.
Not sure where you live, but can't you get a temporary (?) job in a hotel kitchen, or as a waiter. The money may not be brilliant, but at least you'll get a decent meal or two every day.
How did you get into this situation? Where's your family? Do you have any friends? Why don't you have a job? How old are you?
If you want to save money on food, one of the most important principles to understand is what I call the RULE OF DRY.
Disclaimer: I don't live in the US, but these principles are pretty much universal.
To explain this RULE OF DRY, I'll start with an example. Let's say, hypothetically, you can buy for the same price either 1 pound of canned beans or 1 pound of dry beans. You may think the two deals are similar. But if you buy the canned beans, you only get 1 pound of them. Whereas, if you buy the dry beans, you leave them overnight to soak, and then you get 4 pounds of actual beans! For the same price!
This is typical. It applies to everything starchy, whether it's legumes, grains, the flours of grains and legumes, or other products derived from grains or legumes, such as, I believe, oatmeal (which is an American food not common where I live, but I think it falls into the same category.)
All these foods are about the same: 1 kilo of dry product = 4 kilos of hydrated product = about 4000 calories. If the product is refined (white flour, white rice) you only get the carbs and protein, whereas if it's whole, it will be a little more expensive, but you also get vitamins and minerals.
Not only dry starches tend to be incredibly cost effective; they weight little, so they're easy to carry, and they're non-perishable as long as they stay dry, so you can stock up on them.
You can probably buy some on the Internet. Here in my country, I used to buy online huge sacks of dry millet which got shipped to my door and it was unbelievably cost effective relative to nutrients. You can probably shop for the cheapest offer online in dry grains/legumes/flours and buy large sacks of that.
Here's another insight: next to dry starches, the second most cost-effective food type tends to be vegetables (note that I'm talking about VEGETABLES, not FRUIT). This is surprising, because vegetables are known for having virtually no calories. But calories in themselves are dirt cheap, and are not the true problem when one wants to eat on a limited budget. You can get dirt cheap calories in the form of white flour, white rice (dry), fats (in the US, I'm told, the cheapest is canola oil). But these dirt cheap calories lack vitamins, minerals, and flavor. You can combine these dirt cheap calories with vegetables, which provide the most cost effective vitamins, minerals, and flavor. Of course the cost of vegetables varies, but some are cheaper and you can buy as much as possible of the cheapest, whether fresh or canned doesn't matter. Note that, I repeat, I'm talking about VEGETABLES, not FRUIT. You may think that the cost of fruit and of vegetables are similar, relative to weight, but the two are not equivalent; vegetables provide way more vitamins, nutrients, and even flavor, than fruit, making vegetables by far the most cost effective.
Note, by the way, that the human protein requirements are much lower than people assume, to the point that you shouldn't worry much about it. On a calorie sufficient diet, it's difficult to become protein deficient, even in terms of specific amino acids. You should worry more about calories, vitamins and minerals, so I've given you some ideas to get those for cheap. Of course, if you become a long term vegan, you should worry about certain nutrients, especially B12.
I've considered similar lines. My situation has some added health, social, psychological, and environmental concerns that are currently limiting my ability to act on this with maximal efficiency, but I do have some food that fits this description.
https://augasonfarms.com/
This brand seems good to me, right now their cheese powder is keeping me in better spirits than I'd be without it.
Maybe it's a luxury I'm not worthy of, but I do think fresh food is a good thing for anyone, even if strict survivability may be achieved in a well stocked bunker.
Affer all this time, one person has given about $50 for which I am very grateful but none of you assholes found the time to do more than that. Cabal your thumbs can work hard condescending to me,maybe you could use them to help me hit at least median income for my country?
"Maybe it's a luxury I'm not worthy of, but I do think fresh food is a good thing for anyone, even if strict survivability may be achieved in a well stocked bunker."
Buy fresh vegetables.
Like I said in the other comment, they're one of the most cost effective foods, a great choice if you're desperately poor. I know it's counterintuitive, but it's true.
