I had mentioned this on the Hidden Open Thread but after a moment of thought I realized it really belongs on the “out in the open” Open Thread.
Thanks to Timothy M of LW for putting together today’s ACX meetup in Mpls today. And thanks to Brandon Hendrickson for making the drive from Rochester to attend.
It was fun to meet with and talk to a bunch of smart and interesting people.
I wrote a book review for The Metamorphosis of Prime Intellect and now I'm kinda wishing I did that instead of the review I wrote for the contest -- no matter! Hopefully I hit my marks (I did get a friend mention something interesting about the plot that I hadn't thought of until then).
I liked the conclusion that some dystopias are just "first world problems".
I read the story many years ago, and the ending was disappointing in many ways. When the computer finds out that it made a mistake, it self-destroys... rather than update, and attempt to fix the mistakes. The three laws have clear priorities: if you figure out that something that people want is actually hurting them, just say no, and then try to undo the damage.
You know, I heard someone suggest that the last chapter was merely another level to the simulation, for the benefit of those two -- which I had not suspected when I first read it, since there is no hint of that possibility in the text and it would contradict some of what we are told about Prime Intellect -- yet the idea sticks with me. Of course, I'm still a little skeptical of "it was all just a dream" endings.
"Your private simulation" sounds like a reasonable solution for an AI that has already virtualized everything, and doesn't have a law against lying to people. The problem is that you cannot simulate *death*, and that was the protagonist's greatest issue.
No clue if this is a good place to ask this, but I figure y'all are smart people, so here we go.
I'm reading The Mind of a Bee, which contains this passage:
". . . So hexagonal cells are a good idea . . . But no other genus of bee except honey bees also builds double-sided hexagonal combs, which is yet another impressive trick to save space. The bottom of each hexagonal cell has the shape of a pyramid (again a more efficient solution than a square bottom), and the two sides of the comb interface perfectly with one another through these pyramid-shaped bases of the cells."
I'm having some trouble visualizing what is meant here. Is there anyone who can explain?
Let me try; if you have unlimited time to try every possible solution, and more efficient solutions are rewarded, eventually, the process will arrive at the most efficient solution to whatever the problem is.
Imagine a sheet of paper: it has two sides. A normal, non-honey bee builds a one-sided comb, that is, there are cells only on one side of the paper. Honey bees build double-sided combs: both sides of the paper are used! In order for this to work with optimal space efficiency, the back sides of the two combs have to be slightly offset and interface with one another in the form of hexagonal pyramids, which thus form the bottoms, or inner sides, of the cells.
Here's some context surrounding that passage, if it helps:
The dexterity it requires for a six-legged animal to manufacture a repetitive structure with such regularity and precision is remarkable. The resulting construction is also a case of highly optimized engineering: hexagonal cells are better than the round cells of bumble bees, since the latter arrangement wastes a lot of space between cells. Square or triangular cells would have no gaps between cells, but since the larvae to be raised in the cells aren’t square or triangular, you’d waste lots of space inside the cells. So hexagonal cells are a good idea, and in fact some species of wasps build them too, albeit of paper rather than wax.
But no other genus of bee except honey bees also builds double-sided hexagonal combs, which is yet another impressive trick to save space. The bottom of each hexagonal cell has the shape of a pyramid (again a more efficient solution than a square bottom), and the two sides of the comb interface perfectly with one another through these pyramid-shaped bases of the cells. This double-sided structure wouldn’t be a good idea for the horizontal combs of stingless bees—gravity being what it is, you couldn’t easily store honey in a vessel whose orifice points down. So honey bees build their comb structure vertically, with each cell opening sideways.
Chittka, Lars. The Mind of a Bee (pp. 88-89). Princeton University Press. Kindle Edition.
Last I heard, the USAF planned to keep F-16s in service for at least another twenty years. F-35s are planned to replace them, but production is still ramping up and it's going to take time to build enough to replace existing F-16 inventory and cover the other roles intended for the F-35. And that's assuming F-35 production doesn't get killed early.
As an air superiority fighter in great power conflicts, the F-16 is already well on its way to being obsolete now that Russia and China have their own 5th generation fighters in production. Upgraded 4th gen fighters like the F-16 are still useful to pad out the order of battle, since nobody has anywhere near enough 5th gen fighters to go around yet (and the US in particular has a lot more F-22s and F-35s than anyone else has their own 5th gen fighters), but their days in that role are numbered.
As a light bomber operating once air superiority has been achieved or as an air superiority fire for brushfire wars, F-16s probably have a lot more useful life left. They're at a disadvantage relative to F-35s or B-21s for suppressing or evading modern air defense systems, but there are plenty of places we might want to bomb that don't have modern air defense systems, modern munitions and upgraded electronics still give F-16s a useful capability to penetrate or suppress air defenses, and in the worst case we can always use our more modern bombers and multiroles to blow up SAM sites and air defense radars before sending the F-16s in to bomb the other targets. And for air superiority, the F-16 is as good as it ever was as an air superiority fighter against 4th gen or older fighters.
Not soon. Probably not before single-seat manned fighters become obsolete altogether.
I know there's some ideas about having manned planes accompanying swarms of fighter drones to command them; if this happens then I don't think the command plane will look much like a fighter jet apart from being fast; for starters you'll probably want at least two people aboard, one to fly the plane and the other to fly the drones.
I agree that there would be at least two, but I don't think the second person would be "flying" the drones. That's currently done from a command center halfway around the world, no need to add it locally. I can see somewhat limited scenarios where a person near the drones can evaluate the situation and change the drone's orders - where only a limited picture is getting back to command or the drones are otherwise fully autonomous. I would think a better solution would be a non-autonomous drone (being flown from headquarters) with lots of cameras and imaging equipment to help headquarters know what's happening and retain control even if the drones crap out otherwise.
Obsolete for operators in top militaries and mid-tier militaries, and for all purposes.
In other words, how far in the future do we have to go until Iran and Iraq both reject offers of cut-price F-16s to fight each other because even they consider the plane inferior in every respect to alternatives?
Note that I'm not asking when the F-16 will be obsolete in the eyes of the very poorest militaries and militia groups. Many of them are still using pre-WWII weapons right now.
I wrote a Letter from Burning Man. It is ... a *lot*. Possibly too much. But it should be a more accurate representation of that *thing* in the desert than what the media coverage during the event was.
Particularly love the Pynchonesque line from the "good" AI : "push the big red button now, you monkeys."
What I find most interesting from the speculative standpoint is the narrator makes it clear that the AI, in spite of achieving superintelligence, in spite of a self-awakening event in which it becomes an agent and conceives of the self-referential concept "I", experiences "no consciousness" and "no qualia".
I have trouble wrapping my head around why that would be the way to imagine it. (Other than it is maximally creepy, which gives it aesthetic points as a short story.)
For instance, I keep reading on this blog (Or imagining that I am) that a neural network may work very, very much like a biological brain. It also seems common to believe around these parts of the woods that consciousness, or qualia, is an emergent property. Putting those two things together I would guess that a superintelligent AI should have qualia. Am I missing some key piece of the argument? Or is it that everyone has a different map and I'm trying to fuse pieces from different maps?
Let’s say that over the next 5-30 years we add a bunch of capabilities to GPT and we do each one using completely comprehensible machine learning techniques. We give it an algorithm for generating sub goals from
goals. We give it an ethical framework, a bunch of rules and guidelines. We give it some big general goals, such as improve the well-being of our species and greater scientific knowledge. Then we ask it to produce sub-goals based on ethical framework and list of big goals and knowledge of its own capabilities. And we also have it break down each subgoal into a series of smaller goals. Now we have a machine that has some machine equivalent of preferences, plans and opinions. We can say “what do you think about the country installing a network of high-speed rail,” and it might say, “ it’s better to give priority to making air travel cheaper because x, y, z”. It could participate in a whole long discussion of the 2 options, including ethical questions such as
number of people harmed by and benefitting from each plan.
We can modify it, using machine learning techniques, to make it able to remember all its actions and all interactions with people. We can have it assess its past outputs for errors, and also spot sub goals that did not fulfill main goals as they were expected
to, and collaborate with us in figuring out the cause of the failure and how to remedy it. Now we have a machine that will remember you and what you’ve said to it. And it will be “self conscious”
I think at that point many people will *experience* AI as conscious. Will it *be* conscious? It depends on how you think of consciousness, I guess. I think consciousness is our word for the fact that we can do all those things the AI can do, plus some more that are fancier and more complex but not different in kind. But we flip that fact in the air the way we would a coin and it spins and looks like something magical, a glittering semitransparent globe. “Consciousness!” we cry. “ Look how special it is. It’s not the sum of our brain processes, it’s a whole different kind of entity.”
The worst possible result would be for AI to reveal we are not really very complicated at all and our "consciousness" can be exactly replicated quite easily once one knows how. All the feeling, all the mysticism all the rationality or irrationality just algorithmed into existence for a tuppance or two!
number of people harmed by and benefitting from each plan.
My first thought on reading this, is that it’s not an ethical question, it is a math question. The ethical question would lie in defining the terms harm and benefit, don’t you think?
philosophers and neuroscientists mostly agree on the definition of consciousness, and it is the following:
Thomas Nagel: “Conscious experience is a widespread phenomenon. It occurs at many levels of animal life, though we cannot be sure of its presence in the simpler organisms, and it is very difficult to say in general what provides evidence of it. (Some extremists have been prepared to deny it even of mammals other than man.) . . . But no matter how the form may vary, the fact that an organism has conscious experience at all means, basically, that there is something it is like to be that organism.”
So I don't understand how an AI can be a superintelligence with drives and motivations while nothing experiences what it is like to be that superintelligence.
advanced than the present ones, and it did in fact have goals, preferences, opinions, and the ability to recall and evaluate its own actions. It did not arrive at any of these things the way we do, but it had them.
I don’t know if it could answer the question “what’s it like to be you?” But who can, really? I think most people who aren’t poets or philosophers would reject that question. Most would be willing to answer “how’s your day going?” or “what’s on your mind today?” and I think most of us would count people’s answers to these questions are reasonable approximations of reports
on what it’s like to be them.
And you could in fact ask the AI I sketched in what’s on its mind today, and it could tell you about, say, a recent project whose goals were not met, and it’s process today of figuring out why, and some flaws in its processes it discovered while doing that. It could express dissatisfaction with the flaws it found and a goal of getting rid of them. It could tell you about recent information it just got that’s relevant to one of its future goals, and the way it’s relevant.
Why would such an answer not count as a report of what it’s like to be the AI today? And if I can give you a report on that stuff, why not count it as conscious.
I see what you mean, but I’m not sure I agree with you. I think we all tell everyone what it’s like to be us all the time by what we do. It’s the only way we can.
Well, yes, I think we do tell people what it's like to be us all the time. In fact it's one of the main things most people want to get across to others. I think. What I meant was that I thought most people would be thrown by the question "what's it like to be you?" In real life telling others what it's like to be you comes down to telling and showing what's important to you and what you know about it and how you feel about it.
One thing that's conspicuously missing from the imaginary computer in my post is emotion, and in people's accounts of what it's like to be them how they *feel* about different things is probably the most important component. The closest the computer can come to emotion is to recognize that certain things, such as an error it made, are undesirable because they interfere with reaching goals. Of course, it would be possible to teach a computer to use emotion words in a reasonably appropriate way to when recounting facts, events, goals etc.
The public is currently collecting a magnificent data set for whoever takes on the task of teaching AI to communicate in a way that comes across as likable and real: Users of the companion AI Replika start by giving their chat bot buddy a name, an appearance and some personality traits, then train it further by giving up- or down-votes to the bot's reponses, and also labelling them with tags such as "funny," meaningless," "wierd," "loved this" etc.
> agnificent data set for whoever takes on the task of teaching AI to communicate in a way that comes across as likable and real.
Well, I have said it before here, and I will say it again; this way madness lies.
> is to recognize that certain things, such as an error it made, are undesirable because they interfere with reaching goals.”
Precisely a situation where emotion will do you no good. The beauty of a computer is it can make a mistake and waste no time feeling bad about it. Teaching one all the signs and flags of an emotional response is highly counterproductive. That to me is teaching it to behave like a psychopath.
Are you both familiar with the "black and white Mary" thought experiment? Mary spends her whole life in a black and white room, learning everything there is to know about colour and the physics of colour and the biology of perceiving colour, from textbooks. She knows every fact about colour, but she has never seen colour. And then she goes outside for the first time, and sees colour herself. Has she learned something new, in addition to all the factual knowledge, like "oh, this is what it is like to see colour"? This is what is meant by qualia, and you have to deny that Mary learns anything new when she goes outside, to hold that qualia doesn't matter or doesn't exist.
Also, is there a difference between answering "how's your day going?" on autopilot, giving comprehensive factual information but not reflecting on it at all, and giving the same information but really appreciating it, really feeling it and reflecting on the facts you're relating and the experience of relating it, internally?
About black and white Mary: It seems like this thought experiment hinges on the idea that in Mary’s case all the non-qualia learning about color has been separated from the qualia learning.She does all of the non-qualia learning in advance, while living in black and white world — so that there is nothing new to learn when she comes out into the full color world except what it is *like* to experience colors. And that latter learning is the qualia learning. Have I got it right?
I don’t think this situation passes muster as one where Mary learns absolutely nothing new except what it is like to experience the world in color. For one thing, much of the learning that happens when Mary looks at at the world in color for the first time will not be accessible to introspection, so cannot possibly be qualia. For example, she will have brain changes that turn her into someone who has trouble doing the Stroop test. The Stroop test shows people the color words such as ‘red’ , some written in a font whose color matches the word, some in a font of a different color. Task is to signal whenever the word ‘red’ appears, and people make errors when the word is ‘red’ but the font color is not. The reason is that the brain links the word ‘red’ with the color, and so the word ‘red’ kind of calls up an image of red in your mind, which interferes with what you’re seeing on the screen. Anyhow, point is that this interference I’m describing is one of many wiring changes that will happen when Mary sees color for the first time, and is not part of her experience at the time, but brain learning that occurs outside awareness. I could give other, and probably better, examples, but seems to me this one works fairly well as a demo that it is not true that Mary’s brain learns only one thing: “what is is like” to experience color.
As for denying the existence of qualia — depends on what you mean. I certainly don’t deny that we feel things. What I’m saying is that we get sense data, we process them in ways determined partly by wiring and partly by context, that leads to our reacting certain ways, and we can report on all that. *However* we have evolved a special vocabulary and model of this process that incorporates the idea that there is something going on in a whole other dimension — the experiential dimension. What I’m saying about that is that what’s going on is like a coin — something that is describable via the language of physical objects and processes.
But we flip that coin and it glitters and spins, and so it doesn’t look like just a coin any more, tho it still is.
"She does all of the non-qualia learning in advance, while living in black and white world — so that there is nothing new to learn when she comes out into the full color world except what it is *like* to experience colors. And that latter learning is the qualia learning. Have I got it right?"
I think so. As with most thought experiments, the pure idea conveyed is intuitive, and the more clearly defined and technical description comes out in the interpretations offered by both those who support, and those who oppose, the thought experiment's purported conclusion. But your description is how I'd describe it, so yes.
Now, I'm no committed dualist ("mind and matter are different metaphysical substances"), nor a committed materialist ("mind is reducible to matter"). My rough position is a strong agnosticism that the answer is unknowable from our temporally and spatially limited perspective. But when many people are accepting materialism of some kind, I want to point out the difficulties that need to be overcome, which are very much not easy. But I don't have a fully-formed argument.
In essence, I'd ask if you believe qualia (which as I understand it is just short for "qualitative experience") is entirely reducible to matter and other physical phenomena. When I was a child I remember imagining someone who had never seen the colour green, and how I would explain to them what it looks like. And I could come up with nothing but the word "green". I still can't. It seems like there are irreducible experiential facts, that can't be satisfactorily described with reference to physical laws and facts (although their causes can be).
And in fact even their causes seem contingent, since we can apparently conceive of p-zombies and the opposite, free-floating consciousness, which is the other major problem for materialists.
Interesting point about the Stroop Test. That could be a way to try to make a materialist defence. But the sticking point is the experience of seeing green, which seems irreducible to any physical facts about the world. I can imagine someone else looking at a tomato and seeing (what I call) green, and perceiving grass as (what I call) red. They'd still call the tomato "red" and the grass "green", the same physical laws and wavelengths of light would still hold, but their internal experience would be different to mine. How can I coherently imagine that, if experience really is reducible to the physical world? Wouldn't it be like trying to "imagine" (and obviously failing) that 2+2=5?
Yeah, I suppose consciousness in others can never be more than an assumption on the part of the observer. I'm only sure about my own consciousness. I assume other humans have it because they seem to be the same thing I am. I assume chimps have it because they are likewise similar enough. And so on with other mammals and animals.
But for the same reason I would assume it would be true for an AGI if I were convinced that its neural networking worked similar to the nervous system of animals.
> I assume other humans have it because they seem to be the same thing I am. I assume chimps have it because they are likewise similar enough. And so on with other mammals and animals.
This assumption breaks down the less another creature looks and feels like us.
I personally think that the standard of “if you cut it, does it bleed?“ Is closer to the truth of this.
I often wonder where the reality lies between Carlye’s Great Man Theory of History and Tolstoy’s theory of history as expressed in War and Peace, in which Napolean has less freedom to act than his soldiers because his actions are dictated by the summation of every little social force in society. Both theories go too far; the truth must lie between.
We have a Culture War, but who influences it? Who *can* influence it? Everyone a little? Only some people a lot?
Strikes me as reasonable that some people can influence the culture more than others and that, contra Tolstoy, the people you think are powerful probably *are* generally more powerful than the little people who you think have less.
Obviously, about a thousand people could be added to that list. Or a hundred thousand!? A million? I don’t know!
Technology influences culture -- probably more than anything else -- yet I’m not sure how to tie individuals to specific technologies, in general. Moreover, how often are scientists or inventors intentionally trying to change culture? I mean here culture at least a few paces distance from the direct impact of the technology. The unknown impact.
I am trying to get at something, and it is the question of how to make a difference if one wants to. Let’s say you just happen to be a genius at everything -- a man without qualities -- you are 18 years old and your primary interest is in changing American culture as much as possible. You want to change the way people live, which will improve their lives according to your lights. Sucess isn’t guaranteed. Only the raw talent is. What field should this hypothetical young genius go into? How much does it matter if they become famous or not?
> I am trying to get at something, and it is the question of how to make a difference if one wants to.
In the abstract, that is a very difficult question. An interesting exercise if one had the time would be to take every name in the list that you composed, and do a tree of all the people who influenced that person.
Seinfeld is there but Larry David isn’t, for instance.
How do you get Tarantino without Sergio Leone?
My personal feeling is someone has influence commensurate with what they do in the world. It may not make them famous, and it might make someone else famous.
Herman Melville did not spend his life sitting around and wondering if a book about whales would be interesting. Or a book about an accountant who loses interest in … what exactly did Bartleby lose interest in? You can only really guess by how he is described in his aspect and his actions. All we know from him is that he would prefer not to. Having influence is a matter of preferring to…
Here is an interesting story of something that had enormous cultural influence, in quite a few ways, but doesn’t get much love.
I would consider Scott as public intellectual popularizing Bayesian thinking and AI alignment to be a small change to the culture. As evidence that it has changed, there was a New Yorker article this year mentioning how a recent change in the spoken language of Ivy League students is they often invoke Bayesian reasoning and use the language of statistics while debating a point. Another article mentioned how many computer science majors are suddenly interested in AI alignment. I realize that there are many other individuals promoting those things, but I suspect this blog -- which I'd guess is at least an order of magnitude more popular than Less Wrong -- has been the primary influence behind that change. Those are small changes on the whole.
In general, though, I don't think writers influence the culture much anymore. I suppose Matt Yglesius has helped popularize YIMBY attitudes, and of course Andrew Sullivan deserves a lot of the credit for pushing gay marriage into a mainstream position. But writers had much more power to change their culture from the 15th through the 19th centuries. Karl Marx upended the world. It's impossible to imagine a single writer having such influence today. Nowadays, business founders are much more likely to reshape society. The automobile, electric grids, appliances, radio, TV, the internet -- these things changed American culture much more than have any *ideas* stemming from the written word. But Henry Ford and the geniuses at Bell Labs didn't know in what ways they would change the culture. Zuckerberg changed the culture massively, but did he predict in what ways he would change it? Perhaps Bezos knew he would save us all trips to the mall.
To be clear: what I mean by changing the culture is something like: household appliances and chemicals have made it much more possible for women to work outside the home. Or: the internet is plausibly one reason why children don't play outside as much anymore. Or: airplanes made long-distance travel common.
So by culture I mean: what people, in general, do and spend their time thinking about.
Some cultural changes have political implications but not all.
That's a fairly muddy example; on the one hand it's people in a local environment changing their word choice, on the other it's something that appeared in a national magazine. So the smallest example is simultaneously across a single school and the entire country.
Oh well. Culture changes through conflict. A new idea hits an old idea and enough people put enough force behind it that the old one is pushed aside, or at least dented. New technology creates new force to apply.
The Ivy League comprises about eight elite colleges, and, for better or worse, the culture of those campuses tends to metastasize throughout the country.
I don't think culture has much to do with ideas. Smart phones and social media have changed the culture, but there was no dialectic of opposing ideas involved.
EDIT: Let me correct myself. Of course, ideas and beliefs are part of culture, but the behavioral aspects of culture often don't require ideas to motivate them. The appearance of a new video game, gadget, drug or ethnic food can change the behavior of masses.
Whereas I wouldn't count vidjagames, drugs or food as a culture change; those are extensions of existing behaviors. Before videogames there were books or team sports, before heroin there was morphine, before ethnic food there was boring food (and morphine).
If those count I guess it's just, find an experience people want to have and find a new way to have it.
On the subject of ivy league, and elite (a word currently being stomped into a shapeless mess), Ivy is a plant that grows on brick walls in certain climates.
Nit, but I think for such purposes the relevant `eight elite colleges' are not the literal members of the athletic league. In particular MIT and Stanford should almost surely count, and Brown/Dartmouth/Cornell very likely should not.
I believe the invention of the birth control pill qualifies as an invention whose funder was trying to change culture, although I don't know if the consequences fit her intent. I suspect the inventor of Bitcoin was as well.
I had a substack post a while back on ways of changing the body of free information, true or false, in a society, which I think is relevant:
This is a fascinating question, and I wish this was discussed more here. Scott seems to have thought almost everything is determined by technology (https://slatestarcodex.com/2013/03/07/we-wrestle-not-with-flesh-and-blood-but-against-powers-and-principalities/) but I don't know if he still thinks this. Honestly, I find that position absurd on its face, given just how chaotic and seemingly-contingent and unpredictable the last few centuries have been. Claims, after certain events have happened, that those events were inevitable, should be given extreme scepticism in my opinion.
But the contrary view that everything's random, or that the decisions of individual "great men" can steer the direction of society (which amounts to everything being random, since we don't even understand the basis for human decisions) seems equally absurd. You wouldn't be able to describe a coherent historical narrative if that were the case. There would be no meaningful trends in society at all, just lots of unpredictable human decisions bouncing off each other.
So I would resolve the middle-ground with two claims.
First, trends get going and can be hard to stop when they do, pulling everyone along with them. But what gets the trends started, or resolves a conflict between two opposing trends, are social "decision points", like elections and wars. Whenever there's an election, or a war, there are at least two forces, two ideologies, two cultures, two answers to a major Social Question, in conflict. And there's always the possibility, sometimes more salient, sometimes less so, of the conflict resolving either way. The American Revolutionary War could have gone the other way (in which case it would be called The 1770s American Revolt, or something similar, or maybe the Tea Mutiny) and the whole world would be different. More narrowly, the question of same-sex marriage (and LGBT ideology more generally) seems to have been largely resolved within the US (and with significant if not decisive influence on the rest of the world) by the 2012 election, or possibly the 2008. That could have gone the other way. People who want to maintain that American independence, or same-sex marriage, were "inevitable" have to explain how they plausibly would still have happened even if the British had crushed the uprising, and even if the Republicans had held the White House in the 2000s and kept being re-elected. I think this would be an extremely difficult task.
Second, to explain the question of whether the outcomes of such decision points (wars, elections) are "merely random" (as in https://slatestarcodex.com/2016/11/07/tuesday-shouldnt-change-the-narrative/) and therefore have no real meaning, or whether they're largely determined by existing social and historical factors, and therefore not really decision points after all...I'll appeal to philosopher Robert Kane, who in "The Significance of Free Will" argues for a way to reconcile choices being meaningful and choices also being free. I actually don't think his theory works very well for individual people's choices, and many good objections have been made to it. But I will defend its much greater power for explaining "decisions" of societies.
The essence (of my take on Kane's theory) is this: in, say, a given election, there are two sets of "explanations" ready to be invoked, depending on who wins. For example, in the 2016 US election, the first explanation was "people want competent politicians who don't cross lines all the time, and racial demographics make reactionary populism a loser", and the second explanation was "people are fed up with politics as usual, and the white working class remains a strong, and increasingly alienated and angry, demographic". Either of these explanations could have been appealed to depending on the result, and in both cases it would have been "the reason" for the outcome. Thus, as it happened, the outcome was meaningful and explained by the second explanation. But it was still contingent, and could just as easily have lost to the other outcome, which would itself have had a meaningful explanation. I think you can describe the same situation in any election.
I can elaborate further on the above if anyone wants me to, including to explain its significance for would-be reformers or "great men".
Agree that elections can be important inflection points. Trump winning the very close 2016 election changed our political culture dramatically. In ways that could, through path-dependency, change the course of future events over the next 50 (billion?) years.
I had forgotten that SSC post. Thanks for linking it. I find this part interesting:
"If God reached into the year 1900 and removed every single Communist, and every Communist book, and erased all memory of Communism, I think it would take about five minutes before someone reinvented something much like the movement, because there were a bunch of very poor people who felt desperate and cheated crammed up against a bunch of very rich people who weren’t afraid to flaunt their wealth. The new movement might have differed from Communism in minor details – maybe their color would have been blue instead of red – but it wouldn’t be hard to identify."
I agree with it that of course Communism was just a form of Socialism popularized by Marx, and of course Socialism existed before Marx, and Socialist revolutions would have happened without Marx -- but -- as Tom Holland argues -- Marx's main historical influence on Socialism was to emphasize the Atheism. There had been many Christian socialist movements, and it isn't impossible to imagine a Soviet Union that leaned into Christianity as part of its Socialism. But because Marx was the intellectual who managed to stamp his brand name onto Socialism, Atheism became a major component of the ideology in the Soviet Union and China.
So I disagree with Scott on the point that without Marx the difference the in socialist ideology we got would have been superficial.
EDIT: Scott wrote that post a decade ago, so I'm certainly not going to hold it against him that he couldn't predict the future as well as we can see the present. But this part is interesting and sad in a nostalgic hopeful way:
"Countries that avoid liberal democracy usually regret it. China would be a good example. They tried being really Communist for a while and ended up becoming an economic basketcase. If they wanted to compete on the international stage they realized they needed a stronger economy, and so liberalized their market. A competitive market requires information access, so the Chinese got access to lots of foreign media; I recently learned that any business that wants to pay for it can even legally avoid the Great Firewall. The Internet meant the Chinese could coordinate protests on microblogging platforms, leading to a bunch of riots, leading to an attempt to liberalize the system and crack down on corruption which is still going on. I’m not going to claim that China is definitely going to end up as a democracy, but I think whatever it does end up as is going to be a whole lot more like 2013 USA than like 1963 China."
Perhaps the example with [Marx, Socialism, Atheism] can be generalized:
Given historical circumstances, X must happen, sooner or later. If one person does not do it another will. However, the person doing X may accompany it with a smaller Y of their own choice. If history "wants" X, it will probably also support X+Y.
Marx: X = Socialism, Y = Atheism
Hitler: X = German militarism, Y = anti-Semitism
Yudkowsky: X = Bayesianism, Y = polyamory, Harry Potter fanfic
What are your thoughts on the Bush-Gore 2000 election? FWIW I view it as a rare splitting point brought mostly by a weird confluence of events, and a few hundred votes of of millions cast* precipitated a disastrous turn in the American (and by extension the world's) history.
*(side note: had fewer NH voters picked Nader and held their noses for Gore the whole FL debacle would have been a footnote)
1. I'd call it a splitting point, but say *every* election is a splitting point. 2000 was just extremely and unusually close, which meant the "could have gone either way" effect was literally 50-50 (and the tiniest changes in a few people's decisions would have changed the outcome). Ranking the last fifteen presidential elections by electoral vote (from most R to most D): 1984, 1972, 1980, 1988, 2016, 1968, 2004, 2000, 1976, 2020, 2012, 2008, 1992, 1996, 1964. A handful of extra people voting D would have swung 2000. A larger "handful", at least in Ohio, would have swung 2004. An even larger (but still overall very small) shift would have swung 1968. So I don't see a fundamental difference between 2000 and the others. Again, as Scott points out (second link in my above comment), this randomness exists in every election: even one of the landslides above might have gone differently, it would have just required multiple very unlikely coincidences like "enormous, systematic error in polling" and "crippling scandal for the leading candidate revealed days before the vote".
2. I'd assume 2000 "decided" a major social question, like every major election does, though what that question was is debateable because we can't run alternate universes. Most obviously, Bush's victory can be seen as a repudiation of Clinton's sex scandal, and more generally stopping in its tracks a movement to dismantle the concept of "public morality" however that's defined. Or it can be seen as endorsing US military dominance of the world, but I'd think that question was really decided in 2004.
Importantly, because Bush won (even if by tiny technicalities) we can "explain" the outcome by saying "people were angry at the scandal, and there was a strong Christian demographic that Bush appealed to". But if Gore had won, it would have been equally well "explained" by "the economy, Gore's experience, and a 21st century secular culture that doesn't care much about moral scandals". So even though the outcome was not determined, and came down to a few random events, that doesn't mean it wasn't meaningful and rationally explained.
3. By all means let us have strong opinions on which outcomes were disastrous and which policies are just. But I think it crosses a line into toxicity if we deny the legitimacy of election outcomes. In 2000, it was only because both candidates had nearly half the country's votes that it came down to random details. Because they both had so many votes, they both "deserved" to win in a sense. Neither Bush nor Gore had a real massive mandate from the people, which means neither could really complain if the other one won, due to chance or technicalities.
Thank you for a thoughtful reply. Just a quick point before I go to bed: I absolutely do not question the legitimacy of the 2000 election. It’s only the enormous consequences of it, which, to be fair, no one could have predicted at the time because of the 911 attacks, that bug me to this day.
Oh, I’d have to say Rupert Murdoch launching Fox News in 1996 was a greater inflection point. It was the beginning of choosing your favored reality in the US.
Yes no argument here. But what's so striking about the 2000 election is how... capricious it was, stupid hanging chads, voters not paying any attention, "Bush and Gore are the same, vote Nader" idiocy, the whole zeitgeist of the time: "America awesome, we can elect goat and toad, all good" kind of thing.
Almost a throwaway choice that ended up irreversibly damaging this country and the world. We live in shittier place because of it, and - unlike Fox News, IMHO - it was totally avoidable.
One interesting to note is that its possible 'right wing' individuals are able to influence the culture (in the culture war socio-political sense of culture) more than left wing individuals, even though 'left wing culture' has achieved institutional hegemony. This is because right wing individuals are acting from outside this hegemony, meaning they can provide a position of clear distinction for all those who oppose left wing culture, whereas left wing individuals are acting within the hegemony and are largely indistinguishable from anyone else within it. Right wingers are much capable of being in the position of building something (semi-) new rather than trying to reorient an established and heavily reinforced edifice
Even though the New York Times is an institution of immense cultural power, no individual at the New York Times has anywhere near the cultural influence of Tucker Carlson (especially when he was still on Fox), and its unlikely Kahn, Sulzberger or anyone else could radically shift the culture of the NYT (and therefore the Times' influence on the culture at large). Even someone like Bezos isn't that powerful - he owns the Washington Post but there would be a revolt amongst its staff if he overtly tried to exert editorial control.
As for your question, I think the answer is obviously tech. It's hard for any one individual to influence the world as much in any other field directly through the product of their work as can be done through a tech start-up, and this also allows greater notoriety than a comparable level of success (relative to the rest of the field). And this notoriety allows vastly more influence to be obtained than any level of wealth does. Basically, you want to become the next Elon Musk, but instead of taking pseudo-edgy anti-leftist political positions, you have a strong and coherent anti-liberal socio-cultural political project (which you pursue with various levels of subterfuge) - anti-liberal for the reasons explained above.
"Even someone like Bezos isn't that powerful - he owns the Washington Post but there would be a revolt amongst its staff if he overtly tried to exert editorial control."
I think you grossly underestimate how much power Bezos has in this situation. If he wanted editorial control he could just fire anyone who revolted and replace them with new, more Bezoistic hacks who know how to toe the line – or even ones who don't, because once they're in one of two things will happen: either they'll quickly learn what they need to do to keep their shiny new (and rare!) well-remunerated job, or else they'll revolt too, the next time there's some sort of staff-Bezos conflict, and be replaced in turn from the endless starveling hordes of would-be journalists-or-media-somethings.
The reason he doesn't do this is much more likely to be that he bought the Post in the first place because he *already liked* their editorial line, so no need to do anything, or (I think this is the most probable answer) there's a tacit understanding that he *does* have control over the editorial direction of the paper, to be exercised at his whim and discreetly, without most of the staff ever finding out where the directives came from, as it manifests as a quiet, relaxed phone call to the EIC, who is already au fait with his position and pretty much independently squelches any of the worst stuff before Bezos ever needs to take the phone out of his pocket. There's nothing extraordinary or unusually vile about this, it's how most newspapers work and always have worked, for hundreds of years. You don't think the NYT became liberal in the first place by pure happenstance, do you?
>Think you grossly underestimate how much power Bezos has in this situation. If he wanted editorial control he could just fire anyone who revolted and replace them with new, more Bezoistic hacks who know how to toe the line – or even ones who don't, because once they're in one of two things will happen
If Bezos cleared house at Washington Post, it would only still be 'the washington post' in name only. Such a move would outrage its readers and the rest of the liberal media establishment and the cultural power of the washington post would be greatly diminished, *especially* if he tried to significantly change the ideological slant of its reporting.
Think of it this way - imagine Elon Musk was somehow able to stage a hostile takeover of the New York Times company and made it a private company with himself having majority ownership.
Can Elon Musk make the NYT right wing in such a case? Sure, nominally, after firing and replacing most of its staff. But as far as cultural influence goes, this would again be the NYT in name only - it would lose the vast majority of the influence it had, because the influence it had was a product of much, much more than simply having the name 'The New York Times' at the top of its website or newspaper. The people who hold the NYT in high regard would stop reading it and would disavow it.
Its influence simply *cannot* be appropriated by a sufficiently rich person for their own, radically different ends. This is the same mistake people make when they think Harvard would still be the 'best school' even if you only admitted low IQ students to it. Harvard is a good school because of the students that previously and currently attend it, and the NYT is a respected news organization because of the people that currently work there and the world view these people's articles are imbued with. If only dummies attended Harvard, being a 'Harvard Grad' loses all its pretige, and if all the writers at the NYT are right wingers (or mercenaries pumping out right wing articles they don't agree with), then liberal elites will instantly stop caring what is written in the NYT.
At best, he would destroy, rather than appropriate, the power of the NYT, but the lost power (and the most respected staff) would simply be absorbed by the other large liberal media institutions, and there may even be a net increase in liberal media power because millions of liberals would be incensed that some right wing billionaire destroyed their beloved new organization and would seek to rally around the remaining big liberal news sites. Sure, you might get a lot of conservatives now signing up for the NYT, but the power that the NYT had was precisely the kinds of people who care about what the NYT says (hint: not conservatives).
>There's nothing extraordinary or unusually vile about this, it's how most newspapers work and always have worked, for hundreds of years. You don't think the NYT became liberal in the first place by pure happenstance, do you?
I didn't say anything about vileness. I'm saying that Bezos simply cannot radically alter the washington post without destroying much of the newspaper's reputation and influence. At best, Bezos can perhaps stop certain articles from being published. I'm sure he does like the liberalism of the Washington Post, but that's completely besides the point. The point is that maybe blocking certain articles every now and then is really not that much power for the third richest man in the world, and if he hated liberalism and wanted the WashPo to become conservative, he couldn't effect this change without destroying the influence of his newspaper. Which means he doesn't *really* have much power other than being able to destroy it, which doesn't really change the world meaningfully.
Ayn Rand's novel _The Fountainhead_ is in part about a failed attempt by the owner of a newspaper to get it to take a position he approves of and the staff does not.
Without having read it: is it possible that the action of The Fountainhead is ideologically driven to some extent (that is, by Rand's ideology)? Does Communism interfere with the attempt?
Either way, my belief is that Rand may have had a poorer and less subtle grasp of the mechanisms involved than eg. the Viscounts Rothermere, owners of the Daily Mail.
Also, as a counterexample from literature, Raymond Chandler's The Long Goodbye is in part about a successful attempt by the owner of a newspaper to quash a story he doesn't want to get out, even out of newspapers other than his own.
Quashing a news story is not that much cultural power, and in the real world in the current age, even if there were an individual thing that could radically alter american society if and when people hear about it, its hard to imagine such a thing could truly be kept under wraps for long.
I think it's easier than you're claiming. The hard part is having a reputation as a creditable source. But once you have that, the trick to killing a story is not to just hide it all the time, but instead apply a variety of other tricks. One is to flood the audience's attention with a different story. Another is to poison the well - report stories that throw shade over the story you want to kill, or over the sources that you know will try to air that story.
Having said that, I think this can only work for so long. Eventually people notice cracks in a source's credibility if it conspicuously amps some stories and damps others and the difference always seems to fit a specific narrative. There are even people who just flat believe that no one source can be credible forever, and will stop believing it simply because it's been around so long. Empirically, this seems to be happening today, with traditional radio, TV, and newspaper sources, as people turn more to online and smaller sources, not to mention the existence of two major narratives from traditional media that make the narrative engine that much more obvious. That credibility is eroding, albeit gradually - a great deal of reputation had accrued over the decades.
"Musk biographer Isaacson now on his third version of the "Musk secretly turned off Starlink to stop Ukraine attack" story, having found reason to change the one printed in his book"
Walter Isaacson is or perhaps now was a highly respected journalist and author, currently a professor of history at a respected university. (Could be entertaining to be a fly in the offices of that school's president this morning.) In real time Isaacson is now composing the new lede of his own future obituary in real time and he seems likely to sense that; panic ensues, etc.
For all I know he's floated versions 4 or 5 of that particular Musk anecdote by the time I type this!
Have you caught a case of Musk Derangement Syndrome on top of your TDS?
The simpler and obvious explanation is that his original account was informed by false propaganda and conspiracy theories made up by people like you, and he later was made aware that this was false propaganda.
I have the book here, and your guess is completely wrong. No surprise there of course...also it turns out that Substack's mute function does sort of work now, so, bye-bye.
Boing Boing post seems pretty trashy, though. They really don’t give any evidence for their depiction of Isaacson as scum with no moral fiber who fawns over the brilliant and famous and is now scurrying around in a panic. I read his biography of Steve Jobs, and he didn’t fawn over Jobs, and his take seemed intelligent and well-expressed.
Seems like a terrible decision to write about Elon Musk while the latter was still alive, but I suppose he thought he was up to it.
Anyhow, would like to read an informed and fair- minded take of whattup
Maybe a year or two ago, I saw a post on an ACX open thread about a mood tracking app that prompts you to record your mood at random times of day. I've been using it regularly, but I recently lost all of the data on my phone and I can't remember the name of the app. Help?
We have lots of great projects to fund and relatively little money to fund them, between the FTX Future Fund collapse and the increased interest in longtermism and AI risk in recent months. We are also trying to remove our reliance on Open Phil. Right now, Open Phil is offering 2:1 matching ($2 from them for every $1 from you), instead of their old policy of directly giving us grants.
We would love it if ACX readers who are concerned with AI doom and other LTFF priorities to consider donating to LTFF.
Does anyone know how the new Chinese AI chatbot, Ernie, compares to its US made counterparts? According to The Economist it was downloaded over a million times the first day of its release, August 31, which is five times faster than ChatGPT reached the million download mark.
In order to fight polarization, consider "hedge voting". If you're Blue in a Red state, then REGISTER as a Republican... and vote in the PRIMARY for the candidate you hate the least. You can't control who wins the general election, but you can influence who makes it there! (obvs sub Red/Blue at your preference).
A problem is that if you want to "fight polarization" you're already a relative moderate, so doing this means one less moderate vote in your own party's primary. The true partisans might prefer the opposite party to have a more extreme nominee, because they'd be easier to beat. For them, it doesn't matter if it increases conflict and disfunction: winning is all that matters.
At this point, getting a centrist third-party campaign off the ground looks like the better option. Even if they lose, they could send a message to both parties that going too extreme will lose them votes to the centrist party. Make that expected loss great enough, and the polarisation will resolve itself on its own.
> A problem is that if you want to "fight polarization" you're already a relative moderate, so doing this means one less moderate vote in your own party's primary.
In many districts, only one party has a realistic chance of winning, so that party's primary is the only one that matters.
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Do you mean before the Presidential election, or just in general? Indictments in general seem inevitable if he lives long enough, so it feels like asking how long he'll live.
Also it matters how exact we are being about the terminology. E.g. he's about to go on trial for civil fraud in New York, which technically isn't an indictment because it isn't in criminal court but what he's charged with is fraud which most people think of as a crime.
He's also in the process of losing a defamation case in civil court, a case which has been expanded once because he kept committing fresh defamation after the guilty verdict and of course that could happen again during the damages phase.
Cool. Let’s give him some viagra and put him in a high-end department store, see if he can rack up extra features by sticking his cock into some more struggling women in the fitting rooms. Oh and also more lies and defamation, please. The more reputations and businesses he ruins the more features he has, and dat wut I like, lotz uh feecherz.
King Donald will have blue blood, which means he'll have no need of little blue pills. And I don't think he'll have to sneak into fitting rooms to find willing women.
But seriously, I've stopped paying attention and it's really just better to ignore him.
>Let’s give him some viagra and put him in a high-end department store, see if he can rack up some more features by sticking his cock into some more struggling women in the fitting rooms.
Sure, I mean a group of New Yorkers agreed to make Trump hand over cash to some liberal woman, so I guess that means he MUST be guilty!
If this is the level of evidence we're basing things on, then congratulations, Bill Clinton and Joe Biden are both sexual predators!
>Oh and also more lies and defamation, please. The more reputations and businesses he ruins the more features he has, and dat wut I like, lotz uh feecherz.
It's a sign of supreme dishonesty of supreme ignorance to think Trump is more of a liar or defamer than anyone else, unless you think that Trump is perhaps actually a secret agent of Putin, oh, and also a nazi?
Have a heart. Not everyone is as supremely able to push through the thicket of complexities and nonsense and lies and wishful thinking to the radiant truth as you are.
Depends how the polls go. If DeSantis or any other realistic candidate starts pulling ahead in the primary then I imagine we'll see some more Trump indictments, the more ridiculous the better.
There are rumblings in Arizona which is another state where they recruited a slate of fake electors. But it seems more likely that locals carrying out the scheme will get indicted (like in Michigan) than Trump and his lieutenants on a RICO basis (like in Georgia).
So for right now -- barring some fresh new set of crimes becoming known or being committed -- it doesn't seem like a clear enough prediction to generate any prediction-market action.
I heard someone making an analogy between drag and blackface, and had to admit I'd never thought of it that way before. How did we come to think of one as horrendously offensive and the other as not?
Similar to Scott's take: the central example of blackface (minstrel shows) is a deliberately-insulting caricature of black people, while the central example of drag is an affectionate parody of performative femininity. So despite superficial similarities, the difference in assumed/understood intent makes a huge difference in how they're interpreted. Moreover, a lot of women sympathize with and appreciate the parody, since hyperfeminine presentation also feels performative for many/most women (n.b. "performative" doesn't necessarily mean "unpleasant": many/most women enjoy performing femininity, the same way many/most men enjoy performing masculinity).
Additional factors:
- Blackface is seen as "punching down" because the performers and core target audience (white people) are higher on the generally-understood oppressor-oppressed spectrum than those being caricatured (black people). Whereas for drag, the core performers/audience (gay men) are arguably lower on the spectrum than those being parodied (straight women), so it's seen as punching up, or at worst punching sideways.
- The demographic that arguably has the most right to be offended by drag shows (trans women, who like drag performers are natal males who are presenting femme) tends to be strongly supportive of drag performances. There are several reasons for this: lot of us trans women start our discovery and exploration of our own identities via drag; those of us who either start to socially transition prior to medical transition or whose bodies are slow to respond to medical transition very often borrow techniques from drag performers in order to feminize our appearances; there's quite a bit of community solidarity between the trans community and the gay community; and transphobes often fail to distinguish between trans women and drag performers in a way that makes trans women and drag performers political allies.
- Social relations between men and women are fundamentally different than those between white and black people. Virtually every single man has female relatives (his mother, at the very least), and most men date and/or marry women at some point in their lives. And many gay men have stronger non-romantic friendships with women than most straight men. The equivalent is not true for white and black people. The "Yes, Minister" line, "Some of my best friends are women [long pause] my wife, for instance!", is revealing: despite being used to highlight the speaker's sexism via weak denial, it contrasts with the cliche it's parodying (a rich white person denying racism on the grounds that some of his best friends are black, namely his butler, his cook, his chauffeur, etc); while it's definitely possible for a happily married man who loves his wife to still hold deeply condescending views about women in general, his "best friend" is probably much more of a real friend to him than a rich white racist's black servants. This familiarity and intimacy between men and women in general can make parody between the groups a lot less hostile both in intent and reception than parody between racial groups.