In 2020, the average US retail price of fresh green cabbage is 0.70 dollars per pound.
For the nutrition you get, it's a steal.
Combine the cheapest fresh vegetables with white rice (purchased dry) to get dirt cheap meals.
Average US retail prices of fresh vegetables in 2020 according to department of agriculture, dollars per pound:
green cabbage 0.7
carrots 0.87
onions 1
iceberg lettuce 1
trimmed celery 1
plum tomatoes 1.16
These are extremely cost effective; they're all packed with nutrition and their lack of calories is immaterial because as I've explained calories are super cheap.
Yes, these vegetables are the cheapest on the list. But you can eat the cheapest.
My local library has a fridge with free produce donated by the community for anyone to take. Check with your local library (if within walking distance, naturally). Ditto for foodbanks.
Huh, how about friends, neighbors and family? (That's where I would go for help.)
Then eat whatever is in the cupboards/store. You may have a lot of tinned food, pasta, rice, etc. that is shoved into the press and only used once in a while. Cook all that.
Walking on foot - depends if you have to walk a long way to work etc. Best of luck with that! See if you can carpool with colleagues to get you to work?
How can we help? money, advice, something else?
If money, it would probably be useful to drop a link that would allow people to send you money, or drop your email at the very least so people can privately get in touch.
wbcarter1992@gmail.com, I do have PayPal, thank you.
I recognize that some people may not be willing to donate personally to me on this basis. Local to me, this is sort of the flag ship charity for my area.
www.unitedway-nny.org
I went to a local food bank the other day, went in debt for a ride, and they didn't have the resources to be open at dinner time. If you want to help me, this could be a direct way to help me as well.
I wonder what is the reason for the bad "sales pitch". Are they afraid that they might be doing something dangerous, but they also do not want to stop unilaterally because that would be obviously bad for business? Or are they just trying to get the AI industry heaving regulated, with the current winners on top and everyone else prevented from doing the same or better?
Yesterday I finally overcame my laziness and actually tried chatGPT. From my perspective, it is a way to find information online (albeit excluding the most recent information) that is way better than what current search engines allow (a part of that is probably that the SEO industry has not adapted to this yet). My sales pitch would be: "a search that understands". Instead of a list of hyperlinks that may or may not contain the information you were looking for, it provides the information itself, and instead of matching strings it matches the meaning (so you don't have to find the right keyword, just use a synonym or a vague description).
Consider how popular Google has become in the past by producing a search engine which at that moment was much better than the competitors. A similarly successful product could be made by integrating ChatGPT with web search. Maybe don't let the AI run loose on the internet, but give it a read-only access to a fresh index of web pages, and tell it to provide a short answer *followed by* a list of relevant web pages. (On a second thought, maybe this wouldn't scale well. But, Moore's law, etc. Or maybe just cache the answers to the most frequent questions, and prioritize paying customers when the question is outside the cache.)
To give an example, I asked chatGPT to give me a list of DOS games that included a level editor. The returned list contained many first-person shooters (such as Doom), so I asked again, telling chatGPT to *exclude* the first-person shooters. And I got exactly what I wanted.
I cannot imagine getting the same information from Google search. First, almost any question just gets me SEO optimized pages like "Best DOS games", "50 Best DOS Games", etc. Second, the nature of Google search just does not support the concept of excluding something based on its *traits*; it can only include or exclude based on *keywords*. I can't tell Google to exclude the first-person shooters; I can only tell it to exclude the pages that explicitly contain the "first-person shooter" keywords (maybe for an unrelated game, or just as an item in the menu).
Next, I asked whether there are any words in Japanese starting with "v". This seems like something that Google search could handle well... but it returns a list of pages that have "Japanese words starting with 'v'" as a title, but actually contain a list of *English* words starting with "v". It is a mystery for me why someone would create so many pages like this. Do people really ask this question often enough to make SEOs interested? Anyway, this is what I got; all results on the first page utterly irrelevant to my question, but I had to click them all in order to figure this out.
Next, I ask chatGPT. First it gives me a list of excuses, like "you know, native Japanese words usually do not start with 'v', only loanwords do" and "actually, in Japanese 'v' and 'b' are pronounced very similarly". Okay, I don't have the answer yet, but I learned something relevant anyway. So I tell it, hey, give me a list of Japanese words starting with "v" (not "b") and I don't care whether they are loanwords... and then chatGPT gives me the actual list. Sugoi desu ne?
This was just like 10 minutes of experimenting with the *free* version GPT-3.5. (I was told that the paid GPT-4 is an order of magnitude better.) And I didn't have anything important in mind to ask. My friend told me that he uses chatGPT when he is learning new things from a textbook: anytime something seems unclear or he has an additional question, he just asks chatGPT, and it provides an explanation that is easy to understand. (I am also planning to try this.) He calls chatGPT a perfect tutor. The advantage again is that instead of a link containing keywords, it provides the information itself. It's like someone has read the entire internet for you (excluding recent changes), understood most of it, and can give you a high-level summary on any topic that interests you.
Aren't you just describing Bing search? I tried using it for research once and it gave me basically what I'd learn by skimming the first few Google search results, with links to the pages it was citing.
Bing provides a short summary with references. ChatGPT provides a detailed step-by-step explanation. Both are an improvement over the usual experience. The ideal product, as I imagine it, would provide both.
To use an analogy to Wikipedia articles, it's as if Bing gives you the summary of the article, and ChatGPT gives you the article itself, but without references. I would like to get the entire article, with the references.
It also feels like (though I am just guessing here) as if Bing does the web search first, and then summarizes the knowledge from the search results, while ChatGPT uses all the knowledge it has. But this is just my impression from very little experimenting.
It's interesting you did this and it worked out so well, because I tried a number of things with ChatGPT that I thought were in a similar vein as your DOS question (90s video games) and was deeply disappointed.
One such question: give me a complete list of games on Sega Genesis developed by Treasure.
If I Google "Treasure Sega Genesis" the top response is the Wikipedia article for Treasure, which has the information I want in a table.
When I asked ChatGPT a while ago, it gave me a list that was incomplete and that included a game that wasn't on Sega Genesis. When I asked it this question just now, the response was even worse than the previous one. It lists one game (there were 5-6 depending on how you count), then gives me a paragraph-long disclaimer. Paraphrased: "Maybe Treasure developed more games for Sega Genesis after September 2021. Consult their website or other official sources."
Now, my point isn't that ChatGPT is useless. There are definitely things it does better than Google. But this is an example of extremely basic information that Google (or at least Wikipedia) remains much better at finding.
Now that you said that, I notice that I haven't actually checked yet whether those games actually have the editor. Maybe ChatGPT was just lying to me all the time! :D
Humans indeed are gullible, starting with myself.
Yep, one thing about ChatGPT is it doesn't give you any indicators of confidence. And it does lie. And when you ask it for an exhaustive list, it usually leaves things out, but if you point out the omissions, it will agree immediately and add them. I don't know if it even assigns confidence intervals to anything it says, but if it did, it would sure be helpful if it gave us an indication of them.
It could say: "I KNOW Treasure developed these games for Sega Genesis, and I THINK it developed these, and if I had to take a wild guess or just wanted to lie, I would say it developed these." or something along those lines. Maybe people would find the constant hedging annoying, but I'd actually appreciate that sort of hedging much more than the annoying and useless disclaimers it currently insists on including.
Just a quick UI idea -- replace the confidence indicators with emojis. Green check for "I KNOW", a purple question mark for "MAYBE", etc.
Thumbs up.
They're afraid they're doing something dangerous, but it's the only thing they know how to do that they're at all excited about doing, so they find a way to rationalize it as being the right thing to do. "At least our AI will be slightly less dangerous than the Chinese one, so it is morally imperative that we get there first", is a decent enough rationalization to do AI research, and now that you're the Good Guys for doing exciting AI research, you try to make it blandly but profitably inoffensive.