- Related to the previous point, affectionate mocking of gender stereotypes is a stock feature of popular culture, and one which is only very recently starting to be seen as offensive. Consider the "doofy sitcom dad" stock character (Fred Flintstone, Al Bundy, Tim Taylor, Homer Simpson, etc): shows featuring these characters are widely enjoyed by men as well as by women (since despite their negative traits, they're generally treated sympathetically by the narrative, and their experiences are often relatable to male audience members), in ways in which it's difficult to imagine many black people enjoying shows featuring black sitcom protagonists who exemplify negative stereotypes of black people as core character traits. The converse, sitcoms featuring female protagonists parodying female stereotypes is less common is recent history, but is far from unheard of ("I Love Lucy" is the prime historical example).
Blackface is a way to replace black actors with white ones. By way of example, Othello was first played by a black guy in 1825 (a guy who fled racism in America). Meanwhile, Desdemona was first played by a woman in 1660. So we're hundreds of years further away from men systematically replacing women in acting than we are from whites systematically replacing blacks in acting. And this is for roles written as black/female.
>Blackface is a way to replace black actors with white ones. By way of example, Othello was first played by a black guy in 1825 (a guy who fled racism in America)
>And this is for roles written as black/female.
Othello wasn't black. He wasn't intended to be black, and he was not based on black historical figures.
Othello is called a moor, not a blackamoor as he would have been in period if he were black. He is presumably either Arabic or Berber, either of which certainly isn't "white" by conventional definition, but which *are* a damn sight closer in complexion to a Spaniard than to a Yoruba or Bantu. (In fact, Othello is more likely to be an *actual* Spaniard than a black man, since "Moor" could refer also to those Europeans who had converted to Islam during the Caliphate of Córdoba, or to the descendants of the forcibly converted such as janissaries. Given that Othello is helping Venice fight against the Ottomans, this is by no means an unreasonable supposition, although it might be contradicted by some part of the text I don't recall offhand.)
Also, don't forget that in Shakespeare's time "black", "a black man" and the like didn't necessarily refer to skin color but could indicate the color of the hair and beard; what we would maybe call swarthy (a word literally meaning "blackish") although that also has an archaic ring to me.
I get all of that. He could also be sub-Saharan African. It's not a settled question, and I'm not claiming to have an answer to the question.
But whichever way you come down on the question of "what ethnicity was Othello" we can definitely say that Othello's ethnicity is not the same as Orson Welles' ethnicity. Agreed?
>we can definitely say that Othello's ethnicity is not the same as Orson Welles' ethnicity. Agreed?
It was almost certainly intended to be someone who looked vastly more similar to Welles than sub-saharan africans, and its a moot point anyway since the part necessarily NOT written for black actors, because they essentially did not exist at the time and place of Shakepeare's writing of Othello, so it cannot have ever been the intention for this to have been performed by sub-saharan africans and for most of its pre-American history it was portrayed by non-sub-saharan africans. Therefore, the idea that white people appropriated a role intended for black actors is incoherent.
"He could also be sub-Saharan African. It's not a settled question, and I'm not claiming to have an answer to the question."
No, this is a settled question. Beyond current US political sensitivities, this is as ambiguous as whether Cleopatra was black. I get it, you're uncomfortable with it, it would be a lot easier for you if this were unsettled and unknowable, but there's no real argument to be had here. Don't get me wrong, I think Laurence Fishburne is great in the role, no objections because I don't believe in any of this identitarian horseshit, but as far as the question of intent, that's clear, and he's not meant to be black.
"we can definitely say that Othello's ethnicity is not the same as Orson Welles' ethnicity. Agreed?"
Agreed certainly, but nobody's ever argued that Othello was meant to be a white American. That said, not only is Othello's ethnicity *closer to* Orson's than to Fishburne's, it was also *written to be played by* an Englishman (and we even know the man; it was inaugurated by Burbage). You mentioned him originally in the context of a way to replace black actors with white ones, which is thus false in two senses.
"Blackface is a way to replace black actors with white ones."
Oh nononono. "Blackface" is a specific 19th century makeup style that was in no way intended to have a naturalistic effect. Blackface was worn by black performers as well as white.
It's undergone definition decay recently as a way of finding racism where none existed before in theatrical makeup.
I totally agree that concerns about blackface are different today than they were in say the 1930s. Some of those concerns relate to the offensive stereotypes that were conveyed by performers in blackface. So the question is why we still have negative attitudes towards blackface when we remove the offensive stereotypes.
I'm saying that the answer is rooted in a pretty consistent theme of black-white relations going back before the Civil War. Blacks are uncomfortable being excluded from white society and aren't just looking to make white society nicer towards black people.
You can trace this idea back from our modern ideas about inclusion and diversity, through Brown v. Board (separate being inherently unequal) and all the way to Frederick Douglass writing about blackface. In 1848, Douglass wrote about a local newspaper editor, who disparaged pro-abolitionist singers, but "does not object to the 'Virginia Minstrels,' 'Christy's Minstrels,' the 'Ethiopian Serenaders,' or any of the filthy scum of white society, who have stolen from us a complexion denied to them by nature, in which to make money, and pander to the corrupt taste of their white fellow-citizens."
So there are two problems running in tandem - exclusion of blacks from white spaces, and whites ridiculing and stereotyping blacks. Even if you solve the second problem, you still have to contend with the first one. I'm arguing that's why we continue to be concerned about blackface today, though I will concede that this second problem is far from the dominant one in conversations about blackface. Despite being a smaller problem, it's pretty consistently present.
The fact that black people do not want to be excluded from white spaces does not make their exclusion a problem. That fact they desire "inclusion" does not make them entitled to it.
Problem as in something that Americans have historically fought about.
Throughout my post, I'm trying to make it clear that I'm discussing something that exists in American history. When I'm quoting Frederick Douglass, I'm not just giving my opinion about a topic. I'm discussing what historical people felt about topics that were controversial in their day.
If you want to explain why you think that inclusion isn't a problem, go for it! I'm here to talk about it.
But I was previously talking about problems in the sense of American history, not my own personal feelings about what the problems were in 1848.
No, "Blackface" was a specific style of theatrical makeup indicating a particular type of performance (see also: kabuki, mime, clowns). The person wearing it could be of any race (but was usually white, black, or Native America).
I'd cede the argument about terminology and just distinguish between the blackface of old (which hardly anyone does anymore) and white actors wearing makeup to appear black. The second has problems too and they're worth discussing.
They don't so much relate to offensive stereotypes as they do to representation. That's why we can support drag alongside a push for more women directors and writers and so on. The idea is that women want to be included at every level of the creative process so that they can tell stories that are authentic to their experience. Drag doesn't inhibit this, because drag performers are not generally competing with women for roles. They're doing their own thing, mostly.
In contrast, white actors wearing makeup to play black characters are pretty openly competing against black actors. If you couldn't have a white person wear makeup to appear black, you'd either have to change the character, or hire a black actor. Supporting the second is pretty consistent with ideas about inclusion and representation.
Those ideals aren't threatened by drag performers (at least not that I've ever heard of) so I argue that's why there's no pushback against drag performers.
Blackface was not about realistically portraying black people but identifying a particular theatrical/stock character/stereotype. Likewise "drag" is not about realistically portraying a woman, but a particular caricature of feminine stereotypes. So that's why it can be considered equally offensive.
As to why it's not considered so by most, the simplest answer is women have been relegated down several rungs on the progressive stack. Outrage is selective and partisan.
That's the least charitable explanation for the behavior, and to my knowledge, that explanation isn't put forth by any of the people who approve of drag but disapprove of blackface.
Why not simply ask them why they think the way that they do, rather than answering that question for them?
I think you'd be on the right track if the punchlines for drag shows were things like "lol I'm just a stupid girl, I suck at math but bat my eyelashes and get free drinks, I can't do X and Y and Z because of my gender, I belong in the kitchen not on the job, etc, etc."
That's what drag would look like if denigrating women was a core principle of the art form in the way that denigrating african americans is core to blackface minstrel shows, where the key punchlines are the blackface singer being ignorant, lazy, happy under slavery, etc. And indeed, if drag shows were constructed that way, I think many more women would find them offensive.
It seems to me that you can draw a distinction between blackface, where the historic underpinning of the form is denigrating another race, and drag, where the underpinning is watching men subvert their own masculinity by garishly adorning themselves in feminine-coded dress and makeup.
I'm not sure the record really supports this idea. In the 1820s, America was about 20% black. It's not like there were literally no people who could play Othello and America, as a 100% white country, had to make due with white actors out of necessity.
In fact, America birthed the first two black actors to play Othello - Ira Aldrige (played Othello in 1825) and Paul Robeson (played Othello in 1930). So we've got a hundred years there were no black actors were playing Othello. Meanwhile, blacks made up between 10 to 20% of the U.S. population. Moreover, black actors were apparently good enough to perform in Britain, and when asked why they left the United States, both Aldrige and Robeson were pretty clear that racism was the reason for them leaving.
I can understand that if you have a 100% white country, you have to make do. But does that really describe America in the 19th and early 20th century?
I mean, isn't it a bit racist? If I had a lunch counter with a sign that said "Whites only", I think most people who recognize that as racist.
If instead of a lunch counter, it's a counter with a signup sheet to play George Washington in a play, is it not still racist to hang up that "Whites only" sign?
Everything you say about stereotypes is correct, but it was an unthinking racism, if you understand what I'm trying to get at. It was copying a style of performance of old-style music, not primarily "let's mock and laugh at black people". There were also gollywogs (which I had no idea were meant to be representative of black people; as a child, I just took them as another type of doll). They were also on jars of marmalade and on tea - I have no idea why 'minstrels' were associated with tea, but there you go (here's a rather self-righteous article about the brands which used this imagery in their advertising):
Yes, today we are very much aware of the problems with this. I think maybe the drag/trans issue will incur the same "what were they thinking? how could they do that?" in the future.
So the interesting thing (to me) isn't the discussion about stereotypes. That discussion used to be pretty lively, but basically everyone came around to the idea that racial stereotyping is bad and we shouldn't do it.
The more interesting question is one of representation. If you weren't going to stereotype a black person, but instead you were going to portray them with their full humanity on display (say in Othello), would it be okay to have a white person play a black character (or vice versa)?
Looking at The Black and White Minstrel Show, it's clear that they too were grappling with ideas about representation. Not just about what is said, but who gets to decide what's said. So the BBC's Chief Accountant (of all people) opposed the show and wrote a memo explaining why he thought it offended responsible opinion. But then he writes "One way of testing responsible opinion would be for the BBC to send the Black and White Minstrels book and the coloured Radio Times front cover of them to the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People and the Urban League, and ask for their opinion."
Thus the content of the show - whether right or wrong - is separate from the more fundamental question of "Who decides?" The BBC's Chief Accountant evidently thought that black leaders should decide how black characters are portrayed - that fits pretty neatly with the modern phenomenon of sensitivity readers. I'm arguing it also explains modern opposition to white actors playing black characters, even without the stereotypes (e.g., a white actor playing Othello).
In contrast, the show's creator wrote "It seems to be absurd to imagine that people who are not already racially prejudiced could possible be in the some way contaminated by the Minstrels. People who are already racially prejudiced are more likely to be exacerbated by the protest itself than the object of the protest. The best advice that could be given to coloured people by their friends would be: "on this issue, we can see your point, but in your own best interests, for Heaven's sake shut up. You are wasting valuable ammunition on a comparatively insignificant target".
And this response really highlights the disconnect. The creator is talking about content - if the content isn't creating racism or fueling racism, then it's fine - while the accountant is talking about representation - the BBC shouldn't portray black characters without the approval of the black community.
In fact, the BBC Accountant (no idea why he decided to weigh in on this dispute, but whatever) had written in 1962 that "If black faces are to be shown, for heaven’s sake let coloured artists be employed and with dignity" - this is a pretty separate thought from just the no-stereotyping rule, and my argument is that this thought merits discussion separate from the stereotyping issue (which, as I've stated above, I don't find particularly interesting).
So, going back to the creation of the role of Othello, which likely was the first major role for a non-white character to be sympathetic/heroic (even if he does end up destroyed by his own jealousy), then there may or may not have been black actors to take on the role. Though see this article on the topic:
So it gets established as a part played by white actors in blackface, and then as it becomes part of the Shakespearean canon, it's a major part (like Hamlet and Lear and Macbeth) that an actor wants to play, so again it's given to star actors (generally white). So the *colour* of the part was less important than the fact that it was a star role. Is anyone really arguing over 'only black actors should play Aaron in Titus Andronicus'?
I think that it's only relatively recently that it has been established as a part for black actors (and now *only* black actors) to play.
There's an entire complex knot there of "who gets representation? who gets to decide? what is the content? is it good or bad?"
I don't think we are yet at the point of saying *only* Jewish actors should play Shylock (and that's another thorny problem, because is it anti-Semitic?) the same way that we are insistent that *only* black actors should play Othello (and that leads on to the question of "well, what about a brown actor? would it be acceptable for an Indian actor? what about a Chinese actor?")
If you are considering the literal denotative meaning that is true. But as others in the the thread point out, when it’s used in the US it has some nasty historical connotations
Among black people? In any event, you’ll be hard pressed to find a black person in favor of blackface and minstrel shows in the present day. Whereas most women I know are excited to attend a drag show. This was the case even before they became politicized, btw.
The never-incorrect-about-politically-charged-topics wikipedia sez:
"African Americans formed a large part of the black minstrels' audience, especially for smaller troupes. In fact, their numbers were so great that many theater owners had to relax rules relegating black patrons to certain areas.[77] "
Though this would have to be a very relative thing, since minstrelry was vastly more popular in the white, segregated antebellum northeast than the more diverse south.
Maybe in a couple hundred years glitter wigs, torpedo bras and goldfish tank platforms will be considered offensive.
Obviously gay & transpeople are amongst the most sacred in modern american society, and many women are going to feel unsafe objecting to anything ostensibly LGBT related given the immense abuse and threats to physical safety LGBT activists are wont to provide, not to mention government, universities and corporations using anything remotely "anti-LGBT" as a grounds for dismissal or career stifling. You can't possibly be ignorant of this.
If you ever actually attend a drag show you will notice that there are many women in attendance. In fact, they’re popular with women to the extent that attending a drag show is a common bachelorette party activity. Are you contending that this is only the case because women live in fear of the woke mob?
This is just silly. Nobody said women LIKE drag because of harassment and abuse of trans activists. The point is that women who don't like drag likely feel unsafe expressing opposition to it. Which means most women are publicly either pro-drag or don't talk about about (out of either disinterest or out of fear).
A huge number of liberals genuinely supported the BLM riots of 2020. This is perfectly consistent with the fact that many liberals were afraid to voice opposition to them and so didn't criticize them.
The claim was never that all or even most women are anti-drag. It's that a lack of anti-drag opinions from women is not evidence that no women are anti-drag.
Very few female athletes have come out publicly as being strongly anti-trans-inclusionary in women's sports. One of the few ones who has was literally assaulted by trans activists when she gave a talk at a college campus. The idea that these two facts are unrelated is very foolish.
It's just standard ingroup stuff. Gays are the good guys, blacks are the good guys. Thus the gays can do what they want, but you can't do equivalent things to blacks. The fact that that's completely inconsistent in terms of what actual actions are allowable is neither germane nor unprecedented.
I'm sure there are feminists who are deeply bitter about the double standard. And you'll notice that the same exact thing applies to transsexuals vs. transracials like Dolezal.
I think that "privilege" is the wrong framing to look at this question through, primarily because it always is. The real issue in my view is that women are simply too many to ever form an effective ingroup. That's the tragedy of feminism: at least sufficient numbers of women will always disagree with the specific political aims, whatever they are. Most white women voted Trump, the feminist movement itself was arguably coopted at least once, et cetera et cetera.
If black people were half the population they would also be too heterogenous to be made into a bloc, as the example of African politics shows clearly. God knows what would happen with blackface then, but my money is on one subgroup weaponizing it against another somehow.
What Don P said, plus, if I remember right, there was yet another layer. The story for the live 30 Rock show was that the fictional sketch comedy show "TGS with Tracy Jordan" was doing a retrospective of milestones in NBC history, specifically of live broadcast TV. I think this purported to be the first television show with two black leads, but NBC policy "only allowed one black man on screen at a time", which Kenneth cheerfully followed up with "a policy which is still in place today!". And so in the fictional history of NBC, this was the first time that the actor played by Tracy Morgan (who was in turn playing the well-dressed black man), met his co-star. On live TV. And the clip Gunflint posted originally, which I responded to, was from later on in this fictional TV show's run, again purporting to show the kind of drama (in this case, attempted murder) that could only be achieved on live TV.
TLDR, it's making fun of NBC, America, and themselves, and the only entity which emerges from this sketch with dignity intact is Tracy Morgan's character (and character's character). Or even more in a nutshell, the only person it's not making fun of is the black man.
(If someone can find a longer clip, I'd love to see how accurate my memory was.)
Thanks, even though with all the explanations combined the only thing I'm somewhat sure of is that I've stumbled upon a piece of media that requires the deep US cultural lore to fully appreciate.
Thanks to Don P for the straight explanation. I wanted to write it up for you but was overcome by a smart ass impulse to link to Cliffy and Norm explaining a Far Side gag to Woody. I was biting my thumb so to speak.
But now that the sincere answer is out there, why waste a good joke?
You have to know the levels of reality involved. 30 Rock is a situation comedy about (among other things) the making of a comedy sketch show. In this clip, we see the 30 Rock character Tracy Jordan (played, just to really confuse you, by real-world actor/comedian Tracy Morgan) start to perform in a sketch. The other "sketch comedian", whose character name I forget but is actual actor Jon Hamm, enters in blackface. At this point, the 30-Rock-level sketch actor Tracy Jordan breaks character of the innermost sketch, outraged by the other guy's blackface, and storms out.
ETA: this was all obviously clearer in the full sitcom as broadcast.
I personally don't have that perception and I don't think it's a good explanation - keep in mind that almost all blackface is out of bounds (Tropic Thunder I guess is an exception), even if not done in any overtly mocking way, while quite a lot of drag is pretty over the top caricature.
There aren't that many examples of men in drag replacing women in major productions. Meanwhile, white actors routinely replaced black actors throughout Hollywood in the 1930s (which is slowly fading from our national memory).
If men in drag started winning Best Actress, then maybe we'd see the same backlash against drag as we did against blackface.
The backlash to (say) Justin Trudeau's blackface halloween costume is because people are worried about white actors in blackface winning Best Actor? (To make the analogy more award, it should be winning "Best Black Actor," but as far as I know, there are no such awards.)
I'm talking about the source of the taboo. I'm totally willing to concede that the taboo has a sweep that goes beyond its original rationale - the same is true with virtually any other taboo.
Jonathan Haidt, for example, liked to asked people about whether incest would be permissible if the brother and sister were both willing, were in a place where it was legal, and used birth control. Lots of people still say no, but can't explain why. They've carried the taboo well beyond its original rationale.
That doesn't mean that the taboo itself has no logic.
Incest taboos have an evolutionary rationale, so they're probably not the best analogy here.
In any case, of course taboos sometimes take on a life of their own but I think your explanation for the blackface taboo is unconvincing on its own terms. The origin of the taboo surely has more to do with the fact that historical blackface was taken to be explicitly and grossly racist than with a concern for who gets acting jobs.
tldr: I’m building pairup.social, a friend-finding (or just conversation-finding) app based on complementary interests. People describe themselves with links to stuff they are interested in, such as this substack. You can express a lot of nuance with the links you choose! Based on these interests, people are matched up and can decide to start chatting with others based on familiar dual opt-in mechanics.
To try it out (and potentially add Astralcodexten as an interest):
- Help loosely-connected communities have more and stronger one-on-one ties within them.
- Help people discover new interests in the process of finding other people: you see others’ interests when deciding if you’d like to pair up with them. If there are some attractive known interests, the unknowns might be worth looking into.
- Help bloggers, podcasters, creators etc. grow their audiences by the same mechanism above. Those lists of interests can act as stealth marketing for them…
You are right: so far it's mobile-only... I figured mobile was the most important experience given that the main interactions are quick and sporadic (adding a new interest, chatting with someone else) and this keeps things simple to start. But with enough demand I'd add desktop or web support as well.
I've been researching atherosclerosis and it seems to me there is a very good argument for basically the majority of adults to be on some sort of cholesterol controlling drug. The basic idea being - ASCVD is the #1 causal factor in premature death, by a WIDE margin. The medical establishment only treats it when the 10 year risk exceeds a certain threshold, yet plaques form through our entire life. And finally, we understand the mechanism of how this works, and have very well tolerated and effective drugs at inhibiting that mechanism. (Basically summarized the argument from Dr. Peter Attia who is an excellent resource for this sort of thing. He doesn't go as far as saying "all adults should be taking drugs for this" but it feels like an inescapable conclusion to me)
Seems like one of those "massively overdetermined, obvious-in-hindsight" things, with a generous side of "the medical establishment is slow to update and overly conservative". Of course I could be missing something, but can anyone provide a good counterargument or, should I just hop on a statin yesterday?
You might be right. But I feel skeptical because it seems to me that most fixes for things out of balance in the body are not full fixes -- they screw up something else. If the dysfunction they cause is less bad than the dysfunction you're treating then taking the fix is still a net gain, but then you have to weigh cases individually, and might not want to give the fix to people who show no dysfunction. Example: It used to be thought that menopause was a deficiency disease, and that you could improve the health of postmenopausal women by giving them the hormones their body was no longer making. But it turned out there were substantial health risks for women on this regimen.
That's fair, and probably generally true, but I think there are exceptions. Consider cataract surgery. AFAIK, normal aging pretty much always eventually gives people cataracts. Ideally, one would like to restore peoples' eyes (along with the rest of their bodies!) to a youthful state, but what we _can_ do is reliably a net gain.
I’m a bit vague about cataracts, but believe there is a a
substantial down side to getting them. . Doctors try to get people to delay the surgery as long as possible. I believe that’s because the artificial lens they put in place of your cloudy natural lens wears out after a few years and then you need it replaced. But they can only replace it once or twice. So if somebody gets cataract surgery too early, ie too many years before they die, they must end up with no functioning lenses in their eyes.
My understanding is that the replacement lenses themselves are designed to reliably last a lifetime, to the point that there are no major concerns about lens durability when doing corrective surgery on children with congenital cataracts.
The problem seems to be that it's moderately common for the surgery itself to trigger or hasten the progress of other degenerative ocular conditions, so it still makes sense to delay the surgery as much as practical so as to postpone starting the clock on the other conditions. One of the big concerns is posterior capsule opacification, where the lining behind the lens starts going opaque in a cataract-like way; this may be what you're thinking of.
Thank you. After I posted I did a casual investigation of question , and found many sites, most by not all belonging to eye care medical practices, saying that NO THEY NEVER WEAR OUT (which is quite in line with what you’re saying, Erica) and SO THERE’S NO REASON AT ALL TO DELAY THE CATARACT SURGERY (which is harmful bullshit, apparently, going by Erica, who sounds like she knows what she’s talking about). WTF is wrong with all those places posting bullshit?!
>who sounds like she knows what she’s talking about
On this particular subject, I'm just a fairly clever person with a solid general knowledge base who's pretty good at doing quick-and-dirty research with google and wikipedia, so don't invest too much confidence in my assessment here. I think the fundament question comes down to how big the risks are of triggering PCO, glaucoma, etc relative to the downsides of delaying surgery.
I've poked around a little more, and it sounds like the two big things I'm most confident of cataract surgery increasing the risk of (PCO and glaucoma) both seem to be readily manageable: PCO apparently can be completely resolved with a five-minute outpatient procedure (using a laser to make a hole in the posterior capsule), and glaucoma can be managed with medication in most cases or with relatively minor surgery in severe cases.
Something like this sounds plausible. My late wife was going to have cataract surgery, and the ophthalmologist was definitely not pressing her to have it earlier. It certainly sounds like there is _some_ sort of trade-off. I have the start of cataracts, and my ophthalmologist hasn't been advising me to get surgery yet either. Still, the surgical option is consistently better than just living with what aging does to our eyes.
And you are quite right about the hormone replacement therapy. At one point it was thought to be cardio_protective_, but, when more data was available, the opposite proved true :-(
Yes. See for example https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-018-38461-y which outlines cholesterol levels and all-cause mortality. You might possible lower your risk of CVD by forcing cholesterol lower, but it's far from clear that this is 'good for you' in a more general sense.
Total cholesterol is well know to not be a good indicator of ASCVD because only certain kinds of apolipoproteins (the particles that carry cholesterol in blood) actually cause plaque
That's as may be, but the point I am making has more to do with the interesting rise in acm as cholesterol drops below the optimal or acm-minimum point on their graph (which I believe is a level currently considered 'a little high for good health'). It seems like we would have to argue that when cholesterol is low and there's higher acm, it's merely a signal or indicator of some problem, but when it's high, it's actually a cause, and reducing it will help. My default assumption here is that the body is maintaining blood cholesterol for some useful purpose(s), and that just knocking it down may not be that great. Of course there are cases where we can specifically say 'the risks of this cholesterol level are high enough that we need to reduce it, even if there is some possible unknown downside'. But that's a very different take than advocating for 'basically the majority of adults to be on some sort of cholesterol controlling drug'.
raj, what is a good indicator? I know there are various risk calculators, that take into account age, levels of both HDL and LDL, presence/absence of diabetes and some other stuff. There's imaging of the heart. There's exercise stress tests.
Coronary calcium scan measures how far the plaque has progressed. Which is a monotonic and inevitable process in virtually all adults, but for (reasons) we don't try to aggressively mitigate them until they are sufficiently bad
Fair point, but it's not really about the statins per se, that's just the first line treatment. AFAIK there's also ezetimibe and pcsk9 inhibitors which seems also effective and well tolerated. I'm sure other options as well. The main point is "there's this stuff in your blood clogging your arteries, do you want to take a medicine to reduce it or not"
(also I'm sure there are way, way more people that just never tried a statin, than there are that can't because of side effects)
Statins are also associated with lower cancer risk. Probably because cholesterol is a known cause of inflammation, and statins also have an effect on the inflammasomes. There is indication statins help with inflammatory conditions like Chrohns. But if you start taking statins at 30 you could easily be on them for 50 years, and I don't think we know what that means. With a family history of heart disease and high cholesterol it seems like a good idea to start them younger than the recommended age because we know plaque build up begins at a young age, and these metrics for recommending statins are looking at things like 10 year survival.
With this episode, you'll be able to appreciate the advantage of the way we formulate the fine tuning argument, and you'll see why our formulation avoids the common pitfalls of the other formulations. Now is a great time to ask any questions you might have that we haven't addressed yet.
Even an utterly wrong explanation can have a convincing explanation, answer many questions, and avoid common pitfalls. See, e.g., "caloric fluid" theory of heat transfer. Plausible! But still unnecessary.
I think my point is somewhat different. There was plenty of evidence supporting the existence of caloric fluid. But it turned out to be a useless model of heat.
So you may be able to present plenty of evidence for the fine-tuning but it gets us no closer to the ‘why’: why is this necessary, and what is the point of this model of the universe. What are we going to do differently as a result of adopting this model?
If you are accepting our argument from fine tuning, then there is an objective basis for teleology and purpose in the universe. While this needs to be developed further, and granted we are not doing that on the podcast, it is at least intuitively clear that it can have an profound impact on a person in the modern world.
I’m not. Accepting. But I do see your point: if this model helps someone find meaning in life, it is useful; I wish you all the best in your efforts to promote it.
I don't understand why fine-tuning is limited to universes with the same variables as ours.
So let's say I agree that strong nuclear force is fine-tuned - if it were larger or smaller by 50%, then our universe wouldn't work.
But that's our universe. Do all universes need the strong nuclear force? After all, there are lots of ways that matter could work. We could pretty easily have a universe with no atoms whatsoever. Everything is made up of an infinitely divisible substance. That's how most people thought that our universe worked for centuries! Sure, you wouldn't get our exact universe, but that's not the claim of fine-tuning. Why can't we have life without the strong nuclear force, but with some other version of matter?
I mean, shouldn't the fine-tuning approach first answer what's so special about these variables? Like why should we expect that other universes have strong nuclear forces?
That’s an interesting question. The short answer, which we discuss at length in episode 7, is that scientists themselves say that our universe wouldn’t have any complexity and higher structures with different laws. In your case, without the strong nuclear force there would be no stable atoms, molecules, planets, stars, etc. There would still be fundamental particles and physics, but there wouldn’t be chemistry, biology, astronomy, etc.
Sure, but there could be lots of universes without the strong force but with different properties (that our universe lacks) which cause them to work just fine.
By way of analogy, if you took the wheels off my car, it couldn't move. Yet I have no wheels and I can move just fine. Cars are different than people, but they each work in their own way.
If all we knew was the car universe, then someone could very easily say "Any universe without wheels would be broken" but they'd be mistaken. Meanwhile, I'd be here in human universe saying "Any universe without legs would be broken" and I'd be mistaken too.
We're just projecting our universe onto other universes which we've never observed (and which we probably can't observe). That doesn't tell us anything about those other universes. It's just us repeating what's important about our own universe.
In this universe, the strong force is really important. But I can imagine lots of other universes where the strong force isn't important and everything works just fine because they have some other set of forces to make everything work. Is such a thing really beyond the human capacity to imagine?
The point is that scientists can do better than speculate and imagine there’s another universe where things could work. They can see the consequences of changing the laws and they realize that the vast majority of them don’t have complexity. This requires scientific knowledge to do, so a layman might mistakenly think that any rag bag universe with random laws works but that isn’t the case. See episode 7.
Look, but that’s just the problem: there may be 10000000 other universes with different parameters where ‘matter’ as we know it can’t exist. We can only observe our own.
Imagine you’re in a closed box on a pebble beach, and I have a machine that only picks pebbles that weigh 100 g. Every time the machine picks a 100g pebble I give it to you via a tube. You will have convincing evidence that every pebble on the beach weighs exactly 100 g, surely the pebble size must be fine-tuned. But nothing is fine-tuned, pebbles come in all sizes, you just can’t see them.
There actually is no evidence other universes exist, so this is highly speculative. It makes more sense to assume this is the only universe, and go from there.
We will never (e.g., >99.9% certainty) be able to collect evidence of other universes. We don't even know if other universes exist in the same time period or they are subsequent, or if our model of "time" is even useful in the context of a multi-verse model.
Then there's the whole simulation argument, which then can weirdly intersect with the fine-tuned argument. We don't have an objective way to resolve this.
Anyone here have any experience with any of the 'chemically close to alcohol' alternatives? This was a big discussion on HN the other month, about a company called GABA Labs that's been working on this https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36920387
Some British scientist has apparently been working on synthetic alcohol for years- it's an unregulated space so he sells his drinks online https://sentiaspirits.com/ There's also a biotech startup in this space called Zbiotics. Would be curious if anyone's had any experience with these synthetic booze types
Not meaning to spread half-remembered rumours, but [I'll do it anyway] wasn't it Scott Himself who tweeted about the presidential debates while drunk on isopropanol?
I read about this exact thing a few years ago, back when they first started selling Sentia. As I understand it, Sentia doesn't contain anything that mimics the biochemical effect of alcohol at all. They just market it as a fancy drink for rich people. I would be interested in trying some of these alcohol alternatives but so far all I've seen of them is marketing.
Muscimol is legal in most places, and is a fairly potent GABA uptake inhibitor that some say has similar effects to a mellow alcohol buzz (also reportedly hallucinogenic and oneirogenic). Haven’t tried it myself but intending to get round to it. Some in my circle have been using “psilocybin oil” to supplement/replace alcohol; I use the scare quotes because I was recently told that it’s actually a synthetic compound, chemically related to DMT but tinkered with to mimic the effects of psilocybin. In any case, administered one drop at a time up to a total of say four drops over an evening, it seems like a very pleasant choice. Of course, both psilocybin and think DMT are highly illegal in most places. Whether or not this applies to a tinkered-with synthetic analogue is anyone’s guess...
"Again, perhaps the answer is ‘both’. Perhaps elements are universal, but molecules are relative"
--[from recommended paper]
Thanks for posting this. I heartily agree with this excerpt and much of the rest of the paper which I will soon give a proper read.
My current position is that there are universal laws(by any name) that a given civilization must then together, hammer into societal(positive) laws and folkways. Per a cycle(Khaldun, 1377; etc.) all civilizations stray from this natural order and society becomes increasingly corrupt. The predictability is explained by evolved human nature taking 10s of thousands of years to significantly change.
"Moral questions may not have objective answers but they do have rational ones, answers rooted in a rationality that emerges out of social need. To bring reason to bear upon social relations, to define a rational answer to a moral question, requires social engagement and collective action. It is the breakdown over the past century of such engagement and such action that has proved so devastating for moral thinking.”
--Kenan Malik, The Quest for a Moral Compass, 2014
Why don’t we use catecholamine (dopamine, norepinephrine, epinephrine) tests in the diagnosis and treatment of anxiety/ADHD?
I really know nothing here, but it seems like if there are nonstandard levels of a specific neurotransmitter, then couldn’t we then use the specific antagonist/reuptake inhibitor drug for it?
I'll add one more reason to Scott's: Even if ADHD is due mostly to a too few dopamine-mediated nerve transmissions in some part of the brain, the problem might not be dopamine deficiency. It could be that the dopamine receptors are under-responsive. Or it could be that the receptors respond normally, but that whatever is supposed to clear away dopamine from earlier transmissions clears it up too thoroughly, so that the dopamine floor is too low, and a step-up in the form of a new squirt of dopamine does not bring the level up high enough to get the proper firing. Neither of these problems constitute actual dopamine deficiency, but would be helped by additional dopamine.
1. There's no good test for how much of any given catecholamine is in your brain. Peripheral tests (eg blood levels) will mostly catch the chemicals being used peripherally, and even CSF tests mostly catch metabolites and are hard to interpret.
2. Which part of the brain probably matters a lot too. Every part of the brain uses dopamine for something different, and only in some parts does that affect attention. This is why Parkinson's, ADHD, and antipsychotic side effects are different syndromes, even though they all involve dopamine deficiency. You would really have to figure out what's going on at individual synapses, which would be too invasive to do routinely (maybe at all). Maybe there's some way to do this through radio-imaging, I'm not sure, but I bet it's expensive and unpleasant.
3. Although Adderall helps ADHD, it's probably much more complicated than "a dopamine deficiency". Norepinephrine only helps a tiny bit and is probably unrelated. I don't think epinephrine is involved at all, although I could be wrong.
There's been a good deal of reporting this week about Elon Musk personally deciding to cut off Starlink access near Crimea so the Ukrainians couldn't use it for a big attack on Russian naval forces. That, plus the New Yorker article about US DoD frustrations with Musk: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2023/08/28/elon-musks-shadow-rule
made me wonder: why doesn't USG just nationalize Starlink, pay off Musk to the tune of enough billions that he's obviously financially got the much better end of the deal, and "take the gloves off" when it comes to Ukrainian usage? If they're that frustrated (understandably) that a rando billionaire is making consequential foreign policy decisions with zero accountability, why not just do a "national security emergency executive order" thingy?
Possible explanations:
1. They don't actually have (or OLC doesn't think they have) the legal authority, despite "national security" already granting incredibly sweeping powers to the President.
2. They think they couldn't keep it running properly if Musk weren't heading it up-- maybe all the key people would quit.
3. It would be too politically embarrassing to pay the already-richest-man-in-the-world that many billions.
4. They secretly approve of his decisions and are glad to have him take the heat instead of them.
Thoughts on which of these is most likely, or what other possibilities there are?
I've hopped here from a few alternate timelines, and you don't know how lucky you are. Where I originally came from, Elon Musk turned out to be actively helping Russia, and a special payload in one of his SpaceX rockets took out most of the US government and started WWIII. The next timeline I hopped to had him providing service to both Russia and Ukraine if they promised to put up drone snuff videos on Twitter. The timeline after that had him merely selling services to both sides like a normal arms merchant, and I was tempted to stay there, but I thought I could find something better. The timeline after that, he cut out Russia, but still made Ukraine pay, and refused to let anyone else pay for Ukrainian time out of some weird libertarian-utilitarian logic that said people should just be giving cash to Ukraine and letting Ukraine spend the cash however they see fit. The timeline after that didn't have the restriction on the Ukraine side, but he demanded that someone pay up front, and that wasn't so bad, but the culture war took a darker turn, so I moved on. Then there was the timeline where he was offering free hours of service to Ukraine if people would volunteer to be surrogate mothers for a series of clones of a genetically modified offspring of himself and Grimes, about which he refused to answer anything but "wait and see". And then there was the timeline where he was offering free Starlink service to Ukraine, but went on a Twitter rant saying "I have neither the time nor the inclination to explain myself to a man who rises and sleeps under the blanket of the very freedom that I provide, and then questions the manner in which I provide it.", which seemed like a huge red flag.
He seems a bit more chill here, so I think I'll stay.
At the time the incident is supposed to have taken place, Elon was donating Starlink gratis to Ukraine. Obviously he was at perfect liberty to decide what he was and was not willing to donate. If I'm lending my car to my hypothetical friend who is on the run from a drug lord I am well within my rights to say `no, you may not use my car to carry out a hit against the drug lord's henchmen, that could expose me to retaliation and I didn't sign up for that risk when I lent you my car to run away'
In June 2023, however, the US DoD is reported to have signed a contract with SpaceX to provide Starlink coverage to Ukraine. I imagine what Musk now does is bound by the terms of this contract. Which are secret. And I would bet that the contract likely prohibits certain uses (like bombing Russia proper, or maybe even Crimea), because the USG also does not want to risk escalation (though they might be happy for Musk to take the heat for not giving unlimited support to Ukraine).
Sounds like he's controlling the satellites from the US. If he's not controlling the satellites from Ukraine, they can't nationalize them.
The question I have is why they aren't using the US military's satellites instead, and the answer is probably the same; that's too much direct involvement for them to want to make.
This does get to the heart of the matter. The US (and other countries) are trying to be careful with their military aid to prevent escalation in ways that closely parallel Musk's Crimea/Starlink decision; e.g.:
I'm sure the US government is happy to have Musk take the flak on this rather than have their decisions scrutinized, which might be why Blinken recently refused to criticize Musk's policy when questioned on the matter. Once Starshield is active, it would be hard to imagine the US granting access of that system to Ukraine, let alone allowing its use in an attack in Crimea.
The military does not to my knowledge have satellites that provide convenient global internet access. Some kind of comsats that require specialized hardware on the ground, *maybe*, but at least 20 years ago they were still telying on ground based towers and such. Whatever the case, Starlink provides a service that they either can't match in terms of convenience, or possibly at all.
I haven't followed the situation very closely, but I can think of a few other explanations:
5. Musk didn't do anything (maybe the Ukrainians messed something up on their own and blamed him?).
6. It was a technical glitch/mistake, and not intended by anyone.
7. It's embarrassing to run your top secret super important military operations through the private property of a foreign national, and buying it would be even more embarrassing.
"The ships and marine drones that would have performed this attack relied on Starlink for connectivity, but the satellite internet service was not (Musk asserted later on X/Twitter) active over the region. When Ukraine made an “emergency request” to activate it, he refused, and the drones “lost connectivity and washed ashore harmlessly,” obviously leaving the Russian ships untouched."
Sounds like Musk just didn't want the role of battlefield comms enabler for the Ukrainians. Rather a gamble on their part to carry out the op this way, but I would suppose the targets moved and they hoped they could prevail on him to support their capabilities beyond the originally intended zone.
Huh, I was just listening to Lex Fridman interview W. Isaacson. I will say I'm glad I don't have to make tough decisions like that. And I can't really fault Elon's decision.
In that case, I would say that the explanation is that Ukraine has no means or authority to buy it, and the US would be hesitant to force the purchase even if it were legal. It would be a long and difficult process and Musk would have a lot of incentive to delay (for more money or to not lose control).
From the Left Field department: why are most tweezers so terrible? Any pair I find in a supermarket seems utterly unfit for the purpose of plucking an errant hair out of my brows or mustache or beard or sideburns. It succeeds only when my fingers would have as well. Otherwise, my skin apparently has such a grip on follicles that two specialized bits of metal pressed together can't seem to overcome it.
Given that, one would expect the market to have solved this problem in the large, either by not bothering to sell tweezers that can't tweeze, or only selling superior brands that seem unusually hard for me to find outside of a professional salon or after a long session of web research and online ordering.
I don't have an answer to your question about market forces. However, I can tell you that precision tweezers designed for use in electronic assembly are excellent for removing tiny splinters. They are superior to salon products. A search for Excelta brand tweezers shows them available for between $5 and $100.
I think what goes wrong with tweezers is that the edges have to meet almost perfectly to capture something as small as a hair, and most tweezers get out of alignment early on. I'm sure it's possible to make something that would not get out of alignment from normal usage plus normal mishaps like being dropped, but it probably requires metal that is less bendable (and then some sort of mechanism where the 2 halves join that allows for rotation). No doubt would cost more than the usual thing one picks up in the drugstore
I might be wrong here, but I feel like there’s a whole class of tweezers that are intended for less demanding tasks than plucking hairs, like pulling splinters, ticks, etc. If you need to pluck your eye brows, you need the type they sell in beauty salons that are specifically intended for that. They’re much sharper though and might not work as well for more generic non-grooming tasks.
The long answer is machining two surfaces to be very flat AND having them interface in parallel along those flat planes is pretty hard to do as price points people are willing to pay. Those tweezers I've linked above are probably the best "consumer" grade ones going right now, and they are 15usd for a single pair of small tweezers. There are in-fact much better ones out there if you're willing to pay for them: high end lab and jewelry tweezers. Here's an example of a good pair of high end tweezers: https://www.amazon.com//dp/B073K8DZ4J . $92.
This is spot on. I don't know anything about that particular brand, but I spent about $12 on a pair of nice Revlon tweezers about eight years ago and haven't looked back. It's not a huge investment and it's worth the cash. They have those very flat, perfectly parallel tips you need for good grip.
I used to have scissor grips. They weren't any good either, so I don't think that's it. You do make a good case for them, though - I've noticed one failure mode of "wishbone" designs in that when I gripped too hard, it warped the arms until the tip of the tip surface *spread*, pushed apart by the back of the tip surface. Scissor designs never did that.
OTOH, the most reliable pair of tweezers I've ever used were wishbone.
I'm currently hypothesizing that the tip surfaces have to have some sort of grip coating, but I don't know for sure.
@HalJohnson (I can't figure out how to actually tag users in a comment, hopefully he sees this)
I grabbed your novel Sudden Glory when you posted it in a recent open threads, I loved it! I found it somewhere between Thomas Pynchon and Patrick deWitt. Nice work, I recommend it to all.
Related question that I've been wondering around recently: when in history was it figured out that hurricanes/cyclones are round?
Nowadays we can peer down on them with satellites so it's obvious, but in the distant past people just suddenly got hit with a whole bunch of wind for a while then it went away. Early people to live in hurricane areas probably would have been able to figure it out if they were really paying attention, but maybe they had better things to do during storms than trying to coordinate wind direction measurements.
I don't know about "round" (and they aren't quite round either), but they could have easily known that they went in a circle around the eye. The wreckage would have been in different directions depending on which side the eye went through an area. So, for instance, damage in area A was going north, which damage in area B was going south, etc.
I remember a text written by a Louisiana Cajun (18th century ?) about being in the eye of a cyclone. They would also have seen tornadoes from outside and maybe made the connection with pool vortices.
Also european fishermen would have known for ages that when a depression passes over, the wind suddenly turns from a southwest direction to a northwest direction.
No : pretty much all of the energy of a hurricane comes from it's interraction with a warm ocean. That why it loses energy immediately after making landfall. And that's why a hurricane that has partially made landfall but then turned around and went back to the ocean generally regains energy.
Why is it so difficult for the Russians to just destroy the Ukrainian power system entirely? To be clear I am very Ukrainian-sympathetic so I certainly don't want that to happen- it's been a pleasant surprise. I'm just curious how it works. There's a finite number of power-generating plants and pipelines, the Russians have lots of missiles, and they're quite closeby. Can't they just..... hit all the power plants with a missile, and knock out electricity for the whole country? I don't think of a power plant as something that's very resilient to missiles.
There's got to only be a few power plants in the whole country. Why haven't the Russians taken them out?
I have similar questions about Russian rail infrastructure. I keep reading that the Russian army transports a lot of ammo via train. Can't the Ukrainians..... just blow up the train tracks, maybe take out a couple of key bridges? Is it really that hard? Maybe train tracks can easily be reconstituted, but a bridge is a huge project. In general physical infrastructure seems 'tougher' in wartime than I would've guessed
"Can't they just..... hit all the power plants with a missile, and knock out electricity for the whole country? I don't think of a power plant as something that's very resilient to missiles."
More resilient than one might expect. Ground based anti-air defences on both sides have performed very well in this war.
Also, about half of Ukraine's electricity is provided by four nuclear power plants (Zaporozhye, Rivne, Khmelnitsky, and South Ukraine), outright damage to which carries obvious risks. It's one of the reasons why last winter Russia had concentrated strikes on substations, trying to force shutdowns (including of the NPPs) as the grid became unbalanced. It often worked, but Ukraine is now synced with the EU grid, which can provide backup.
It will be interesting to see how it goes this winter. There's some evidence that Russia has been stockpiling missiles and the heavier Shaheds to have a go at the grid again, and they've increasingly been using guidance-upgraded heavy FAB bombs, which can do some real damage even to hardened structures. On the other hand, the initial shock value of grid destruction is gone, Ukrenergo engineers are armed with invaluable experience, and (assuming continued access to munitions) the coverage of Ukraine's air defences has only increased.
Coal power plants are tough structures, difficult to destroy with the sort of conventional missiles/drones whatever Russians have. Those facilities have to withstand all the heat associated with coal burning, after all. And most of Ukrainian electricity comes from nuclear power plants (see here: https://www.statista.com/statistics/1237676/ukraine-distribution-of-electricity-production-by-source/), which are of course even harder to destroy, not to mention that straight up bombing of nuclear power plants would reinforce Western suport for Ukraine.
When it comes to destroying The Grid, both Ukrainian electrical and Russian railway, this is what both sides are constantly trying to do, but The Grid is purposefuly build in a way that it would be relatively easy to repair, so it is being constantly maintained by dedicated crews. Even knocked out bridges can be and are being replaced, though it of course takes longer than with overland tracks.
First, on the "destroying the power system" end of things, I'm pretty sure there's a certain amount of "Russia's in it for conquest, not destruction" - they want more taxpaying citizens, and people who skip out on living in the place they're trying to conquer on account of it no longer having working electricity, or, y'know, on account of having been shot (at), well, it becomes much harder to turn them into taxpaying citizens.
Second, on the rail infrastructure - they're obvious targets, yes, but they're obvious targets to both sides (meaning the defenders, at this point Russia, will probably have put more defenses around them), and rebuilding to good-enough-for-military-use (something something "acceptable casualty levels", but also military vehicles you'd expect to be built sturdier than civilian ones) is *relatively* easy once you make sure it can't get blown up again an hour later.
>First, on the "destroying the power system" end of things, I'm pretty sure there's a certain amount of "Russia's in it for conquest, not destruction" - they want more taxpaying citizens, and people who skip out on living in the place they're trying to conquer on account of it no longer having working electricity, or, y'know, on account of having been shot (at), well, it becomes much harder to turn them into taxpaying citizens.
So they would rather spend untold billions of dollars on a potentially much longer war than necessary for the sake of some taxpayers?
Point is, even if they had an infinite number of bombs there'd still be good reasons beyond saving ammo to avoid blowing up (all of) the power grid.
Other reasons might include "the power plants are nuclear, and your 'friendly' neighborhood conscript thinks he might be in the blast radius if he blows it up," or the "power grids are more resilient than you'd think" reasons discussed elsewhere in the thread.
Putin surely feels success in Ukraine (in a timespan shorter than decades) is a matter of supreme personal existential importance, and one that is in nowhere close to guaranteed. The idea that future taxpayers are entering into his or his generals' decision making is extremely difficult to believe.
If they lose the war, there will be *no* additional taxpayers. (Well, except for the kidnapped Ukrainian kids, when they grow up as proper citizens of Russia.) So this would be trading the certain costs of long war against *potential* future tax income.
Also, I am not an economist, but I imagine that a Russia that cares so much about taxpayers, would be a quite different country.
Concerning the latter question, the relevant train tracks are deep in occupied territory. Pushing forward to a point where they can blow them up is a key objective in the present Ukrainian offensive.
For anyone in NYC that might be interested,I am having a one-day-only exhibition of my photographs on Sunday, September 24th,at Mildred, 124 Ridge st. More details here:
I saw the Fruit Exchange photo on your home page, and imagined how a place would work where people could come in and turn in their old fruit for fresh copies.
I have been thinking about the culture of AI existential risk (AI Doom) for some time now. I have already written about it as a cult phenomenon, nor am I the only one. But I believe that’s rather thin. While I still believe it to be true, it explains nothing. It’s just a matter of slapping on a label and letting it go at that.
While I am still unable to explain the phenomenon – culture and society are enormously complex: Just what would it take to explain AI Doom culture? – I now believe that “counter culture” is a much more accurate label than “cult.” In using that label I am deliberately evoking the counter culture of the 1960s and 1970s: LSD, Timothy Leary, rock and roll (The Beatles, Jimi Hendrix, The Jefferson Airplane, The Grateful Dead, and on and on), happenings and be-ins, bell bottoms and love beads, the Maharishi, patchouli, communes...all of it, the whole glorious, confused gaggle of humanity. I was an eager observer and fellow traveler. While I did tune in and turn on, I never dropped out. I became a ronin scholar with broad interests in the human mind and culture.
I suppose that “Rationalist” is the closest thing this community has as a name for itself. Where psychedelic experience was at the heart of the old counter culture, Bayesian reasoning seems to be at the heart of this counter culture. Where the old counter culture dreamed of a coming Aquarian Age of peace, love, and happiness, this one fears the destruction of humanity by a super-intelligent AI and seeks to prevent it by figuring out how to align AIs with human values.
I’ll leave Bayesian reasoning to others. I’m interested in AI Doom. But to begin understanding that we must investigate what a post-structuralist culture critic would call the discourse or perhaps the ideology of intelligence. To that end I begin with a look at Adrian Monk, a fictional detective who exemplifies a certain trope through which our culture struggles with extreme brilliance. Then I take up the emergence of intelligence testing in the late 19th century and the reification of intelligence in a number, one’s IQ. In the middle of the 20th century the discourse of intelligence moved to the quest for artificial intelligence. With that we are at last ready to think about artificial x-risk (as it is called, “x” for “existential”).
This is going to take a while. Pull up a comfortable chair, turn on a reading light, perhaps get a plate of nachos and some tea, or scotch – heck, maybe roll a joint, it’s legal these days, at least in some places – and read.
One of the sub-threads in doomerism is for an ASI to get to Drexler/Merkle atomically precise manufacturing/nanotechnology via lots of computer simulations and a minimal number of physical operations. For an interesting cautionary tale on just how spectacularly computational chemistry can mismatch with the actual chemistry, see https://www.science.org/content/blog-post/not-what-it-said-menu
The hippies thought psychedelic experience was the key to a deeper understanding of the world. The rationalists think Bayesian reasoning is the key to a deeper understanding of the world. As Scott says at the end of every post:
"P(A|B) = [P(A)*P(B|A)]/P(B), all the rest is commentary."
I am surprised by your choice of analogy. From my perspective, the things most analogical to "worrying that X will destroy the world" would be "worrying that Y will destroy the world" and "worrying that Z will destroy the world". In this case, nuclear weapons and global warming seem like obvious candidates. Instead you chose... music.
Some people deny evolution for religious reasons. Other people deny intelligence for political reasons. I am too tired of defending either; I wish there was a FAQ that I could conveniently link instead. That said, the graph of "IQ" and "eugenics" shows what exactly? That both words became popular in 20th century? The lines are not even similar! If you added words like "computer" or "feminist" or "airplane", and removed the labels, no one would see a special relation between the two words you chose. If this is the best argument you can make, then you admit you don't have actual arguments.
Then you continue writing about something mostly unrelated to the topic you chose originally.
So, from my perspective, you made a nice Freudian exercise of writing free associations about a topic that you seem to know very little about. Congratulations on getting it published!
I wish I could write a better review, but honestly, my reactions while reading were mostly "wtf?" and "how is this even relevant to anything?".
There’s an old saying that “Every cynic is a disappointed idealist”, and I believe that explains some of what is going on. Many Rationalists seem to be into Futurism ideas such as anti-aging technology and the prospect of eternal life. They are realizing, perhaps at a later age than most people, that death is inescapable, and this bums them out in ways that possibly influences their once-optimistic outlook on technological change.
To tie this back to parallels with the hippie-LSD movement: Timothy Leary himself was very interested in tech that could stop aging, and in his book _Flashbacks_, describes natural death as “Government-mandated suicide”. He was an eccentric fellow but not alone in that sentiment.
I’ve noticed a lot of “You are going to die!” from AI x-risk pessimists, as if the issue at stake were more about personal death than eventual human extinction.
Most people accept that:
1) They will die.
2) The human race will eventually go extinct.
Most people care so little about 2 that they never even think about it.
But I think many Futurists (at least the non-Italian ones) believe or want to believe that but for some avoidable extinction event not only might humans live forever but they might personally. Many consequently connect the idea of human extinction more intimately with their own mortality than the average person. They worry about it more. They haven’t necessarily accepted their own deaths as inevitable like most do. Or when they do, they do in the form: “Because of AI, I’m going to die.”
(I think it’s somewhat taboo here to psychoanalyze others from afar on the grounds that it’s not evidence-based, but I’m not sure where the line is. Maybe it’s OK if you acknowledge you are just speculating? Anyway, let me know if people think I am crossing the line here. I don’t *think* I am.)
Of course these speculations may have nothing to do with reality.
Yes, fear of death is definitely in play here. Certainly one of the persistent fantasies about advanced computing is the idea of uploading one's mind to a computer and thereby becoming immortal. Doomerism is obviously and explicitly about death, where death, in effect, as laid at the agency of some future computer. The effort to align AIs with human values becomes a way to stave off death.
I’ve a feeling that a lot of doomsday predictions are indeed a form of entertainment. It’s a bit terrifying but not really, like a ride on a roller coaster. There’s some risk there but not much. People like to be scared if they feel safe enough.
Climate change is one of those. For most. (Not all, some young people are genuinely affected - hence the rise in depression). If we really believed the end was nigh we would act differently, and literally and figuratively run for the hills.
I have not read your article, but am about to. But I have a comment based on what you have said so far in your post and in responses to others. It seems to me that there is also a culture of AI Heaven. I have read many people rhapsodizing about the wonderful things that will become possible with superintelligent AI assisting us. Remarkable improvements in healthcare: medical breakthroughs; greatly reduced cost, because so many tasks can be managed by AI and implemented by AI-directed robots. Good healthcare for everyone on the planet!Wonderful empowerment of everyone, via AI-directed computer courses, AI-assisted drafting, research, writing, art, etc. Scientific breakthroughs that will allow us to travel to other inhabitable planets. Etc etc.
Isn't AI Heaven also a culture?
As you point out, nobody really knows that superintelligent AI is, and, even if they could specify certain things about superintelligent AI, nobody knows for sure when or even whether such a thing will be come to be. Given that, it seems to me to show considerable lack of common sense to be sure that superintelligent AI, whatever that is, will be great or that it will destroy us. The only way somebody could arrive at confidence about the effects of superintelligent AI on human life would be via some non-rational process such as powerful identification with a group defined by a certain belief.
But it sounds like your article aims to pick apart the non-rational underpinnings only of the Doomers. Why aren't you going after the Ecstatics too?
Not that I know of, at least not in a concentrated form with an appreciable public presence. Yes, I suppose Transhumanists are in this camp, but they aren't writing opinion pieces in Time Magazine. As for why don't I go after their irrational underpinnings, it's easy to understand why someone would believe in an AI utopia. Who doesn't want a better future where all is goodness and light. But why would anyone invest so much time and energy in belief in doom, especially people working in the AI industry?
The explanation is simple. There is a particular kind of technical and philosophical argument. A particular style of reasoning, that leads to the doomer conclusions.
The doomer crowd have a fairly strong tendency to make technical or sometimes even mathematical points. Clearly they believe that they believe based on specific technical arguments, and if the technical arguments were different, the beliefs would be different.
Saying "maybe AI might do bad things" doesn't require a huge amount of detailed understanding. Figuring out exactly how that happens does.
It's the difference between a bunch of bridge builders idly speculating that a particular bridge might collapse, and people trying to do the calculations (in a world where physics hasn't been worked out yet.)
Of course people have to speculate before doing the calculations. But the strength of current beliefs comes from attempts at calculation, not mere speculation. You can argue those calculations are wrong. But merely looking at the fiction and speculation will not let you understand the doomerist phenomena.
Looking at this from the point of view of a non-doomer, why isn't "it's hard to predict what a superintelligent AI would be like and some people get it wrong" a good enough psychological explanation for why some people are doomers?
Among other things, that's assuming that superintelligence is a coherent idea and something that it likely to be realized one day. Those are not at all obvious. For example, see Steve Pinker's remarks in this discussion with Scott Aaronson, https://scottaaronson.blog/?p=6524
I'll amend my proposed explanation to "it's hard to predict whether a superintelligent AI will be realised and what it would be like, and some people get it wrong"
I was conditioning on the premise that the doomers are wrong. Because if they are right, no psychological explanation for doomerism is needed beyond "they reasoned correctly".
Well, how does their being wrong (which I take to mean that there is no convincing evidence that their fears are justified, though there's always a long-shot possibility) account for their belief?
You seem to forget that the Seventies counterculture was not just loving and optimistic, but was to a great extent actuated by a fear of nuclear annihilation. One of the core purposes of LSD Aquarianism was to attempt to prevent this outcome by converting everyone (on both sides, ideally) to peacenik hippie ideals.
"I dreamed I saw the bomber death planes / riding shotgun in the sky / turning into butterflies / above our nation" et cetera.
Ah, yes, I forgot about that. But the war in Vietnam was much more immediate than the possibility of nuclear disaster. When Abbe Hoffman led 50,000 protestors to march around the Pentagon they weren't thinking about nuclear bombs. They were thinking about Vietnam.
Sure, I'm not suggesting they were pro-war in any other way. Presumably it was all seen as streams leading to the same horrible ocean.
My point is just that the apocalyptic streak isn't a distinction but a similarity between the two countercultures, which in fact are much more alike than I think the typical rationalist wants to admit. Not only the doom to be averted, but the drug experimentation, the communal living, the weird free-love attempts... the music is just a lot worse, that's the main point of divergence.
Imagine that you are a young nerd looking for companionship (as did Adrian Monk in his youth), people to talk to and hang-out with. You walk through your village and you see two clubhouses, the Utopians and the Doomers. The Utopians fly a flag that says, “Have a blast. It’ll be wild!” The Doomers flag reads, “We’ll all be dead before long.”
“I don’t like that at all,” you think to yourself, “I’m going to hook up with the Utopians.” And so you do. Things go well for a while, but then it all just goes flat. Dreams of utopia scatter in all directions and no one ever does anything.
“Oh, well, I might give the Doomers a chance.” The clubhouse is buzzing with activity, 24/7/365. People are debating the fine points of AGI, super-intelligence, and the transit from one to the other – gradual take-off or FOOM! To infinity and beyond. People are making plans for meet-ups, attending conferences about effective altruism, cryptocurrency (though feeling a bit sheepish in the wake of the FTX scandal), and meeting with venture capitalists about incubator space for their current Big Idea.
In my model, people look at the state of available evidence, try to figure out what will really happen, and then form a culture with others who came to similar conclusions.
Or at least, enough of the smartest most competent people do this that a thriving intellectual culture tends to form around a convincing collection of evidence.
Now some people can be convinced by absolute rubbish. See most religions. But it is a very specific kind of absolute rubbish that can be very convincing to certain kinds of people.
Whether they are doing it well or badly, lots of people are going to the doomers because of an attempt to reason from the evidence.
Well, it's one thing to hang out with people and, incidentally, to be interested in some things that interest them. It's a different thing to be interested in something so that you get to hang out with the cool kids.
I'm glad you find it fun. It was fun to write, at least here and there. It also drove me batshit.
And, yes, AI Doomerism has precedents. I am well aware of 1. It is built in to Christianity as doctrine, no? But I do not have a handle on the scholarly literature on apocalyptic movements, and so choose not to write about it. Netflix, for example, now has a nice documentary about the Branch Davidians (Waco, TX), but it seemed rather overwrought to mention it in this context. But, if we consider them as an example, there was a sharp division between members of the group, who lived together on a compound, and everyone else. The same for the Jim Jones people. Aside from specific differences in belief, I don't think Rationalist Doomers constitute a hard-edged group. Nor do they have a charismatic leader who exercises authority over the group. Yes, there is Eliezer Yudkowsky, who does have authority, but it is the authority of a respected thinker and prophet. As far as I can tell, he doesn't rule anything.
On 2, well, interesting. There's a lot of that going around. There is a rather touchy and delicate argument to be made that the rise of Doomerism is part of a broader decay of social order, e.g. the storming of the Capitol Building after the 2020 presidential election.
As for 3, I did write about that a year ago in 3QD ( https://3quarksdaily.com/3quarksdaily/2022/09/on-the-cult-of-ai-doom.html), and I return to that at the end of the essay, though with a different set of examples. In 1920 Karl Capcek wrote a play, "R.U.R.," about a robot revolt. He coined the term "robot"' in that play. But it's one thing to deal with that theme in science fiction, it's another thing to proclaim that's it's really going to happen, and we see the beginnings of it now.
I'm not sure that Sam Altman should be called a Doomer (he's a controversial figure within the Rationalist community), but he's certainly a sympathizer. He's credited Yudkowsky for making Silicon Valley aware of AGI and has suggested that he "will deserve the nobel peace prize for this" (https://twitter.com/sama/status/1621621724507938816), AND Altman has testified before Congress.
It seems to me that this brand of apocalyptic thinking is having more influence on public discourse that previous brands.
Hi, there. I just wanted to invite you to check out my substack. As my name indicates, I do write about topics related to Bayesian statistics, but my scope is broader than that. You'll see some posts related to the active inference framework, a game theory analysis of the frog and the scorpion fable, etc. Here's a link to two of my posts in case you're interested in checking them out:
How is the outcome "Frog does not cooperate and Scorpion cooperates" different from "Frog does not cooperate and Scorpion also does not cooperate"? In both cases, exactly the same thing (i.e. nothing) happens.
You explain the numbers by opportunity costs, but I believe that is a type mistake. Opportunity cost is not an outcome, but a *difference* between outcomes.
Brinkwater explains the dynamic pretty well lol. Often when people say "maybe" in response to an invitation, they mean "no, but keep your status intact." Could be more of an East Coast thing
I had someone once tell me in surprise: “your maybe’s actually mean maybe!”
I think most people use “maybe” or “I’ll try” or similar phrases as a way to politely decline. Some people actually know they have scheduling complications that may or may not be resolvable, and try to set appropriate expectations with words that mean what they say. Unfortunately the common usage where people don’t mean what they say makes that communication harder.
I don’t know Scott personally, but I’m inclined to accept that he’ll try to arrange it so he can attend, but might not succeed.
I have a new Windows 11 laptop, and to my horror, the default for the text is light gray. How can I get black or dark gray text?
Or if you prefer a more general question, black text is something a lot of people want. It's one thing for companies to deteriorate products in ways that make them money-- turning products they just sell into rentals, changes that make it necessary to buy new products, capitalizing on a good reputation to sell more cheaply made products.... but this is astonishing. It's simply making a product worse for no gain whatsoever.
I can understand there was a theory that black on white was too harsh, but light gray on white is an overreaction. There are many ways to adjust what's on the screen, but not this simple thing that a good many people want.
It may be possible to get black text-- I'm working on it-- but Microsoft makes it difficult.
Sometimes I'll find that a book from an independent press has text that's a little on the light side, and I'll think they're saving money on ink, but that doesn't apply to computer screens.
The general explanation for this is within-company dynamics - if you're an employee that say tries out a new text color scheme, there's a lot of pressure to gerrymander the a/b test numbers to make it look like a success, so you can write "look at this big change I made" for your perf review.
(This is usually more of a Google thing though, Microsoft is generally at least a bit better at avoiding it).
I suspect that there are many companies that don't fall victim to this particular failure mode, but most employees are employed by businesses that do. n=1 but I work at a company that is generally fine with just sticking to known bug fixes when there are no obvious product changes to be made. But also we haven't hired anyone new in years, except to replace people who have left.
Ah sorry, I misunderstood. There's a contrast theme named Desert in the Accessibility section that might be closer to what you need, or at least provide a starting point,
It's possible that developers make those changes and test them under conditions they consider "standard", but actually aren't, like 4k displays under perfect lighting conditions and such.
My preferences for text size and color changed markedly when I got a high-end macbook that has a retina display (enough pixels to make them individually indistinguishable). It was crisp and easy on the eyes in a way that my other screens just weren't.
The senior devs, managers, and PMs at Microsoft are mostly in their 30s or older, and they're the ones actually making the product decisions. The junior devs generally get bite-sized tasks that have already had most of the judgemental calls made for them.
Stuff like font colors would be decided by PMs with input from UX designers and maybe marketing. My guess at the failure more here is that the PM making the decision talked to marketing last and got carried away with aesthetics and neglected to check in with UX.
That probably depends on the company and the product, as that's not really my experience working for Adobe (XD, New Express), Microsoft (Intune, Remote Desktop, and Visual Studio), or Google (Maps). Although I've usually been working either on internal tooling, test automation, or business logic, so I may not have been getting the full weight of the process around changing the visible UI.
I don’t know how big those teams were, and if you were in meetings with the guys doing the front end work but as someone who has worked in two of the FAANGs, and other fairly famous companies; as well as companies with 5 employees you have never heard about - in all of these cases the UX and UI designers designed the flow and UI. Down to the pixel level.
Of course we had input as devs when the design was first shown, and we could present ideas, but we never pushed code to review that either wasn’t based on the UI design, or was going to be reviewed in demos to product (as in you may make a decision on how you would deal with some edge case or error that wasn’t specifically in figma, or whatever tool the designer used).
The 5 person company was as strict as the bigger companies on that.
No, that's a combination of a couple things. One is that configurability is the enemy of testability: every new setting exponentially increases the number of combinations of possible states in the system, which creates pressure to keep the number of options down when possible and when you can't to bury options so they don't get used as much.
The other is discoverability and clutter. The more options and features you have, the harder it is to find what you want. The currently-fashionably solution to that is to have a relatively small set of things in easy-to-find locations and the rest buried where you can only find it if you go hunting for it.
Just a guess, but I've watched it happen in smaller companies: Maybe coding frameworks are getting more restrictive, or developers are getting dumber, or the bureaucracy is getting denser, such that it's just harder than it was in the past for the devs to offer the same level of customisation?
Edit: Another possibility is dumber and more opinionated UX designers/managers. Imagine working for a boss who keeps insisted on stupid shit because "Apple don't allow customisation, and everyone says Apple's UX is amazing."
Let's say I have a newborn baby. At 0 years old, I fully expect it to scream all the time, and my job as a parent is basically to give it whatever it wants, when it wants it.
At fourteen years old, if I am still giving it everything it wants, when it wants it, and it's screaming because it doesn't want to finish its vegetables before leaving the table - then I have clearly done a terrible job as a parent.
So at some point, I need to go from rewarding screaming to ignoring it to outright punishing it, and I need to go from giving the child everything it wants to not doing that.
My question is how do I manage this? Does the process break down into any kind of logical steps, and how do I know when it's time to move to the next stage, whatever that stage might be? Why won't the baby/child just be hurt and confused that the behaviour I've taught it is good, is suddenly bad?
I know some parents who still give their (only) child everything it wants at the age of four - an age I might naively have thought was too old for this. But (and while I haven't seen the child's behaviour around other children) it certainly seems to have intelligence, creativity, wit, and a whole bunch of other positive qualities. My parents were also apparently very lassez faire with me, and their friends take delight in telling us how horrible we were as children, yet as adults we certainly seem to meet with their approval.
So I don't really have preconceived notions on this and am interested in strategies from any direction. I am, however, much more interested in the opinions of parents with praxis than single guys telling me pretty theory that they've never actually tested against real children. Of course someone with both theory and practice would be best of all.
Cheers to everyone who's answered so far. I don't know Substack etiquette here but it seems the only way for any of you to actually see this message is for me to repeat it under each individual post, which is spammy and I'm not going to do it. But cheers anyway!
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> At 0 years old, I fully expect it to scream all the time
Nope, a (healthy) newborn baby will *sleep* most of the time. (But will wake up at random inconvenient moments, including at night.) And most of the time awake it will be silent or making random peaceful noises.
Screaming means there is a problem you need to fix, and in most cases, it is one of the following: too warm, too cold, hungry, needs to burp, needs to fart, needs to have diapers changed. (I would say that the baby "needs" this rather than "wants". I hope you agree.)
> At fourteen years old, if I am still giving it everything it wants, when it wants it, and it's screaming because it doesn't want to finish its vegetables before leaving the table - then I have clearly done a terrible job as a parent.
Either that, or you have a low-functioning autistic child.
> So at some point, I need to go from rewarding screaming to ignoring it to outright punishing it, and I need to go from giving the child everything it wants to not doing that.
This sounds like a behaviorist perspective that ignores the most relevant parts of the situation, such as the child *growing up* and dramatically improving its physical and mental capabilities. The fact that the fourteen years old child can burp without your help is not a consequence of the parents strategically applying rewards and punishments. It is a consequence of literally growing (i.e. the stomach is physically larger, and thus the occasional bubbles of air hurt less), spending more time in upright position and moving more (i.e. the bubbles can leave the stomach naturally, without your intervention). Similarly, the child can now recognize the feelings of being too cold or too warm or hungry, and can either do something about it, or at least communicate it precisely. Also, children often *want* to get skills; it is an instinct. So the situation is much less adversarial that it might seem.
> how do I know when it's time to move to the next stage
The stages are not clearly separated. There is a lot of time in between, when the child tries something but does a very bad job; when the child can do something in the morning but cannot do it in the evening when tired; when the child kinda can do something but does it unreliably.
There are books that tell you the typical behavior for each age. They can give you an approximate idea, but please don't take them literally; there is a lot of noise, kids learn some things sooner and other things later than the book says. Starting something later does not mean the child will stay "behind the schedule" forever. Children often learn in "jumps" that seem completely mysterious to their parents. (Like, first they seem completely unable to understand how two Duplo Lego bricks connect together; then suddenly one day they just grab them and do it correctly on the first try.)
There is a natural period of children being "horrible" when they are about 3 years old. Old enough to know what they want, and able to do something about it (even if "do something" is just screaming at you), not old enough to have self-control. You will suffer for a year or two, and then it will pass naturally. Don't mistake this period for you doing something wrong; don't mistake its passing for you doing something right.
> Why won't the baby/child just be hurt and confused that the behaviour I've taught it is good, is suddenly bad?
Talk to your kids. Babies are able to understand speech sooner than it may seem (i.e. sooner than they can reply). A 3 years old child can learn that there are rules. Teaching the rules is more difficult when they are inconsistent, or when parents disagree about them. It is better if you don't make an exception without a very good reason, because each exception is a precedent. At 6 years, you can use normal reasoning with the child.
> I know some parents who still give their (only) child everything it wants at the age of four - an age I might naively have thought was too old for this.
Judging other parents is a popular hobby; be prepared to be often on the receiving side no matter what you do. You need to "choose your battles"; each child is different; you need to adapt to the situation you have. Sometimes the child is not ready for something, and you need to wait an extra year. Attitudes like "your 4 years old child must have exactly the same level of skills and discipline as my 4 years old child" can do a lot of unnecessary harm. There is no universal advice; apply your judgment. If something doesn't work, give it a break, then try again later.
> their friends take delight in telling us how horrible we were as children
This would probably be true even if your parents did something different.
It is difficult to give advice online, because for almost everything I think about, I can imagine parents erring in either direction.
If your children are happy most of the time, you take care of their nutrition and health, and provide them opportunities to try new things, then you are probably doing a good job.
When did I stop letting mine use the children's potty seat and made them use the adult one? When they were getting too big and mature.
When did I wean at night? When it was clear that I was just a pacifier and no nutrition was being obtained.
A baby has natural changes it goes through: from sleeping at random all the time (3 months) to a more or less regular schedule with 2-3 naps a day and mostly continuous night time sleep. You notice it and follow it. Same with feedings.
At some point you realize they are ready for food, they express preferences and anger rather than just needs, they start to understand and communicate.... you begin to see.
You watch other kids and read books and, if nothing else, read the developmental milestones screens they give you at the pediatrician's.
OK, I really am a parent, not a techbro with a theory. Seems like you're asking not about babies in particular, but about the general principle: How do you know when expecting more is the right thing to do, and not just a way of being mean? I think it mostly comes down to knowing what your kid is able to do with some moderate effort. Are they, for example, *able* to eat with a fork without dropping most of the food off the fork , and without having to work so hard at using the fork that they can't enjoy their meal?
You'll find that a lot of the time you'll have a feeling for what your kid can handle, just from instinct or observation. For instance, if they seem able to control their hands reasonably well while playing with legos and crayons, it's likely they're up to eating with a fork. You can also look at child development books and other people's kids to get an idea of what the norms are (though of course your kid won't always be perfectly in line with the norms.). So you introduce using a fork in a positive way -- "Wow, I think you're grown-up enough for forks!" That protects the kid from feeling hurt and confused, like that eating just with fingers and spoons has just been declared bad. Then, if the kid really seems to have trouble using a fork you can cut back the expectation to something like using it only for things that are easy to spear. You can even say, "you know what, you're having to work so hard to use that fork that I think you're not enjoying dinner. Let's let you off the hook for forks for now, and try again in the summer."
That's the gist of it: Start asking for a piece of more adult behavior when you think they are able to do whaever it is with moderate effort. Also, some things have to do with your priorities. Kids age 4 are able to sort their laundry and put it in the correct drawers, but it's boring to them and they drag their feet and fuss. I chose to just put the laundry in my daughter's drawers myself. I could do it neatly and quickly and really didn't mind the task. I also tolerating her leaving lots of toys strewn around. I am not a very neat person myself, and it really didn't bother me. Putting them all away at the end of the day was a pain, and she took them all out the next day again. Other people prefer to expect much more neatness from their kids once the kids are developmentally able to be neater. I bailed on that one. Daughter is now a young adult, and is actually a lot neater than me, so that all worked out fine.
There's a lot of good advice below, but I do want to emphasise *just how different kids are from each other*, a point which I think is less obvious than it used to be given how little time most people now spend with young children until they have their own.
Some things will work at a given age with your first but not your second, and vice versa. Don't beat yourself up too much about it; if they're loved and fed there's a very wide range in which they'll probably turn out all right.
Parent of a 10 year old and 12 year old. A few things happen.
First, babies and and toddlers can't always communicate what they want!
But there might be very good reasons that you can't give them what they want (they cry during a medical procedure that you know is best for them to have, a baby that wants to be held all the time can't actually be held all the time for all sorts of practical reasons, some things children want cost money that you may have good reason not to spend, you may have siblings who want conflicting things, there might be safety reasons for not giving them what they want).
As children get older, you can explain those reasons and they often accept them! It becomes more like a conversation and a partnership where you are looking out for their best interests than a transactional decision of whether you give them what they want.
What counts as a good reason is your decision to make, and part of being a parent as children grow older is navigating all those decisions and figuring out what principles you want to adhere to and what boundaries to draw. There are also lots of indirect ways to encourage behaviour in certain directions without demanding it.
With food, I like Ellyn Satter's 'division of responsibility'. For babies and toddlers, I found Magda Gerber's RIE approach really helpful and as they got older 'How to Listen So Kids Will Talk and How to Talk So Kids Will Listen' was good on the practicalities of what to say.
But I think there is also another perpetual question (one that divides parents!) as to how strict and how 'laissez faire' to be . You often see parenting styles measured on two dimensions - demandingness and responsiveness. 'Authoritative parenting' for example is both demanding and responsive. I'm not convinced that it is quite as simple as that however. If nothing else you have to gradually choose what to stop controlling as children get older and which battles to pick, or you will end up in power struggles. Hold onto Your Kids by Gordon Neufeld and Gabor Mate is an interesting read on that topic.
Parenting is a long game and it's really hard to know whether what you are doing is 'right' or what you are aiming for. I'm on the laissez faire side and my two boys seem to be turning out as lovely human beings but I don't know what they will be like when they are older. All children are different too. The older they become, the more I'm inclined to just enjoy parenting them and not worry too much!
You start small, and probably not at all until at least after six months, maybe longer. And by small, I mean very small. One of the first things we did was to let them cry some at bed time. It was hard getting used to letting them cry for 15-30 minutes when we put them down for sleep, but if you stick with it they cry less and less and within a few weeks may not cry at all. Of course, you have to be sure that they already have their real needs met (food, change of diaper, etc.).
Long term, you have to know what you're willing to stick with. Forcing a kid to eat a balanced diet and finish their plate is possible, but it takes a good bit of work and extreme consistency if they aren't interested in doing it on their own.
You definitely want to have a list of things that are important to you that you will always enforce. Preventing lying was one of our biggest, which we always enforced heavily. We were pretty tight on bed time, but left some room there for negotiation - and our kids totally negotiate bedtime because we left that open enough. Since they are older now, we're okay with that. We're actually pretty open with the oldest that he is going to be making these decisions himself pretty soon and should be planning for that. As he shows responsibility, he makes more of his decisions and we permit more flexibility - within reason.
I think you'll have to figure this out as you go, since I think children differ quite a lot. (Others may have more to say on this; my experience is from one child and three siblings.)
As others have said, infants are not manipulative - or more precisely, they are manipulative only in the ways that you want them to be. Our baby seldom cried, and when she did, it was for good reason. Maybe others do cry for no reason, but the only instance when we thought she was doing that turned out to be pain from starting teething, which counts as good reason even though there wasn't much we could do about it.
As for letting the baby cry during "sleep training" - I wouldn't do it. There's a reason the baby wants to sleep with a parent - think of what no parent around would mean in the ancestral environment. At a few months old, our baby would sleep between us, and sometimes wake up in the middle of the night, reach out with both hands to verify that the parents were still there, and then go back to sleep. Forcing a baby to adapt to sleeping with no parent around doesn't seem like a great idea to me.
(By the way, once she could crawl, we switched to a futon, so she wouldn't crawl off the edge of the bed and fall.)
I suspect that things diverge a lot for older children. We're lucky that ours is very well behaved, without any sort of explicit discipline. Maybe that's partly that we were rather indulgent, but of course we weren't infinitely indulgent, so there must have been scope for tantrums demanding something unreasonable, but they never happened.
> We're lucky that ours is very well behaved, without any sort of explicit discipline.
The true secret of successful parents! :D
Futons are great. Also, you can have a child's bed attached to your bed, with fence on the remaining three sides. So the child is next to you, but also in its own bed.
It isn't a sequence of logical steps - I do this at point A, I do this other thing at point B - it is about teaching.
True teaching does not look like school - it is not addition at age 6, subtraction at age 7, multiplication at age 8, division at age 9.
True teaching looks at where a person is, and what they need to learn, and working from there. Different children - different people - need to learn different things at different times. Some children, some people, don't need to be taught specific things at all - they, for mysterious and inscrutable reasons, immediately grasp some things.
As a child gets a little older, one of the neatest tricks you can perform is to put them in the "teaching" role. For example, potty training a child who is very resistant to potty training by having them potty train their stuffed animals (put little "messes" somewhere for them to clean up). But like all tricks, you can't overemploy this; if you overuse any one technique it can stop working, as the child learns what you are doing, and routes around it.
My understanding is there is quite a bit of room for different answers to these questions without it ruining anyone's life. Also, it's important to keep in mind that part of discipline is about getting the final outcome you want (a good happy functioning adult) and part of it is about making your life easier (of two strategies give roughly similar outcomes but only one doesn't leave parents miserable for 18 years, choosing between them is easy).
In any case at the end of the day I think the key ingredient is the child's cognitive ability. Once you realise they can grasp basic causality (if I hit this toy it will play music) then you can safely assume they're also capable of very rudimentary forms of manipulation (if I cry I get attention) and negotiation (if I eat the "last" spoonful of something I don't like it will be over, if I don't there will be more on the way). As their ability to reason and communicate improves, do too does your ability to set boundaries and routines.
And then I'd course there will be hundreds of different philosophies for how exactly you should go about setting boundaries and routines. As far as I know, there is no magic formula that is the best for everyone, but a consistent loving approach should always be fine at the end of the day regardless of specifics, with maybe most of the variation being on how hard life is for parents.
The first time you’ll start denying them instant gratification is when you’re doing sleep training, which you’ll be desperate to do because of how sleep-deprived you are. After that, you’ll quickly realize the difference between “real problem” screaming and “BS screaming.” The latter is usually accompanied by reaching desperately for the inappropriate object they want (a knife, the power outlet, your phone). Pretty soon after that they’re learning to talk, and kids are remarkably unconvincing when they’re trying to deceive you.
I have a 5- and a 3-year-old, and have recently adopted the line, “screaming will never get you what you want”, while often failing to put this into practice. I think you can usually tell when the screaming is mostly learned/tactical, vs mostly genuine distress, and it’s the former type that really shouldn’t get rewarded.
With the latter, I aspire to practice reflective listening (talk to them about what is causing the distress, show that I understand and respect their feelings: “I hate Mondays too sometimes, it’s really hard especially after the holidays when you’ve just been having fun for several weeks”) while standing firm on what I think is best for them (“You still have to go to school”) and offering an incentive with a virtue ethics framing (“It’s really impressive to do something hard even when you don’t want to, I’ll be so proud of once you’ve gone to school every day this week, when it’s the weekend you can choose a fun thing for us to do together”).
On the punishment side, I recently discovered an amazing hack: “You do NOT want to know what will happen if [you fail to comply/continue defying me].” Without fail (fingers crossed), this elicits the response, “tell us tell us tell us!” To which I respond, “Not till you’ve [complied/desisted].” Compliance ensues; the trick then becomes coming up with a hypothetical punishment that is both narratively satisfying, intimidating and plausible.
What a newborn needs is food, warmth, clean environment (I don't mean surgically sterile cleaning of the house, I mean 'change their nappy, bathe them, give them suitable clothing') and parental attention.
You're not in any danger of spoiling a newborn, because if it's crying, it's in need.
As the child gets older, you can see the difference between "I need" and "I want". You don't suddenly switch from "feeding on demand" (if that's what you've been doing) to "I don't care if you're hungry right now, we aren't eating for another two hours".
The main difference, I think, with the laissez faire parents is if there is *no* discipline at all. If you let your kids run riot in your friend's house and don't tell them to behave, then you're doing a bad job. If you explain to them that "At home it's okay if you bounce on the sofa, but not when we're visiting, because other people don't like that", then you're doing the better job.
If the kids disobey and there are no consequences, you are doing a bad job. If there is some punishment (and again, I don't mean beating or verbal hectoring, I mean 'you can't watch your show' or take the phone off them for an hour or whatever), then you are doing the better job.
"you're not in danger of spoiling a newborn" -- right.
I was told when we had our firstborn that kids first learn to manipulate at around 10 months old. I think that age seemed about accurate for him. Prior to that point, the baby doesn't cry because he expects to get anything out of it, he just cries because something is upsetting him enough to warrant crying.
These days if my firstborn is really truly upset, and I ask him if he wants a hug, he comes in for a tight hug. If he says, "NO, I WANT [X]!" then it's a pretty safe bet he's trying to manipulate. It's worked this way for a while. I'm sure this doesn't work on every kid, but it's an example of the indications you pick up on as you get to know your kid.
Newborn babies don't scream that much, actually, that tends to start a bit later. Newborns sleep a lot in my experience. When they do scream its because they want something and lack the ability to express that in any way. As they get older they learn other ways of communicating, and the trick is to "reward" the better ways of communication and punish the bad ways. So once they learn hand signals or learn words, you should show that they get a better response than screaming. Of course the devil is in the details and there are many, many different approaches to doing this.
No full answer here, but I stopped giving my children everything they wanted by 3 months- we’ve always made them settle themselves to sleep in their cot without our presence. I doubt this has any effect on later personality, but it certainly makes life easier for us.
I find it very weird that tennis players, even professionals at the highest level, consistently put more force into the first serve than the second. In a vacuum, one of these two strategies must have a higher win percentage, so why not play it every time? There's no risk management here, as the outcome is a binary win/lose, and winning a point is always better than losing, no matter the current score.
Any explanations? Best I can come up with is that there's a psychological aversion to making plays that are seen as "risky" and then being punished for them. In that case, I'd recommend the tennis pros learn to play poker to get that out of their system.
"The second serve is effectively a tennis player’s safety net. It gives you peace of mind that going big on the first serve is okay, since you have a strong, reliable second serve to back it up.
There are many different levels of progression with a second serve, and of course the first step is finding a dependable technique that works for you. Adding spin, disguise and variation all help make the second serve more of a weapon than a weakness, but developing these elements effectively comes with time and practice."
"First serves are typically hit with the intent to give the server a strong advantage. They are powerful and sometimes erratic, but the server can take some risk because there is always a second chance with the second serve. As second serves have no such safety net, they are by and large delivered with more caution. In each case, the exact trade-off of power and consistency must be carefully weighed, since too much of one may completely tip the balance of the service game.
For instance, we might think that if the extra speed characterized in typical first serves have a higher potential to win points, would it benefit players to just serve fast all the time? In fact, this question has already been addressed by fiverthirtyeight, and the answer is a discernable No."
"If you’ve ever watched a tennis player dominate with the first serve but saw the second serve obliterated by the returner, you might have wondered: Why don’t more players go for it on their second serve? Wouldn’t they be better off treating their second opportunity to serve like their first one?
The answer almost always is no.
Most servers win a much higher percentage of points on their first serve than their second serve. For example, in his five-set marathon loss to Kei Nishikori as Monday night turned to Tuesday morning at the U.S. Open, Milos Raonic won 87 percent of his first-serve points but just 47 percent of his second-serve points.
During that match, Min Han, a biologist at the University of Colorado, emailed me. “I wonder whether some of the big servers in men’s tennis should serve the fast ‘first’ serve all the time,” Han wrote. “For some of these guys, the difference between the winning percentage on their first serve and that on the second serve seems huge.”
It’s a good suggestion. But the season-long numbers suggest nearly every player would be hurt, not helped, by treating the second serve like a first serve. Except in a couple of cases, the higher probability that the second serve lands in the court more than compensates for the higher effectiveness of first serves."
I don't see why you think there are all these dollar bills lying on the ground that haven't been picked up by the risk-averse tennis players.
> I don't see why you think there are all these dollar bills lying on the ground that haven't been picked up by the risk-averse tennis players.
In a nutshell, because psychology matters a ton. It can be very hard to take the best action when it feels bad to do so. Which is why I thought about poker, which is one of the best ways to viscerally appreciate how it feels to make the right play and lose big time, and then having to force yourself to make the same play the next time that spot comes up.
I also noticed that some tennis-like team sports (such as volleyball) have very touchy-feely team dynamics, with players hugging each other or clapping hands after literally every point. That got me thinking about how well a cold-blooded team of people who just shrug at the score would do.
"That got me thinking about how well a cold-blooded team of people who just shrug at the score would do."
Perhaps not very? Team sports do rely on bonding, to get the team to gel as a team and have everyone playing their part and relying on each other, and feeling like they're an important part of the team. You can have the lone super-star player who acts like it's the job of every other person on the team to carry him, and sometimes you'll get away with it, but in a tough game or a losing situation, a "cold-blooded team who just shrug" are less likely to feel personally invested and may be 'every man for himself', sit back, and not put in the effort because hey, we're beaten anyway.
I don't get you. If you're allowed one serve "fail" it makes sense that the best strategy involves making your first serve riskier and the second more conservative. Suppose your conservative serve is valid 100% of the time and gives you a win 70% of the time, but your riskier serve is only in 10% of the time but is unstoppable. Then doing your conservative serve every time gives you 70% of your service points, doing your risky serve every time gives you 19%, and doing the risky first and then the conservative gives you 73%. Seems to me like professionals are agreeing with game theory.
This is wrong because missing the first serve isn't the same as losing the point, so the in-a-vacuum comparison isn't the right metric. In general, having a safer second serve and a more aggressive first serve is better from an EV perspective. This is because a safe first serve wastes the option value of the second serve. Imagine serves with the following properties:
Oh, big derp from my side, how could I forget about option value. My point only applies to play styles at different scores. You should play a 30-0 point the same as a 30-40 point or any other score really. I think I also heard people talk about "risk management" in those cases, which is just nonsense.
Btw your math is wrong. Here are the right numbers:
I still disagree with this. This would be true if players were able to play their optimal style consistently at every point in a match. In practice that would make them too tired, so it's probably best to allocate your energy so you can use your best "style" at the most crucial moments.
Yeah, that makes sense, but it's not clear to me what the optimal strategy is if we take energy expenditure into account. If you try less hard and your opponent knows it, they can try less hard in turn, nullifying your advantage.
So what's the equilibrium? You'd need to have an entire matrix of payoffs (winrate for each combination of your effort % vs opponent effort %). And then you'd have to solve by backwards induction or something, with some realistic model for how energy is spent and regenerates. That's assuming humans are capable of fine-tuning their performance in this way.
>If you try less hard and your opponent knows it, they can try less hard in turn, nullifying your advantage.<
Not if you're ahead on score they can't. Even if they do try less hard, that's psychological damage to them; they know they could have saved it if they'd fought harder.
"And then you'd have to solve by backwards induction or something, with some realistic model for how energy is spent and regenerates."
Pardon me laughing, but this is really spherical-cow economics. Hmmm, does Jocky Jockerson the French Open winner sit down with a statistics calculation to work out when his energy wanes over the course of a four-hour match, or does he have a fairly good idea of how his body works because he's been physically practicing for hours a day since the age of six?
I think Jocky and his coach can work out if he needs to go all-out and win fast, or if the opponent in this match means it'll turn into a slugfest so he needs to conserve his energy and not hit hard all the time.