Advertising it as something that provides information might weaken their defense positions in the cases about hallucinated libel. Or they are afraid of this outcome. Trying to describe how to use it properly and what the true strengths are — this can make a compelling _and_ safe deployment story. But they might be afraid of scaring away the subscribers attracted by the aura of magic. So, «HeadOn: apply directly to the forehead».
Is being a math professor at a top university significantly less demanding of a job than I'm imagining?
How can China be 'stagnating' with a higher growth rate than the US?
How do you know what China's growth rate is, and how confident are you in this answer?
If we're not confident of what China's true growth rate, then confidence that they are "firmly in the middle income trap" makes no sense.
agreed.
I think we can be fairly confident (given the incentives) that the figures which the CCP reports are upper bounds on the size and growth of the Chinese economy. But how much space there is between the reported figures and reality I have no idea.
It's not clear that their growth rate is actually still higher than the US. It probably was until some time in the past year or two, and probably will be again in a few years, but it may well not be right now.
China is collapsing at a rate of approximately 5.5% growth per year.
How do you know what China's growth rate is, and how confident are you in this answer?
I Googled it and very.
Anyway here is the guardian which says 6.3%
https://amp.theguardian.com/business/2023/jul/17/china-gdp-growth-down-economy-june-quarter-gross-domestic-profit
Also the economist admits to 6.3% a year before editorialising about “annualised growth rates”.
https://www.economist.com/finance-and-economics/2023/07/17/how-much-trouble-is-chinas-economy-in
All growth rates (reported by google, the Economist, the guardian etc) are based on data supplied by the CCP. If you are very confident, I suggest your confidence is misplaced.
I think given the incentives it is probable that CCP data overstates PRC growth rates. By how much...I have no idea.
As for not trusting the Chinese figures - if we don’t accept the stats we can’t say anything at all about China.
However China is the one reporting the slow down to 0.8% this quarter, and therefore the quarterly reports show relative slowdowns and increases.
(I think China is in fact much richer than the actual statistics suggest. Its main cities seem up there with the west, but somehow that is not apparent in the statistics.)
NB I've seen analyses attempting to estimate Chinese GDP without relying on CCP figures, by using instead stuff like nighttime light output (as detected by satellites), which correlates tightly with GDP in the rest of the world. These kinds of analyses generally end up concluding that total PRC GDP is overstated by a factor of 2-3. But my level of confidence in these kinds of analyses is low. About as low as my confidence in CCP statistics.
The last bit is easy to explain. The third world is full of first world pockets. In China those pockets might even have grown to city size. But national statistics average over the whole country (including the rural hinterlands).
What incentive would CCP apparatchiks have to underreport their economic figures?
The economist used to be good.
The Chinese statistics office actually expected 5% a year this year, not 10%. In fact that’s their long term goal not the old export led growth of 10%.
The economist gets 3% from taking the quarterly statistic from a weak quarter and assuming that that continues. In other words the 3% is a projection from now assuming 0.8% in the next 3 quarters.
It’s not the actual annual growth rate to now (6.3%) or even the potential calendar growth rate, because the first quarter was higher. (That would be 4.6% even if the next quarters are as weak as this one, because the 1Q results are locked in. )
If the economist had annualised the first quarter growth (of 2.2%) it would have said that China would grow at 9% a year. I don’t think anybody wrote that article at the time.
Not that the slowdown isn’t important, it might be, but it probably isn’t.
I'd be very careful with premature conclusions. There was a similar crisis situation in 2015; that time it was stock market, now real estate, which is more serious, but still, it tells us something they managed to solve that without much damage.
Here's an as-good-as-anything write-up on the topic: https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/why-chinas-economy-ran-off-the-rails
Summary: a classic real estate bubble inflated to an insane level.
Wasn't the solution there, though, just the state pumping money into it? I guess if it works for the USA, there's no reason China can't go for the "it is impossible to default, they can just print more currency/sell more debt" fix too.