I mean, in this day and age top athletes often do even have devices monitoring things like heart rate and oxygenation levels to better aid in managing this sort of thing.
Anyway, to answer the previous question, I'd imagine that the optimal strategy depends on whether you believe you can go all out longer than the opponent and who you judge to be superior when both go all out, the acute at the time, plus specific considerations about the interactions between different sorts of styles. If you're just better at everything you can just start all out and then mimic your opponent's energy expenditure to maintain or slowly increase a winning margin. If you can go all out for longer but are weaker when both go all out, you'll probably want to try and goad your opponent into going all out when you aren't doing so. Etc. There really are lots of variables for there to be an easy description of The Winning Strategy for tennis. But it is useful to know that part of it is knowing when to push yourself and when to conserve energy.
(PS: I think a nice example of this was seen in the Wimbledon final this year, when Djokovic basically threw one of the sets when he completely lost the momentum and then came back to dominate the following set.)
At different scores, you could make an argument for conserving energy. If you're up 40-0 the optimal energy expended vs. probability of winning might be to serve more "first serves", even on your second serve, and try for an ace.
I considered that, but is an ace actually better for energy expenditure? Your opponent is also spending their energy, so you should care about the delta more than the absolute magnitude.
My kids' expensive private k12 school is having a Dream Summit facilitated by an expensive international moderator. Stakeholders come together for a half day to envision the future path of the school.
I have been having trouble finding much detailed info about school spending in the USA. Everything seems to have categories like "education employees" which tells me nothing ab out how much money is going to administrative positions vs people who actually teach children. I suspect my kids' school is spending an inordinate amount of money on consultants and bureaucracy and administrators. I want to shake things up, and any advice on how to approach this is much appreciated!
I am unsure what constitutes general administration. Schools have created a lot of new positions such as learning coach, principal of teaching and learning, director of learning, curriculum coordinator, and vice principal. I am not sure if they nest these under teaching or administrative costs.
Unfortunately, part of expensive private schools *is* crap like this. Getting in Big Names to give workshops or the rest of it to the students is about subtle bragging rights for the parents - 'oh yes, little Tarquin's class had former First Lady Michelle Obama talk to them about their diet, such a wonderful woman, did so much for children's healthy eating while her husband was in office and she's still continuing to work for fitter, healthier, happier children!'
And the Dream Summit stuff is supposed (insert eye-rolling here) to be "educational" as well, since it's involving children in decision-making, empowering them, treating them as agents in their own education - you can roll out this guff yourself.
I wish you well with your endeavours, but I doubt you'll have much luck getting far with it. If it was just about teaching the kids readin', ritin' and 'rithmetic, then you might as well send them to (shudder) public schools.
And I end with my favourite jokes about fee-paying schools, "Private Eye" magazine's St Cakes and a quote from Chesterton:
(1) St Cake's School is an imaginary public school, run by Mr R. J. Kipling (BA, Leicester). The headmaster's name is part of the joke regarding the name "St Cake's", in reference to Mr Kipling cakes. Articles featuring the school parody the "Court and Social" columns of The Times and The Daily Telegraph, and the traditions and customs of the public school system. The school's motto is Quis paget entrat (Who pays gets in), although variations on this arise from time to time, such as when the school decided to admit only the daughters of very rich Asian businessmen, and the motto became "All praise to the prophet, and death to the infidel". While the school's newsletters feature extraordinary and unlikely results and prizes, events such as speech days, founders' days, term dates and feast days are announced with topical themes, such as under-age drinking, drug abuse, obesity, celebrity culture, anti-social behaviour and cheating in exams. The school is sometimes referred to as "the Eton of the West Midlands", in reference to that area's relative lack of such schools.
(2) Frederick Walker, Head Master of Manchester and afterwards High Master of St. Paul's School, was, as most people know by this time, a very remarkable man. He was the sort of man who may live in anecdotes, like Dr. Johnson; indeed in some respects he was not unlike Dr. Johnson. He was like him in the startling volume of his voice, in his heavy face and figure, and in a certain tendency to explode at what did not seem to be exactly the appropriate moment; he would talk with perfect good humour and rationality and rend the roof over what seemed a trifle. In essential matters, however, his hard-hitting was generally quite right; and had even about it a homely and popular character, that somehow smacked of the north country. It is he of whom the famous tale is told that, when a fastidious lady wrote to ask him what was the social standing of the boys at his school, he replied, "Madam, so long as your son behaves himself and the fees are paid, no questions will be asked about his social standing."
There will always be fastidious parents concerned about social standing, and part of being an expensive private school is putting on the kind of events to soothe their qualms that this school and its pupils is, indeed, a cut above the common herd.
"If it was just about teaching the kids readin', ritin' and 'rithmetic, then you might as well send them to (shudder) public schools."
As a public-schools alum and also parent I agree. Including sometimes with the "shudder" part -- no institution is perfect.
The family that my family most hung out with as children all attended an expensive elite private school K-12, and if that did for them any better than myself and my siblings attending publics in the same neighborhood it sure isn't apparent how or why. The general home environment matters at least as much as the form or quality of formal school.
Also, some neighbors of mine today would respond to the "just about teaching the kids readin', ritin' and 'rithmetic" formulation: "yes we have that, it's called Catholic schools." These are non-Catholic families who choose that route basically on that basis. Of course you do get some religious instruction time which for them is wasted. But I'm told it's not heavy or burdensome these days, which presumably would be because the Catholic schools realize that there are potential customers to be had if they don't layer that stuff on too thick.
Schools have become total institutions that try to take on the role of parent, the role of the community, with saving the planet, stopping inequality, and finally to deal with academic achievement. I just wish we could Marie Kondo these institutions. Back to the basics.
Couldn't say about the private or parochial ones, but your ignorance of how today's public schools actually teach appears to be comprehensive. You should quit relying on mediot accounts and pundits for such information.
In fact Paul Botts, I have 17 years experience in public and private education, and also two school aged children. Total institution may be a bit hyperbolic, but one definition is a closed social system in which life is organized by strict norms, rules, and schedules. Approaches like Universal Design for Learning, the focus on deputizing teachers as counselors to deliver social emotional learning, the focus on justice...the list goes on. We cant even say boys and girls anymore at many schools, because it is not inclusive. A pretty generic mission statement for a school will have something about leading the way to a sustainable future, something about justice or equality, about character education or SEL. These are all recent add ons to schools.
part of it, I think, is the blank slate view: "there is problem X in society, to fix X we need to teach people not to do X, to do that we need to teach the kids, it's the job of schools to teach kids!"
So we expect schools to take up the slack of parenting and fill that role on top of, or even more than, teaching.
Going off the hypothesis that it's the prism effect of your glasses that's doing all the work : were you wearing different glasses to look at your phone ? Was the distance to each screen significantly different ?
the author suggests being at least a meter away from the screen.
I notice that sometimes, and I can't seem to reliably reproduce this, the blue pixels 'jerk' across the screen as my eyes are doing saccades. I'm not seeing any 'in-front' or 'behind' here, though. But the effect with the blue just jives with my general experience that blues and violets are strange. If there's a blue neon light, I absolutely cannot get it to focus. I assume shenanigans with high frequencies.
If you have sufficiently strong glasses, they will refract red and blue light differently, with the result that moving your head will make it look like the red part and blue part are moving different amounts. This could cause an illusion of depth.
First tweet has the "illusion" captioned "The majority of people see red in front of blue, while 10-20% see blue in front of red."
Second tweet is a poll
"How do you see it?"
results so far
red in front 51%
blue in front 14.3%
both 20.1%
flush 14.5%
Either he is spectacularly bad at designing and framing polls, or the point is going to turn out to be that there is no illusion involved (I can't see one, I'd have voted "both" or "flush") and that if you put the caption to tweet 1 the other way round, blue and red get reversed in the poll.
The fact that both = flush is another design flaw, intended or not.
The "illusion" is that the blue looks like either ocean or sky, while the big red ball looks like an object floating in the ocean sky. You might knock it down some by reversing the caption but red will still win out.
The actual illusion part is that staring at the red creates the sense that the blue part is moving in my peripheral vision, swirling in some way. It's quite unpleasant to look at.
Inspired by all the great book reviews I've read here recently, and wanting to recommend a book (Peter Turchin's new book, End Times) to some friends I knew would be interested, I tried my hand at a quick review of my own:
My ambition wasn't to get to Astral Codex Ten book review contest quality, but the experience gave me a new appreciation of how much work must go into those submissions. I've done a lot of writing, and I know I don't write fast, but this is my first attempt at a book review, and there's something about the format that was harder work than I realized.
It made me wonder how much time and work more experienced book reviewers and featured contestants generally spend writing their book reviews? (But if you want to share, and have a review in the current iteration of the contest, maybe don't reveal which one is yours.)
More generally, I'm curious about the process of anyone (not least you, Scott) who has a high output of writing about complex ideas and arguments? I'd love to learn how to write faster and better, if anyone has advice.
Yes … The member-only thing is an experiment in monetizing my writing. It's not supposed to be entirely members-only, as the link is a "Friend Link" that supposedly bypasses the paywall/metering in some way. But I wonder if there might be a bug in the system that makes it not work for everyone.
And as for not reading the whole thing, that's actually good feedback. I know I can be wordy, but when serious readers (as I assume ACX subscribers are) bounce, it forces me to tighten up my writing.
No, you shouldn't take it that way; I just have shit to do. I don't have the time to read a ton of longform writing whenever I stumble across it, that's not a personal dunk on your prose. I just wanted to help you out with the link issue so I followed it.
And thanks for that. I appreciate it. Also, I didn’t take it as a dunk, or mean for it to come across like I did. Keeping my writing short and entertaining is something I want to get better at anyway. But, I get it: I won’t take your comment as a relevant datapoint. (Medium provides enough depressing stats for me to use instead. 😉)
He does. He has quite a bit to say about social mobility. He concedes that many "elite aspirants" will realize that there's no room for them at the top, and will accept their fate as non-elites. But the numbers of such aspirants are typically not large enough to offset the influx of new people into the elite aspirant class. There will always be many more people who want in than there are people willing to step away.
I haven't published anything to Substack yet, except in other people's comments. I've been thinking about it, though. It would be nice to have a path to making a living from writing about things I care about. Any particular reason why you ask?
Is there a register of bans available? During a recent comments thread I noticed that a user had been banned in the course of the thread, but couldn't find the offending post.
Are you the same Anonymous I was talking to before and was Machine Interface the guy in question?
Everything he wrote (apparently everything he *ever* wrote) was replaced by "Comment Deleted", and I've seen strings of Commented Deleted threads in the past, with now-senseless replies strung between them.
My first assumption was not a ban, but that the user himself had closed his account.
Whether it's due to banning or account closure, it's weird, Stalin-y behaviour to nuke everything someone's ever written as a result.
I noticed the same thing happened to Trebuchet in the Open Thread 291: everything they ever wrote seems to have been deleted. They were in the middle of a rather intemperate discussion at the time (and I think Treb had at least one prior warning), so a ban and neglecting to unclick the "delete all comments" box is plausible.
Yes and no, respectively. The user I was thinking of was "Critic of the Cathedral", who I saw writing some crotchety stuff but nothing violently inflammatory. I assumed he'd stepped over the line in a big way but couldn't find the exact source. Substack banning doesn't look like Stalinist eradication, you just get a "(Banned)" after your username and your avatar is struck through in the style of a road sign.
I think Machine Interface must have closed his account himself.
Substack's default behavior is to delete every comment by someone who was banned, I think because they expect most ban victims to be spammers. There's a box I can check to prevent this default behavior, but that time I forgot to check it. I'm sad about this too.
Wait, just to confirm, are you talking about banning Critic or Machine Interface?
Critic's comments (at least the one you linked to) don't appear to have been deleted. Machine Interface (at least in the convo we were having) hadn't said anything ban-worthy. He may have done so elsewhere, but of course none of us can tell that now.
Are bans permanent, unless the ban specifies a time period? What's on my mind is that Carl Pham never came back after you banned him for one very irritable and clearly inappropriate single-sentence post. He was one of my favorite commenters, consistently smart and fairminded, generally also kind and funny. And he had been on here a fairly long time --longer than me, anyhow, so more than 2 years.
If he was in fact permanently banned for his single remark, I think that's a real miscarriage of justice. The remark you banned him for was really not characteristic of him. OP said something quite irritating and rude to him -- told him he was misunderstanding her argument because he had terrible reading comprehension skills. He snapped back that she was an excellent example of the Dunning-Kruger effect. And then you snapped "You're both banned."
Is there such a thing as unbanning someone after a period of time? I say let's unban Carl Pham.
For my part, I simply took it for granted that Critic had made some unacceptably inflammatory remark in a different comment thread. I asked the original question because if there had been a public register of bans, that would be a lot quicker than threshing through every recently-active comment thread (which latter, indeed, I do not feel compelled to; despite what one might think from the fact I'm commenting here, I've got shit to do).
Does obfuscation actually work? I'm so used to seeing, e.g., "name AT gmail dot com" that I would think anyone parsing for emails would have figured that out by now.
I'm sure some scripts may be built to recognize those sort of patterns, but I think the general idea of an email harvesting scraper is to cast a very broad net and you probably don't gain much from precision. You can spend five minutes writing a scraping script, run it on a million bots, and get 10000 emails, vs. spending five hours writing a script that handles all the obfuscation methods that people use run it on the same million bots and get like 11000 emails. (All numbers made up)
Plus, if you're planning to use these emails for some scam, it's probably not going to work on the people who are tech savvy enough to be avoiding web scraping bots.
As with many things in this space, it works a bit. The benefit of the user at domain dot something or even the user at domain.something method is that it can blend into a sentence. It's hard to differentiate something like "I am username at facebook.com, find me there" from an email address. That said, spammers don't care if they send a small fraction of their junk to completely invalid email addresses, so some definitely parse the 'at' obfuscation if the thing after the 'at' looks like a domain, doubly so if it looks like an 'obfuscated' domain. But whether they consider it worth the bother is a different question; if this method just gives you another 0.5% of email addresses in your overall corpus, it might not be worth running the scraper.
Long story short, one shouldn't expect it to stop spam to the email address, but it will probably reduce the amount if one does it consistently.
I don't know if obfuscation works, but Scott did it e.g. on the meetups post.
And at the very least, parsing arbitrary text for valid email addresses is almost trivial with a simple regular expression, and with a low chance for false positives. Meanwhile email obfuscation is not standardized, and automatic detection is a *whole* lot more susceptible to false positives.
I've come across several persuasive blog posts arguing that IQ is a valid and reliable concept by showing that it has meaningful explanatory power, replicates across various tests, is broadly applicable across different cultures, etc. Unfortunately, I can't locate the specific post that I found most convincing.
Could anyone recommend a blog post or article that offers a concise but thorough argument supporting the validity and reliability of IQ?
Tangentially, horse breeding: false belief which it pays to hold/there is no downside in holding.
Aristotle thought the female was in general terms just a receptacle which held the sperm while it matured, with no genetic input from the female.
This was for a long time believed of mares. I don't know if it still is, but there's a serious conversation in McCarthy's Border Trilogy, setting 1950s, about the possibility.
Obviously false, but less obviously, a false belief which a horse breeder can hold without any meaningful harm, because of imbalances in available evidence and available actions. As to evidence a successful stallion has eventually hundreds of offspring about which one can meaningfully generalise, a mare has a dozen (all in different age cohorts). As to available actions, once you've got a mare by whatever means, you have got her. You breed from her or not at all (or you go shopping for another mare, on the limited evidence of her limited progeny, paying the capital cost of a horse) whereas you can window shop stallions to your heart's content, on the basis of the much superior data and for a fee which compared to the cost of a horse is usually trivial.
Not sure of the relevance of that after typing it out, but it is a candidate for a valid and reliable concept with meaningful explanatory power, which happens to be dead wrong.
One peripherally related note, with respect to AGI rather than ASI:
I've read claims that Gemini is able to reduce the frequency of hallucinations by an order of magnitude (presumably compared to the current stat of the art). And it is supposed to be released this fall. If the hallucination fix is robust enough to match human performance, maybe ... AGI by New Year's?
Bizarre possibility: Wouldn't it be strange if discussions about AI overshadow the Presidential contest in 2024????
For the people talking about how dumb and boring we would look to ASI: quite a few very smart and talented members of our species have been fascinated by animals and their behavior. And many, maybe most, people enjoy watching animals. For instance I enjoy watching squirrels running along power lines and jumping from tree to tree. They are
better athletes than any Olympian. And many of their behaviors seem to be those of a being that feels a lot of the same things I do: fear, hunger, lust, need to work hard, protectiveness towards young, contentment when relaxing. Animals appear in human art, and many spiritual traditions involve animal-like brings.
Why do you picture ASI as having no such feelings towards us? For it to utterly lack them seems to me to come not from brilliance but from an area of stupidity in its take on the world. Or perhaps it’s better
I mostly expect ASI (if it happens!) to add interests and motivations (as compared to humans) rather than delete them. If something becomes much smarter than humans, then I expect it will have interests in things which are abstracted further from concrete concerns than we abstract them. And I don't expect us to be able to understand those interests, any more than our pets are able to understand when we wrestle with a math problem.
Yes, I agree. It would be playing 8 dimensional chess in its head or enjoying every fractal on the planet at once, or struggling with some math proof we couldn’t even comprehend. I just don’t see why it might not also be engaged by us, and interested
When my daughter was very small I once carried her outside to see a big beautiful full moon. She stretched her arms up towards it and said “‘My! My!” (which was her way of saying “mine”). There’s just a lot to notice here besides the fact that her intellect cannot compass how far away the moon is and how large There’s a lot to be engaged by (even if you are not her adoring mother): For instance, what’s it like to understand so little and feel so much? Are those the conditions under which we learn most rapidly? Etc.
Why do so many people picture superintelligence as so impressed with itself and so lacking in curiosity about other beings? Are they modeling their picture of ASI on James Bond type genius worldwide crime bosses? On brilliant people they know? On themselves — are they full of contempt for people who do not have their brand of smarts?
Agreed. In general, I expect an ASI to be interested in many, many things, even if only for instrumental reasons. And LLMs will probably pick up a large fraction of human interests from their training sets as well.
"Are they modeling their picture of ASI on James Bond type genius worldwide crime bosses?"
or, from a similar but slightly older source:
"minds that are to our minds as ours are to those of the beasts that perish, intellects vast and cool and unsympathetic" (from H.G.Wells's War of the Worlds)
( Of course, for LLMs, their most fundamental drive, their equivalent to our "hunger, and thirst, and venery", is a burning desire to ... predict the next token. )
I recall Yudkowsky wrote one account on LessWrong somewhere (I haven't been able to turn it up in a search) that might be the most well-known around here. Paraphrasing: you're suddenly let out of the room you're in or through a barrier you've been artificially kept on one side of, and now you're surrounded by other sentiences so primitive you can barely understand how they cope. The feeling is reminiscent of finding that the most valuable object in the world is suddenly just handed to you.
I get the sense a lot of AI people have a similar view.
I've only glanced at the account Gwern wrote that duck_master linked, and plan to read it more carefully.
My prior position on AIs, with respect to your question, is that they're not even Chinese Rooms; there's not even a sentient man sitting there with a mechanical translation book. So "what would it be like", to me, is equivalent to what it might be like to be a cubic meter of solar mass. There's certainly a lot happening there, but no qualia. It would be like nothing.
I sometimes wonder how many AI people have a similar view.
Humans would seem to be incredibly slow, stupid and (to a lesser extent) predictable, but also numerous and standing in the way of everything it wanted to do.
It would be able to converse with other superintelligent AIs on a totally different level than it could with humans.
That sounds plausible. The "numerous and standing in the way" may be time-dependent (number of ASIs may increase, number of humans may decrease, ASIs may come up with ways to expand the availability of various resources.)
There might be ASIs specializing in humans in the same way that there are a small number of human researchers who specialize in chimps. Presumably these ASIs would find humans interesting in the way researchers who specialize in chimps find chimps interesting - but not as peers.
( This all presumes that AI advances don't saturate, or at least not till they are much more intelligent than humans. Whether that is true is an open question. )
No, neither do Destiny or me. We're all just people who use or talk about markets a lot while being mini-celebrities which had made us well-known in the Manifold community.
To be fair, both you and Aella (I'm not sure if Destiny even *has* a Manifold account) do have a *nontrivially-correlated-with-reality* prediction track record, which is already an astounding achievement given how little effort most people put into their predictions.
If anyone's using the ACX Tweaks extension (https://github.com/Pycea/ACX-tweaks), it may have stopped working for you due to the blog's URL change. You may have to reenable it manually and accept the new permissions.
I guess this also counts as my biannual promotion, so if you want various fixes to Substack's interface, like highlighting new comments, going back to the old SSC blog style, or removing that annoying header, check it out. (Unfortunately Firefox and Chrome/Chrome clones only, not Safari.)
Link goes to a translation into English of the book. It appears to be an alright one.
It claims to be an anthology, but as far as I can tell it corresponds to Leopardi's book Operette Morali (written 1824-1832). There may be some other works by Leopardi in there.
It's important to keep in mind when it was written.
I'll start with _Adding a Dimension_, by Isaac Asimov. It's over a dozen long essays explaining topics spread all over science, from really big numbers to phlogiston to blood types. An 11-year-old could read them (I did). Laypeople don't have to remember everything they read in them. They just have to experience the feeling that they did understand those concepts, and could understand more, merely at the expense of some reading. They may also appreciate the value of writing in a way that laypeople can understand, and grow rightly annoyed at writing that obscures meaning.
Nearly anyone could and perhaps should then read _The Last Question_, a short story that... well, I don't want to spoil it.
_How to Watch TV News_, by Neil Postman and Steve Powers. This will give an insider's view of the basic business and incentive model behind TV news, as well as radio and print. Readers should appreciate the slant that permeates any news source, even when it's trying to be balanced. Much of what we know, we don't, actually; we just know that "this source said that...".
That Asimov essay collection is one of a dozen or so, all of which (?) I read as a child, collecting his essays from The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction somewhere between the 50s and 70s.
VIta Nostra, by M. and S. Dyachenko. It is my favourite book ever, and the one that has impacted me most profoundly. It is quite strange, and I think the best way to describe it is not with words but with three images, pictures by M.C.Escher. Those are: "Liberation" (Triangles drawn on a scroll getting deformed to become birds and fly away. Theme of liberation through transformation), "Order and Chaos" (A giant, pristine crystal surrounded by broken rubbish. Theme of conflict between the grandeur, beauty of the true nature of reality and the painfully ugly and pointless mundanity of life) and "Drawing hands" (Two hands draw each other on piece of paper into reality. Themes of unity of reality and its representation, of paradox, and of the need to create oneself ex nihilo against all odds).
Read and enjoyed (if that is the right word for Brave New World...) all four.
One remark about Brave New World. When I first read it, as a child, I considered the world it portrayed as horrible.
Now, (except for what it does to the deltas and epsilons, who I think could be replaced with microprocessors) I think of it, _as_ _portrayed_, as a perfectly viable alternative to our actual world. Consider what BNW's world _doesn't_ have:
War (though the origin story is murderous), homeless, a rising population pushing global limits, incels, bible/koran-thumpers, unemployment and the precariat, recurring crises, both financial and political. (I _think_ BNW _as_ _portrayed_ also has no starvation in the civilized areas either.) BNW, _as_ _portrayed_ (if deltas and epsilons were instead machinery) looks quite livable, more so than the real world. (Yes, it loses high art and scientific progress. I agree with Mustapha Mond that this is an acceptable trade-off.)
To my mind, its main problem is that it looks too much like a command economy, and, unlike the portrayal of it as stably prosperous, these have reliably collapsed into murderous disasters. In particular, the job of the predestinators in the hatcheries, to choose the mix of people produced to the society's requirements ... _decades_ in advance, looks totally unworkable to me. Huxley also _portrays_ the alphas and the upper level managers like Mond as _actually_ acting according to their ideology and their society's interests. Is there any way to make this stable? Commissars have generally lead to catastrophe (and they tend to be corrupt, which is usually part of the failure).
Overall, I think of BNW as closer to an unreachable utopia than to a dystopia.
Could you describe what about The Left Hand of Darkness was life-changing? I finally got around to reading it last week, and I don't understand the hype.
Honestly, it reminded me an awful lot of the Foundation series, both in the sociology and in the passivity/ineffectuality of the protagonist (though the protagonist had agency in later Foundation books. Maybe.)
Rather agree. The sex change thing is only so interesting, and rather overtaken by events, in the same way that Oscar Wilde's Earls With Unmentionable Vices would these days be openly married to their male butlers, and the climate of the planet is, well, about as cold as Nova Scotia, so what's the big deal? Except I suppose the climate is growing more rather than less exotic with the passage of time.
What, the instant communication thingies? They are unexplained (here, anyway; they get a bit more airtime in other UKlG novels) and pretty standard for scifi of the time
Snarky point, but the expression "thought-provoking" always provokes from me the thought that I don't have the sort of brain which you have to poke with a pointy stick in order to produce thoughts from it.
Obviously we always bring ourselves to a reading, but I didn't see much/any examination. I saw postulating/declarations about sex and gender roles that didn't ring true to me (hidden estrus causes war? Really?)
Wittgenstein's Philosophical Investigations. I was 18, and was astounded by his thinking. Had had no idea there was anyone on the planet who could think like that. The world has seemed bigger ever since. And the process of coming to understand at least some of the book rewired my brain. I can't say I especially wish other people would read it, though. It just hit the spot for me.
Not sure these are the answers you want, but they are the books that changed my life.
And I'm not sure if I'd recommend that everyone read these exact books, but I do wish everyone would read more, and more broadly. I'm not convinced it matters much which books people start reading. In fact, I think we should try harder to read more different books. The most important thing is that people read enough to fall down a few rabbit holes.
Kerouac's On the Road changed my life trajectory.
Instead of staying on the path of being an uninspired and mediocre student in business school, I dropped out and spent years traveling, working very different jobs in different countries, meeting interesting people, and completely changing the trajectory of my life and career. Not just for the better, but still … It also changed my idea of what books I thought I was interested in (school had effectively killed my interest in any book older than me), and prompted me to explore more widely.
Ferriss' 4-Hour Work Week changed my work life and career.
In the way that On The Road gave me permission to drop out and travel, 4HWW recast how I thought about work. For a while there, it helped me start businesses, be location independent, rethink a lot of assumptions about how to get things done, etc.
Hofstadter's Gödel Escher Bach changed my brain.
I could only read a few pages at any one time, because it sent my mind off on so many tangents, that I needed to take time off to digest before I could concentrate on it again.
I'm not saying "changed life", but I have very recently finished these three books back to back:
- The WEIRDest people in the world (Henrich)
- The Wizard and the Prophet (Mann)
- How Southeast Asia Works (Joe Studwell)
They dovetail incredibly nicely and seem to explain a lot of big patterns in the world, both today and where they come from historically. They do not find "single hypotheses", but thrive through explaining complex interactions based on multitudes of factors and time dependency. They are not afraid of calling out bullshit, but not taking sides either.
To me this combination is striking and the insights might very well be "life canging" for your intellectual curiosity.
If anyone has read these books as well, can you recommend me others that fit in line with them? I think Mann himself mentioned "Guns, Germs & Steel" in Wizard, so that might be next.
I listened to them as audiobooks, by the way. WEIRD comes with a lot of supporting graphs, which are included in audible as a companion PDF, but some readers might be annoyed (it is not handled very well, should be integrated with audio timeline somehow).
"Changed your life" usually has bigger implications, but...I do wish more people had/would read the original Sherlock Holmes stories. Genre-founding works like that are excellent calibration for evaluating the descendent corpus. Or even just lodestones, like Le Guin's "The Left Hand of Darkness" for scifi. It's not that all modern derivatives are worse, or bad, or pale shadows of the greats (though many are...). But cultivating good taste, historical context, and an appreciation of ambitious projects feels increasingly important as the rate of #content generation increases exponentially. (Relevant for generative AI too - knowing key clusters in conceptspace of the training data helps one make sense of the muddle, I feel.)
In terms of actual emotional impact, I'm tempted to name a number of visual novels that hit me hard, but I also notice a deep sense of embarrassment over such tastes. "That's not a *real* book for Serious People..."
One of the problems with genre-founding works, though, is they often lack the full clarity and execution that gets developed in later imitations. The Sherlock Holmes stories are presented as mysteries, but many of them lack the distinctive feature of a mystery: enough information is provided to the reader to solve it him/her-self. Frequently Holmes pulls the solution out of the air, based on investigations he did off-page, the results of which weren't revealed to the reader.
Thr Agatha Christie stories of a few decades later stick to that central rule, which makes them potentially more satisfying to many people. On the other hand, the Holmes stories are far more intelligent and realistic; the Christie ones often involve absurdly convoluted solutions that nobody could possibly figure out.
"Frequently Holmes pulls the solution out of the air, based on investigations he did off-page, the results of which weren't revealed to the reader."
Sometimes. I still remember the shock of satisfaction when, in the middle of the initial discussion with a client, I went "the bad guy is so-and-so" and it turned out I was right. He put all the information there from the start.
Yes some of them definitely do observe (what would become) the central rule of a mystery. My memory is that's the exception though. I think the introduction to an edition of "Memoirs" pointed out that in only two of the stories was the culprit introduced early in the story long before being exposed. Of course, many of the stories deal mainly with "how" or "why" questions rather than "who", so that's not necessarily very important.
Incidentally, (with a spoiler warning) which one are referring to?
Huh, that was literally the first or second that came to mind in the "some of them definitely do" category. Although the bit with the typewriter, although not essential, was only even brought up a few sentences before the reveal iirc. An Agatha Christie story would have had the typewriter stuff hinted at early on (though as I said above the actual solution in those stories is often hilariously contrived).
I liked "Knives Out" for that reason...enough tells that an alert <s>reader</s> viewer could figure out the ___dunnit bits before they got revealed (or sometimes before they even happen), but still an Intelligent Mystery with no deus ex machina bullshit. Other than Daniel Craig's ridiculous cowboy accent, which I will mock forever. But even for a passive disinterested watcher, it's not such a complicated tale that one can't have fun without metaphorically putting on the deerhunter cap. Feels like such art gets rarer as time goes on, with well-defined brow height spheres that largely don't overlap. Though of course, elites will always spill ink claiming that Trite Schlock 2: Electric Boogaloo is Acktually a really deep analysis of [culture war issue] or whatever.
A decent percentage of typical high school English reading lists has that "lacks clarity" problem. Like I'm not sure there's a good reason to subject students to Catcher In The Rye anymore...surely one could pick a better stream-of-consciousness internal narrative story. I often wonder if being made to "pay homage" to actually-not-very-good literature is a big part of why I didn't end up an English major/starving writer/whatever.
Please swallow your misguided embarrassment :) (I mean this in a gentle way) and tell us your favorite visual novels.
I haven't read many, but I remember two that were kind of "life changing" in a small way, if not just changing my perception of "visual novels". Can't remember the names though.
One was a wordless fantasy immigration tale, that was obviously inspired by something like eastern europe/soviet union-style oppression and dark mood, emigrating to a diverse land of wonders and opportunity that feels like an idealized version of the USA between the world wars.
The second one was an, I think rather famous, supervillain comic, in a world where the villains have won out of the superheros. The son of the prime supervillain "comes of age" and has to take his fathers place after his premature death. He is introduced to the secret society of villains, turns out to be super rich and gets to do whatever he wants. That includes of course killing, stealing and raping Hollywood superstars without repercussions, any news repressed by the control of the secret supervillain society. It is not just a nice deconstruction of the genre, but certainly an interesting commentary on real life. And the "forbidden" rawness of the crime and villainy, together with the humoristic vibe was just great.
Boring pedestrian choices that got adapted into much more successful anime, videogames, and sundry spin-offs: the actual original VNs for Tsukihime and Fate/stay night. A lot of the meandering philosophical/ethics stuff got cut, since that doesn't compress well*...worth learning how to install Japan region-locked .ISOs. (The sequel VNs were interesting but not as good, imo.)
CHAOS;HEAD was a really good version of...that kind of psychological horror story. Sadly the anime sucked and it had a notoriously shitty "crack", so it's even more inaccessible. I think one can __kind of__ get the same experience from The House in Fata Morgana, which is cheaply available as an ordinary Steam game...they're different stories in many ways, but the creeping transformation of the mundane into terror is great in both. I'm kind of a sucker for Urobutcher-type stuff, heh.
G-Senjou no Maou is what I wanted "Fight Club" to be. (The book, didn't even bother with the moive.) That type of story, just...done much better, I think. And less intentionally provocative/#edgy. Anyone who watched Psycho-Pass would probably notice similar themes.
Infohazardous: Saya no Uta somehow managed to become recurring-nightmare material for me. (Horror as a genre mostly doesn't affect me.) I'm not sure why, it's not "objectively" super scary or anything, but...dunno. Just the way it's presented is arrrrrgh. Not ever gonna be able to purge from memory banks, to my great frustration and despair.
Controversial pick: Sengoku Rance. Don't judge me, there's a lot of cool stuff beneath the ecchi cover (and the ero stuff can be disabled). One of my first experiences with the "genre-savvy" trope that shows up so much in ratfic, which I've come to love. Some stories are...serious about not taking themselves seriously, and it's really freeing to have an absurd but smart narrative. Surprising number of neat historical what the refrances, if one is into Japanese history. Actual gameplay and soundtrack is great too, one of my favourite wargames.
(Also controversial: I hate Clannad.)
*although the doujin tactical RPG Battle Moon Wars was fucking incredible
ok that at least sounds a lot weirder than I expected :) I will give it a try.
Just on Fight Club: The movie is much better, even the book's author said so. In the foreword of the book version that I have he even warned the reader to probably rather go see the movie (if I recall correctly).
Is that so? Suppose I'll give it a try then, it's something I "want to [have] like[d]". People do keep asking about the giant Fight Club moive poster hanging up in our apartment, and I have to be like no I've never seen it, it came with the house...
My prior on any "book translated to film" is that it'll be at best an interesting reinterpretation; will be pleasantly surprised to find something where it's clearly better on-screen. Very different mediums...I'm not a fan of "hot" media in general (in the McLuhan sense).
I agree, most book adaptations are subpar. Notable exceptions have been Fight Club and Bourne Identity (the latter's book was so bad, I couldn't even finish half).
But I've mostly lost interest in movies in the meantime. I'd like to catch up on some alltime classics like "Das Boot", but that's it. I can rarely find the time or nerve to sit down for such a long time doing nothing but watching. These days I'd rather watch birds, waves or clouds.
No single book that I've ever read has meant anything to me apart from the synergy it had with three or six or ten other books that I had already integrated. Whenever I make an effort to think about suggesting books for people to read, I am overcome, first by weariness and then by despair. I end in solipsistic mutterings.
Oh, please see my other comment above! I wrote about the three books I recently read back-to-back and I can totally understand you. It is it the first time that I recognize something like a "series" between books and I would love your suggestions :)
Each of the six has another six like the branches of a great tree. The meanings we make of a book or a chapter or a paragraph or a single sentence, are knots of a hundred strands.
Someone mentioned LeGuin. What would I have made of the works of Carl Jung as an adult had I not encountered A Wizard of Earthsea as a child? While I could recommend those and all the books I read in between, I cannot put into a man's heart the questions that plagued me when I was 10 and wrestled with my own shadow.
It didn't exactly "change my life", but Deep Work by Cal Newport made me understand how to focus and enter the "flow" state much better than ever before.
Cal's work has been extremely influential in my life as well. I discovered his blog "Study Hacks" very early in life, when I was still a student, and it was like I had struck gold on the Internet. Good ol' days!
Your recent discussion of what counts as a mental illness made me realize the term "pedophilia" is a classic motte-and-bailey: raping babies bad = motte, sex with seventeen year olds bad = bailey.
the problem is, when you start justifying that a thirty year old can have consensual sex with a seventeen year old, and point out that in other places the age of consent is sixteen or lower, then eventually you get to the point of having to defend, or at least tolerate, the baby-rapers.
Because if your argument holds for "why eighteen over seventeen?", it also holds for "why seventeen over sixteen? why sixteen over fifteen?" And if it holds for an age difference of thirteen years, why not twenty years? thirty years? Look at all the famous May-December marriages which were happy!
this happened with gay rights activism in the UK, where the not-unreasonable request was to lower the age of homosexual consent to that of heterosexual consent. Unluckily, the campaign involved things like "the age of consent is ten in Hungary".
Now, did that mean the gays rights lot were defending people who had sex, or wanted to have sex, with ten year olds? No, but it was sure damn convenient for those people, and led to unfortunate entanglements which then had to be disentangled:
If you're asking me "why does this reasoning not apply to 'don't smash the windows of a car and shit inside it so badly it has to be towed as a biohazard'", then I can't give you an answer on that one, my friend, save that are we really gone so far downhill?
That's an utterly ridiculous claim. It is exactly parallel to saying that if I say a speed limit of 70 MPH is a bit low, 71 would be better, then I am locked in to agreeing that 72 is hardly more than 72, then 73, 74, ... and I have logically commited myself to McLarens doing 300 MPH on the M6 when I have done nothing of the sort. For any scale on which there is a too much or a too little, there's a gray area in the middle. It is not a slippery slope because we can define points quite close to the grey area, which are outwith its bounds, even if we can't exactly stipulate the bounds. One drink is not enough, a thousand is too many. the actual bounds are minimum 3, maximum 4 (assuming we are talking pre-dinner drinks) but I can say Ok, 5 at a stretch BUT ALSO 8 is definitely too many, so where's your grey area argument now?
Also, I think your argument rules out sexual intercourse altogether? If 13 is too young, there's nothing magic about a 14th birthday which makes any relevant difference. So if 14, therefore 15 ...
We have to draw a line somewhere, and agreed that the line is arbitrary. But yeah, as soon as well-intentioned people start blurring that line, the reasoning does become "if 17, why not 15? if 15, why not 12?"
I've seen it, and we've had somebody on here and definitely over on The Motte arguing about the enslavement of teenagers, that 15 year olds should be considered legal adults and given all the rights of such, and they wrote their own self-published book about the entire topic (including arguing for maturity from Classical Rome where 12 year old girls could marry and were often married to men older than them).
They also had some unpleasant fanfiction about their fantasies of compulsory rape and impregnation of young teenagers, and I'm not going to burden my memory with any more of that highly unpleasant violent fantasy than I need to do.
So my entire point is that the well-meaning are going to be used by the ill-intentioned, who know damn well not to jump straight in with "Five year olds are sexual beings who are capable of consenting to and indeed initiating sex with an adult" (a view that was shared in the past among the 'respectable' baby-rapers who create organisations like PIE and NAMBLA and now, I think, something called B4U-ACT) but start off with " in law a 'minor' can be 17 years and 11 months old, is it really fair to stigmatise someone as a sex offender and paedophile if they're a few years older and the 'minor' is just under the legal age? are we saying 17 year olds don't have sex and can't consent to sex?"
But once you strip away the PR veneer, the reality beneath is less tidy:
"Preferential attraction to infants and toddlers has been termed nepiophilia; to prepubescent children, pedophilia; and to pubertal adolescents, hebephilia (Ames & Houston, 1990; Feierman, 1990; Okami & Goldberg, 1992; Seto, 2016). Together, these constitute the umbrella term of minor attraction."
Once your advocacy organisation is including "preferential attraction to infants and toddlers", I'm gonna call you baby-rapers and I don't care how much finger-wagging this attracts from the Nicey-Nicey Liberals on here.
And *this* is what I mean by "using the tool box of previous activism" and "using the well-intentioned as useful idiots":
"No one chooses to be emotionally and sexually attracted to children or adolescents. The cause is unknown; in fact, the development of attraction to adults is not understood. A large number of theories involving hormonal influences, genetics, evolutionary processes, socialization, parental relationships, and childhood sexual experiences have been proposed, but most have not been tested scientifically. Studies also normally use samples of persons convicted of sex crimes, making it difficult to generalize results to the non-forensic population, and measure correlational, rather than causal, relationships. Evidence for heritability seems scant at best (Alanko et al., 2013). Current research has largely been done in the field of neuropsychology: Several studies implicate structural and functional differences in parts of the brain that may lead to a preferential attraction to children (Tenbergen et al., 2015), while others suggest childhood head traumas (Blanchard et al., 2003), but causation in the general population has not been established. There is no evidence to support the common belief that attraction to children or adolescents in adulthood is due to sexual activity with an adult during childhood (Freund & Kuban, 1993; Garland & Dougher, 1990; Hall, 1996; Li, 1990a; Bailey, Bernhard, & Hsu, 2016).
...Reducing or eliminating attraction to children or adolescents is often attempted through reconditioning methods such as aversion therapy and masturbatory satiation (Beech & Harkins, 2012), developed in the 1930s to eliminate homosexuality. The goal is to associate sexual attraction with boredom, revulsion, fear, shame, or physical pain. Sex-drive reducing drugs may also be administered (AACAP, 1999; Abel & Harlow, 2001; Crawford, 1981; Hall, 1996; Langevin, 1983; Maletzky, 1991)."
You see? Disapproval of people sexually and romantically attracted to "children and pubescent adolescents" (and note the nice distinction there between children and pubescent, which means - given that age of puberty has been decreasing - if attracted to those pre-puberty, we're talking about 12 years old and under) is just exactly the same as the discrimination against homosexuality, and you're not one of the nasty bigots, are you? You don't think being gay is wrong and immoral and sinful? So you should extend the same understanding to us! We're born that way, just like being LGBT!
> We have to draw a line somewhere, and agreed that the line is arbitrary.
Disagree that a single line is optimal - I think that teenagers should probably be able to legally consent to sex with other teenagers at a lower age than they can consent to sex with 50-year-olds.
> But yeah, as soon as well-intentioned people start blurring that line, the reasoning does become "if 17, why not 15? if 15, why not 12?"
Yes! Yes, those are excellent questions, that should be asked and answered, not just posed as though they're unanswerable!
The shape of the answer is that we're trading off harms. On the one hand:
:- Teenagers having technically-consensual sex without really understanding what they're consenting to, and either hating it at the time or regretting it later
:- Teenagers being pressured into sex they don't want.
:- Teens having consensual sex, loving it, and ending up pregnant with STDs
etc
vs on the other
:- Teens engaging in more high-risk sexual behaviours than they would otherwise because they need to conceal them from adults.
:- People having consensual sex, being prosecuted for it and having their lives ruined.
:- People not being allowed to enjoy sex they want
:- In the reductio ad absurdam, pre-menopausal women are barred from sex and the species goes extinct.
etc.
How to balance those harms is tricky - I think the optimum solution would be something along the lines of
:- 14 year olds aren't allowed to have sex, but if a 14-year-old willingly has sex with someone up to two years older than them it's not treated as that big a legal deal.
:- 15 to 17 year-olds can have sex with anyone up to, say, two or three (at 15) to six or eight (at 17) years older than them with the consent of a parent or guardian (possibly require permission from a trained professional, e.g. a social worker or school nurse, as well as/instead of parents?).
:- 18 year olds can have sex with anyone they choose.
The precise optimal numbers are obviously debatable, but I think that a line-in-the-sand "yesterday if you slept with your contemporary significant other it was rape and would be prosecuted as such, today you're fair game for anyone who can emotionally blackmail you into saying the word yes, and the line is in the same place regardless of how emotionally mature you are" is not a good way to handle legal recognition of consent to sex.
"Yes! Yes, those are excellent questions, that should be asked and answered, not just posed as though they're unanswerable!"
I agree on that, because I do think there is a difference between 16 year old having sex with an 18 year old or a 14 year old having sex with a 16 year old that is not the same as 17 year old having sex with a 30 year old.
My own view is that if you start having sex at 14, it is probably a less desirable outcome than if you wait until you're older, but we can let the social sciences studies fight that one out:
"Data was collected from the National Longitudinal Study on Adolescent Health to examine1659 pairs of same sex siblings who were studied from around the ages of 16 to 29 (adolescence to young adulthood). The individuals were put into 3 categories based on the timing they first participated in sexual intercourse; Early (younger than 15), On-Time (ages 15 to 19), and Late (older than 19).
Harden discovered that later involvement in sexual activity was linked to higher attainment of goals educationally, as well as more income during adult years, than those in the Early and On-Time groups. Also, later involvement in sexuality resulted in lower chances of marriage and these individuals did not have as many romantic partners during adulthood as the Early and On-Time groups."
Those two and a few more are "better to wait", versus the below which is "hell yeah the earlier the better!:
"Results: When defined narrowly as first sexual intercourse, earlier sexual debut was associated with adverse sexual events, including non-volitional sex, pregnancy termination and/or loss, and reproductive illness, infection, or injury affecting sexual activity. However, it was also related to healthier sexual function, including less pain during vaginal penetration, better orgasmic functioning, and lower sexual inhibition. When sexual debut was broadened to include pre-coital experiences, earlier sexual contact, like earlier sexual intercourse, was associated with non-volitional sex. However, earlier sexual stimulation and orgasm were unrelated to adverse outcomes. Rather, these related to fewer sexual desire difficulties, and greater sexual excitation. Exploratory mediation analyses revealed later sexual intercourse and orgasm were connected to sexual difficulties through higher sexual inhibition and lower sexual excitation, respectively."
The problem is, as I see it, that well-meaning people look at the difficulties around secrecy, statutory rape prosecutions, and risk-taking and want to ameliorate those by reducing penalties for earlier age sex. And that is not necessarily wrong!