I think China is hitting the logical end point of the economic boom. All the low-hanging fruit has been well and truly plucked, they've caught up as much as possible, now they have to deal with "we are no longer a source of cheap labour, other growing economies are replacing us there" growing pains.
I mean, when it comes to "country able to build decently working car", you still cannot find cheaper labor than in China.
Thailand screws together some decent Hondas. South Africa makes BMWs. Vietnamese-made Vinfasts are supposedly okay (on a par with Chinese cars at least). Tesla is building a factory in Indonesia.
All of these places have a lower per capita GDP than the PRC which I'm guessing translates to cheaper factory labour.
I guess the obvious starting point to me is to start keeping track of what decisions and tradeoffs you find yourself making. Each decision is a data point, and with enough of them you can narrow down what function is generating them.
Pretty cool, metriod ambience. Do you post to youtube?
It was not so much that so many babies died on her shift as that a weirdly high number of deaths occurred among babies who hitherto had been showing no cause for concern. There was then positive postmortem evidence of intervention eg of injection of insulin at a time when insulin wasn't being used in the treatment of any child on the ward.
One can't of course really take a view without having sat through the trial but the evidence was rather more than the statistical patterns.
True, but the stats are impressive in their own right. Out of 26 suspicious incidents, Letby was the only member of staff present for them all, more than double her closest competitor - and that's just the data from the trial. Operation Hummingbird is now entering phase 2 and they are looking at her whole career. Reminds me of Shipman where he was found guilty of 7 murders and then the inquiry was launched and it turned out it was hundreds of murders over decades. Letby is only 33 and I assume she had to be more careful than Shipman because of her client group, who are more closely monitored than the elderly, but I predict the inquiry will conclude:
- at least 20 murders including convictions (80%)
- at least 30 attempted murders including convictions (disregarding the not guilty verdicts) (60%)
Her guilt seems clear cut, firstly because in a search of her house the police found diaries covering the relevant periods with all kinds of bizarre heavily underscored entries along the lines of "I hate myself for what I've done" and similar.
A very charitable interpretation for her diary entries would have been that she had taken it upon herself to shoulder blame for mishaps that had occurred naturally, as sometimes happens with premature babies. But the police search also uncovered resuscitation notes she had taken from the hospital for the infants who had died, and one can only assume those were to be mementos as serial killers often keep.
Despite her generally calm and friendly demeanor, she had also made bizarre and inappropriate comments to the parents of the children who died.
Also, I think the symptoms of some of the babies before they died indicated that air had been introduced into their blood stream, and post mortems may even have confirmed that (not sure). So clearly someone with access to the neonatal wards in the hospital had been tampering with the patients, and Letby was the only person on duty when all the incidents occurred, and off duty when they didn't!
Several doctors had noticed this and demanded the hospital management suspend Letby from nursing duties while an investigation was conducted. But the manager ignored their requests, and even asked them to apologise! Maybe a bit contentious, but it appears to me this was less about preserving the hospital's reputation, as the MSM have mostly assumed, and more a show of solidarity against what the (female) manager stupidly assumed was unfair male persecution.
Besides the families of the dead infants of course, I feel sorry for Letby's parents. However many people she killed, two more innocents have undoubtedly had their lives irretrievably destroyed.
"Besides the families of the dead infants of course, I feel sorry for Letby's parents. However many people she killed, two more innocents have undoubtedly had their lives irretrievably destroyed."
Honestly, there seems to be something very odd about them as well.
The parents got involved with her employer when the hospital attempted to investigate Letby in 2017. Letby would have been 27 at the time. If she'd been 18-20 I'd understand, but the parents of a fully grown woman threatening to refer the hospital to the General Medical Council is bizarre.
Additionally, when Letby was arrested in 2018, her mother told the police 'I did it, take me instead'. Either deeply weird or just extremely melodramatic (the woman was accused of murdering her infant charges, not theft or something).
Charitably, the parents are what sounds like a particularly obnoxious mixture of overbearing and histrionic, her father handling her grievance process smacks of a perceived immaturity on her behalf. Armchair psychology, but it does seems somewhat enabling behaviour.