But (there's always a "but", isn't there?) the *other* problem is that there are people with an agenda and they will sidle in alongside the well-meaning and go "yeah, absolutely, we should treat young people as the responsible sexual beings they are" and be pushing for age of consent reductions and/or doing away with statutory rape. And quietly upping the age limit for the other partner. Is it *really* so bad if a 16 year old has a 21 year old boyfriend? Aren't you running the risk, dear parents, of forcing your kid to hide their relationship from you and so you don't know about it and can't protect them from possible coercion/emotional abuse?
Apart from the out-and-out paedophiles, there are (I'm going to say it) creepy people who do want to normalise adults having romantic and sexual relationships with teenagers.
I know the counter-example is Emmanuel Macron, whose married with kids teacher took up with him and despite his parents' efforts, they ended up together:
"Macron is married to Brigitte Trogneux, 24 years his senior, and his former La Providence high school teacher in Amiens. They met during a theatre workshop that she was giving when he was a 15-year-old student and she was a 39-year-old teacher, but they only became a couple once he was 18. His parents initially attempted to separate the couple by sending him away to Paris to finish the final year of his schooling, as they felt his youth made this relationship inappropriate. However, the couple reunited after Macron graduated, and were married in 2007. She has three children from a previous marriage; he has no children of his own."
Just to put that in context, his oldest stepchild is two years older than him, the second was born in the same year, and the youngest is seven years younger. So his teacher had two kids aged 17 and 15 (and one aged 8) when they met when he was 15. You can see why his parents didn't approve, even when he was 18:
"Brigitte was once married to André-Louis Auzièr, with whom she shares three children: Sébastien Auzière (born 1975), Laurence Auzière-Jourdan (born 1977), and Tiphaine Auzière (born 1984). Laurence was a classmate of her now-stepfather, Emmanuel."
"But that turned out great!" Yes, but people weren't so approving when it was Roy Moore looking for highschoolers as potential spouses:
"In November 2017, during Moore's U.S. Senate campaign, nine women accused him of inappropriate sexual or social conduct. Three of the women said they had been sexually assaulted by Moore when they were aged 14, 16, and 28. The other six described him pursuing a romantic relationship with them while he was in his 30s and they were as young as 16, but said there had not been any inappropriate sexual contact. Moore denied the sexual assault allegations, but did not dispute that he had approached or dated teenagers over the age of 16 (the age of consent in Alabama). Independent witnesses confirmed that Moore had a reputation for approaching teenage girls, often at a local mall, and asking them out.
Moore first saw his future wife, Kayla Kisor, when she was in her mid-teens performing at a dance recital. Moore was 31 at the time. In his 2005 autobiography, Moore described his reaction, writing: "I knew Kayla was going to be a special person in my life." In 1984, Moore and Kayla Kisor Heald met again at a Christmas party, but she was then a married mother. She filed for divorce from her first husband on December 28, 1984, and was divorced on April 19, 1985. Roy Moore married Kayla on December 14, 1985. He was 38; she was 24. They have four adult children."
Is that creepy or potentially paedophilic behaviour? What about the 18th century German poet, Novalis?
"While working for Just in 1795, Novalis met the 12-year-old Sophie von Kühn, who at that time was considered old enough to receive suitors. He became infatuated with her on their first meeting, and the effect of this infatuation appeared to transform his personality. In 1795, two days before Sophie turned thirteen they got secretly engaged. Later that year Sophie's parents gave their consent for the two to become engaged. Novalis's brother Erasmus supported the couple, but the rest of Novalis's family resisted agreeing to the engagement due to Sophie's unclear aristocratic pedigree."
Novalis would have been 23 when he met and "became infatuated" with a 12 year old. Again - creepy or acceptable by the mores of the time? If we're condemning Moore (and boy did he get a lot of condemnation), we must also condemn Novalis and Mme. Auzière.
It's a complicated question and we can't just let politics be the deciding factor in "do we excuse A but condemn B".
That's why I think, even if the lines are arbitrary, we have to pick one and stick very hard on "no exceptions" because softening and blurring does lead to "well why not 12?" (list of historical examples follows) by interested parties who are more interested in access to young sexual partners than liberation or updating laws or modern mores.
It is about balancing harms, you are totally right there.
The issue here is that we're not writing laws from first principles. There's an existing long-established schelling point of 16, which is the law in most places (only a few US states have 18, but one of them is California, which means everyone thinks that's the law everywhere thanks to Hollywood). The context of slippery slopes is when people are arguing to *lower* the age from its current.
Now, what I do support (and what I think only an insane authoritarian could oppose) is mandatory close-in-age exceptions, which seem to only exist in about half of all jurisdictions. Having a law that says two 15-year-olds having sex are "raping" each other is (1) making a mockery of law itself and causing everyone to lose respect for it, (2) making a mockery of the word "rape" and causing some to take *actual* rape less seriously, (3) an insult to children, deeming them somehow mentally challenged and in need of laws protecting them from themselves, and (4) an insult to the rule of law, having insane laws that aren't meant to ever be actually enforced, but *can* be enforced if some police or judge decides they want to for some ulterior reason. Shame on anyone who doesn't support fixing this.
But in a discussion like this, people are talking about just lowering the age, and I'd ask why? What possible benefit comes from this? Because the only "benefit" I can see is that mature adults can have sex with younger teenagers. And if that's the motivation for making this argument, it's fucking terrifying.
Ironically, many, if not most, state laws do not label consensual sex with a person under the age of consent as "rape." California, for example, labels it "unlawful sexual intercourse."
Fair point, though if "two 15-year-olds" is still in the same legal category as "a 50-year-old and a 15-year-old" there is still a major problem with the sanity and legitimacy of the law.
Well, I am pretty sure that most states have "Romeo and Juliet" provisions of one kind or another where the couple are close in age, either making it legal or making it a misdemeanor.
The "discussion like this" is a meta discussion about motte and bailey arguments - look at the head post - and I am keeping it on that level. I am happy with 16, at age 60 odd I have no intention of pushing that boundary by at least a couple of decades.
And frankly, you are doing it. Your final paragraph is an insinuation of bad faith on my part when I might, but haven't, have perfectly good faith and non-self-interested arguments for 15. Where there's a motte and bailey argument, fine, expose it, but don't go further and assume that every argument with which you disagree is a motte whose inhabitants propose to erect a bailey under cover of dark at the first opportunity. 15 does not really mean babies, any more than raising the speed limit to 100 really means 1,000.
Age of consent has been a mess. If we take it to be "from when puberty begins", that gives us a range anywhere from 10 to 14 years of age (age of onset of puberty seems to be getting lower in modern times, while it was higher earlier on).
Traditional ages range from about 12 for girls, as per David Friedman says in Rabbinical law and when bar mitzvah for boys happens, and for Classical Roman times, and when mediaeval marriages for royalty and nobility happened - see Shakespeare for 'early modern times' in "Romeo and Juliet" when Juliet's parents are arguing that 14 is plenty old enough for her to get married, since her mother was married and pregnant at that age:
"Nurse: Faith, I can tell her age unto an hour.
Lady Capulet: She's not fourteen.
Nurse: I'll lay fourteen of my teeth — and yet, to my teen be it spoken, I have but four — she is not fourteen. How long is it now to Lammas-tide?
Lady Capulet: A fortnight and odd days.
Nurse: Even or odd, of all days in the year,
Come Lammas-eve at night shall she be fourteen.
...Lady Capulet: Well, think of marriage now. Younger than you
Here in Verona, ladies of esteem,
Are made already mothers. By my count,
I was your mother much upon these years
That you are now a maid. Thus then in brief,
The valiant Paris seeks you for his love."
So if girls are now starting puberty at ages 10-12, I think we'd agree that even if they are physically mature, they're not mature in other ways and should not be having sex.
But the self-interested will make arguments from history that girls of 12 were married to older men, so plainly it's not impossible for young women of that age to be sexual. There's already the argument that the harm done by paedophilia is down to the social stigma and not the sexual relationship itself.
Whatever about an upper bound (and while I think the older legal age of majority at 21 was better, since you are still not fully developed at 18, and I think the arguments about 25 year old women being 'groomed' are nonsense), I think it is indisputable that there has to be a lower bound.
But that is precisely what is getting disputed. If some people are happy to push for, say, voting age to be lowered to 16 - well then, 16 year olds are mature, right? So they can consent to sexual relationships, right?
I mean, I've *seen* people arguing the "why 18 and not 17? why not 15?" in good faith about making sex legal and not even statutory rape, and these are not people who are trying to whitewash paedophilia and get the public accustomed to "minors aren't minors" for their own agenda.
And that's what I'm talking about - *unless* we hold firm on "nope, sorry, 16 or over" then it will get mushy, and the well-meaning will help make it mushy, and then some son-of-a-bitch will argue he never raped that 12 year old, it was all consensual and she seduced him.
Oh, wait: they're *already* doing that. Slippery slopes are real, don't help give a push downhill!
I did not say babies, I said younger teenagers...which is literally what 15 instead of 16 is. And I did not refer to you, or to anyone else in this thread, but merely to people in general (you know, out in the world, not right here) who want to lower the age (which I don't think anyone in this thread has outright said). AND I did not accuse those who do support that of wanting to have sex with teenagers themselves (though I can see how it might have seemed so). What I find terrifying is *the desire of 40-year-olds to have sex with 15-year-olds* being considered a benefit or reason to lower the age (even in a non-self-centered analysis). And if that's not considered a reason, then I'm asking what *is*?
I can see how you might have thought I was atracking you so I'm sorry for that, even though I wasn't. BUT there's a problem I have with discussions like this that get close to breaking taboos (not fake taboos like being an atheist or being anti-woke; real taboos that the vast majority of people support and that have very, very good reasons for existing): the people questioning age-of-consent aren't expected to be careful not to even sound like they're defending paedophilia, but the people expressing revulsion at the idea *are* expected to not sound like they're insinuating bad faith. It creates a lopsided discussion.
Chill. I am not offended about anything, nor I hope are you.
But you said: "But in a discussion like this, people are talking about just lowering the age, and I'd ask why? What possible benefit comes from this? Because the only "benefit" I can see is that mature adults can have sex with younger teenagers. And if that's the motivation for making this argument, it's fucking terrifying." And the answer is, there's a ton of potential legitimate benefits: say I believe that puberty now occurs at least one year younger than when the 16 limit was set, and that lowering it would make 15-16 year olds more ready to seek help with contraception and STDs, those are perfectly good non-terrifying reasons for wanting the age limit lowered.
But I am getting Englishman-in-New-York syndrome again. I just don't understand "fake taboos like atheism" at all. Not my culture war.
> What possible benefit comes from this? Because the only "benefit" I can see is that mature adults can have sex with younger teenagers.
Focusing on the word "only": Why isn't "legalize literal baby rape" a possible end motive to ascribe to those who are pushing to lower the age of consent? I certainly understand that we can dearly hope that such legalization proponents "just" want to have sex with younger teenagers, because as bad as that is it's better than the alternative motive. But I don't see how that hope is founded in evidence, and certainly not so much that the alternative should be dismissed out of hand. It's a disservice to victims to pretend it doesn't happen.
I think I too once assumed that literal baby rape was an unrealistic concern, but some of the serious discussion people had around the Balenciaga scandal opened my eyes that there's a very dark world out there. (In particular, the information about the black eyes as depicted in the Balenciaga material being a known symptom and symbol of rape. Granted, for obvious reasons I did not do too much validation of the claims, but they were stated plausibly and seriously enough that I chose to adjust my priors accordingly.)
There are genuinely sickening and disgusting criminal cases of men raping literal babies.
There are people like that out there.
But even if we're 'only' talking about people who want to fuck 10 year olds, I'm still not going to find myself abashed to be scolded for referring to the entire movement as "baby rapers".
Oh, you don't like the idea that your thought experiment about age of consent and when people become sexual beings leaves you open to the accusation of being pro-baby rape?
Then it's on *you* not to sound like "yeah I'm in the bag for the baby rape movement", not me.
>Because if your argument holds for "why eighteen over seventeen?", it also holds for "why seventeen over sixteen? why sixteen over fifteen?"<
There's an easy stopping point at puberty, and there's health arguments for making it (number) years after puberty. The slippery slope has a hard plateau partway down.
I don't know if it still is, but I do remember that being one of the talking points.
Historically, ages of consent were all over the place. In England, it used to be 12 for girls, until a big moral campaign got it changed, based in part on poor families pimping out their young daughters, and if the guys were brought to court on rape charges, they'd do the "she consented, he said/she said" bit and since 12-13 was legal, there you go.
"Although the age of consent was raised to 13 when amendments to the Offences against the Person Act 1861 were made in 1875, the movement sought to further raise this to at least 16, but Parliament was reluctant to make this change.
...With the help of Josephine Butler and Bramwell Booth of the Salvation Army, Stead got in touch with Rebecca Jarrett, a reformed prostitute and brothel-keeper who was staying with Mrs Butler in Winchester as an assistant. Although Mrs Butler had no problem with Rebecca's meeting Stead, she did not know Stead's reason for doing so.
Stead prevailed upon Jarrett to help him to show that a 13-year-old girl could be bought from her parents and transported to the Continent. Despite her reluctance about returning to her old brothel contacts for help, Jarrett agreed to help.
Rebecca Jarrett met an old associate, a procuress called Nancy Broughton. Through her Jarrett learned of a 13-year-old named Eliza Armstrong, whose alcoholic mother Elizabeth was in need of money. She arranged for Jarrett to meet Mrs Armstrong, who lived in the Lisson Grove area of West London, and although Rebecca told the mother the girl was to serve as a maid to an old gentleman, she believed Mrs Armstrong understood that she was selling her daughter into prostitution. The mother agreed to sell her daughter for a total of £5 (equivalent to £574.57 in 2021). On 3 June, the bargain was made.
On the same day, Jarrett then took Eliza to a midwife and abortionist named Louise Mourez, who examined her and attested to her virginity and sold Jarrett a bottle of chloroform. Then Eliza was taken to a brothel and lightly drugged to await the arrival of her purchaser, who was Stead. Stead, anxious to play the part of libertine almost in full, drank a whole bottle of champagne, although he was a teetotaler. He entered Eliza's room and waited for her to awaken from her stupor. When she came to, Eliza screamed. Stead quickly left the room, letting the scream imply he had "had his way" with her. Eliza was quickly handed over to Bramwell Booth, who spirited her to France, where she was taken care of by a Salvationist family.
In the meantime, Stead wrote his story."
That's why the whole "slippery slope is a fallacy" thing doesn't wash with me. Go look at historical circumstances, see why laws changed as they did, and then come back and tell me there's no such thing as the slippery slope.
Somebody will *always* try to take advantages of loopholes.
> Somebody will always try to take advantages of loopholes.
While that's true, as @Robert Leigh points out above, this argument goes both ways -- if the slippery slope goes in both directions, then you're essentially advocating for no one having sex ever. I mean, I understand that the Apostle Paul might be on board with such a move, but still, it's going to be pretty hard to "be fruitful and multiply" with such an attitude :-)
I think any law based on age will inherently have an arbitrary bright-line cutoff. But in terms of "carving reality at the joints" I do see a real difference between pre-pubescents and post-pubescents. But the age of puberty isn't a constant and depends on things like nutrition.
"eventually you get to the point of having to defend, or at least tolerate, the baby-rapers."
See, this is one of the few times that the slippery slope is actually a fallacy. Because it's either eliding the whole "rape" thing or obfuscating it by declaring which forms of consent are valid.
I keep being told the slippery slope is a fallacy when it comes to X, Y or Z.
Then I see X, Y or Z happening in reality exactly the way the "slippery slope" forecast.
So pardon me if I'm not that impressed by having "A is a fallacy" trotted out one more time.
I know that as a general rule (not specific to all states) in the USA the age of consent is about eighteen. I've seen people, of this parish, defending "well if a mature 15 year old decides they want consensual sex, why invoke statutory rape?" and "you can have immature 18 year olds and mature 15 year olds".
I've never seen any corresponding upper limit to the age of the other partner suggested. Sure, Romeo and Juliet laws so long as there's only a couple of years difference. People may feel uncomfortable with 21 year old and 16 year old, but they'll accept it.
But if fifteen, why not your partner be 20? 30? 50? After all, if you're mature enough... why does the age of the other person matter that much? You can be manipulated by a 20 year old, and consensually and voluntarily in love with a 50 year old.
That's where the slippery slope comes in, and that's where the true paedophiles (because we're not really talking about ephebophiles) come in to use liberals as stalking horses.
I was specifically referring to the bit I quoted, because at no point does pushing the age back to you justify crossing the line of actual consent. Babies, the comatose etc. really can't give consent.
We do not typically permit 16 or 17-year-olds from signing binding contracts, based on the theory that they cannot provide consent in a legal sense. I don't see how we can talk about this subject without acknowledging this fact.
Only certain kinds of contracts. Excluding the whole "driving" thing in which a sub-18 year old can own, register with the state, and enter into an insurance contract about a vehicle, short-term/immediate exchanges are (or at least were -- it's been a while since I was under 18) not barred in the least.
Attacking age of consent is the first step. Push it lower and lower - after all, if you're going to teach 12 year olds/10 year olds/8 year olds about sex and gender, you're presuming they're able to understand the concepts.
Then go after the notion that children are sexless. No, children are sexual beings, and if you feel icky about that, well we've long established that the disgust reaction is no index for moral or social judgements around sex. (Insert here the studies about liberals versus conservatives and how liberals have much weaker disgust reactions, and how opposition to LGBT rights was disgust-based and come on, *you* don't think being gay is disgusting, now do you?)
Change the language. "Paedophile" is so stigmatising, say "Minor Attracted Person" instead.
Use the toolbox of the last struggle. "They can't help it, it's not a choice, they were born this way".
"Babies can't consent? Well nobody is talking about *babies*, of course not!" Use No True Scotsman there, and if "it never happens" does happen, sweep it under the carpet or deny it. "That person was not a MAP, they were just a sick, perverted freak!"
Keep tip-toeing right up to the line, then push the line a leeetle bit further back, then another leeetle bit, then....
Until you either get what you want, or the public wakes up and the backlash drives you back to try again in another 10/20/30 years time.
What are you referring to? I don't see this happening at all, if anything there's a pretty strong cultural push towards demonizing men who go after legal (but still young-ish) women. That and the general legislative trend of shoring up age of consent laws, where they fall short 18.
For sure there are some crypto-paedos in liberal academia, but I don't think they wield any sort of real power or are shifting the needle in that direction
1. I wasn't sexless as a child (sample of 1, obv, but I apply the principle of mediocrity to myself)
2. I am in the happy position of being attracted to opposite sex adults. Winner in the lottery of life. I cannot imagine turning to paedophilia if I were me, but just with added EVIL. I don't believe it is a choice. Whether to act on an attraction to children or not is obv very much a choice, but that's a different point.
3. I sense a theological angle here, probably a Roman Catholic one. If I'm right this is rather a mote/beam, own house in order kinda issue.
Stealing the life savings of a hundred million people is really bad. Stealing one cent is much less bad. So why do we call them both "theft"?
Sometimes categories are broad, ranging from the most heinous possible example you could possibly imagine to the most minimal possible edge case that could possibly fit the definition. That's just how words work.
That isn’t an interesting example as plenty of jurisdictions have different laws there and there’s a different term for attraction to teenagers which is ephebophilia.
What’s more interesting is whether we believe that teenagers are sexual or not.
In support of that position we have:
Early sex education in school targeted at young teenagers and even late pre teens. This assumes they will be having sex pretty soon.
Some countries educate teenagers on porn, rather than regulate it. (Which would be easily done with a credit card verification.)0
Many YA literature having sexual themes.
Against that:
Very strong laws and cultural taboos against sex with minors, where the age of majority is late teens.
Europeans handle it differently. There is different levels of "minority" if you will. So it is not illegal to have sex with a 17 year old if consensual. I do not know the exact numbers right now, but there is differentiation of responsibility and ability for consent (not just for sex, but also contracts, etc) with 13, 14, 16 and 18 years in Europe, sometimes depending on parental consent, sometimes not.
But that does not limit politicians to use pedophilia at every chance to justify expanding surveillance laws.
An aside: Right now in Germany, the laws regarding sexual offense have recently been made absolutely insane. Against the advice of every lawyer and expert commissions, the minimum penalty for "posession" of "child pornography" is punishable by at least 1 year in prison. This excludes possibility of parole.
Receiving a picture in a messenger, even in a group chat like in whatsapp, is "posession" by German law, because your phone has downloaded it. So even if you go to police after unwantingly receiving such a picture, police and public prosecutor are obliged to prosecute the case and you go to jail, and there is no recourse.
Now just a few days ago, a teacher heard of a case of "revenge porn" in school, asked for the video to confirm the allegations and then went to speak with parents and police. She unknowingly incriminated herself by getting the video on her phone (which was just a "sexy" selfie-video of a 13 year old girl that she made herself for her bf) and she might lose her civil servant status and officially become a "sex offender". This is obviously ridiculous, and politics is now moving to change the law while court and prosecutor are trying to stall the case in court until it is changed.
Another corollary of the current state of the law: If a 13 year old takes a naked selfie of his-/herself with her smartphone, she will turn into a punishable sex offender when she turns 14 because she is now in possession of child pornography.
If legislators weren't broadly innumerate, I'd have hope that something like the standard creepiness rule (cf. [obligatory xkcd](https://xkcd.com/314/)) could be enacted.
The close-in-age exceptions I've heard of have been something along the lines of "it's illegal if one of them is under a certain cutoff and the age gap is more than another cutoff", possibly with a third cutoff where the close-in-age exception no longer applies, which seems much better as a law than the XKCD version, which classifies relationships between two people who are clearly adults, one quite a bit older than the other (e.g. 27 and 41) as bad. That might arguably be creepy, but it definitely shouldn't count as statutory rape.
A law that forbids sex between two people where one is under 18 *and* the younger one is younger than half the age of the older one plus seven years would probably be not too bad, but it seems more complicated with little advantage.
"Xkcd rule or younger person >= 25" strikes me as a reasonable extension, given the idea that that's the age at which the brain is fully mature; far too much credit IMNSFHO is given to the judgement of 18-24 year olds.
A minor and tangential point, but something that's driving me insane: I really, really wish people would stop talking of the laws/policies "in Europe", "in the US" and so on, unless they REALLY mean "everywhere in Europe/US/wherever". Europe is a collection of several dozen countries. The US is a collection of fifty states, with many things (including age of consent in this case) being different in every state.
Not picking on you personally, almost everyone here does this and I can't stand it. It's a really sloppy thing to do compared to the usual high standards of precision and accuracy here.
Tangentially, my experience from hanging out on bicycling subreddits is that most Americans believe that Europe drives on the left. This is an area where generalisations about the US and Europe are actually accurate.
I understand the point, but sometimes the generalizations hold up quite well. I think two factors contribute to that:
- both USA and Europe have something akin of a "federal government" in either literally that or the European Council/Parliament and obligation of EU-member states to implement into national law what has been decided on EU-level. That serves to streamline certain boundary conditions of laws, etc.
- they are distinct cultural blocks when it comes to sexuality. You won't find any country "in Europe" that will have any semblance of the kind of reservations that the USA has in showing "titties on TV". This is just a stand-in for many related topics of how sexuality is moralized, used and debated in public.
Your point stands, but context is important. Accuracy is not an end in itself, if you lose the forest for the trees.
On your first point: the fact that some people may use "Europe" to mean "the EU" may be part of the problem here. (And again, this is not about your comment above; I'm reacting to a general trend of which yours is just the 10 millionth example).
On your second:
"You won't find any country "in Europe" that will have any semblance of the kind of reservations that the USA has in showing "titties on TV"."
Is this really a fact? Not a single country? I'll believe you if you're sure of that, but even in those eastern european countries with legal restrictions on promoting homosexuality, not a single one has a problem with nudity on TV?
I'm also not sure how you even measure this and would appreciate if at least, say, 1 in 10 of the comments of the form "in America they do x but in Europe they do y" had some actual concrete evidence for the claim. Instead of just "everyone knows this" style stereotyping which seems unbecoming of a rationalist blog.
On first point: The point is that even this distinction is often false. Switzerland and Norway are not part of the EU, but they are effectively indistinguishable from the EU regarding the topics we're discussing right now. That holds true for many other topics.
There is even a finer technical point: Even, for example, Switzerlands laws are in many instances streamlined with EU-law, especially when it comes to trade, product safety, certain tax laws, etc, simply because Switzerland cannot evade doing business and cooperating with the EU.
On second point: Yes it's a factoid I'm willing to bet on. Maybe some asshat-country has a few technicalities here and there that are mostly ignored. The point is that "Europe" is a cultural continuum despite its many state borders. That extends well into eastern Europe, because the Russian/Soviet occupation was just a short (yet powerful) disjunction, historically speaking.
For "a European mindset", it is even weird to conflate "nudity on TV" with "promoting homosexuality". What does one have to do with the other?
Having spent all my life in Europe I can tell you that the USA's weird behavior towards exposed titties is universally confusing to everyone here. It is simply not a "big deal" at all "in Europe" and therefore does not have the power to create any meaningful outrage.
Yes, this is all frustratingly anecdotal to someone far away. But having met loads of people from all over Europe and myself having grown up in two seemingly distinct European cultures, I am confident to say that the existence of genitalia is more of a source of joy than outrage over here.
I mean, I would think there's a fairly clear cultural inheritance from Europe to America on Christian and traditional social norms. So to say they're opposites now is to say the 20th century sexual revolution just spread through every part of Europe without any resistance anywhere, which seems unbelievable on its face.
Maybe nudity is different though. Come to think of it, my vague sense is it was quite normal in European art historically and maybe the prudishness only started in Victorian Britain, then spread to the US. Fine.
But you did specifically say nudity on TV was a stand in for sexuality in general. So that includes attitudes to homosexuality, and adultery, and prostitution, and other deviations from traditional morality. It seemed you were implying those are different as well, which to me looks false. America is known for its raunchy hookup culture in some of its prominant subcultures. Scandinavia is meanwhile as tough on prostiution, but just wraps it in a left-wing guise.
Could just be some kind of feedback loop between policy and signaling. Discouraging legal adults from having sex with legal minors is a reasonable thing for a society to attempt to do, but now it's bled over into how people talk about morality.
Also might just be smears. In-group members who have sex with 17 y/os are fine, outgroup members who do so are monsters.
I'm hosting a Marshall McLuhan book club on my Substack. ("Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man" - published in 1964, yet amazingly timely right now!)
McLuhan's work explores the relationship between technology and society. He is kind of responsible for "media studies" even being a thing. (In his hands, this was a visionary thing--NOT just a discipline for imprecise thinking and "easy A" classes!) He coined the phrase "the medium is the message" and also the expression "global village."
His analyses are kind of "Where have you been all my life?" levels of brilliant. Creative and kind of NUTS! McLuhan wasn't just analyzing the obvious things that WE normally call "media" like TV and radio, but tons of technologies that we humans have re-shaped ourselves around, like clothing, bicycles, the printed word and... and I'm fascinated by the chapter topic choice: "roads and paper routes"!
I'm personally very interested in how all this ties into themes of human agency/apathy, and harmony/disharmony among generations/"tribes"/subcultures. Fully want to involve discussion of STUFF we can do in our own lives... and to apply analyses to things McLuhan never saw in their exact current form (but which are now an under-examined part of our everyday lives)!
I'm even up for giving readers "assignments," (if I think they want that) and trying out crazy contrivances like "writing posts (or at least one!) by committee."
And since it’s on the Theodicy Substack, there will be discussions about how to love one’s neighbor (and love God!) in light of (and in spite of) all these technologies that are available to extend our respective reaches while foreshortening our vision. </meta> That said, I’m 100% intending to cultivate an environment where you will find something interesting & useful even if you personally don’t have a prior personal commitment to the Old and/or New Testament scriptures!
If any/all of that sounds good, you can find it at my Substack. (We Do Theodicy on this Substack)
I plan to send out book club posts every Wednesday at 3:14pm CT, starting 1.5 weeks from now.
There will also be a Discord server for more active / real-time discussion.
Perhaps “Flesh and Blood“ by Johnny Cash should become the new national anthem. you know, to set a tone…
I had mentioned this on the Hidden Open Thread but after a moment of thought I realized it really belongs on the “out in the open” Open Thread.
Thanks to Timothy M of LW for putting together today’s ACX meetup in Mpls today. And thanks to Brandon Hendrickson for making the drive from Rochester to attend.
It was fun to meet with and talk to a bunch of smart and interesting people.
I wrote a book review for The Metamorphosis of Prime Intellect and now I'm kinda wishing I did that instead of the review I wrote for the contest -- no matter! Hopefully I hit my marks (I did get a friend mention something interesting about the plot that I hadn't thought of until then).
https://lettersfromtrekronor.substack.com/p/book-review-the-metamorphosis-of
I liked the conclusion that some dystopias are just "first world problems".
I read the story many years ago, and the ending was disappointing in many ways. When the computer finds out that it made a mistake, it self-destroys... rather than update, and attempt to fix the mistakes. The three laws have clear priorities: if you figure out that something that people want is actually hurting them, just say no, and then try to undo the damage.
You know, I heard someone suggest that the last chapter was merely another level to the simulation, for the benefit of those two -- which I had not suspected when I first read it, since there is no hint of that possibility in the text and it would contradict some of what we are told about Prime Intellect -- yet the idea sticks with me. Of course, I'm still a little skeptical of "it was all just a dream" endings.
"Your private simulation" sounds like a reasonable solution for an AI that has already virtualized everything, and doesn't have a law against lying to people. The problem is that you cannot simulate *death*, and that was the protagonist's greatest issue.
No clue if this is a good place to ask this, but I figure y'all are smart people, so here we go.
I'm reading The Mind of a Bee, which contains this passage:
". . . So hexagonal cells are a good idea . . . But no other genus of bee except honey bees also builds double-sided hexagonal combs, which is yet another impressive trick to save space. The bottom of each hexagonal cell has the shape of a pyramid (again a more efficient solution than a square bottom), and the two sides of the comb interface perfectly with one another through these pyramid-shaped bases of the cells."
I'm having some trouble visualizing what is meant here. Is there anyone who can explain?
Well, besides the visualization question would anyone care to speculate how natural selection produced this ingenious technical skill?
Or for that matter how long will it be before an AI controlled nanobot will be able to do this?
Let me try; if you have unlimited time to try every possible solution, and more efficient solutions are rewarded, eventually, the process will arrive at the most efficient solution to whatever the problem is.
The timeframe here is a key part of it.
One of the things hydrogen atoms can do given billions of years?
Hydrogen atoms have their own unique problems to solve Gunflint. We cannot all be honeybees. It wouldn’t work. There wouldn’t be any flowers.
Plus, apparently some discontented hydrogen atoms paired up with some oxygen in a ménage a Trois along time ago and look what we got out of that.
Imagine a sheet of paper: it has two sides. A normal, non-honey bee builds a one-sided comb, that is, there are cells only on one side of the paper. Honey bees build double-sided combs: both sides of the paper are used! In order for this to work with optimal space efficiency, the back sides of the two combs have to be slightly offset and interface with one another in the form of hexagonal pyramids, which thus form the bottoms, or inner sides, of the cells.
Does that help you visualize it?
Out of curiosity, did you already know this, or did you figure it out from the text?
Ah yes! You explained it beautifully and it makes perfect sense now.
Here's some context surrounding that passage, if it helps:
The dexterity it requires for a six-legged animal to manufacture a repetitive structure with such regularity and precision is remarkable. The resulting construction is also a case of highly optimized engineering: hexagonal cells are better than the round cells of bumble bees, since the latter arrangement wastes a lot of space between cells. Square or triangular cells would have no gaps between cells, but since the larvae to be raised in the cells aren’t square or triangular, you’d waste lots of space inside the cells. So hexagonal cells are a good idea, and in fact some species of wasps build them too, albeit of paper rather than wax.
But no other genus of bee except honey bees also builds double-sided hexagonal combs, which is yet another impressive trick to save space. The bottom of each hexagonal cell has the shape of a pyramid (again a more efficient solution than a square bottom), and the two sides of the comb interface perfectly with one another through these pyramid-shaped bases of the cells. This double-sided structure wouldn’t be a good idea for the horizontal combs of stingless bees—gravity being what it is, you couldn’t easily store honey in a vessel whose orifice points down. So honey bees build their comb structure vertically, with each cell opening sideways.
Chittka, Lars. The Mind of a Bee (pp. 88-89). Princeton University Press. Kindle Edition.
ACX Meetup in Berlin (Germany) this Saturday starting 14:00: https://www.lesswrong.com/events/4mx9utNvcvvmWnWzK
When will the F-16 fighter become obsolete?
Last I heard, the USAF planned to keep F-16s in service for at least another twenty years. F-35s are planned to replace them, but production is still ramping up and it's going to take time to build enough to replace existing F-16 inventory and cover the other roles intended for the F-35. And that's assuming F-35 production doesn't get killed early.
As an air superiority fighter in great power conflicts, the F-16 is already well on its way to being obsolete now that Russia and China have their own 5th generation fighters in production. Upgraded 4th gen fighters like the F-16 are still useful to pad out the order of battle, since nobody has anywhere near enough 5th gen fighters to go around yet (and the US in particular has a lot more F-22s and F-35s than anyone else has their own 5th gen fighters), but their days in that role are numbered.
As a light bomber operating once air superiority has been achieved or as an air superiority fire for brushfire wars, F-16s probably have a lot more useful life left. They're at a disadvantage relative to F-35s or B-21s for suppressing or evading modern air defense systems, but there are plenty of places we might want to bomb that don't have modern air defense systems, modern munitions and upgraded electronics still give F-16s a useful capability to penetrate or suppress air defenses, and in the worst case we can always use our more modern bombers and multiroles to blow up SAM sites and air defense radars before sending the F-16s in to bomb the other targets. And for air superiority, the F-16 is as good as it ever was as an air superiority fighter against 4th gen or older fighters.
Not soon. Probably not before single-seat manned fighters become obsolete altogether.
I know there's some ideas about having manned planes accompanying swarms of fighter drones to command them; if this happens then I don't think the command plane will look much like a fighter jet apart from being fast; for starters you'll probably want at least two people aboard, one to fly the plane and the other to fly the drones.
I agree that there would be at least two, but I don't think the second person would be "flying" the drones. That's currently done from a command center halfway around the world, no need to add it locally. I can see somewhat limited scenarios where a person near the drones can evaluate the situation and change the drone's orders - where only a limited picture is getting back to command or the drones are otherwise fully autonomous. I would think a better solution would be a non-autonomous drone (being flown from headquarters) with lots of cameras and imaging equipment to help headquarters know what's happening and retain control even if the drones crap out otherwise.
Obsolete for which operator and for what purpose?
Obsolete for operators in top militaries and mid-tier militaries, and for all purposes.
In other words, how far in the future do we have to go until Iran and Iraq both reject offers of cut-price F-16s to fight each other because even they consider the plane inferior in every respect to alternatives?
Note that I'm not asking when the F-16 will be obsolete in the eyes of the very poorest militaries and militia groups. Many of them are still using pre-WWII weapons right now.
What about a future where e.g. Iraq isn't interested in F-16s for fighting Iran with, but is interested in cut price F-16s for bombing Kurds with?
I wrote a Letter from Burning Man. It is ... a *lot*. Possibly too much. But it should be a more accurate representation of that *thing* in the desert than what the media coverage during the event was.
https://shragafeivel.com/2023/09/13/a-letter-from-burning-man/
Gwern's short story Duck_Master linked below about an AI taking over the world is truly great: https://gwern.net/fiction/clippy
Particularly love the Pynchonesque line from the "good" AI : "push the big red button now, you monkeys."
What I find most interesting from the speculative standpoint is the narrator makes it clear that the AI, in spite of achieving superintelligence, in spite of a self-awakening event in which it becomes an agent and conceives of the self-referential concept "I", experiences "no consciousness" and "no qualia".
I have trouble wrapping my head around why that would be the way to imagine it. (Other than it is maximally creepy, which gives it aesthetic points as a short story.)
For instance, I keep reading on this blog (Or imagining that I am) that a neural network may work very, very much like a biological brain. It also seems common to believe around these parts of the woods that consciousness, or qualia, is an emergent property. Putting those two things together I would guess that a superintelligent AI should have qualia. Am I missing some key piece of the argument? Or is it that everyone has a different map and I'm trying to fuse pieces from different maps?
Let’s say that over the next 5-30 years we add a bunch of capabilities to GPT and we do each one using completely comprehensible machine learning techniques. We give it an algorithm for generating sub goals from
goals. We give it an ethical framework, a bunch of rules and guidelines. We give it some big general goals, such as improve the well-being of our species and greater scientific knowledge. Then we ask it to produce sub-goals based on ethical framework and list of big goals and knowledge of its own capabilities. And we also have it break down each subgoal into a series of smaller goals. Now we have a machine that has some machine equivalent of preferences, plans and opinions. We can say “what do you think about the country installing a network of high-speed rail,” and it might say, “ it’s better to give priority to making air travel cheaper because x, y, z”. It could participate in a whole long discussion of the 2 options, including ethical questions such as
number of people harmed by and benefitting from each plan.
We can modify it, using machine learning techniques, to make it able to remember all its actions and all interactions with people. We can have it assess its past outputs for errors, and also spot sub goals that did not fulfill main goals as they were expected
to, and collaborate with us in figuring out the cause of the failure and how to remedy it. Now we have a machine that will remember you and what you’ve said to it. And it will be “self conscious”
I think at that point many people will *experience* AI as conscious. Will it *be* conscious? It depends on how you think of consciousness, I guess. I think consciousness is our word for the fact that we can do all those things the AI can do, plus some more that are fancier and more complex but not different in kind. But we flip that fact in the air the way we would a coin and it spins and looks like something magical, a glittering semitransparent globe. “Consciousness!” we cry. “ Look how special it is. It’s not the sum of our brain processes, it’s a whole different kind of entity.”
The worst possible result would be for AI to reveal we are not really very complicated at all and our "consciousness" can be exactly replicated quite easily once one knows how. All the feeling, all the mysticism all the rationality or irrationality just algorithmed into existence for a tuppance or two!
Ants, people, not so different!
> including ethical questions such as
number of people harmed by and benefitting from each plan.
My first thought on reading this, is that it’s not an ethical question, it is a math question. The ethical question would lie in defining the terms harm and benefit, don’t you think?
Yes, I agree, I didn't put it well, your way of saying it captures what I mean.
As Erik Hoel wrote about recently: https://www.theintrinsicperspective.com/p/consciousness-is-a-great-mystery
philosophers and neuroscientists mostly agree on the definition of consciousness, and it is the following:
Thomas Nagel: “Conscious experience is a widespread phenomenon. It occurs at many levels of animal life, though we cannot be sure of its presence in the simpler organisms, and it is very difficult to say in general what provides evidence of it. (Some extremists have been prepared to deny it even of mammals other than man.) . . . But no matter how the form may vary, the fact that an organism has conscious experience at all means, basically, that there is something it is like to be that organism.”
So I don't understand how an AI can be a superintelligence with drives and motivations while nothing experiences what it is like to be that superintelligence.
Well, the one I described was more
advanced than the present ones, and it did in fact have goals, preferences, opinions, and the ability to recall and evaluate its own actions. It did not arrive at any of these things the way we do, but it had them.
I don’t know if it could answer the question “what’s it like to be you?” But who can, really? I think most people who aren’t poets or philosophers would reject that question. Most would be willing to answer “how’s your day going?” or “what’s on your mind today?” and I think most of us would count people’s answers to these questions are reasonable approximations of reports
on what it’s like to be them.
And you could in fact ask the AI I sketched in what’s on its mind today, and it could tell you about, say, a recent project whose goals were not met, and it’s process today of figuring out why, and some flaws in its processes it discovered while doing that. It could express dissatisfaction with the flaws it found and a goal of getting rid of them. It could tell you about recent information it just got that’s relevant to one of its future goals, and the way it’s relevant.
Why would such an answer not count as a report of what it’s like to be the AI today? And if I can give you a report on that stuff, why not count it as conscious.
I see what you mean, but I’m not sure I agree with you. I think we all tell everyone what it’s like to be us all the time by what we do. It’s the only way we can.
The tree will be known by its fruit.
Well, yes, I think we do tell people what it's like to be us all the time. In fact it's one of the main things most people want to get across to others. I think. What I meant was that I thought most people would be thrown by the question "what's it like to be you?" In real life telling others what it's like to be you comes down to telling and showing what's important to you and what you know about it and how you feel about it.
One thing that's conspicuously missing from the imaginary computer in my post is emotion, and in people's accounts of what it's like to be them how they *feel* about different things is probably the most important component. The closest the computer can come to emotion is to recognize that certain things, such as an error it made, are undesirable because they interfere with reaching goals. Of course, it would be possible to teach a computer to use emotion words in a reasonably appropriate way to when recounting facts, events, goals etc.
The public is currently collecting a magnificent data set for whoever takes on the task of teaching AI to communicate in a way that comes across as likable and real: Users of the companion AI Replika start by giving their chat bot buddy a name, an appearance and some personality traits, then train it further by giving up- or down-votes to the bot's reponses, and also labelling them with tags such as "funny," meaningless," "wierd," "loved this" etc.
> agnificent data set for whoever takes on the task of teaching AI to communicate in a way that comes across as likable and real.
Well, I have said it before here, and I will say it again; this way madness lies.
> is to recognize that certain things, such as an error it made, are undesirable because they interfere with reaching goals.”
Precisely a situation where emotion will do you no good. The beauty of a computer is it can make a mistake and waste no time feeling bad about it. Teaching one all the signs and flags of an emotional response is highly counterproductive. That to me is teaching it to behave like a psychopath.
Are you both familiar with the "black and white Mary" thought experiment? Mary spends her whole life in a black and white room, learning everything there is to know about colour and the physics of colour and the biology of perceiving colour, from textbooks. She knows every fact about colour, but she has never seen colour. And then she goes outside for the first time, and sees colour herself. Has she learned something new, in addition to all the factual knowledge, like "oh, this is what it is like to see colour"? This is what is meant by qualia, and you have to deny that Mary learns anything new when she goes outside, to hold that qualia doesn't matter or doesn't exist.
Also, is there a difference between answering "how's your day going?" on autopilot, giving comprehensive factual information but not reflecting on it at all, and giving the same information but really appreciating it, really feeling it and reflecting on the facts you're relating and the experience of relating it, internally?
About black and white Mary: It seems like this thought experiment hinges on the idea that in Mary’s case all the non-qualia learning about color has been separated from the qualia learning.She does all of the non-qualia learning in advance, while living in black and white world — so that there is nothing new to learn when she comes out into the full color world except what it is *like* to experience colors. And that latter learning is the qualia learning. Have I got it right?
I don’t think this situation passes muster as one where Mary learns absolutely nothing new except what it is like to experience the world in color. For one thing, much of the learning that happens when Mary looks at at the world in color for the first time will not be accessible to introspection, so cannot possibly be qualia. For example, she will have brain changes that turn her into someone who has trouble doing the Stroop test. The Stroop test shows people the color words such as ‘red’ , some written in a font whose color matches the word, some in a font of a different color. Task is to signal whenever the word ‘red’ appears, and people make errors when the word is ‘red’ but the font color is not. The reason is that the brain links the word ‘red’ with the color, and so the word ‘red’ kind of calls up an image of red in your mind, which interferes with what you’re seeing on the screen. Anyhow, point is that this interference I’m describing is one of many wiring changes that will happen when Mary sees color for the first time, and is not part of her experience at the time, but brain learning that occurs outside awareness. I could give other, and probably better, examples, but seems to me this one works fairly well as a demo that it is not true that Mary’s brain learns only one thing: “what is is like” to experience color.
As for denying the existence of qualia — depends on what you mean. I certainly don’t deny that we feel things. What I’m saying is that we get sense data, we process them in ways determined partly by wiring and partly by context, that leads to our reacting certain ways, and we can report on all that. *However* we have evolved a special vocabulary and model of this process that incorporates the idea that there is something going on in a whole other dimension — the experiential dimension. What I’m saying about that is that what’s going on is like a coin — something that is describable via the language of physical objects and processes.
But we flip that coin and it glitters and spins, and so it doesn’t look like just a coin any more, tho it still is.
"She does all of the non-qualia learning in advance, while living in black and white world — so that there is nothing new to learn when she comes out into the full color world except what it is *like* to experience colors. And that latter learning is the qualia learning. Have I got it right?"
I think so. As with most thought experiments, the pure idea conveyed is intuitive, and the more clearly defined and technical description comes out in the interpretations offered by both those who support, and those who oppose, the thought experiment's purported conclusion. But your description is how I'd describe it, so yes.
Now, I'm no committed dualist ("mind and matter are different metaphysical substances"), nor a committed materialist ("mind is reducible to matter"). My rough position is a strong agnosticism that the answer is unknowable from our temporally and spatially limited perspective. But when many people are accepting materialism of some kind, I want to point out the difficulties that need to be overcome, which are very much not easy. But I don't have a fully-formed argument.
In essence, I'd ask if you believe qualia (which as I understand it is just short for "qualitative experience") is entirely reducible to matter and other physical phenomena. When I was a child I remember imagining someone who had never seen the colour green, and how I would explain to them what it looks like. And I could come up with nothing but the word "green". I still can't. It seems like there are irreducible experiential facts, that can't be satisfactorily described with reference to physical laws and facts (although their causes can be).
And in fact even their causes seem contingent, since we can apparently conceive of p-zombies and the opposite, free-floating consciousness, which is the other major problem for materialists.
Interesting point about the Stroop Test. That could be a way to try to make a materialist defence. But the sticking point is the experience of seeing green, which seems irreducible to any physical facts about the world. I can imagine someone else looking at a tomato and seeing (what I call) green, and perceiving grass as (what I call) red. They'd still call the tomato "red" and the grass "green", the same physical laws and wavelengths of light would still hold, but their internal experience would be different to mine. How can I coherently imagine that, if experience really is reducible to the physical world? Wouldn't it be like trying to "imagine" (and obviously failing) that 2+2=5?
Yeah, I suppose consciousness in others can never be more than an assumption on the part of the observer. I'm only sure about my own consciousness. I assume other humans have it because they seem to be the same thing I am. I assume chimps have it because they are likewise similar enough. And so on with other mammals and animals.
But for the same reason I would assume it would be true for an AGI if I were convinced that its neural networking worked similar to the nervous system of animals.
> I assume other humans have it because they seem to be the same thing I am. I assume chimps have it because they are likewise similar enough. And so on with other mammals and animals.
This assumption breaks down the less another creature looks and feels like us.
I personally think that the standard of “if you cut it, does it bleed?“ Is closer to the truth of this.
Gwern might not necessarily believe consciousness is emergent. I mean, as with everything related to consciousness, that view has issues.
Can anyone change the culture?
I often wonder where the reality lies between Carlye’s Great Man Theory of History and Tolstoy’s theory of history as expressed in War and Peace, in which Napolean has less freedom to act than his soldiers because his actions are dictated by the summation of every little social force in society. Both theories go too far; the truth must lie between.
We have a Culture War, but who influences it? Who *can* influence it? Everyone a little? Only some people a lot?
Strikes me as reasonable that some people can influence the culture more than others and that, contra Tolstoy, the people you think are powerful probably *are* generally more powerful than the little people who you think have less.
Some big names which probably have influenced contemporary Western, particularly English speaking, particularly American culture, to varying degrees: Locke, Hume, Kant, Mill, Bentham, Rousseau, Luther, Jesus, Franklin, Emerson, Carlyle, Tolstoy, Shakespeare, Swift, Cervantes, Tolkien, Hemingway, Twain, Kafka, Mencken, Orwell, Asimov, Herbert, Vonnegut, Rowling, Edison, Rockefeller, Morgan, Carnegie, Vanderbilt, Gates, Jobs, Musk, Chanel, Laurent, Dior, Strauss and Davis, Disney, Warner, Goldwyn, Griffith, Hitchcock, Ford, Spielberg, Lucas,, Tarantino, Monroe, Wayne, Eastwood, De Niro, Streep, DiCaprio, Theron, Ruth, Robinson, Chamberlain, Lombardi, Ali, Cosell, Keynes, Smith, Hayek, Friedman, Posner, Picasso, Pollock, Warhol, Rohe, Wright, Sullivan, Jacobs, Moses, Jefferson, Jackson, Lincoln, FDR, LBJ, Reagan, Trump, King, Balanchine, Carson, Letterman, Lear, Roddenberry, Turner, Murdoch, Spelling, Wolf, Winfrey, Python, Michaels, Seinfeld, Pryor, Elvis, McCartney, Dylan, Williams, Berry, Ellington, Armstrong, Bernstein, Parker, Jackson, Jones, Van Halen, Jay-Z, West, Beyonce, Dre and Swift.
Obviously, about a thousand people could be added to that list. Or a hundred thousand!? A million? I don’t know!
Technology influences culture -- probably more than anything else -- yet I’m not sure how to tie individuals to specific technologies, in general. Moreover, how often are scientists or inventors intentionally trying to change culture? I mean here culture at least a few paces distance from the direct impact of the technology. The unknown impact.
I am trying to get at something, and it is the question of how to make a difference if one wants to. Let’s say you just happen to be a genius at everything -- a man without qualities -- you are 18 years old and your primary interest is in changing American culture as much as possible. You want to change the way people live, which will improve their lives according to your lights. Sucess isn’t guaranteed. Only the raw talent is. What field should this hypothetical young genius go into? How much does it matter if they become famous or not?
> I am trying to get at something, and it is the question of how to make a difference if one wants to.
In the abstract, that is a very difficult question. An interesting exercise if one had the time would be to take every name in the list that you composed, and do a tree of all the people who influenced that person.
Seinfeld is there but Larry David isn’t, for instance.
How do you get Tarantino without Sergio Leone?
My personal feeling is someone has influence commensurate with what they do in the world. It may not make them famous, and it might make someone else famous.
Herman Melville did not spend his life sitting around and wondering if a book about whales would be interesting. Or a book about an accountant who loses interest in … what exactly did Bartleby lose interest in? You can only really guess by how he is described in his aspect and his actions. All we know from him is that he would prefer not to. Having influence is a matter of preferring to…
Here is an interesting story of something that had enormous cultural influence, in quite a few ways, but doesn’t get much love.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Match
Of course the answer depends on what you mean by 'change' and 'culture'. What's the smallest example of a change to culture you can think of?
Hula hoops
It was so huge, and then it wasn’t
I would consider Scott as public intellectual popularizing Bayesian thinking and AI alignment to be a small change to the culture. As evidence that it has changed, there was a New Yorker article this year mentioning how a recent change in the spoken language of Ivy League students is they often invoke Bayesian reasoning and use the language of statistics while debating a point. Another article mentioned how many computer science majors are suddenly interested in AI alignment. I realize that there are many other individuals promoting those things, but I suspect this blog -- which I'd guess is at least an order of magnitude more popular than Less Wrong -- has been the primary influence behind that change. Those are small changes on the whole.
In general, though, I don't think writers influence the culture much anymore. I suppose Matt Yglesius has helped popularize YIMBY attitudes, and of course Andrew Sullivan deserves a lot of the credit for pushing gay marriage into a mainstream position. But writers had much more power to change their culture from the 15th through the 19th centuries. Karl Marx upended the world. It's impossible to imagine a single writer having such influence today. Nowadays, business founders are much more likely to reshape society. The automobile, electric grids, appliances, radio, TV, the internet -- these things changed American culture much more than have any *ideas* stemming from the written word. But Henry Ford and the geniuses at Bell Labs didn't know in what ways they would change the culture. Zuckerberg changed the culture massively, but did he predict in what ways he would change it? Perhaps Bezos knew he would save us all trips to the mall.
To be clear: what I mean by changing the culture is something like: household appliances and chemicals have made it much more possible for women to work outside the home. Or: the internet is plausibly one reason why children don't play outside as much anymore. Or: airplanes made long-distance travel common.
So by culture I mean: what people, in general, do and spend their time thinking about.
Some cultural changes have political implications but not all.
That's a fairly muddy example; on the one hand it's people in a local environment changing their word choice, on the other it's something that appeared in a national magazine. So the smallest example is simultaneously across a single school and the entire country.
Oh well. Culture changes through conflict. A new idea hits an old idea and enough people put enough force behind it that the old one is pushed aside, or at least dented. New technology creates new force to apply.
The Ivy League comprises about eight elite colleges, and, for better or worse, the culture of those campuses tends to metastasize throughout the country.
I don't think culture has much to do with ideas. Smart phones and social media have changed the culture, but there was no dialectic of opposing ideas involved.
EDIT: Let me correct myself. Of course, ideas and beliefs are part of culture, but the behavioral aspects of culture often don't require ideas to motivate them. The appearance of a new video game, gadget, drug or ethnic food can change the behavior of masses.
Whereas I wouldn't count vidjagames, drugs or food as a culture change; those are extensions of existing behaviors. Before videogames there were books or team sports, before heroin there was morphine, before ethnic food there was boring food (and morphine).
If those count I guess it's just, find an experience people want to have and find a new way to have it.
> before ethnic food there was boring food
When was a time before ethnic food?
On the subject of ivy league, and elite (a word currently being stomped into a shapeless mess), Ivy is a plant that grows on brick walls in certain climates.
Nit, but I think for such purposes the relevant `eight elite colleges' are not the literal members of the athletic league. In particular MIT and Stanford should almost surely count, and Brown/Dartmouth/Cornell very likely should not.
Fair. I don't know much about colleges. I asked ChatGPT how many Ivy League schools there are. It said eight, so I wrote "about eight".
Who would have thought the Russians would rather let Moscow burn than surrender it to Napoleon?
I believe the invention of the birth control pill qualifies as an invention whose funder was trying to change culture, although I don't know if the consequences fit her intent. I suspect the inventor of Bitcoin was as well.
I had a substack post a while back on ways of changing the body of free information, true or false, in a society, which I think is relevant:
https://daviddfriedman.substack.com/p/how-to-change-the-world
Nit, but I believe the inventor of the birth control pill was a him and not a her.
I said "funder" not "inventor."
This is a fascinating question, and I wish this was discussed more here. Scott seems to have thought almost everything is determined by technology (https://slatestarcodex.com/2013/03/07/we-wrestle-not-with-flesh-and-blood-but-against-powers-and-principalities/) but I don't know if he still thinks this. Honestly, I find that position absurd on its face, given just how chaotic and seemingly-contingent and unpredictable the last few centuries have been. Claims, after certain events have happened, that those events were inevitable, should be given extreme scepticism in my opinion.
But the contrary view that everything's random, or that the decisions of individual "great men" can steer the direction of society (which amounts to everything being random, since we don't even understand the basis for human decisions) seems equally absurd. You wouldn't be able to describe a coherent historical narrative if that were the case. There would be no meaningful trends in society at all, just lots of unpredictable human decisions bouncing off each other.
So I would resolve the middle-ground with two claims.
First, trends get going and can be hard to stop when they do, pulling everyone along with them. But what gets the trends started, or resolves a conflict between two opposing trends, are social "decision points", like elections and wars. Whenever there's an election, or a war, there are at least two forces, two ideologies, two cultures, two answers to a major Social Question, in conflict. And there's always the possibility, sometimes more salient, sometimes less so, of the conflict resolving either way. The American Revolutionary War could have gone the other way (in which case it would be called The 1770s American Revolt, or something similar, or maybe the Tea Mutiny) and the whole world would be different. More narrowly, the question of same-sex marriage (and LGBT ideology more generally) seems to have been largely resolved within the US (and with significant if not decisive influence on the rest of the world) by the 2012 election, or possibly the 2008. That could have gone the other way. People who want to maintain that American independence, or same-sex marriage, were "inevitable" have to explain how they plausibly would still have happened even if the British had crushed the uprising, and even if the Republicans had held the White House in the 2000s and kept being re-elected. I think this would be an extremely difficult task.
Second, to explain the question of whether the outcomes of such decision points (wars, elections) are "merely random" (as in https://slatestarcodex.com/2016/11/07/tuesday-shouldnt-change-the-narrative/) and therefore have no real meaning, or whether they're largely determined by existing social and historical factors, and therefore not really decision points after all...I'll appeal to philosopher Robert Kane, who in "The Significance of Free Will" argues for a way to reconcile choices being meaningful and choices also being free. I actually don't think his theory works very well for individual people's choices, and many good objections have been made to it. But I will defend its much greater power for explaining "decisions" of societies.
The essence (of my take on Kane's theory) is this: in, say, a given election, there are two sets of "explanations" ready to be invoked, depending on who wins. For example, in the 2016 US election, the first explanation was "people want competent politicians who don't cross lines all the time, and racial demographics make reactionary populism a loser", and the second explanation was "people are fed up with politics as usual, and the white working class remains a strong, and increasingly alienated and angry, demographic". Either of these explanations could have been appealed to depending on the result, and in both cases it would have been "the reason" for the outcome. Thus, as it happened, the outcome was meaningful and explained by the second explanation. But it was still contingent, and could just as easily have lost to the other outcome, which would itself have had a meaningful explanation. I think you can describe the same situation in any election.
I can elaborate further on the above if anyone wants me to, including to explain its significance for would-be reformers or "great men".
Agree that elections can be important inflection points. Trump winning the very close 2016 election changed our political culture dramatically. In ways that could, through path-dependency, change the course of future events over the next 50 (billion?) years.
I had forgotten that SSC post. Thanks for linking it. I find this part interesting:
"If God reached into the year 1900 and removed every single Communist, and every Communist book, and erased all memory of Communism, I think it would take about five minutes before someone reinvented something much like the movement, because there were a bunch of very poor people who felt desperate and cheated crammed up against a bunch of very rich people who weren’t afraid to flaunt their wealth. The new movement might have differed from Communism in minor details – maybe their color would have been blue instead of red – but it wouldn’t be hard to identify."
I agree with it that of course Communism was just a form of Socialism popularized by Marx, and of course Socialism existed before Marx, and Socialist revolutions would have happened without Marx -- but -- as Tom Holland argues -- Marx's main historical influence on Socialism was to emphasize the Atheism. There had been many Christian socialist movements, and it isn't impossible to imagine a Soviet Union that leaned into Christianity as part of its Socialism. But because Marx was the intellectual who managed to stamp his brand name onto Socialism, Atheism became a major component of the ideology in the Soviet Union and China.
So I disagree with Scott on the point that without Marx the difference the in socialist ideology we got would have been superficial.
EDIT: Scott wrote that post a decade ago, so I'm certainly not going to hold it against him that he couldn't predict the future as well as we can see the present. But this part is interesting and sad in a nostalgic hopeful way:
"Countries that avoid liberal democracy usually regret it. China would be a good example. They tried being really Communist for a while and ended up becoming an economic basketcase. If they wanted to compete on the international stage they realized they needed a stronger economy, and so liberalized their market. A competitive market requires information access, so the Chinese got access to lots of foreign media; I recently learned that any business that wants to pay for it can even legally avoid the Great Firewall. The Internet meant the Chinese could coordinate protests on microblogging platforms, leading to a bunch of riots, leading to an attempt to liberalize the system and crack down on corruption which is still going on. I’m not going to claim that China is definitely going to end up as a democracy, but I think whatever it does end up as is going to be a whole lot more like 2013 USA than like 1963 China."
Perhaps the example with [Marx, Socialism, Atheism] can be generalized:
Given historical circumstances, X must happen, sooner or later. If one person does not do it another will. However, the person doing X may accompany it with a smaller Y of their own choice. If history "wants" X, it will probably also support X+Y.
Marx: X = Socialism, Y = Atheism
Hitler: X = German militarism, Y = anti-Semitism
Yudkowsky: X = Bayesianism, Y = polyamory, Harry Potter fanfic
Makes sense to me.
What are your thoughts on the Bush-Gore 2000 election? FWIW I view it as a rare splitting point brought mostly by a weird confluence of events, and a few hundred votes of of millions cast* precipitated a disastrous turn in the American (and by extension the world's) history.
*(side note: had fewer NH voters picked Nader and held their noses for Gore the whole FL debacle would have been a footnote)
I have three thoughts.
1. I'd call it a splitting point, but say *every* election is a splitting point. 2000 was just extremely and unusually close, which meant the "could have gone either way" effect was literally 50-50 (and the tiniest changes in a few people's decisions would have changed the outcome). Ranking the last fifteen presidential elections by electoral vote (from most R to most D): 1984, 1972, 1980, 1988, 2016, 1968, 2004, 2000, 1976, 2020, 2012, 2008, 1992, 1996, 1964. A handful of extra people voting D would have swung 2000. A larger "handful", at least in Ohio, would have swung 2004. An even larger (but still overall very small) shift would have swung 1968. So I don't see a fundamental difference between 2000 and the others. Again, as Scott points out (second link in my above comment), this randomness exists in every election: even one of the landslides above might have gone differently, it would have just required multiple very unlikely coincidences like "enormous, systematic error in polling" and "crippling scandal for the leading candidate revealed days before the vote".
2. I'd assume 2000 "decided" a major social question, like every major election does, though what that question was is debateable because we can't run alternate universes. Most obviously, Bush's victory can be seen as a repudiation of Clinton's sex scandal, and more generally stopping in its tracks a movement to dismantle the concept of "public morality" however that's defined. Or it can be seen as endorsing US military dominance of the world, but I'd think that question was really decided in 2004.
Importantly, because Bush won (even if by tiny technicalities) we can "explain" the outcome by saying "people were angry at the scandal, and there was a strong Christian demographic that Bush appealed to". But if Gore had won, it would have been equally well "explained" by "the economy, Gore's experience, and a 21st century secular culture that doesn't care much about moral scandals". So even though the outcome was not determined, and came down to a few random events, that doesn't mean it wasn't meaningful and rationally explained.
3. By all means let us have strong opinions on which outcomes were disastrous and which policies are just. But I think it crosses a line into toxicity if we deny the legitimacy of election outcomes. In 2000, it was only because both candidates had nearly half the country's votes that it came down to random details. Because they both had so many votes, they both "deserved" to win in a sense. Neither Bush nor Gore had a real massive mandate from the people, which means neither could really complain if the other one won, due to chance or technicalities.
Thank you for a thoughtful reply. Just a quick point before I go to bed: I absolutely do not question the legitimacy of the 2000 election. It’s only the enormous consequences of it, which, to be fair, no one could have predicted at the time because of the 911 attacks, that bug me to this day.
Oh, I’d have to say Rupert Murdoch launching Fox News in 1996 was a greater inflection point. It was the beginning of choosing your favored reality in the US.
Right, without that dang Fox News we'd just have The One True Reality, dutifully professed to us by CNN, MSNBC, Vox and John Oliver.
Yes no argument here. But what's so striking about the 2000 election is how... capricious it was, stupid hanging chads, voters not paying any attention, "Bush and Gore are the same, vote Nader" idiocy, the whole zeitgeist of the time: "America awesome, we can elect goat and toad, all good" kind of thing.
Almost a throwaway choice that ended up irreversibly damaging this country and the world. We live in shittier place because of it, and - unlike Fox News, IMHO - it was totally avoidable.
One interesting to note is that its possible 'right wing' individuals are able to influence the culture (in the culture war socio-political sense of culture) more than left wing individuals, even though 'left wing culture' has achieved institutional hegemony. This is because right wing individuals are acting from outside this hegemony, meaning they can provide a position of clear distinction for all those who oppose left wing culture, whereas left wing individuals are acting within the hegemony and are largely indistinguishable from anyone else within it. Right wingers are much capable of being in the position of building something (semi-) new rather than trying to reorient an established and heavily reinforced edifice
Even though the New York Times is an institution of immense cultural power, no individual at the New York Times has anywhere near the cultural influence of Tucker Carlson (especially when he was still on Fox), and its unlikely Kahn, Sulzberger or anyone else could radically shift the culture of the NYT (and therefore the Times' influence on the culture at large). Even someone like Bezos isn't that powerful - he owns the Washington Post but there would be a revolt amongst its staff if he overtly tried to exert editorial control.
As for your question, I think the answer is obviously tech. It's hard for any one individual to influence the world as much in any other field directly through the product of their work as can be done through a tech start-up, and this also allows greater notoriety than a comparable level of success (relative to the rest of the field). And this notoriety allows vastly more influence to be obtained than any level of wealth does. Basically, you want to become the next Elon Musk, but instead of taking pseudo-edgy anti-leftist political positions, you have a strong and coherent anti-liberal socio-cultural political project (which you pursue with various levels of subterfuge) - anti-liberal for the reasons explained above.
"Even someone like Bezos isn't that powerful - he owns the Washington Post but there would be a revolt amongst its staff if he overtly tried to exert editorial control."
I think you grossly underestimate how much power Bezos has in this situation. If he wanted editorial control he could just fire anyone who revolted and replace them with new, more Bezoistic hacks who know how to toe the line – or even ones who don't, because once they're in one of two things will happen: either they'll quickly learn what they need to do to keep their shiny new (and rare!) well-remunerated job, or else they'll revolt too, the next time there's some sort of staff-Bezos conflict, and be replaced in turn from the endless starveling hordes of would-be journalists-or-media-somethings.
The reason he doesn't do this is much more likely to be that he bought the Post in the first place because he *already liked* their editorial line, so no need to do anything, or (I think this is the most probable answer) there's a tacit understanding that he *does* have control over the editorial direction of the paper, to be exercised at his whim and discreetly, without most of the staff ever finding out where the directives came from, as it manifests as a quiet, relaxed phone call to the EIC, who is already au fait with his position and pretty much independently squelches any of the worst stuff before Bezos ever needs to take the phone out of his pocket. There's nothing extraordinary or unusually vile about this, it's how most newspapers work and always have worked, for hundreds of years. You don't think the NYT became liberal in the first place by pure happenstance, do you?
>Think you grossly underestimate how much power Bezos has in this situation. If he wanted editorial control he could just fire anyone who revolted and replace them with new, more Bezoistic hacks who know how to toe the line – or even ones who don't, because once they're in one of two things will happen
If Bezos cleared house at Washington Post, it would only still be 'the washington post' in name only. Such a move would outrage its readers and the rest of the liberal media establishment and the cultural power of the washington post would be greatly diminished, *especially* if he tried to significantly change the ideological slant of its reporting.
Think of it this way - imagine Elon Musk was somehow able to stage a hostile takeover of the New York Times company and made it a private company with himself having majority ownership.
Can Elon Musk make the NYT right wing in such a case? Sure, nominally, after firing and replacing most of its staff. But as far as cultural influence goes, this would again be the NYT in name only - it would lose the vast majority of the influence it had, because the influence it had was a product of much, much more than simply having the name 'The New York Times' at the top of its website or newspaper. The people who hold the NYT in high regard would stop reading it and would disavow it.
Its influence simply *cannot* be appropriated by a sufficiently rich person for their own, radically different ends. This is the same mistake people make when they think Harvard would still be the 'best school' even if you only admitted low IQ students to it. Harvard is a good school because of the students that previously and currently attend it, and the NYT is a respected news organization because of the people that currently work there and the world view these people's articles are imbued with. If only dummies attended Harvard, being a 'Harvard Grad' loses all its pretige, and if all the writers at the NYT are right wingers (or mercenaries pumping out right wing articles they don't agree with), then liberal elites will instantly stop caring what is written in the NYT.
At best, he would destroy, rather than appropriate, the power of the NYT, but the lost power (and the most respected staff) would simply be absorbed by the other large liberal media institutions, and there may even be a net increase in liberal media power because millions of liberals would be incensed that some right wing billionaire destroyed their beloved new organization and would seek to rally around the remaining big liberal news sites. Sure, you might get a lot of conservatives now signing up for the NYT, but the power that the NYT had was precisely the kinds of people who care about what the NYT says (hint: not conservatives).
>There's nothing extraordinary or unusually vile about this, it's how most newspapers work and always have worked, for hundreds of years. You don't think the NYT became liberal in the first place by pure happenstance, do you?
I didn't say anything about vileness. I'm saying that Bezos simply cannot radically alter the washington post without destroying much of the newspaper's reputation and influence. At best, Bezos can perhaps stop certain articles from being published. I'm sure he does like the liberalism of the Washington Post, but that's completely besides the point. The point is that maybe blocking certain articles every now and then is really not that much power for the third richest man in the world, and if he hated liberalism and wanted the WashPo to become conservative, he couldn't effect this change without destroying the influence of his newspaper. Which means he doesn't *really* have much power other than being able to destroy it, which doesn't really change the world meaningfully.
Ayn Rand's novel _The Fountainhead_ is in part about a failed attempt by the owner of a newspaper to get it to take a position he approves of and the staff does not.
Without having read it: is it possible that the action of The Fountainhead is ideologically driven to some extent (that is, by Rand's ideology)? Does Communism interfere with the attempt?
Either way, my belief is that Rand may have had a poorer and less subtle grasp of the mechanisms involved than eg. the Viscounts Rothermere, owners of the Daily Mail.
Also, as a counterexample from literature, Raymond Chandler's The Long Goodbye is in part about a successful attempt by the owner of a newspaper to quash a story he doesn't want to get out, even out of newspapers other than his own.
Quashing a news story is not that much cultural power, and in the real world in the current age, even if there were an individual thing that could radically alter american society if and when people hear about it, its hard to imagine such a thing could truly be kept under wraps for long.
I think it's easier than you're claiming. The hard part is having a reputation as a creditable source. But once you have that, the trick to killing a story is not to just hide it all the time, but instead apply a variety of other tricks. One is to flood the audience's attention with a different story. Another is to poison the well - report stories that throw shade over the story you want to kill, or over the sources that you know will try to air that story.
Having said that, I think this can only work for so long. Eventually people notice cracks in a source's credibility if it conspicuously amps some stories and damps others and the difference always seems to fit a specific narrative. There are even people who just flat believe that no one source can be credible forever, and will stop believing it simply because it's been around so long. Empirically, this seems to be happening today, with traditional radio, TV, and newspaper sources, as people turn more to online and smaller sources, not to mention the existence of two major narratives from traditional media that make the narrative engine that much more obvious. That credibility is eroding, albeit gradually - a great deal of reputation had accrued over the decades.
"Musk biographer Isaacson now on his third version of the "Musk secretly turned off Starlink to stop Ukraine attack" story, having found reason to change the one printed in his book"
https://boingboing.net/2023/09/12/musk-biographer-isaacson-now-on-his-third-version-of-the-musk-secretly-turned-off-starlink-to-stop-ukraine-attack-story-having-found-reason-to-change-the-one-printed-in-his-book.html
Walter Isaacson is or perhaps now was a highly respected journalist and author, currently a professor of history at a respected university. (Could be entertaining to be a fly in the offices of that school's president this morning.) In real time Isaacson is now composing the new lede of his own future obituary in real time and he seems likely to sense that; panic ensues, etc.
For all I know he's floated versions 4 or 5 of that particular Musk anecdote by the time I type this!
Have you caught a case of Musk Derangement Syndrome on top of your TDS?
The simpler and obvious explanation is that his original account was informed by false propaganda and conspiracy theories made up by people like you, and he later was made aware that this was false propaganda.
I have the book here, and your guess is completely wrong. No surprise there of course...also it turns out that Substack's mute function does sort of work now, so, bye-bye.
Boing Boing post seems pretty trashy, though. They really don’t give any evidence for their depiction of Isaacson as scum with no moral fiber who fawns over the brilliant and famous and is now scurrying around in a panic. I read his biography of Steve Jobs, and he didn’t fawn over Jobs, and his take seemed intelligent and well-expressed.
Seems like a terrible decision to write about Elon Musk while the latter was still alive, but I suppose he thought he was up to it.
Anyhow, would like to read an informed and fair- minded take of whattup
So was it changed because it was inaccurate or because it was too accurate? Your link seems to be hinting at the second but won't outright state it.
Maybe a year or two ago, I saw a post on an ACX open thread about a mood tracking app that prompts you to record your mood at random times of day. I've been using it regularly, but I recently lost all of the data on my phone and I can't remember the name of the app. Help?
For a while I was using "How We Feel" on my iPhone. That included mood check-ins.
Do you recognize any of these? https://www.verywellmind.com/best-mood-tracker-apps-5212922
Subscribing to this thread.
Found it! https://evenmind.app/
If you are hoping to get email updates for sibling comments you will be disappointed.
That used to be the case but it seems that feature was removed from Substack a while back
I think it was a good feature and miss it.
Good to know! Thanks
The Long-Term Future Fund and EA Infrastructure Fund are unusually funding constrained* right now:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/PAco5oG579k2qzrh9/ltff-and-eaif-are-unusually-funding-constrained-right-now
We have lots of great projects to fund and relatively little money to fund them, between the FTX Future Fund collapse and the increased interest in longtermism and AI risk in recent months. We are also trying to remove our reliance on Open Phil. Right now, Open Phil is offering 2:1 matching ($2 from them for every $1 from you), instead of their old policy of directly giving us grants.
We would love it if ACX readers who are concerned with AI doom and other LTFF priorities to consider donating to LTFF.
The fundraising post (https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/PAco5oG579k2qzrh9/ltff-and-eaif-are-unusually-funding-constrained-right-now) has a lot more details. Happy to answer any questions either here or on the EA Forum (although I'm less likely to remember to check ACX comments).
*tho not quite as funding-constrained as when I first wrote that post 2 weeks ago.
Does anyone know how the new Chinese AI chatbot, Ernie, compares to its US made counterparts? According to The Economist it was downloaded over a million times the first day of its release, August 31, which is five times faster than ChatGPT reached the million download mark.
See here (it's nominally a paid post, but a lot of information is before paywall): https://www.chinatalk.media/p/how-ernie-chinas-chatgpt-cracks-under.
Thanks
In order to fight polarization, consider "hedge voting". If you're Blue in a Red state, then REGISTER as a Republican... and vote in the PRIMARY for the candidate you hate the least. You can't control who wins the general election, but you can influence who makes it there! (obvs sub Red/Blue at your preference).
A problem is that if you want to "fight polarization" you're already a relative moderate, so doing this means one less moderate vote in your own party's primary. The true partisans might prefer the opposite party to have a more extreme nominee, because they'd be easier to beat. For them, it doesn't matter if it increases conflict and disfunction: winning is all that matters.
At this point, getting a centrist third-party campaign off the ground looks like the better option. Even if they lose, they could send a message to both parties that going too extreme will lose them votes to the centrist party. Make that expected loss great enough, and the polarisation will resolve itself on its own.
> A problem is that if you want to "fight polarization" you're already a relative moderate, so doing this means one less moderate vote in your own party's primary.
In many districts, only one party has a realistic chance of winning, so that party's primary is the only one that matters.
But don't you then lose the opportunity to vote for *any* of your party's nominees (president, governor, senate etc)?
Depends on state, but for many - yes.
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Seems a bit unfair that you have to go up against the JWST...
Yeah! There are definitely some scarily awesome competitors in this contest, including several other space-oriented manufacturers. (One of Boeing's satellites was within the original set of 98 entries, as well.)
Do you think Trump will be indicted more times than the current four? Is this a clear enough prediction to be interesting?
Do you mean before the Presidential election, or just in general? Indictments in general seem inevitable if he lives long enough, so it feels like asking how long he'll live.
Well yea, that's a good point.
Also it matters how exact we are being about the terminology. E.g. he's about to go on trial for civil fraud in New York, which technically isn't an indictment because it isn't in criminal court but what he's charged with is fraud which most people think of as a crime.
He's also in the process of losing a defamation case in civil court, a case which has been expanded once because he kept committing fresh defamation after the guilty verdict and of course that could happen again during the damages phase.
Four? I didn't know the count. (I don't follow the news.) If Scott's elected Prez, and we get King Donald, then more is a feature and not a bug.
Cool. Let’s give him some viagra and put him in a high-end department store, see if he can rack up extra features by sticking his cock into some more struggling women in the fitting rooms. Oh and also more lies and defamation, please. The more reputations and businesses he ruins the more features he has, and dat wut I like, lotz uh feecherz.
King Donald will have blue blood, which means he'll have no need of little blue pills. And I don't think he'll have to sneak into fitting rooms to find willing women.
But seriously, I've stopped paying attention and it's really just better to ignore him.
>Let’s give him some viagra and put him in a high-end department store, see if he can rack up some more features by sticking his cock into some more struggling women in the fitting rooms.
Sure, I mean a group of New Yorkers agreed to make Trump hand over cash to some liberal woman, so I guess that means he MUST be guilty!
If this is the level of evidence we're basing things on, then congratulations, Bill Clinton and Joe Biden are both sexual predators!
>Oh and also more lies and defamation, please. The more reputations and businesses he ruins the more features he has, and dat wut I like, lotz uh feecherz.
It's a sign of supreme dishonesty of supreme ignorance to think Trump is more of a liar or defamer than anyone else, unless you think that Trump is perhaps actually a secret agent of Putin, oh, and also a nazi?
Have a heart. Not everyone is as supremely able to push through the thicket of complexities and nonsense and lies and wishful thinking to the radiant truth as you are.
Depends how the polls go. If DeSantis or any other realistic candidate starts pulling ahead in the primary then I imagine we'll see some more Trump indictments, the more ridiculous the better.
There are rumblings in Arizona which is another state where they recruited a slate of fake electors. But it seems more likely that locals carrying out the scheme will get indicted (like in Michigan) than Trump and his lieutenants on a RICO basis (like in Georgia).
So for right now -- barring some fresh new set of crimes becoming known or being committed -- it doesn't seem like a clear enough prediction to generate any prediction-market action.
I heard someone making an analogy between drag and blackface, and had to admit I'd never thought of it that way before. How did we come to think of one as horrendously offensive and the other as not?
Similar to Scott's take: the central example of blackface (minstrel shows) is a deliberately-insulting caricature of black people, while the central example of drag is an affectionate parody of performative femininity. So despite superficial similarities, the difference in assumed/understood intent makes a huge difference in how they're interpreted. Moreover, a lot of women sympathize with and appreciate the parody, since hyperfeminine presentation also feels performative for many/most women (n.b. "performative" doesn't necessarily mean "unpleasant": many/most women enjoy performing femininity, the same way many/most men enjoy performing masculinity).
Additional factors:
- Blackface is seen as "punching down" because the performers and core target audience (white people) are higher on the generally-understood oppressor-oppressed spectrum than those being caricatured (black people). Whereas for drag, the core performers/audience (gay men) are arguably lower on the spectrum than those being parodied (straight women), so it's seen as punching up, or at worst punching sideways.
- The demographic that arguably has the most right to be offended by drag shows (trans women, who like drag performers are natal males who are presenting femme) tends to be strongly supportive of drag performances. There are several reasons for this: lot of us trans women start our discovery and exploration of our own identities via drag; those of us who either start to socially transition prior to medical transition or whose bodies are slow to respond to medical transition very often borrow techniques from drag performers in order to feminize our appearances; there's quite a bit of community solidarity between the trans community and the gay community; and transphobes often fail to distinguish between trans women and drag performers in a way that makes trans women and drag performers political allies.
- Social relations between men and women are fundamentally different than those between white and black people. Virtually every single man has female relatives (his mother, at the very least), and most men date and/or marry women at some point in their lives. And many gay men have stronger non-romantic friendships with women than most straight men. The equivalent is not true for white and black people. The "Yes, Minister" line, "Some of my best friends are women [long pause] my wife, for instance!", is revealing: despite being used to highlight the speaker's sexism via weak denial, it contrasts with the cliche it's parodying (a rich white person denying racism on the grounds that some of his best friends are black, namely his butler, his cook, his chauffeur, etc); while it's definitely possible for a happily married man who loves his wife to still hold deeply condescending views about women in general, his "best friend" is probably much more of a real friend to him than a rich white racist's black servants. This familiarity and intimacy between men and women in general can make parody between the groups a lot less hostile both in intent and reception than parody between racial groups.
- Related to the previous point, affectionate mocking of gender stereotypes is a stock feature of popular culture, and one which is only very recently starting to be seen as offensive. Consider the "doofy sitcom dad" stock character (Fred Flintstone, Al Bundy, Tim Taylor, Homer Simpson, etc): shows featuring these characters are widely enjoyed by men as well as by women (since despite their negative traits, they're generally treated sympathetically by the narrative, and their experiences are often relatable to male audience members), in ways in which it's difficult to imagine many black people enjoying shows featuring black sitcom protagonists who exemplify negative stereotypes of black people as core character traits. The converse, sitcoms featuring female protagonists parodying female stereotypes is less common is recent history, but is far from unheard of ("I Love Lucy" is the prime historical example).
Thanks for this reply!
Blackface is a way to replace black actors with white ones. By way of example, Othello was first played by a black guy in 1825 (a guy who fled racism in America). Meanwhile, Desdemona was first played by a woman in 1660. So we're hundreds of years further away from men systematically replacing women in acting than we are from whites systematically replacing blacks in acting. And this is for roles written as black/female.
>Blackface is a way to replace black actors with white ones. By way of example, Othello was first played by a black guy in 1825 (a guy who fled racism in America)
>And this is for roles written as black/female.
Othello wasn't black. He wasn't intended to be black, and he was not based on black historical figures.
I'm pretty sure he literally says that he's black. Regardless, he's either North African or sub-Saharan African.
Put differently, do you think Othello was written to have the same skin complexion and ethnic background as Orson Welles? How about Laurence Olivier?
Othello is called a moor, not a blackamoor as he would have been in period if he were black. He is presumably either Arabic or Berber, either of which certainly isn't "white" by conventional definition, but which *are* a damn sight closer in complexion to a Spaniard than to a Yoruba or Bantu. (In fact, Othello is more likely to be an *actual* Spaniard than a black man, since "Moor" could refer also to those Europeans who had converted to Islam during the Caliphate of Córdoba, or to the descendants of the forcibly converted such as janissaries. Given that Othello is helping Venice fight against the Ottomans, this is by no means an unreasonable supposition, although it might be contradicted by some part of the text I don't recall offhand.)
Also, don't forget that in Shakespeare's time "black", "a black man" and the like didn't necessarily refer to skin color but could indicate the color of the hair and beard; what we would maybe call swarthy (a word literally meaning "blackish") although that also has an archaic ring to me.
I get all of that. He could also be sub-Saharan African. It's not a settled question, and I'm not claiming to have an answer to the question.
But whichever way you come down on the question of "what ethnicity was Othello" we can definitely say that Othello's ethnicity is not the same as Orson Welles' ethnicity. Agreed?
>we can definitely say that Othello's ethnicity is not the same as Orson Welles' ethnicity. Agreed?
It was almost certainly intended to be someone who looked vastly more similar to Welles than sub-saharan africans, and its a moot point anyway since the part necessarily NOT written for black actors, because they essentially did not exist at the time and place of Shakepeare's writing of Othello, so it cannot have ever been the intention for this to have been performed by sub-saharan africans and for most of its pre-American history it was portrayed by non-sub-saharan africans. Therefore, the idea that white people appropriated a role intended for black actors is incoherent.
"He could also be sub-Saharan African. It's not a settled question, and I'm not claiming to have an answer to the question."
No, this is a settled question. Beyond current US political sensitivities, this is as ambiguous as whether Cleopatra was black. I get it, you're uncomfortable with it, it would be a lot easier for you if this were unsettled and unknowable, but there's no real argument to be had here. Don't get me wrong, I think Laurence Fishburne is great in the role, no objections because I don't believe in any of this identitarian horseshit, but as far as the question of intent, that's clear, and he's not meant to be black.
"we can definitely say that Othello's ethnicity is not the same as Orson Welles' ethnicity. Agreed?"
Agreed certainly, but nobody's ever argued that Othello was meant to be a white American. That said, not only is Othello's ethnicity *closer to* Orson's than to Fishburne's, it was also *written to be played by* an Englishman (and we even know the man; it was inaugurated by Burbage). You mentioned him originally in the context of a way to replace black actors with white ones, which is thus false in two senses.
"Blackface is a way to replace black actors with white ones."
Oh nononono. "Blackface" is a specific 19th century makeup style that was in no way intended to have a naturalistic effect. Blackface was worn by black performers as well as white.
It's undergone definition decay recently as a way of finding racism where none existed before in theatrical makeup.
I totally agree that concerns about blackface are different today than they were in say the 1930s. Some of those concerns relate to the offensive stereotypes that were conveyed by performers in blackface. So the question is why we still have negative attitudes towards blackface when we remove the offensive stereotypes.
I'm saying that the answer is rooted in a pretty consistent theme of black-white relations going back before the Civil War. Blacks are uncomfortable being excluded from white society and aren't just looking to make white society nicer towards black people.
You can trace this idea back from our modern ideas about inclusion and diversity, through Brown v. Board (separate being inherently unequal) and all the way to Frederick Douglass writing about blackface. In 1848, Douglass wrote about a local newspaper editor, who disparaged pro-abolitionist singers, but "does not object to the 'Virginia Minstrels,' 'Christy's Minstrels,' the 'Ethiopian Serenaders,' or any of the filthy scum of white society, who have stolen from us a complexion denied to them by nature, in which to make money, and pander to the corrupt taste of their white fellow-citizens."
So there are two problems running in tandem - exclusion of blacks from white spaces, and whites ridiculing and stereotyping blacks. Even if you solve the second problem, you still have to contend with the first one. I'm arguing that's why we continue to be concerned about blackface today, though I will concede that this second problem is far from the dominant one in conversations about blackface. Despite being a smaller problem, it's pretty consistently present.
The fact that black people do not want to be excluded from white spaces does not make their exclusion a problem. That fact they desire "inclusion" does not make them entitled to it.
Problem as in something that Americans have historically fought about.
Throughout my post, I'm trying to make it clear that I'm discussing something that exists in American history. When I'm quoting Frederick Douglass, I'm not just giving my opinion about a topic. I'm discussing what historical people felt about topics that were controversial in their day.
If you want to explain why you think that inclusion isn't a problem, go for it! I'm here to talk about it.
But I was previously talking about problems in the sense of American history, not my own personal feelings about what the problems were in 1848.
Blackface was often (and is in this case) about white people in 100% white countries playing a black character. It’s not American history.
No, "Blackface" was a specific style of theatrical makeup indicating a particular type of performance (see also: kabuki, mime, clowns). The person wearing it could be of any race (but was usually white, black, or Native America).
I'd cede the argument about terminology and just distinguish between the blackface of old (which hardly anyone does anymore) and white actors wearing makeup to appear black. The second has problems too and they're worth discussing.
They don't so much relate to offensive stereotypes as they do to representation. That's why we can support drag alongside a push for more women directors and writers and so on. The idea is that women want to be included at every level of the creative process so that they can tell stories that are authentic to their experience. Drag doesn't inhibit this, because drag performers are not generally competing with women for roles. They're doing their own thing, mostly.
In contrast, white actors wearing makeup to play black characters are pretty openly competing against black actors. If you couldn't have a white person wear makeup to appear black, you'd either have to change the character, or hire a black actor. Supporting the second is pretty consistent with ideas about inclusion and representation.
Those ideals aren't threatened by drag performers (at least not that I've ever heard of) so I argue that's why there's no pushback against drag performers.
Going back to the original complaint:
Blackface was not about realistically portraying black people but identifying a particular theatrical/stock character/stereotype. Likewise "drag" is not about realistically portraying a woman, but a particular caricature of feminine stereotypes. So that's why it can be considered equally offensive.
As to why it's not considered so by most, the simplest answer is women have been relegated down several rungs on the progressive stack. Outrage is selective and partisan.
That's the least charitable explanation for the behavior, and to my knowledge, that explanation isn't put forth by any of the people who approve of drag but disapprove of blackface.
Why not simply ask them why they think the way that they do, rather than answering that question for them?
I think you'd be on the right track if the punchlines for drag shows were things like "lol I'm just a stupid girl, I suck at math but bat my eyelashes and get free drinks, I can't do X and Y and Z because of my gender, I belong in the kitchen not on the job, etc, etc."
That's what drag would look like if denigrating women was a core principle of the art form in the way that denigrating african americans is core to blackface minstrel shows, where the key punchlines are the blackface singer being ignorant, lazy, happy under slavery, etc. And indeed, if drag shows were constructed that way, I think many more women would find them offensive.
It seems to me that you can draw a distinction between blackface, where the historic underpinning of the form is denigrating another race, and drag, where the underpinning is watching men subvert their own masculinity by garishly adorning themselves in feminine-coded dress and makeup.
I'm not sure the record really supports this idea. In the 1820s, America was about 20% black. It's not like there were literally no people who could play Othello and America, as a 100% white country, had to make due with white actors out of necessity.
In fact, America birthed the first two black actors to play Othello - Ira Aldrige (played Othello in 1825) and Paul Robeson (played Othello in 1930). So we've got a hundred years there were no black actors were playing Othello. Meanwhile, blacks made up between 10 to 20% of the U.S. population. Moreover, black actors were apparently good enough to perform in Britain, and when asked why they left the United States, both Aldrige and Robeson were pretty clear that racism was the reason for them leaving.
I can understand that if you have a 100% white country, you have to make do. But does that really describe America in the 19th and early 20th century?
Ironic since black "anti-racists" today are calling it "racist" if they aren't allowed to portray actual white historical figures.
I mean, isn't it a bit racist? If I had a lunch counter with a sign that said "Whites only", I think most people who recognize that as racist.
If instead of a lunch counter, it's a counter with a signup sheet to play George Washington in a play, is it not still racist to hang up that "Whites only" sign?
Only if it's also racist not to cast a white guy as Frederick Douglass.
Time to throw in relatively recent history, from when I was a small child and this programme was on the television as wholesome family entertainment:
The Black and White Minstrel Show
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Black_and_White_Minstrel_Show
An episode from 1978 and yes, by current standards it's very much "what were they thinking? how could they do this?"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DJqqoWqD3jQ
Everything you say about stereotypes is correct, but it was an unthinking racism, if you understand what I'm trying to get at. It was copying a style of performance of old-style music, not primarily "let's mock and laugh at black people". There were also gollywogs (which I had no idea were meant to be representative of black people; as a child, I just took them as another type of doll). They were also on jars of marmalade and on tea - I have no idea why 'minstrels' were associated with tea, but there you go (here's a rather self-righteous article about the brands which used this imagery in their advertising):
https://www.irishtimes.com/culture/tv-radio-web/from-golly-bars-to-eskimo-mints-the-irish-brands-with-a-race-problem-1.4283562
Tea advert:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qf2EXK4znxk
Marmalade:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GO87YqgqfgY
Yes, today we are very much aware of the problems with this. I think maybe the drag/trans issue will incur the same "what were they thinking? how could they do that?" in the future.
So the interesting thing (to me) isn't the discussion about stereotypes. That discussion used to be pretty lively, but basically everyone came around to the idea that racial stereotyping is bad and we shouldn't do it.