According to the Guardian, the manager (chief executive) who told the doctors to apologize was called Tony Chambers and was presumably male.
”Another executive, Tony Chambers, then the hospital’s chief executive, instructed senior doctors to write a letter of apology to Letby on 26 January 2017 for repeatedly raising concerns about her. The apology was ordered on the basis of two external reviews, which executives felt exonerated Letby.”
I based my fact in that regard on a Mail Online article dated today:
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-12427079/Senior-NHS-manager-ignored-warnings-Lucy-Letby-director-nursing-baby-killers-hospital-suspended-allegations-murder-trial.html
I presume, Alison Kelly, the senior manager the Mail Article identifies, reported to Tony Chambers, and he took her side without making further enquiries.
There are more administrators than medical staff in the bloated, useless NHS. So I can quite believe there were several management levels between the two, making it even less likely he had a clue what was really going on.
https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2023/aug/19/doctors-were-forced-to-apologise-for-raising-alarm-over-lucy-letby-and-baby-deaths
According to this a lot of managers were involved and Chambers spent hours interviewing the nurse and her father, so he seems to have been quite involved. —
”
These reviews were considered by executives to clear Letby of any wrongdoing and they decided in January 2017 that she should return to the neonatal unit, documents show.
Bereaved parents were told the following month that the reviews had not found any suspicious circumstances in their babies’ deaths.
In a meeting called to discuss these reports on 26 January 2017, Chambers said he had spent hours talking to Letby and her father and that he believed she was innocent, according to internal documents seen by the Guardian and interviews with two paediatric consultants, Dr Steve Brearey and Dr John Gibbs.
Chambers then ordered the consultants to apologise to Letby and said she would return to work on the unit imminently. In the event, she did not return to the neonatal unit and a police investigation began four months later.
Gibbs told the Guardian: “To be told what the reviews showed without having seen them at all was a bit surprising, and then to be told we were to draw a line under the matter and that was it, and then to be instructed to send a letter of apology to Lucy Letby was just flabbergasting.”
Gibbs, who gave evidence 13 times at Letby’s trial, said senior doctors had started to “think the unthinkable” in suspecting foul play but that “I don’t think the management could accept that”.
After Letby’s removal from the unit in July 2016 there were discussions about contacting the police but the hospital decided to carry out two external reviews first.
Brearey said that on one occasion, Stephen Cross, the hospital’s director of corporate affairs and legal services, said contacting the police would be “terrible” for the hospital’s reputation and turn the neonatal unit into a crime scene.
”
Circumstantial evidence can be just fine. lots of people get convicted on the basis of it, because criminals tend to go out of their way not to do things in front of witnesses.
She wrote on a note " I killed them on purpose because I'm not good enough to care for them." That is not circumstantial.
The article you link to has very serious issues, starting with the extraordinary disclaimer at the start.
As a UK person I have followed the case on and off. I don't have any doubt at all about her guilt.
She has just been sentenced to a whole life order. In the UK murder always gets life imprisonment, but usually with a recommendation of the possibility of release on parole after 15-30 years. Whole life means prison till you die.
I'd have sworn I read (or heard in a video) that there was a blood test which could tell whether insulin was made by the baby or given from an external source, but I can't find the reference.
According to BBC Panorama, if the body produces insulin, there is another chemical it produces at the same time, so you can test for this. If there is insulin but not the other, then it must have come from outside the body.
Thank you. Here's the article.
https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-66120934
Somewhat relatedly, Kathleen Folbigg was recently pardoned and released from prison after 20 years here in Australia. She had been convicted of killing her 4 children.
The case against her was largely built on the improbability that 4 children all spontaneously died for no apparent reason. Later, it was discovered that the children may have shared a rare genetic mutation.
I don’t know anything about this British case, but I will simply say that the standard of “beyond reasonable doubt” is intentionally extremely high for very good reasons, and courts and juries that fudge it risk committing horrible injustices.