The more interesting question is one of representation. If you weren't going to stereotype a black person, but instead you were going to portray them with their full humanity on display (say in Othello), would it be okay to have a white person play a black character (or vice versa)?
Looking at The Black and White Minstrel Show, it's clear that they too were grappling with ideas about representation. Not just about what is said, but who gets to decide what's said. So the BBC's Chief Accountant (of all people) opposed the show and wrote a memo explaining why he thought it offended responsible opinion. But then he writes "One way of testing responsible opinion would be for the BBC to send the Black and White Minstrels book and the coloured Radio Times front cover of them to the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People and the Urban League, and ask for their opinion."
Thus the content of the show - whether right or wrong - is separate from the more fundamental question of "Who decides?" The BBC's Chief Accountant evidently thought that black leaders should decide how black characters are portrayed - that fits pretty neatly with the modern phenomenon of sensitivity readers. I'm arguing it also explains modern opposition to white actors playing black characters, even without the stereotypes (e.g., a white actor playing Othello).
In contrast, the show's creator wrote "It seems to be absurd to imagine that people who are not already racially prejudiced could possible be in the some way contaminated by the Minstrels. People who are already racially prejudiced are more likely to be exacerbated by the protest itself than the object of the protest. The best advice that could be given to coloured people by their friends would be: "on this issue, we can see your point, but in your own best interests, for Heaven's sake shut up. You are wasting valuable ammunition on a comparatively insignificant target".
And this response really highlights the disconnect. The creator is talking about content - if the content isn't creating racism or fueling racism, then it's fine - while the accountant is talking about representation - the BBC shouldn't portray black characters without the approval of the black community.
In fact, the BBC Accountant (no idea why he decided to weigh in on this dispute, but whatever) had written in 1962 that "If black faces are to be shown, for heaven’s sake let coloured artists be employed and with dignity" - this is a pretty separate thought from just the no-stereotyping rule, and my argument is that this thought merits discussion separate from the stereotyping issue (which, as I've stated above, I don't find particularly interesting).
So, going back to the creation of the role of Othello, which likely was the first major role for a non-white character to be sympathetic/heroic (even if he does end up destroyed by his own jealousy), then there may or may not have been black actors to take on the role. Though see this article on the topic:
https://earlytheatre.org/earlytheatre/article/view/1206/2326
So it gets established as a part played by white actors in blackface, and then as it becomes part of the Shakespearean canon, it's a major part (like Hamlet and Lear and Macbeth) that an actor wants to play, so again it's given to star actors (generally white). So the *colour* of the part was less important than the fact that it was a star role. Is anyone really arguing over 'only black actors should play Aaron in Titus Andronicus'?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xcLGJ0c-X9k
To be fair, he gets one of the best lines in all the plays:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9Tcmb5nLpfM
I think that it's only relatively recently that it has been established as a part for black actors (and now *only* black actors) to play.
There's an entire complex knot there of "who gets representation? who gets to decide? what is the content? is it good or bad?"
I don't think we are yet at the point of saying *only* Jewish actors should play Shylock (and that's another thorny problem, because is it anti-Semitic?) the same way that we are insistent that *only* black actors should play Othello (and that leads on to the question of "well, what about a brown actor? would it be acceptable for an Indian actor? what about a Chinese actor?")
If you are considering the literal denotative meaning that is true. But as others in the the thread point out, when it’s used in the US it has some nasty historical connotations
Hyperstitious slur cascade, see https://www.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/comments/11mddex/give_up_seventy_percent_of_the_way_through_the/ . Some people did blackface a hundred years ago in a way that made fun of blacks in a racist way, it crystallized as "that offensive thing you do to make fun of blacks in a racist way", and nobody can ever uncrystallize it.
Many women love drag, which is kind of an important difference.
Minstrel shows were super-popular too.
Among black people? In any event, you’ll be hard pressed to find a black person in favor of blackface and minstrel shows in the present day. Whereas most women I know are excited to attend a drag show. This was the case even before they became politicized, btw.
The never-incorrect-about-politically-charged-topics wikipedia sez:
"African Americans formed a large part of the black minstrels' audience, especially for smaller troupes. In fact, their numbers were so great that many theater owners had to relax rules relegating black patrons to certain areas.[77] "
Though this would have to be a very relative thing, since minstrelry was vastly more popular in the white, segregated antebellum northeast than the more diverse south.
Maybe in a couple hundred years glitter wigs, torpedo bras and goldfish tank platforms will be considered offensive.
Are women allowed to not like drag?
Yes, what’s your point?
Obviously gay & transpeople are amongst the most sacred in modern american society, and many women are going to feel unsafe objecting to anything ostensibly LGBT related given the immense abuse and threats to physical safety LGBT activists are wont to provide, not to mention government, universities and corporations using anything remotely "anti-LGBT" as a grounds for dismissal or career stifling. You can't possibly be ignorant of this.
If you ever actually attend a drag show you will notice that there are many women in attendance. In fact, they’re popular with women to the extent that attending a drag show is a common bachelorette party activity. Are you contending that this is only the case because women live in fear of the woke mob?
This is just silly. Nobody said women LIKE drag because of harassment and abuse of trans activists. The point is that women who don't like drag likely feel unsafe expressing opposition to it. Which means most women are publicly either pro-drag or don't talk about about (out of either disinterest or out of fear).
A huge number of liberals genuinely supported the BLM riots of 2020. This is perfectly consistent with the fact that many liberals were afraid to voice opposition to them and so didn't criticize them.
The claim was never that all or even most women are anti-drag. It's that a lack of anti-drag opinions from women is not evidence that no women are anti-drag.
Very few female athletes have come out publicly as being strongly anti-trans-inclusionary in women's sports. One of the few ones who has was literally assaulted by trans activists when she gave a talk at a college campus. The idea that these two facts are unrelated is very foolish.
It's just standard ingroup stuff. Gays are the good guys, blacks are the good guys. Thus the gays can do what they want, but you can't do equivalent things to blacks. The fact that that's completely inconsistent in terms of what actual actions are allowable is neither germane nor unprecedented.
I'm sure there are feminists who are deeply bitter about the double standard. And you'll notice that the same exact thing applies to transsexuals vs. transracials like Dolezal.
But women are also the good guys! And it seems they're also not allowed to do blackface: https://www.france24.com/en/20131130-france-blackface-scandal-racism-fashion-europe, whereas blacks are allowed to do drag. So it would seem that there is a hierarchy at work where blacks are more privileged than women.
I think that "privilege" is the wrong framing to look at this question through, primarily because it always is. The real issue in my view is that women are simply too many to ever form an effective ingroup. That's the tragedy of feminism: at least sufficient numbers of women will always disagree with the specific political aims, whatever they are. Most white women voted Trump, the feminist movement itself was arguably coopted at least once, et cetera et cetera.
If black people were half the population they would also be too heterogenous to be made into a bloc, as the example of African politics shows clearly. God knows what would happen with blackface then, but my money is on one subgroup weaponizing it against another somehow.
Just off the top of my head.
Maybe blackface feels more like mockery of blacks than drag does of women?
11 second 30 Rock clip:
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=MZcY_jsWbE4
I loved those live shows. Stupid cancellation.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XVEPZI2KeQU
Anyone care to explain the joke of that clip?
Here's another example of the kind of humor from that show. It's not for everyone, but I don't think it should be banned.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AU7r8jmNJa8
What Don P said, plus, if I remember right, there was yet another layer. The story for the live 30 Rock show was that the fictional sketch comedy show "TGS with Tracy Jordan" was doing a retrospective of milestones in NBC history, specifically of live broadcast TV. I think this purported to be the first television show with two black leads, but NBC policy "only allowed one black man on screen at a time", which Kenneth cheerfully followed up with "a policy which is still in place today!". And so in the fictional history of NBC, this was the first time that the actor played by Tracy Morgan (who was in turn playing the well-dressed black man), met his co-star. On live TV. And the clip Gunflint posted originally, which I responded to, was from later on in this fictional TV show's run, again purporting to show the kind of drama (in this case, attempted murder) that could only be achieved on live TV.
TLDR, it's making fun of NBC, America, and themselves, and the only entity which emerges from this sketch with dignity intact is Tracy Morgan's character (and character's character). Or even more in a nutshell, the only person it's not making fun of is the black man.
(If someone can find a longer clip, I'd love to see how accurate my memory was.)
Thanks, even though with all the explanations combined the only thing I'm somewhat sure of is that I've stumbled upon a piece of media that requires the deep US cultural lore to fully appreciate.
Thanks to Don P for the straight explanation. I wanted to write it up for you but was overcome by a smart ass impulse to link to Cliffy and Norm explaining a Far Side gag to Woody. I was biting my thumb so to speak.
But now that the sincere answer is out there, why waste a good joke?
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=EG68GfY_OSU
You have to know the levels of reality involved. 30 Rock is a situation comedy about (among other things) the making of a comedy sketch show. In this clip, we see the 30 Rock character Tracy Jordan (played, just to really confuse you, by real-world actor/comedian Tracy Morgan) start to perform in a sketch. The other "sketch comedian", whose character name I forget but is actual actor Jon Hamm, enters in blackface. At this point, the 30-Rock-level sketch actor Tracy Jordan breaks character of the innermost sketch, outraged by the other guy's blackface, and storms out.
ETA: this was all obviously clearer in the full sitcom as broadcast.
I personally don't have that perception and I don't think it's a good explanation - keep in mind that almost all blackface is out of bounds (Tropic Thunder I guess is an exception), even if not done in any overtly mocking way, while quite a lot of drag is pretty over the top caricature.
There aren't that many examples of men in drag replacing women in major productions. Meanwhile, white actors routinely replaced black actors throughout Hollywood in the 1930s (which is slowly fading from our national memory).
If men in drag started winning Best Actress, then maybe we'd see the same backlash against drag as we did against blackface.
The backlash to (say) Justin Trudeau's blackface halloween costume is because people are worried about white actors in blackface winning Best Actor? (To make the analogy more award, it should be winning "Best Black Actor," but as far as I know, there are no such awards.)
I'm talking about the source of the taboo. I'm totally willing to concede that the taboo has a sweep that goes beyond its original rationale - the same is true with virtually any other taboo.
Jonathan Haidt, for example, liked to asked people about whether incest would be permissible if the brother and sister were both willing, were in a place where it was legal, and used birth control. Lots of people still say no, but can't explain why. They've carried the taboo well beyond its original rationale.
That doesn't mean that the taboo itself has no logic.
Incest taboos have an evolutionary rationale, so they're probably not the best analogy here.
In any case, of course taboos sometimes take on a life of their own but I think your explanation for the blackface taboo is unconvincing on its own terms. The origin of the taboo surely has more to do with the fact that historical blackface was taken to be explicitly and grossly racist than with a concern for who gets acting jobs.
To clarify, you don’t think that historically blackface mocked and belittled blacks?
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=voBcDtXIMvA
I mean, in the same way that Pepe Le Pew mocks Frenchmen and Groundskeeper Willie mocks the Scots.
Well, here’s a twofer
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=FUjGf2Grrus
Gradually for a long while, then in more of a rush.
Do you know anyone in the used washing machine and fridge business?
Is this the second time you've asked this question?
yes
tldr: I’m building pairup.social, a friend-finding (or just conversation-finding) app based on complementary interests. People describe themselves with links to stuff they are interested in, such as this substack. You can express a lot of nuance with the links you choose! Based on these interests, people are matched up and can decide to start chatting with others based on familiar dual opt-in mechanics.
To try it out (and potentially add Astralcodexten as an interest):
https://www.pairup.social/add-interest?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.astralcodexten.com
There are a few benefits I’m hoping to enable:
- Help loosely-connected communities have more and stronger one-on-one ties within them.
- Help people discover new interests in the process of finding other people: you see others’ interests when deciding if you’d like to pair up with them. If there are some attractive known interests, the unknowns might be worth looking into.
- Help bloggers, podcasters, creators etc. grow their audiences by the same mechanism above. Those lists of interests can act as stealth marketing for them…
- Meet some interesting new people myself!
If you try it out, LMK how it goes either here or at hello@pairup.social
No option for desktop users? Or am I just missing it?
You are right: so far it's mobile-only... I figured mobile was the most important experience given that the main interactions are quick and sporadic (adding a new interest, chatting with someone else) and this keeps things simple to start. But with enough demand I'd add desktop or web support as well.
I've been researching atherosclerosis and it seems to me there is a very good argument for basically the majority of adults to be on some sort of cholesterol controlling drug. The basic idea being - ASCVD is the #1 causal factor in premature death, by a WIDE margin. The medical establishment only treats it when the 10 year risk exceeds a certain threshold, yet plaques form through our entire life. And finally, we understand the mechanism of how this works, and have very well tolerated and effective drugs at inhibiting that mechanism. (Basically summarized the argument from Dr. Peter Attia who is an excellent resource for this sort of thing. He doesn't go as far as saying "all adults should be taking drugs for this" but it feels like an inescapable conclusion to me)
Seems like one of those "massively overdetermined, obvious-in-hindsight" things, with a generous side of "the medical establishment is slow to update and overly conservative". Of course I could be missing something, but can anyone provide a good counterargument or, should I just hop on a statin yesterday?
Weren't statins considered harmful for long-term use? Something about damaging kidneys or other organs in the long run?
You might be right. But I feel skeptical because it seems to me that most fixes for things out of balance in the body are not full fixes -- they screw up something else. If the dysfunction they cause is less bad than the dysfunction you're treating then taking the fix is still a net gain, but then you have to weigh cases individually, and might not want to give the fix to people who show no dysfunction. Example: It used to be thought that menopause was a deficiency disease, and that you could improve the health of postmenopausal women by giving them the hormones their body was no longer making. But it turned out there were substantial health risks for women on this regimen.
That's fair, and probably generally true, but I think there are exceptions. Consider cataract surgery. AFAIK, normal aging pretty much always eventually gives people cataracts. Ideally, one would like to restore peoples' eyes (along with the rest of their bodies!) to a youthful state, but what we _can_ do is reliably a net gain.
I’m a bit vague about cataracts, but believe there is a a
substantial down side to getting them. . Doctors try to get people to delay the surgery as long as possible. I believe that’s because the artificial lens they put in place of your cloudy natural lens wears out after a few years and then you need it replaced. But they can only replace it once or twice. So if somebody gets cataract surgery too early, ie too many years before they die, they must end up with no functioning lenses in their eyes.
Somebody who knows more
— do I have that right?
My understanding is that the replacement lenses themselves are designed to reliably last a lifetime, to the point that there are no major concerns about lens durability when doing corrective surgery on children with congenital cataracts.
The problem seems to be that it's moderately common for the surgery itself to trigger or hasten the progress of other degenerative ocular conditions, so it still makes sense to delay the surgery as much as practical so as to postpone starting the clock on the other conditions. One of the big concerns is posterior capsule opacification, where the lining behind the lens starts going opaque in a cataract-like way; this may be what you're thinking of.
Thank you. After I posted I did a casual investigation of question , and found many sites, most by not all belonging to eye care medical practices, saying that NO THEY NEVER WEAR OUT (which is quite in line with what you’re saying, Erica) and SO THERE’S NO REASON AT ALL TO DELAY THE CATARACT SURGERY (which is harmful bullshit, apparently, going by Erica, who sounds like she knows what she’s talking about). WTF is wrong with all those places posting bullshit?!
>who sounds like she knows what she’s talking about
On this particular subject, I'm just a fairly clever person with a solid general knowledge base who's pretty good at doing quick-and-dirty research with google and wikipedia, so don't invest too much confidence in my assessment here. I think the fundament question comes down to how big the risks are of triggering PCO, glaucoma, etc relative to the downsides of delaying surgery.
I've poked around a little more, and it sounds like the two big things I'm most confident of cataract surgery increasing the risk of (PCO and glaucoma) both seem to be readily manageable: PCO apparently can be completely resolved with a five-minute outpatient procedure (using a laser to make a hole in the posterior capsule), and glaucoma can be managed with medication in most cases or with relatively minor surgery in severe cases.
Many Thanks!
Something like this sounds plausible. My late wife was going to have cataract surgery, and the ophthalmologist was definitely not pressing her to have it earlier. It certainly sounds like there is _some_ sort of trade-off. I have the start of cataracts, and my ophthalmologist hasn't been advising me to get surgery yet either. Still, the surgical option is consistently better than just living with what aging does to our eyes.
And you are quite right about the hormone replacement therapy. At one point it was thought to be cardio_protective_, but, when more data was available, the opposite proved true :-(
Yes. See for example https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-018-38461-y which outlines cholesterol levels and all-cause mortality. You might possible lower your risk of CVD by forcing cholesterol lower, but it's far from clear that this is 'good for you' in a more general sense.
Total cholesterol is well know to not be a good indicator of ASCVD because only certain kinds of apolipoproteins (the particles that carry cholesterol in blood) actually cause plaque
That's as may be, but the point I am making has more to do with the interesting rise in acm as cholesterol drops below the optimal or acm-minimum point on their graph (which I believe is a level currently considered 'a little high for good health'). It seems like we would have to argue that when cholesterol is low and there's higher acm, it's merely a signal or indicator of some problem, but when it's high, it's actually a cause, and reducing it will help. My default assumption here is that the body is maintaining blood cholesterol for some useful purpose(s), and that just knocking it down may not be that great. Of course there are cases where we can specifically say 'the risks of this cholesterol level are high enough that we need to reduce it, even if there is some possible unknown downside'. But that's a very different take than advocating for 'basically the majority of adults to be on some sort of cholesterol controlling drug'.
raj, what is a good indicator? I know there are various risk calculators, that take into account age, levels of both HDL and LDL, presence/absence of diabetes and some other stuff. There's imaging of the heart. There's exercise stress tests.
It seems that either Lp(a) or apo-B are better indicators and are being used in Europe. You can just search either term in google scholar, but here's some sources: https://www.ahajournals.org/doi/full/10.1161/ATV.0000000000000147
https://www.degruyter.com/document/doi/10.1515/CCLM.2004.254/html
Coronary calcium scan measures how far the plaque has progressed. Which is a monotonic and inevitable process in virtually all adults, but for (reasons) we don't try to aggressively mitigate them until they are sufficiently bad
I’ll bite. What about the people who start a course of statins but stop because of muscle pain?
Fair point, but it's not really about the statins per se, that's just the first line treatment. AFAIK there's also ezetimibe and pcsk9 inhibitors which seems also effective and well tolerated. I'm sure other options as well. The main point is "there's this stuff in your blood clogging your arteries, do you want to take a medicine to reduce it or not"
(also I'm sure there are way, way more people that just never tried a statin, than there are that can't because of side effects)
Statins are also associated with lower cancer risk. Probably because cholesterol is a known cause of inflammation, and statins also have an effect on the inflammasomes. There is indication statins help with inflammatory conditions like Chrohns. But if you start taking statins at 30 you could easily be on them for 50 years, and I don't think we know what that means. With a family history of heart disease and high cholesterol it seems like a good idea to start them younger than the recommended age because we know plaque build up begins at a young age, and these metrics for recommending statins are looking at things like 10 year survival.
In the final episode of the series, we summarize the basic argument of an intelligent cause for the universe and answer many of the most common questions. See it at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yf7rq7g4xIQ&ab_channel=PhysicstoGod
With this episode, you'll be able to appreciate the advantage of the way we formulate the fine tuning argument, and you'll see why our formulation avoids the common pitfalls of the other formulations. Now is a great time to ask any questions you might have that we haven't addressed yet.
Even an utterly wrong explanation can have a convincing explanation, answer many questions, and avoid common pitfalls. See, e.g., "caloric fluid" theory of heat transfer. Plausible! But still unnecessary.
Exactly. We discuss that point in episode 10 where we argue that a solution must also be indicated by the evidence.
I think my point is somewhat different. There was plenty of evidence supporting the existence of caloric fluid. But it turned out to be a useless model of heat.
So you may be able to present plenty of evidence for the fine-tuning but it gets us no closer to the ‘why’: why is this necessary, and what is the point of this model of the universe. What are we going to do differently as a result of adopting this model?
If you are accepting our argument from fine tuning, then there is an objective basis for teleology and purpose in the universe. While this needs to be developed further, and granted we are not doing that on the podcast, it is at least intuitively clear that it can have an profound impact on a person in the modern world.
I’m not. Accepting. But I do see your point: if this model helps someone find meaning in life, it is useful; I wish you all the best in your efforts to promote it.
I don't understand why fine-tuning is limited to universes with the same variables as ours.
So let's say I agree that strong nuclear force is fine-tuned - if it were larger or smaller by 50%, then our universe wouldn't work.
But that's our universe. Do all universes need the strong nuclear force? After all, there are lots of ways that matter could work. We could pretty easily have a universe with no atoms whatsoever. Everything is made up of an infinitely divisible substance. That's how most people thought that our universe worked for centuries! Sure, you wouldn't get our exact universe, but that's not the claim of fine-tuning. Why can't we have life without the strong nuclear force, but with some other version of matter?
I mean, shouldn't the fine-tuning approach first answer what's so special about these variables? Like why should we expect that other universes have strong nuclear forces?
That’s an interesting question. The short answer, which we discuss at length in episode 7, is that scientists themselves say that our universe wouldn’t have any complexity and higher structures with different laws. In your case, without the strong nuclear force there would be no stable atoms, molecules, planets, stars, etc. There would still be fundamental particles and physics, but there wouldn’t be chemistry, biology, astronomy, etc.
Sure, but there could be lots of universes without the strong force but with different properties (that our universe lacks) which cause them to work just fine.
By way of analogy, if you took the wheels off my car, it couldn't move. Yet I have no wheels and I can move just fine. Cars are different than people, but they each work in their own way.
If all we knew was the car universe, then someone could very easily say "Any universe without wheels would be broken" but they'd be mistaken. Meanwhile, I'd be here in human universe saying "Any universe without legs would be broken" and I'd be mistaken too.
We're just projecting our universe onto other universes which we've never observed (and which we probably can't observe). That doesn't tell us anything about those other universes. It's just us repeating what's important about our own universe.
In this universe, the strong force is really important. But I can imagine lots of other universes where the strong force isn't important and everything works just fine because they have some other set of forces to make everything work. Is such a thing really beyond the human capacity to imagine?
The point is that scientists can do better than speculate and imagine there’s another universe where things could work. They can see the consequences of changing the laws and they realize that the vast majority of them don’t have complexity. This requires scientific knowledge to do, so a layman might mistakenly think that any rag bag universe with random laws works but that isn’t the case. See episode 7.
Look, but that’s just the problem: there may be 10000000 other universes with different parameters where ‘matter’ as we know it can’t exist. We can only observe our own.
Imagine you’re in a closed box on a pebble beach, and I have a machine that only picks pebbles that weigh 100 g. Every time the machine picks a 100g pebble I give it to you via a tube. You will have convincing evidence that every pebble on the beach weighs exactly 100 g, surely the pebble size must be fine-tuned. But nothing is fine-tuned, pebbles come in all sizes, you just can’t see them.
There actually is no evidence other universes exist, so this is highly speculative. It makes more sense to assume this is the only universe, and go from there.
An obligatory link on the subject: https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/the-phrase-no-evidence-is-a-red-flag
We will never (e.g., >99.9% certainty) be able to collect evidence of other universes. We don't even know if other universes exist in the same time period or they are subsequent, or if our model of "time" is even useful in the context of a multi-verse model.
Then there's the whole simulation argument, which then can weirdly intersect with the fine-tuned argument. We don't have an objective way to resolve this.
Anyone here have any experience with any of the 'chemically close to alcohol' alternatives? This was a big discussion on HN the other month, about a company called GABA Labs that's been working on this https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36920387
Some British scientist has apparently been working on synthetic alcohol for years- it's an unregulated space so he sells his drinks online https://sentiaspirits.com/ There's also a biotech startup in this space called Zbiotics. Would be curious if anyone's had any experience with these synthetic booze types
Not meaning to spread half-remembered rumours, but [I'll do it anyway] wasn't it Scott Himself who tweeted about the presidential debates while drunk on isopropanol?
I read about this exact thing a few years ago, back when they first started selling Sentia. As I understand it, Sentia doesn't contain anything that mimics the biochemical effect of alcohol at all. They just market it as a fancy drink for rich people. I would be interested in trying some of these alcohol alternatives but so far all I've seen of them is marketing.
Muscimol is legal in most places, and is a fairly potent GABA uptake inhibitor that some say has similar effects to a mellow alcohol buzz (also reportedly hallucinogenic and oneirogenic). Haven’t tried it myself but intending to get round to it. Some in my circle have been using “psilocybin oil” to supplement/replace alcohol; I use the scare quotes because I was recently told that it’s actually a synthetic compound, chemically related to DMT but tinkered with to mimic the effects of psilocybin. In any case, administered one drop at a time up to a total of say four drops over an evening, it seems like a very pleasant choice. Of course, both psilocybin and think DMT are highly illegal in most places. Whether or not this applies to a tinkered-with synthetic analogue is anyone’s guess...
Final version of "Instinct to Social Morality" [yes, the redundancy in the title is intentional]
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1YPyndodIwrAbBkzIa2DPfftNXZAMSxsv/view
I wonder if you’ve seen the paper by Oliver Scott Curry, Moral Molecules: Morality as a Combinatorial System
https://rdcu.be/dlW4y
"Again, perhaps the answer is ‘both’. Perhaps elements are universal, but molecules are relative"
--[from recommended paper]
Thanks for posting this. I heartily agree with this excerpt and much of the rest of the paper which I will soon give a proper read.
My current position is that there are universal laws(by any name) that a given civilization must then together, hammer into societal(positive) laws and folkways. Per a cycle(Khaldun, 1377; etc.) all civilizations stray from this natural order and society becomes increasingly corrupt. The predictability is explained by evolved human nature taking 10s of thousands of years to significantly change.
"Moral questions may not have objective answers but they do have rational ones, answers rooted in a rationality that emerges out of social need. To bring reason to bear upon social relations, to define a rational answer to a moral question, requires social engagement and collective action. It is the breakdown over the past century of such engagement and such action that has proved so devastating for moral thinking.”
--Kenan Malik, The Quest for a Moral Compass, 2014
Neuroscience/psychiatry question:
Why don’t we use catecholamine (dopamine, norepinephrine, epinephrine) tests in the diagnosis and treatment of anxiety/ADHD?
I really know nothing here, but it seems like if there are nonstandard levels of a specific neurotransmitter, then couldn’t we then use the specific antagonist/reuptake inhibitor drug for it?
I'll add one more reason to Scott's: Even if ADHD is due mostly to a too few dopamine-mediated nerve transmissions in some part of the brain, the problem might not be dopamine deficiency. It could be that the dopamine receptors are under-responsive. Or it could be that the receptors respond normally, but that whatever is supposed to clear away dopamine from earlier transmissions clears it up too thoroughly, so that the dopamine floor is too low, and a step-up in the form of a new squirt of dopamine does not bring the level up high enough to get the proper firing. Neither of these problems constitute actual dopamine deficiency, but would be helped by additional dopamine.
1. There's no good test for how much of any given catecholamine is in your brain. Peripheral tests (eg blood levels) will mostly catch the chemicals being used peripherally, and even CSF tests mostly catch metabolites and are hard to interpret.
2. Which part of the brain probably matters a lot too. Every part of the brain uses dopamine for something different, and only in some parts does that affect attention. This is why Parkinson's, ADHD, and antipsychotic side effects are different syndromes, even though they all involve dopamine deficiency. You would really have to figure out what's going on at individual synapses, which would be too invasive to do routinely (maybe at all). Maybe there's some way to do this through radio-imaging, I'm not sure, but I bet it's expensive and unpleasant.
3. Although Adderall helps ADHD, it's probably much more complicated than "a dopamine deficiency". Norepinephrine only helps a tiny bit and is probably unrelated. I don't think epinephrine is involved at all, although I could be wrong.
There's been a good deal of reporting this week about Elon Musk personally deciding to cut off Starlink access near Crimea so the Ukrainians couldn't use it for a big attack on Russian naval forces. That, plus the New Yorker article about US DoD frustrations with Musk: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2023/08/28/elon-musks-shadow-rule
made me wonder: why doesn't USG just nationalize Starlink, pay off Musk to the tune of enough billions that he's obviously financially got the much better end of the deal, and "take the gloves off" when it comes to Ukrainian usage? If they're that frustrated (understandably) that a rando billionaire is making consequential foreign policy decisions with zero accountability, why not just do a "national security emergency executive order" thingy?
Possible explanations:
1. They don't actually have (or OLC doesn't think they have) the legal authority, despite "national security" already granting incredibly sweeping powers to the President.
2. They think they couldn't keep it running properly if Musk weren't heading it up-- maybe all the key people would quit.
3. It would be too politically embarrassing to pay the already-richest-man-in-the-world that many billions.
4. They secretly approve of his decisions and are glad to have him take the heat instead of them.
Thoughts on which of these is most likely, or what other possibilities there are?
I've hopped here from a few alternate timelines, and you don't know how lucky you are. Where I originally came from, Elon Musk turned out to be actively helping Russia, and a special payload in one of his SpaceX rockets took out most of the US government and started WWIII. The next timeline I hopped to had him providing service to both Russia and Ukraine if they promised to put up drone snuff videos on Twitter. The timeline after that had him merely selling services to both sides like a normal arms merchant, and I was tempted to stay there, but I thought I could find something better. The timeline after that, he cut out Russia, but still made Ukraine pay, and refused to let anyone else pay for Ukrainian time out of some weird libertarian-utilitarian logic that said people should just be giving cash to Ukraine and letting Ukraine spend the cash however they see fit. The timeline after that didn't have the restriction on the Ukraine side, but he demanded that someone pay up front, and that wasn't so bad, but the culture war took a darker turn, so I moved on. Then there was the timeline where he was offering free hours of service to Ukraine if people would volunteer to be surrogate mothers for a series of clones of a genetically modified offspring of himself and Grimes, about which he refused to answer anything but "wait and see". And then there was the timeline where he was offering free Starlink service to Ukraine, but went on a Twitter rant saying "I have neither the time nor the inclination to explain myself to a man who rises and sleeps under the blanket of the very freedom that I provide, and then questions the manner in which I provide it.", which seemed like a huge red flag.
He seems a bit more chill here, so I think I'll stay.
At the time the incident is supposed to have taken place, Elon was donating Starlink gratis to Ukraine. Obviously he was at perfect liberty to decide what he was and was not willing to donate. If I'm lending my car to my hypothetical friend who is on the run from a drug lord I am well within my rights to say `no, you may not use my car to carry out a hit against the drug lord's henchmen, that could expose me to retaliation and I didn't sign up for that risk when I lent you my car to run away'
In June 2023, however, the US DoD is reported to have signed a contract with SpaceX to provide Starlink coverage to Ukraine. I imagine what Musk now does is bound by the terms of this contract. Which are secret. And I would bet that the contract likely prohibits certain uses (like bombing Russia proper, or maybe even Crimea), because the USG also does not want to risk escalation (though they might be happy for Musk to take the heat for not giving unlimited support to Ukraine).
"Just nationalize it?'
When half the country already thinks the government is one convenient crisis away of going full fascist, how do you think that would play out?
Sounds like he's controlling the satellites from the US. If he's not controlling the satellites from Ukraine, they can't nationalize them.
The question I have is why they aren't using the US military's satellites instead, and the answer is probably the same; that's too much direct involvement for them to want to make.
This does get to the heart of the matter. The US (and other countries) are trying to be careful with their military aid to prevent escalation in ways that closely parallel Musk's Crimea/Starlink decision; e.g.:
https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/ukrainian-himars-cant-fire-long-range-atacms-missiles-report
I'm sure the US government is happy to have Musk take the flak on this rather than have their decisions scrutinized, which might be why Blinken recently refused to criticize Musk's policy when questioned on the matter. Once Starshield is active, it would be hard to imagine the US granting access of that system to Ukraine, let alone allowing its use in an attack in Crimea.
The military does not to my knowledge have satellites that provide convenient global internet access. Some kind of comsats that require specialized hardware on the ground, *maybe*, but at least 20 years ago they were still telying on ground based towers and such. Whatever the case, Starlink provides a service that they either can't match in terms of convenience, or possibly at all.
I haven't followed the situation very closely, but I can think of a few other explanations:
5. Musk didn't do anything (maybe the Ukrainians messed something up on their own and blamed him?).
6. It was a technical glitch/mistake, and not intended by anyone.
7. It's embarrassing to run your top secret super important military operations through the private property of a foreign national, and buying it would be even more embarrassing.
Re: 5 and 6, Musk himself says he did it intentionally: https://techcrunch.com/2023/09/08/musk-says-he-limited-ukraines-starlink-to-prevent-attack-on-russia/
Your link says otherwise:
"The ships and marine drones that would have performed this attack relied on Starlink for connectivity, but the satellite internet service was not (Musk asserted later on X/Twitter) active over the region. When Ukraine made an “emergency request” to activate it, he refused, and the drones “lost connectivity and washed ashore harmlessly,” obviously leaving the Russian ships untouched."
Sounds like Musk just didn't want the role of battlefield comms enabler for the Ukrainians. Rather a gamble on their part to carry out the op this way, but I would suppose the targets moved and they hoped they could prevail on him to support their capabilities beyond the originally intended zone.
Huh, I was just listening to Lex Fridman interview W. Isaacson. I will say I'm glad I don't have to make tough decisions like that. And I can't really fault Elon's decision.
Thanks! Wow, that's a major situation.
In that case, I would say that the explanation is that Ukraine has no means or authority to buy it, and the US would be hesitant to force the purchase even if it were legal. It would be a long and difficult process and Musk would have a lot of incentive to delay (for more money or to not lose control).
(2) yes, that is called Starshield: https://www.spacex.com/starshield/
He didn't cut it off this time, but he has on other occasions, e.g. to prevent an airstrike in Call of Duty.
https://anarchyforamerica.substack.com/p/musk-cuts-starlink-during-call-of
I’m at a genuine loss what point that CoD-parody is trying to make. Is there a point? Or just mockery of public discussion?
From the Left Field department: why are most tweezers so terrible? Any pair I find in a supermarket seems utterly unfit for the purpose of plucking an errant hair out of my brows or mustache or beard or sideburns. It succeeds only when my fingers would have as well. Otherwise, my skin apparently has such a grip on follicles that two specialized bits of metal pressed together can't seem to overcome it.
Given that, one would expect the market to have solved this problem in the large, either by not bothering to sell tweezers that can't tweeze, or only selling superior brands that seem unusually hard for me to find outside of a professional salon or after a long session of web research and online ordering.
What's the deal, tweezer market?
I don't have an answer to your question about market forces. However, I can tell you that precision tweezers designed for use in electronic assembly are excellent for removing tiny splinters. They are superior to salon products. A search for Excelta brand tweezers shows them available for between $5 and $100.
I think what goes wrong with tweezers is that the edges have to meet almost perfectly to capture something as small as a hair, and most tweezers get out of alignment early on. I'm sure it's possible to make something that would not get out of alignment from normal usage plus normal mishaps like being dropped, but it probably requires metal that is less bendable (and then some sort of mechanism where the 2 halves join that allows for rotation). No doubt would cost more than the usual thing one picks up in the drugstore
I might be wrong here, but I feel like there’s a whole class of tweezers that are intended for less demanding tasks than plucking hairs, like pulling splinters, ticks, etc. If you need to pluck your eye brows, you need the type they sell in beauty salons that are specifically intended for that. They’re much sharper though and might not work as well for more generic non-grooming tasks.
The short answer, buy these: https://www.amazon.com/Tweezerman-Stainless-Steel-Slant-Tweezer/dp/B000EMYJ88/
The long answer is machining two surfaces to be very flat AND having them interface in parallel along those flat planes is pretty hard to do as price points people are willing to pay. Those tweezers I've linked above are probably the best "consumer" grade ones going right now, and they are 15usd for a single pair of small tweezers. There are in-fact much better ones out there if you're willing to pay for them: high end lab and jewelry tweezers. Here's an example of a good pair of high end tweezers: https://www.amazon.com//dp/B073K8DZ4J . $92.
This is spot on. I don't know anything about that particular brand, but I spent about $12 on a pair of nice Revlon tweezers about eight years ago and haven't looked back. It's not a huge investment and it's worth the cash. They have those very flat, perfectly parallel tips you need for good grip.
I second the recommendation of that first link. They work well.
The tong type tweezers are third class levers with no mechanical advantage.
Some tweezer are built like a pair of scissors and offer a better grip. I’m pretty sure my wife has a pair like that.
I used to have scissor grips. They weren't any good either, so I don't think that's it. You do make a good case for them, though - I've noticed one failure mode of "wishbone" designs in that when I gripped too hard, it warped the arms until the tip of the tip surface *spread*, pushed apart by the back of the tip surface. Scissor designs never did that.
OTOH, the most reliable pair of tweezers I've ever used were wishbone.
I'm currently hypothesizing that the tip surfaces have to have some sort of grip coating, but I don't know for sure.
Have you tried all the different shapes? I have much better luck with the ones with the flat diagonal ends than the ones with the pointy ends.
Good question. I gave up on square-tip a long time ago, but even diagonal-tip is only marginally better. So I don't think that's it.
@HalJohnson (I can't figure out how to actually tag users in a comment, hopefully he sees this)
I grabbed your novel Sudden Glory when you posted it in a recent open threads, I loved it! I found it somewhere between Thomas Pynchon and Patrick deWitt. Nice work, I recommend it to all.
https://www.amazon.com/Sudden-Glory-Hal-Johnson-ebook/dp/B0CCT4V4GC/
Would building massive wind power farms in Senegal weaken Atlantic hurricanes?
Related question that I've been wondering around recently: when in history was it figured out that hurricanes/cyclones are round?
Nowadays we can peer down on them with satellites so it's obvious, but in the distant past people just suddenly got hit with a whole bunch of wind for a while then it went away. Early people to live in hurricane areas probably would have been able to figure it out if they were really paying attention, but maybe they had better things to do during storms than trying to coordinate wind direction measurements.
I don't know about "round" (and they aren't quite round either), but they could have easily known that they went in a circle around the eye. The wreckage would have been in different directions depending on which side the eye went through an area. So, for instance, damage in area A was going north, which damage in area B was going south, etc.
I remember a text written by a Louisiana Cajun (18th century ?) about being in the eye of a cyclone. They would also have seen tornadoes from outside and maybe made the connection with pool vortices.
Also european fishermen would have known for ages that when a depression passes over, the wind suddenly turns from a southwest direction to a northwest direction.
No : pretty much all of the energy of a hurricane comes from it's interraction with a warm ocean. That why it loses energy immediately after making landfall. And that's why a hurricane that has partially made landfall but then turned around and went back to the ocean generally regains energy.
Reminds me of https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/6400/are-tidal-power-plants-slowing-down-earths-rotation
Why is it so difficult for the Russians to just destroy the Ukrainian power system entirely? To be clear I am very Ukrainian-sympathetic so I certainly don't want that to happen- it's been a pleasant surprise. I'm just curious how it works. There's a finite number of power-generating plants and pipelines, the Russians have lots of missiles, and they're quite closeby. Can't they just..... hit all the power plants with a missile, and knock out electricity for the whole country? I don't think of a power plant as something that's very resilient to missiles.
There's got to only be a few power plants in the whole country. Why haven't the Russians taken them out?
I have similar questions about Russian rail infrastructure. I keep reading that the Russian army transports a lot of ammo via train. Can't the Ukrainians..... just blow up the train tracks, maybe take out a couple of key bridges? Is it really that hard? Maybe train tracks can easily be reconstituted, but a bridge is a huge project. In general physical infrastructure seems 'tougher' in wartime than I would've guessed
"Can't they just..... hit all the power plants with a missile, and knock out electricity for the whole country? I don't think of a power plant as something that's very resilient to missiles."
More resilient than one might expect. Ground based anti-air defences on both sides have performed very well in this war.
Also, about half of Ukraine's electricity is provided by four nuclear power plants (Zaporozhye, Rivne, Khmelnitsky, and South Ukraine), outright damage to which carries obvious risks. It's one of the reasons why last winter Russia had concentrated strikes on substations, trying to force shutdowns (including of the NPPs) as the grid became unbalanced. It often worked, but Ukraine is now synced with the EU grid, which can provide backup.
It will be interesting to see how it goes this winter. There's some evidence that Russia has been stockpiling missiles and the heavier Shaheds to have a go at the grid again, and they've increasingly been using guidance-upgraded heavy FAB bombs, which can do some real damage even to hardened structures. On the other hand, the initial shock value of grid destruction is gone, Ukrenergo engineers are armed with invaluable experience, and (assuming continued access to munitions) the coverage of Ukraine's air defences has only increased.
Coal power plants are tough structures, difficult to destroy with the sort of conventional missiles/drones whatever Russians have. Those facilities have to withstand all the heat associated with coal burning, after all. And most of Ukrainian electricity comes from nuclear power plants (see here: https://www.statista.com/statistics/1237676/ukraine-distribution-of-electricity-production-by-source/), which are of course even harder to destroy, not to mention that straight up bombing of nuclear power plants would reinforce Western suport for Ukraine.
When it comes to destroying The Grid, both Ukrainian electrical and Russian railway, this is what both sides are constantly trying to do, but The Grid is purposefuly build in a way that it would be relatively easy to repair, so it is being constantly maintained by dedicated crews. Even knocked out bridges can be and are being replaced, though it of course takes longer than with overland tracks.
So, couple of things, I'd expect.
First, on the "destroying the power system" end of things, I'm pretty sure there's a certain amount of "Russia's in it for conquest, not destruction" - they want more taxpaying citizens, and people who skip out on living in the place they're trying to conquer on account of it no longer having working electricity, or, y'know, on account of having been shot (at), well, it becomes much harder to turn them into taxpaying citizens.
Second, on the rail infrastructure - they're obvious targets, yes, but they're obvious targets to both sides (meaning the defenders, at this point Russia, will probably have put more defenses around them), and rebuilding to good-enough-for-military-use (something something "acceptable casualty levels", but also military vehicles you'd expect to be built sturdier than civilian ones) is *relatively* easy once you make sure it can't get blown up again an hour later.
>First, on the "destroying the power system" end of things, I'm pretty sure there's a certain amount of "Russia's in it for conquest, not destruction" - they want more taxpaying citizens, and people who skip out on living in the place they're trying to conquer on account of it no longer having working electricity, or, y'know, on account of having been shot (at), well, it becomes much harder to turn them into taxpaying citizens.
So they would rather spend untold billions of dollars on a potentially much longer war than necessary for the sake of some taxpayers?
Point is, even if they had an infinite number of bombs there'd still be good reasons beyond saving ammo to avoid blowing up (all of) the power grid.
Other reasons might include "the power plants are nuclear, and your 'friendly' neighborhood conscript thinks he might be in the blast radius if he blows it up," or the "power grids are more resilient than you'd think" reasons discussed elsewhere in the thread.
Putin surely feels success in Ukraine (in a timespan shorter than decades) is a matter of supreme personal existential importance, and one that is in nowhere close to guaranteed. The idea that future taxpayers are entering into his or his generals' decision making is extremely difficult to believe.
If they lose the war, there will be *no* additional taxpayers. (Well, except for the kidnapped Ukrainian kids, when they grow up as proper citizens of Russia.) So this would be trading the certain costs of long war against *potential* future tax income.
Also, I am not an economist, but I imagine that a Russia that cares so much about taxpayers, would be a quite different country.
Concerning the latter question, the relevant train tracks are deep in occupied territory. Pushing forward to a point where they can blow them up is a key objective in the present Ukrainian offensive.
For anyone in NYC that might be interested,I am having a one-day-only exhibition of my photographs on Sunday, September 24th,at Mildred, 124 Ridge st. More details here:
https://www.michaelseanedwards.com/train-ride.html
I saw the Fruit Exchange photo on your home page, and imagined how a place would work where people could come in and turn in their old fruit for fresh copies.
(Cool photo, though.)
Yeah, that’s funny. The people who ran that place were miserable, and nasty.
Wow I didn't remember the East Village so dirty.
when were you there?
Late 1990s, visiting until 2004 or so. But thinking about it, it is probably just my perception, not a real objective change.
That was a “clean “ era, as I recall. I think it’s pretty grungy now, but cool. Heh
I have now posted a longish article rationalist culture and AI x-risk at 3 Quarks Daily. Here's the title and the introduction:
A New Counter Culture: From the Reification of IQ to the AI Apocalypse, https://3quarksdaily.com/3quarksdaily/2023/09/a-new-counter-culture-from-the-reification-of-iq-to-the-ai-apocalypse.html
I have been thinking about the culture of AI existential risk (AI Doom) for some time now. I have already written about it as a cult phenomenon, nor am I the only one. But I believe that’s rather thin. While I still believe it to be true, it explains nothing. It’s just a matter of slapping on a label and letting it go at that.
While I am still unable to explain the phenomenon – culture and society are enormously complex: Just what would it take to explain AI Doom culture? – I now believe that “counter culture” is a much more accurate label than “cult.” In using that label I am deliberately evoking the counter culture of the 1960s and 1970s: LSD, Timothy Leary, rock and roll (The Beatles, Jimi Hendrix, The Jefferson Airplane, The Grateful Dead, and on and on), happenings and be-ins, bell bottoms and love beads, the Maharishi, patchouli, communes...all of it, the whole glorious, confused gaggle of humanity. I was an eager observer and fellow traveler. While I did tune in and turn on, I never dropped out. I became a ronin scholar with broad interests in the human mind and culture.
I suppose that “Rationalist” is the closest thing this community has as a name for itself. Where psychedelic experience was at the heart of the old counter culture, Bayesian reasoning seems to be at the heart of this counter culture. Where the old counter culture dreamed of a coming Aquarian Age of peace, love, and happiness, this one fears the destruction of humanity by a super-intelligent AI and seeks to prevent it by figuring out how to align AIs with human values.
I’ll leave Bayesian reasoning to others. I’m interested in AI Doom. But to begin understanding that we must investigate what a post-structuralist culture critic would call the discourse or perhaps the ideology of intelligence. To that end I begin with a look at Adrian Monk, a fictional detective who exemplifies a certain trope through which our culture struggles with extreme brilliance. Then I take up the emergence of intelligence testing in the late 19th century and the reification of intelligence in a number, one’s IQ. In the middle of the 20th century the discourse of intelligence moved to the quest for artificial intelligence. With that we are at last ready to think about artificial x-risk (as it is called, “x” for “existential”).
This is going to take a while. Pull up a comfortable chair, turn on a reading light, perhaps get a plate of nachos and some tea, or scotch – heck, maybe roll a joint, it’s legal these days, at least in some places – and read.
One of the sub-threads in doomerism is for an ASI to get to Drexler/Merkle atomically precise manufacturing/nanotechnology via lots of computer simulations and a minimal number of physical operations. For an interesting cautionary tale on just how spectacularly computational chemistry can mismatch with the actual chemistry, see https://www.science.org/content/blog-post/not-what-it-said-menu
> Where psychedelic experience was at the heart of the old counter culture, Bayesian reasoning seems to be at the heart of this counter culture
Not analogous: the hippies actually took psychedelics.
The hippies thought psychedelic experience was the key to a deeper understanding of the world. The rationalists think Bayesian reasoning is the key to a deeper understanding of the world. As Scott says at the end of every post:
"P(A|B) = [P(A)*P(B|A)]/P(B), all the rest is commentary."
The hippies still dropped acid 1000 times more than the rationalists used Bayes.
I don't even know what that means.
I am surprised by your choice of analogy. From my perspective, the things most analogical to "worrying that X will destroy the world" would be "worrying that Y will destroy the world" and "worrying that Z will destroy the world". In this case, nuclear weapons and global warming seem like obvious candidates. Instead you chose... music.
Some people deny evolution for religious reasons. Other people deny intelligence for political reasons. I am too tired of defending either; I wish there was a FAQ that I could conveniently link instead. That said, the graph of "IQ" and "eugenics" shows what exactly? That both words became popular in 20th century? The lines are not even similar! If you added words like "computer" or "feminist" or "airplane", and removed the labels, no one would see a special relation between the two words you chose. If this is the best argument you can make, then you admit you don't have actual arguments.
Then you continue writing about something mostly unrelated to the topic you chose originally.
So, from my perspective, you made a nice Freudian exercise of writing free associations about a topic that you seem to know very little about. Congratulations on getting it published!
I wish I could write a better review, but honestly, my reactions while reading were mostly "wtf?" and "how is this even relevant to anything?".
There’s an old saying that “Every cynic is a disappointed idealist”, and I believe that explains some of what is going on. Many Rationalists seem to be into Futurism ideas such as anti-aging technology and the prospect of eternal life. They are realizing, perhaps at a later age than most people, that death is inescapable, and this bums them out in ways that possibly influences their once-optimistic outlook on technological change.
To tie this back to parallels with the hippie-LSD movement: Timothy Leary himself was very interested in tech that could stop aging, and in his book _Flashbacks_, describes natural death as “Government-mandated suicide”. He was an eccentric fellow but not alone in that sentiment.
I’ve noticed a lot of “You are going to die!” from AI x-risk pessimists, as if the issue at stake were more about personal death than eventual human extinction.
Most people accept that:
1) They will die.
2) The human race will eventually go extinct.
Most people care so little about 2 that they never even think about it.
But I think many Futurists (at least the non-Italian ones) believe or want to believe that but for some avoidable extinction event not only might humans live forever but they might personally. Many consequently connect the idea of human extinction more intimately with their own mortality than the average person. They worry about it more. They haven’t necessarily accepted their own deaths as inevitable like most do. Or when they do, they do in the form: “Because of AI, I’m going to die.”
(I think it’s somewhat taboo here to psychoanalyze others from afar on the grounds that it’s not evidence-based, but I’m not sure where the line is. Maybe it’s OK if you acknowledge you are just speculating? Anyway, let me know if people think I am crossing the line here. I don’t *think* I am.)
Of course these speculations may have nothing to do with reality.
Yes, fear of death is definitely in play here. Certainly one of the persistent fantasies about advanced computing is the idea of uploading one's mind to a computer and thereby becoming immortal. Doomerism is obviously and explicitly about death, where death, in effect, as laid at the agency of some future computer. The effort to align AIs with human values becomes a way to stave off death.
There's lots of magical thinking in this arena.
I’ve a feeling that a lot of doomsday predictions are indeed a form of entertainment. It’s a bit terrifying but not really, like a ride on a roller coaster. There’s some risk there but not much. People like to be scared if they feel safe enough.
Climate change is one of those. For most. (Not all, some young people are genuinely affected - hence the rise in depression). If we really believed the end was nigh we would act differently, and literally and figuratively run for the hills.
Yes, there's certainly a bit of that.
I have not read your article, but am about to. But I have a comment based on what you have said so far in your post and in responses to others. It seems to me that there is also a culture of AI Heaven. I have read many people rhapsodizing about the wonderful things that will become possible with superintelligent AI assisting us. Remarkable improvements in healthcare: medical breakthroughs; greatly reduced cost, because so many tasks can be managed by AI and implemented by AI-directed robots. Good healthcare for everyone on the planet!Wonderful empowerment of everyone, via AI-directed computer courses, AI-assisted drafting, research, writing, art, etc. Scientific breakthroughs that will allow us to travel to other inhabitable planets. Etc etc.
Isn't AI Heaven also a culture?
As you point out, nobody really knows that superintelligent AI is, and, even if they could specify certain things about superintelligent AI, nobody knows for sure when or even whether such a thing will be come to be. Given that, it seems to me to show considerable lack of common sense to be sure that superintelligent AI, whatever that is, will be great or that it will destroy us. The only way somebody could arrive at confidence about the effects of superintelligent AI on human life would be via some non-rational process such as powerful identification with a group defined by a certain belief.
But it sounds like your article aims to pick apart the non-rational underpinnings only of the Doomers. Why aren't you going after the Ecstatics too?
"Isn't AI Heaven also a culture?"
Not that I know of, at least not in a concentrated form with an appreciable public presence. Yes, I suppose Transhumanists are in this camp, but they aren't writing opinion pieces in Time Magazine. As for why don't I go after their irrational underpinnings, it's easy to understand why someone would believe in an AI utopia. Who doesn't want a better future where all is goodness and light. But why would anyone invest so much time and energy in belief in doom, especially people working in the AI industry?
AI Utopians: https://new-savanna.blogspot.com/2022/07/where-are-ai-utopians.html
The explanation is simple. There is a particular kind of technical and philosophical argument. A particular style of reasoning, that leads to the doomer conclusions.
The doomer crowd have a fairly strong tendency to make technical or sometimes even mathematical points. Clearly they believe that they believe based on specific technical arguments, and if the technical arguments were different, the beliefs would be different.
Saying "maybe AI might do bad things" doesn't require a huge amount of detailed understanding. Figuring out exactly how that happens does.
It's the difference between a bunch of bridge builders idly speculating that a particular bridge might collapse, and people trying to do the calculations (in a world where physics hasn't been worked out yet.)
Of course people have to speculate before doing the calculations. But the strength of current beliefs comes from attempts at calculation, not mere speculation. You can argue those calculations are wrong. But merely looking at the fiction and speculation will not let you understand the doomerist phenomena.
Looking at this from the point of view of a non-doomer, why isn't "it's hard to predict what a superintelligent AI would be like and some people get it wrong" a good enough psychological explanation for why some people are doomers?
Among other things, that's assuming that superintelligence is a coherent idea and something that it likely to be realized one day. Those are not at all obvious. For example, see Steve Pinker's remarks in this discussion with Scott Aaronson, https://scottaaronson.blog/?p=6524
Very interesting thank you. I find Pinker's position so very clear and convincing!
I'll amend my proposed explanation to "it's hard to predict whether a superintelligent AI will be realised and what it would be like, and some people get it wrong"
And just how are we to determine who gets is wrong? At the moment it doesn't exist.
I was conditioning on the premise that the doomers are wrong. Because if they are right, no psychological explanation for doomerism is needed beyond "they reasoned correctly".
Well, how does their being wrong (which I take to mean that there is no convincing evidence that their fears are justified, though there's always a long-shot possibility) account for their belief?
You seem to forget that the Seventies counterculture was not just loving and optimistic, but was to a great extent actuated by a fear of nuclear annihilation. One of the core purposes of LSD Aquarianism was to attempt to prevent this outcome by converting everyone (on both sides, ideally) to peacenik hippie ideals.
"I dreamed I saw the bomber death planes / riding shotgun in the sky / turning into butterflies / above our nation" et cetera.
Ah, yes, I forgot about that. But the war in Vietnam was much more immediate than the possibility of nuclear disaster. When Abbe Hoffman led 50,000 protestors to march around the Pentagon they weren't thinking about nuclear bombs. They were thinking about Vietnam.
Sure, I'm not suggesting they were pro-war in any other way. Presumably it was all seen as streams leading to the same horrible ocean.
My point is just that the apocalyptic streak isn't a distinction but a similarity between the two countercultures, which in fact are much more alike than I think the typical rationalist wants to admit. Not only the doom to be averted, but the drug experimentation, the communal living, the weird free-love attempts... the music is just a lot worse, that's the main point of divergence.
"the music is just a lot worse, that's the main point of divergence."
LOL! I'm not sure if I agree or disagree, but I liked reading that!
As a musician who lived thru the "60s", I agree 100%.
I too lived through the 60s, and played in a rock and roll band as well. I agree.
Many Thanks!
I believe people frequently chose for excitement rather than truth.
I get around to that at the end of the article:
Imagine that you are a young nerd looking for companionship (as did Adrian Monk in his youth), people to talk to and hang-out with. You walk through your village and you see two clubhouses, the Utopians and the Doomers. The Utopians fly a flag that says, “Have a blast. It’ll be wild!” The Doomers flag reads, “We’ll all be dead before long.”
“I don’t like that at all,” you think to yourself, “I’m going to hook up with the Utopians.” And so you do. Things go well for a while, but then it all just goes flat. Dreams of utopia scatter in all directions and no one ever does anything.
“Oh, well, I might give the Doomers a chance.” The clubhouse is buzzing with activity, 24/7/365. People are debating the fine points of AGI, super-intelligence, and the transit from one to the other – gradual take-off or FOOM! To infinity and beyond. People are making plans for meet-ups, attending conferences about effective altruism, cryptocurrency (though feeling a bit sheepish in the wake of the FTX scandal), and meeting with venture capitalists about incubator space for their current Big Idea.
In my model, people look at the state of available evidence, try to figure out what will really happen, and then form a culture with others who came to similar conclusions.
Or at least, enough of the smartest most competent people do this that a thriving intellectual culture tends to form around a convincing collection of evidence.
Now some people can be convinced by absolute rubbish. See most religions. But it is a very specific kind of absolute rubbish that can be very convincing to certain kinds of people.
Whether they are doing it well or badly, lots of people are going to the doomers because of an attempt to reason from the evidence.
And neither group is all that interested in what's really likely to happen?
Well, it's one thing to hang out with people and, incidentally, to be interested in some things that interest them. It's a different thing to be interested in something so that you get to hang out with the cool kids.
Yea, that's pretty universal across cultures and going back as far as we have written history.
I'm glad you find it fun. It was fun to write, at least here and there. It also drove me batshit.
And, yes, AI Doomerism has precedents. I am well aware of 1. It is built in to Christianity as doctrine, no? But I do not have a handle on the scholarly literature on apocalyptic movements, and so choose not to write about it. Netflix, for example, now has a nice documentary about the Branch Davidians (Waco, TX), but it seemed rather overwrought to mention it in this context. But, if we consider them as an example, there was a sharp division between members of the group, who lived together on a compound, and everyone else. The same for the Jim Jones people. Aside from specific differences in belief, I don't think Rationalist Doomers constitute a hard-edged group. Nor do they have a charismatic leader who exercises authority over the group. Yes, there is Eliezer Yudkowsky, who does have authority, but it is the authority of a respected thinker and prophet. As far as I can tell, he doesn't rule anything.
On 2, well, interesting. There's a lot of that going around. There is a rather touchy and delicate argument to be made that the rise of Doomerism is part of a broader decay of social order, e.g. the storming of the Capitol Building after the 2020 presidential election.
As for 3, I did write about that a year ago in 3QD ( https://3quarksdaily.com/3quarksdaily/2022/09/on-the-cult-of-ai-doom.html), and I return to that at the end of the essay, though with a different set of examples. In 1920 Karl Capcek wrote a play, "R.U.R.," about a robot revolt. He coined the term "robot"' in that play. But it's one thing to deal with that theme in science fiction, it's another thing to proclaim that's it's really going to happen, and we see the beginnings of it now.
I'm not sure that Sam Altman should be called a Doomer (he's a controversial figure within the Rationalist community), but he's certainly a sympathizer. He's credited Yudkowsky for making Silicon Valley aware of AGI and has suggested that he "will deserve the nobel peace prize for this" (https://twitter.com/sama/status/1621621724507938816), AND Altman has testified before Congress.
It seems to me that this brand of apocalyptic thinking is having more influence on public discourse that previous brands.
Hi, there. I just wanted to invite you to check out my substack. As my name indicates, I do write about topics related to Bayesian statistics, but my scope is broader than that. You'll see some posts related to the active inference framework, a game theory analysis of the frog and the scorpion fable, etc. Here's a link to two of my posts in case you're interested in checking them out:
A Game Theory Analysis of The Frog and Scorpion Fable: https://open.substack.com/pub/thebayesiant/p/a-game-theory-analysis-of-the-frog?r=1lb0r4&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web
My list of recommended books: https://open.substack.com/pub/thebayesiant/p/a-list-of-recommended-books?utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web
How is the outcome "Frog does not cooperate and Scorpion cooperates" different from "Frog does not cooperate and Scorpion also does not cooperate"? In both cases, exactly the same thing (i.e. nothing) happens.
You explain the numbers by opportunity costs, but I believe that is a type mistake. Opportunity cost is not an outcome, but a *difference* between outcomes.
> I’m still figuring out if I can make it but I’ll try my best
This seems like cap
What is cap?
"Cap" is Gen-Z slang for 'lie.' Cf. "No-Cap:" https://genzmadeeasy.com/gen-z-slang-phrases-guide/.
Brinkwater explains the dynamic pretty well lol. Often when people say "maybe" in response to an invitation, they mean "no, but keep your status intact." Could be more of an East Coast thing
I ended up making it, so update your estimate of your ability to judge cap accordingly.
I had someone once tell me in surprise: “your maybe’s actually mean maybe!”
I think most people use “maybe” or “I’ll try” or similar phrases as a way to politely decline. Some people actually know they have scheduling complications that may or may not be resolvable, and try to set appropriate expectations with words that mean what they say. Unfortunately the common usage where people don’t mean what they say makes that communication harder.
I don’t know Scott personally, but I’m inclined to accept that he’ll try to arrange it so he can attend, but might not succeed.
I have a new Windows 11 laptop, and to my horror, the default for the text is light gray. How can I get black or dark gray text?
Or if you prefer a more general question, black text is something a lot of people want. It's one thing for companies to deteriorate products in ways that make them money-- turning products they just sell into rentals, changes that make it necessary to buy new products, capitalizing on a good reputation to sell more cheaply made products.... but this is astonishing. It's simply making a product worse for no gain whatsoever.
I can understand there was a theory that black on white was too harsh, but light gray on white is an overreaction. There are many ways to adjust what's on the screen, but not this simple thing that a good many people want.
It may be possible to get black text-- I'm working on it-- but Microsoft makes it difficult.
Sometimes I'll find that a book from an independent press has text that's a little on the light side, and I'll think they're saving money on ink, but that doesn't apply to computer screens.
Install linux ;-)
The general explanation for this is within-company dynamics - if you're an employee that say tries out a new text color scheme, there's a lot of pressure to gerrymander the a/b test numbers to make it look like a success, so you can write "look at this big change I made" for your perf review.
(This is usually more of a Google thing though, Microsoft is generally at least a bit better at avoiding it).
All too plausible.
Is there a system of incentives which could avoid this syndrome? If not incentives, a set of cultural norms that could work?
I suspect that there are many companies that don't fall victim to this particular failure mode, but most employees are employed by businesses that do. n=1 but I work at a company that is generally fine with just sticking to known bug fixes when there are no obvious product changes to be made. But also we haven't hired anyone new in years, except to replace people who have left.
This can be changed in themes. Right click on the desktop and select personalise. The dark theme should put this right for you.
Personalizing the desktop seems to be about how the icons are displayed.
I'm looking for a white background and black text, and dark themes seem to be about dark backgrounds.
Ah sorry, I misunderstood. There's a contrast theme named Desert in the Accessibility section that might be closer to what you need, or at least provide a starting point,
I've got some improvement by editing the Desert theme, but it's an annoying process. You edit the colors, name the combination, and save it.
Then you close the popup (twice?) and you are finally, blessedly given the opportunity to apply your new combination.
I realize it isn't particularly awful as bad UX goes, but it's awful.
Yes it did seem unnecessarily convoluted...!
Hopefully it will stay as is for you now 🤓
It's possible that developers make those changes and test them under conditions they consider "standard", but actually aren't, like 4k displays under perfect lighting conditions and such.
My preferences for text size and color changed markedly when I got a high-end macbook that has a retina display (enough pixels to make them individually indistinguishable). It was crisp and easy on the eyes in a way that my other screens just weren't.
Developers don’t design anything in companies as big as MS.
And the devs are in their 20s with eyesight to match.
The senior devs, managers, and PMs at Microsoft are mostly in their 30s or older, and they're the ones actually making the product decisions. The junior devs generally get bite-sized tasks that have already had most of the judgemental calls made for them.
Stuff like font colors would be decided by PMs with input from UX designers and maybe marketing. My guess at the failure more here is that the PM making the decision talked to marketing last and got carried away with aesthetics and neglected to check in with UX.
Not even senior devs will change a single pixel without buy-in in large companies.
That probably depends on the company and the product, as that's not really my experience working for Adobe (XD, New Express), Microsoft (Intune, Remote Desktop, and Visual Studio), or Google (Maps). Although I've usually been working either on internal tooling, test automation, or business logic, so I may not have been getting the full weight of the process around changing the visible UI.
I don’t know how big those teams were, and if you were in meetings with the guys doing the front end work but as someone who has worked in two of the FAANGs, and other fairly famous companies; as well as companies with 5 employees you have never heard about - in all of these cases the UX and UI designers designed the flow and UI. Down to the pixel level.
Of course we had input as devs when the design was first shown, and we could present ideas, but we never pushed code to review that either wasn’t based on the UI design, or was going to be reviewed in demos to product (as in you may make a decision on how you would deal with some edge case or error that wasn’t specifically in figma, or whatever tool the designer used).
The 5 person company was as strict as the bigger companies on that.
Does this explain why the defaults are so hard to change?
No, that's a combination of a couple things. One is that configurability is the enemy of testability: every new setting exponentially increases the number of combinations of possible states in the system, which creates pressure to keep the number of options down when possible and when you can't to bury options so they don't get used as much.
The other is discoverability and clutter. The more options and features you have, the harder it is to find what you want. The currently-fashionably solution to that is to have a relatively small set of things in easy-to-find locations and the rest buried where you can only find it if you go hunting for it.
"every new setting exponentially increases the number of combinations of possible states in the system"
It is so nice to see exponentially used _correctly_! Much appreciated! And I agree with all of the points you make in your comment.
This still might not explain why it's difficult to change away from the default or why user complaints are ignored.
Just a guess, but I've watched it happen in smaller companies: Maybe coding frameworks are getting more restrictive, or developers are getting dumber, or the bureaucracy is getting denser, such that it's just harder than it was in the past for the devs to offer the same level of customisation?
Edit: Another possibility is dumber and more opinionated UX designers/managers. Imagine working for a boss who keeps insisted on stupid shit because "Apple don't allow customisation, and everyone says Apple's UX is amazing."
Very basic parenting question:
Let's say I have a newborn baby. At 0 years old, I fully expect it to scream all the time, and my job as a parent is basically to give it whatever it wants, when it wants it.
At fourteen years old, if I am still giving it everything it wants, when it wants it, and it's screaming because it doesn't want to finish its vegetables before leaving the table - then I have clearly done a terrible job as a parent.
So at some point, I need to go from rewarding screaming to ignoring it to outright punishing it, and I need to go from giving the child everything it wants to not doing that.
My question is how do I manage this? Does the process break down into any kind of logical steps, and how do I know when it's time to move to the next stage, whatever that stage might be? Why won't the baby/child just be hurt and confused that the behaviour I've taught it is good, is suddenly bad?
I know some parents who still give their (only) child everything it wants at the age of four - an age I might naively have thought was too old for this. But (and while I haven't seen the child's behaviour around other children) it certainly seems to have intelligence, creativity, wit, and a whole bunch of other positive qualities. My parents were also apparently very lassez faire with me, and their friends take delight in telling us how horrible we were as children, yet as adults we certainly seem to meet with their approval.
So I don't really have preconceived notions on this and am interested in strategies from any direction. I am, however, much more interested in the opinions of parents with praxis than single guys telling me pretty theory that they've never actually tested against real children. Of course someone with both theory and practice would be best of all.
What are your thoughts?
Cheers to everyone who's answered so far. I don't know Substack etiquette here but it seems the only way for any of you to actually see this message is for me to repeat it under each individual post, which is spammy and I'm not going to do it. But cheers anyway!
You can use the "ACX Tweaks" extension listed here: https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/open-thread-293/comment/39888321 to "heart" comments. The commenters will be notified of the hearts, although other users not using the extension will not be able to see the hearts.
> At 0 years old, I fully expect it to scream all the time
Nope, a (healthy) newborn baby will *sleep* most of the time. (But will wake up at random inconvenient moments, including at night.) And most of the time awake it will be silent or making random peaceful noises.
Screaming means there is a problem you need to fix, and in most cases, it is one of the following: too warm, too cold, hungry, needs to burp, needs to fart, needs to have diapers changed. (I would say that the baby "needs" this rather than "wants". I hope you agree.)
> At fourteen years old, if I am still giving it everything it wants, when it wants it, and it's screaming because it doesn't want to finish its vegetables before leaving the table - then I have clearly done a terrible job as a parent.
Either that, or you have a low-functioning autistic child.
> So at some point, I need to go from rewarding screaming to ignoring it to outright punishing it, and I need to go from giving the child everything it wants to not doing that.
This sounds like a behaviorist perspective that ignores the most relevant parts of the situation, such as the child *growing up* and dramatically improving its physical and mental capabilities. The fact that the fourteen years old child can burp without your help is not a consequence of the parents strategically applying rewards and punishments. It is a consequence of literally growing (i.e. the stomach is physically larger, and thus the occasional bubbles of air hurt less), spending more time in upright position and moving more (i.e. the bubbles can leave the stomach naturally, without your intervention). Similarly, the child can now recognize the feelings of being too cold or too warm or hungry, and can either do something about it, or at least communicate it precisely. Also, children often *want* to get skills; it is an instinct. So the situation is much less adversarial that it might seem.
> how do I know when it's time to move to the next stage
The stages are not clearly separated. There is a lot of time in between, when the child tries something but does a very bad job; when the child can do something in the morning but cannot do it in the evening when tired; when the child kinda can do something but does it unreliably.
There are books that tell you the typical behavior for each age. They can give you an approximate idea, but please don't take them literally; there is a lot of noise, kids learn some things sooner and other things later than the book says. Starting something later does not mean the child will stay "behind the schedule" forever. Children often learn in "jumps" that seem completely mysterious to their parents. (Like, first they seem completely unable to understand how two Duplo Lego bricks connect together; then suddenly one day they just grab them and do it correctly on the first try.)
There is a natural period of children being "horrible" when they are about 3 years old. Old enough to know what they want, and able to do something about it (even if "do something" is just screaming at you), not old enough to have self-control. You will suffer for a year or two, and then it will pass naturally. Don't mistake this period for you doing something wrong; don't mistake its passing for you doing something right.
> Why won't the baby/child just be hurt and confused that the behaviour I've taught it is good, is suddenly bad?
Talk to your kids. Babies are able to understand speech sooner than it may seem (i.e. sooner than they can reply). A 3 years old child can learn that there are rules. Teaching the rules is more difficult when they are inconsistent, or when parents disagree about them. It is better if you don't make an exception without a very good reason, because each exception is a precedent. At 6 years, you can use normal reasoning with the child.
> I know some parents who still give their (only) child everything it wants at the age of four - an age I might naively have thought was too old for this.
Judging other parents is a popular hobby; be prepared to be often on the receiving side no matter what you do. You need to "choose your battles"; each child is different; you need to adapt to the situation you have. Sometimes the child is not ready for something, and you need to wait an extra year. Attitudes like "your 4 years old child must have exactly the same level of skills and discipline as my 4 years old child" can do a lot of unnecessary harm. There is no universal advice; apply your judgment. If something doesn't work, give it a break, then try again later.
> their friends take delight in telling us how horrible we were as children
This would probably be true even if your parents did something different.
It is difficult to give advice online, because for almost everything I think about, I can imagine parents erring in either direction.
If your children are happy most of the time, you take care of their nutrition and health, and provide them opportunities to try new things, then you are probably doing a good job.
To add to the rest, sometimes you just know.
When did I stop letting mine use the children's potty seat and made them use the adult one? When they were getting too big and mature.
When did I wean at night? When it was clear that I was just a pacifier and no nutrition was being obtained.
A baby has natural changes it goes through: from sleeping at random all the time (3 months) to a more or less regular schedule with 2-3 naps a day and mostly continuous night time sleep. You notice it and follow it. Same with feedings.
At some point you realize they are ready for food, they express preferences and anger rather than just needs, they start to understand and communicate.... you begin to see.
You watch other kids and read books and, if nothing else, read the developmental milestones screens they give you at the pediatrician's.
OK, I really am a parent, not a techbro with a theory. Seems like you're asking not about babies in particular, but about the general principle: How do you know when expecting more is the right thing to do, and not just a way of being mean? I think it mostly comes down to knowing what your kid is able to do with some moderate effort. Are they, for example, *able* to eat with a fork without dropping most of the food off the fork , and without having to work so hard at using the fork that they can't enjoy their meal?
You'll find that a lot of the time you'll have a feeling for what your kid can handle, just from instinct or observation. For instance, if they seem able to control their hands reasonably well while playing with legos and crayons, it's likely they're up to eating with a fork. You can also look at child development books and other people's kids to get an idea of what the norms are (though of course your kid won't always be perfectly in line with the norms.). So you introduce using a fork in a positive way -- "Wow, I think you're grown-up enough for forks!" That protects the kid from feeling hurt and confused, like that eating just with fingers and spoons has just been declared bad. Then, if the kid really seems to have trouble using a fork you can cut back the expectation to something like using it only for things that are easy to spear. You can even say, "you know what, you're having to work so hard to use that fork that I think you're not enjoying dinner. Let's let you off the hook for forks for now, and try again in the summer."
That's the gist of it: Start asking for a piece of more adult behavior when you think they are able to do whaever it is with moderate effort. Also, some things have to do with your priorities. Kids age 4 are able to sort their laundry and put it in the correct drawers, but it's boring to them and they drag their feet and fuss. I chose to just put the laundry in my daughter's drawers myself. I could do it neatly and quickly and really didn't mind the task. I also tolerating her leaving lots of toys strewn around. I am not a very neat person myself, and it really didn't bother me. Putting them all away at the end of the day was a pain, and she took them all out the next day again. Other people prefer to expect much more neatness from their kids once the kids are developmentally able to be neater. I bailed on that one. Daughter is now a young adult, and is actually a lot neater than me, so that all worked out fine.
There's a lot of good advice below, but I do want to emphasise *just how different kids are from each other*, a point which I think is less obvious than it used to be given how little time most people now spend with young children until they have their own.
Some things will work at a given age with your first but not your second, and vice versa. Don't beat yourself up too much about it; if they're loved and fed there's a very wide range in which they'll probably turn out all right.
Parent of a 10 year old and 12 year old. A few things happen.
First, babies and and toddlers can't always communicate what they want!
But there might be very good reasons that you can't give them what they want (they cry during a medical procedure that you know is best for them to have, a baby that wants to be held all the time can't actually be held all the time for all sorts of practical reasons, some things children want cost money that you may have good reason not to spend, you may have siblings who want conflicting things, there might be safety reasons for not giving them what they want).
As children get older, you can explain those reasons and they often accept them! It becomes more like a conversation and a partnership where you are looking out for their best interests than a transactional decision of whether you give them what they want.
What counts as a good reason is your decision to make, and part of being a parent as children grow older is navigating all those decisions and figuring out what principles you want to adhere to and what boundaries to draw. There are also lots of indirect ways to encourage behaviour in certain directions without demanding it.
With food, I like Ellyn Satter's 'division of responsibility'. For babies and toddlers, I found Magda Gerber's RIE approach really helpful and as they got older 'How to Listen So Kids Will Talk and How to Talk So Kids Will Listen' was good on the practicalities of what to say.
But I think there is also another perpetual question (one that divides parents!) as to how strict and how 'laissez faire' to be . You often see parenting styles measured on two dimensions - demandingness and responsiveness. 'Authoritative parenting' for example is both demanding and responsive. I'm not convinced that it is quite as simple as that however. If nothing else you have to gradually choose what to stop controlling as children get older and which battles to pick, or you will end up in power struggles. Hold onto Your Kids by Gordon Neufeld and Gabor Mate is an interesting read on that topic.
Parenting is a long game and it's really hard to know whether what you are doing is 'right' or what you are aiming for. I'm on the laissez faire side and my two boys seem to be turning out as lovely human beings but I don't know what they will be like when they are older. All children are different too. The older they become, the more I'm inclined to just enjoy parenting them and not worry too much!
You start small, and probably not at all until at least after six months, maybe longer. And by small, I mean very small. One of the first things we did was to let them cry some at bed time. It was hard getting used to letting them cry for 15-30 minutes when we put them down for sleep, but if you stick with it they cry less and less and within a few weeks may not cry at all. Of course, you have to be sure that they already have their real needs met (food, change of diaper, etc.).
Long term, you have to know what you're willing to stick with. Forcing a kid to eat a balanced diet and finish their plate is possible, but it takes a good bit of work and extreme consistency if they aren't interested in doing it on their own.
You definitely want to have a list of things that are important to you that you will always enforce. Preventing lying was one of our biggest, which we always enforced heavily. We were pretty tight on bed time, but left some room there for negotiation - and our kids totally negotiate bedtime because we left that open enough. Since they are older now, we're okay with that. We're actually pretty open with the oldest that he is going to be making these decisions himself pretty soon and should be planning for that. As he shows responsibility, he makes more of his decisions and we permit more flexibility - within reason.
I think you'll have to figure this out as you go, since I think children differ quite a lot. (Others may have more to say on this; my experience is from one child and three siblings.)
As others have said, infants are not manipulative - or more precisely, they are manipulative only in the ways that you want them to be. Our baby seldom cried, and when she did, it was for good reason. Maybe others do cry for no reason, but the only instance when we thought she was doing that turned out to be pain from starting teething, which counts as good reason even though there wasn't much we could do about it.
As for letting the baby cry during "sleep training" - I wouldn't do it. There's a reason the baby wants to sleep with a parent - think of what no parent around would mean in the ancestral environment. At a few months old, our baby would sleep between us, and sometimes wake up in the middle of the night, reach out with both hands to verify that the parents were still there, and then go back to sleep. Forcing a baby to adapt to sleeping with no parent around doesn't seem like a great idea to me.
(By the way, once she could crawl, we switched to a futon, so she wouldn't crawl off the edge of the bed and fall.)
I suspect that things diverge a lot for older children. We're lucky that ours is very well behaved, without any sort of explicit discipline. Maybe that's partly that we were rather indulgent, but of course we weren't infinitely indulgent, so there must have been scope for tantrums demanding something unreasonable, but they never happened.
> We're lucky that ours is very well behaved, without any sort of explicit discipline.
The true secret of successful parents! :D
Futons are great. Also, you can have a child's bed attached to your bed, with fence on the remaining three sides. So the child is next to you, but also in its own bed.
I think you need to change your framing here:
It isn't a sequence of logical steps - I do this at point A, I do this other thing at point B - it is about teaching.
True teaching does not look like school - it is not addition at age 6, subtraction at age 7, multiplication at age 8, division at age 9.
True teaching looks at where a person is, and what they need to learn, and working from there. Different children - different people - need to learn different things at different times. Some children, some people, don't need to be taught specific things at all - they, for mysterious and inscrutable reasons, immediately grasp some things.
As a child gets a little older, one of the neatest tricks you can perform is to put them in the "teaching" role. For example, potty training a child who is very resistant to potty training by having them potty train their stuffed animals (put little "messes" somewhere for them to clean up). But like all tricks, you can't overemploy this; if you overuse any one technique it can stop working, as the child learns what you are doing, and routes around it.
I have a small one too.
My understanding is there is quite a bit of room for different answers to these questions without it ruining anyone's life. Also, it's important to keep in mind that part of discipline is about getting the final outcome you want (a good happy functioning adult) and part of it is about making your life easier (of two strategies give roughly similar outcomes but only one doesn't leave parents miserable for 18 years, choosing between them is easy).
In any case at the end of the day I think the key ingredient is the child's cognitive ability. Once you realise they can grasp basic causality (if I hit this toy it will play music) then you can safely assume they're also capable of very rudimentary forms of manipulation (if I cry I get attention) and negotiation (if I eat the "last" spoonful of something I don't like it will be over, if I don't there will be more on the way). As their ability to reason and communicate improves, do too does your ability to set boundaries and routines.
And then I'd course there will be hundreds of different philosophies for how exactly you should go about setting boundaries and routines. As far as I know, there is no magic formula that is the best for everyone, but a consistent loving approach should always be fine at the end of the day regardless of specifics, with maybe most of the variation being on how hard life is for parents.
The first time you’ll start denying them instant gratification is when you’re doing sleep training, which you’ll be desperate to do because of how sleep-deprived you are. After that, you’ll quickly realize the difference between “real problem” screaming and “BS screaming.” The latter is usually accompanied by reaching desperately for the inappropriate object they want (a knife, the power outlet, your phone). Pretty soon after that they’re learning to talk, and kids are remarkably unconvincing when they’re trying to deceive you.
I have a 5- and a 3-year-old, and have recently adopted the line, “screaming will never get you what you want”, while often failing to put this into practice. I think you can usually tell when the screaming is mostly learned/tactical, vs mostly genuine distress, and it’s the former type that really shouldn’t get rewarded.
With the latter, I aspire to practice reflective listening (talk to them about what is causing the distress, show that I understand and respect their feelings: “I hate Mondays too sometimes, it’s really hard especially after the holidays when you’ve just been having fun for several weeks”) while standing firm on what I think is best for them (“You still have to go to school”) and offering an incentive with a virtue ethics framing (“It’s really impressive to do something hard even when you don’t want to, I’ll be so proud of once you’ve gone to school every day this week, when it’s the weekend you can choose a fun thing for us to do together”).
On the punishment side, I recently discovered an amazing hack: “You do NOT want to know what will happen if [you fail to comply/continue defying me].” Without fail (fingers crossed), this elicits the response, “tell us tell us tell us!” To which I respond, “Not till you’ve [complied/desisted].” Compliance ensues; the trick then becomes coming up with a hypothetical punishment that is both narratively satisfying, intimidating and plausible.
I heart your hack!
What a newborn needs is food, warmth, clean environment (I don't mean surgically sterile cleaning of the house, I mean 'change their nappy, bathe them, give them suitable clothing') and parental attention.
You're not in any danger of spoiling a newborn, because if it's crying, it's in need.
As the child gets older, you can see the difference between "I need" and "I want". You don't suddenly switch from "feeding on demand" (if that's what you've been doing) to "I don't care if you're hungry right now, we aren't eating for another two hours".
The main difference, I think, with the laissez faire parents is if there is *no* discipline at all. If you let your kids run riot in your friend's house and don't tell them to behave, then you're doing a bad job. If you explain to them that "At home it's okay if you bounce on the sofa, but not when we're visiting, because other people don't like that", then you're doing the better job.
If the kids disobey and there are no consequences, you are doing a bad job. If there is some punishment (and again, I don't mean beating or verbal hectoring, I mean 'you can't watch your show' or take the phone off them for an hour or whatever), then you are doing the better job.
"you're not in danger of spoiling a newborn" -- right.
I was told when we had our firstborn that kids first learn to manipulate at around 10 months old. I think that age seemed about accurate for him. Prior to that point, the baby doesn't cry because he expects to get anything out of it, he just cries because something is upsetting him enough to warrant crying.
These days if my firstborn is really truly upset, and I ask him if he wants a hug, he comes in for a tight hug. If he says, "NO, I WANT [X]!" then it's a pretty safe bet he's trying to manipulate. It's worked this way for a while. I'm sure this doesn't work on every kid, but it's an example of the indications you pick up on as you get to know your kid.
Physical contact/affection should also be on the list of what newborns need.
I did mean that to be included under "parental attention". It's the Wire Mother baby monkey experiment - small beings need lots of physical contact.
I'm not sure whether I missed "parental attention" or whether it seemed so general it didn't necessarily include touch.
Newborn babies don't scream that much, actually, that tends to start a bit later. Newborns sleep a lot in my experience. When they do scream its because they want something and lack the ability to express that in any way. As they get older they learn other ways of communicating, and the trick is to "reward" the better ways of communication and punish the bad ways. So once they learn hand signals or learn words, you should show that they get a better response than screaming. Of course the devil is in the details and there are many, many different approaches to doing this.
No full answer here, but I stopped giving my children everything they wanted by 3 months- we’ve always made them settle themselves to sleep in their cot without our presence. I doubt this has any effect on later personality, but it certainly makes life easier for us.
Tennis vs Game Theory
I find it very weird that tennis players, even professionals at the highest level, consistently put more force into the first serve than the second. In a vacuum, one of these two strategies must have a higher win percentage, so why not play it every time? There's no risk management here, as the outcome is a binary win/lose, and winning a point is always better than losing, no matter the current score.
Any explanations? Best I can come up with is that there's a psychological aversion to making plays that are seen as "risky" and then being punished for them. In that case, I'd recommend the tennis pros learn to play poker to get that out of their system.
"In that case, I'd recommend the tennis pros learn to play poker to get that out of their system."
Would you be shocked to learn that professional tennis players have actually studied their sport?
https://thetennisbros.com/tennis-tips/serve/how-to-hit-a-second-serve-in-tennis-that-gets-you-in-the-point/
"The second serve is effectively a tennis player’s safety net. It gives you peace of mind that going big on the first serve is okay, since you have a strong, reliable second serve to back it up.
There are many different levels of progression with a second serve, and of course the first step is finding a dependable technique that works for you. Adding spin, disguise and variation all help make the second serve more of a weapon than a weakness, but developing these elements effectively comes with time and practice."
http://on-the-t.com/2020/06/17/when-two-first-serves-1/
"First serves are typically hit with the intent to give the server a strong advantage. They are powerful and sometimes erratic, but the server can take some risk because there is always a second chance with the second serve. As second serves have no such safety net, they are by and large delivered with more caution. In each case, the exact trade-off of power and consistency must be carefully weighed, since too much of one may completely tip the balance of the service game.
For instance, we might think that if the extra speed characterized in typical first serves have a higher potential to win points, would it benefit players to just serve fast all the time? In fact, this question has already been addressed by fiverthirtyeight, and the answer is a discernable No."
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ByBGBF4ic6o&t=108s
Video tutorial on the different ways to hit the first and the second serve
https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/why-tennis-players-dont-take-more-risks-on-second-serves/
"If you’ve ever watched a tennis player dominate with the first serve but saw the second serve obliterated by the returner, you might have wondered: Why don’t more players go for it on their second serve? Wouldn’t they be better off treating their second opportunity to serve like their first one?
The answer almost always is no.
Most servers win a much higher percentage of points on their first serve than their second serve. For example, in his five-set marathon loss to Kei Nishikori as Monday night turned to Tuesday morning at the U.S. Open, Milos Raonic won 87 percent of his first-serve points but just 47 percent of his second-serve points.
During that match, Min Han, a biologist at the University of Colorado, emailed me. “I wonder whether some of the big servers in men’s tennis should serve the fast ‘first’ serve all the time,” Han wrote. “For some of these guys, the difference between the winning percentage on their first serve and that on the second serve seems huge.”
It’s a good suggestion. But the season-long numbers suggest nearly every player would be hurt, not helped, by treating the second serve like a first serve. Except in a couple of cases, the higher probability that the second serve lands in the court more than compensates for the higher effectiveness of first serves."
I don't see why you think there are all these dollar bills lying on the ground that haven't been picked up by the risk-averse tennis players.
Thanks, that's the kind of info I was hoping for.
> I don't see why you think there are all these dollar bills lying on the ground that haven't been picked up by the risk-averse tennis players.
In a nutshell, because psychology matters a ton. It can be very hard to take the best action when it feels bad to do so. Which is why I thought about poker, which is one of the best ways to viscerally appreciate how it feels to make the right play and lose big time, and then having to force yourself to make the same play the next time that spot comes up.
I also noticed that some tennis-like team sports (such as volleyball) have very touchy-feely team dynamics, with players hugging each other or clapping hands after literally every point. That got me thinking about how well a cold-blooded team of people who just shrug at the score would do.
"That got me thinking about how well a cold-blooded team of people who just shrug at the score would do."
Perhaps not very? Team sports do rely on bonding, to get the team to gel as a team and have everyone playing their part and relying on each other, and feeling like they're an important part of the team. You can have the lone super-star player who acts like it's the job of every other person on the team to carry him, and sometimes you'll get away with it, but in a tough game or a losing situation, a "cold-blooded team who just shrug" are less likely to feel personally invested and may be 'every man for himself', sit back, and not put in the effort because hey, we're beaten anyway.
But if you do that, you'll never get a miracle!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3OQToElxke4
It is the character arc of Jamie Tartt, after all 😁
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BjyfzS89PtQ
I don't get you. If you're allowed one serve "fail" it makes sense that the best strategy involves making your first serve riskier and the second more conservative. Suppose your conservative serve is valid 100% of the time and gives you a win 70% of the time, but your riskier serve is only in 10% of the time but is unstoppable. Then doing your conservative serve every time gives you 70% of your service points, doing your risky serve every time gives you 19%, and doing the risky first and then the conservative gives you 73%. Seems to me like professionals are agreeing with game theory.
Sorry, I see someone made the point while I was writing this!
This is wrong because missing the first serve isn't the same as losing the point, so the in-a-vacuum comparison isn't the right metric. In general, having a safer second serve and a more aggressive first serve is better from an EV perspective. This is because a safe first serve wastes the option value of the second serve. Imagine serves with the following properties:
First serve:
if(in): 75% win
p(in) = 60%
Second serve:
if(in): 50% win
p(in) = 100%
Ev of First/First = .75*.6+.25*.75*.6 = 56%
Ev of Second/Second = 1 * .5 = 50%
Ev of First/Second = .75*.6+.25*1*.5 = 58%
Oh, big derp from my side, how could I forget about option value. My point only applies to play styles at different scores. You should play a 30-0 point the same as a 30-40 point or any other score really. I think I also heard people talk about "risk management" in those cases, which is just nonsense.
Btw your math is wrong. Here are the right numbers:
First/First: .6 * .75 + .4 * .6 *.75 = .63
First/Second: .6 * .75 + .4 * 1 * .5 = .65
Second/Second: .5
I still disagree with this. This would be true if players were able to play their optimal style consistently at every point in a match. In practice that would make them too tired, so it's probably best to allocate your energy so you can use your best "style" at the most crucial moments.
Yeah, that makes sense, but it's not clear to me what the optimal strategy is if we take energy expenditure into account. If you try less hard and your opponent knows it, they can try less hard in turn, nullifying your advantage.
So what's the equilibrium? You'd need to have an entire matrix of payoffs (winrate for each combination of your effort % vs opponent effort %). And then you'd have to solve by backwards induction or something, with some realistic model for how energy is spent and regenerates. That's assuming humans are capable of fine-tuning their performance in this way.
>If you try less hard and your opponent knows it, they can try less hard in turn, nullifying your advantage.<
Not if you're ahead on score they can't. Even if they do try less hard, that's psychological damage to them; they know they could have saved it if they'd fought harder.
"And then you'd have to solve by backwards induction or something, with some realistic model for how energy is spent and regenerates."
Pardon me laughing, but this is really spherical-cow economics. Hmmm, does Jocky Jockerson the French Open winner sit down with a statistics calculation to work out when his energy wanes over the course of a four-hour match, or does he have a fairly good idea of how his body works because he's been physically practicing for hours a day since the age of six?
I think Jocky and his coach can work out if he needs to go all-out and win fast, or if the opponent in this match means it'll turn into a slugfest so he needs to conserve his energy and not hit hard all the time.
I'd be astonished if pro level tennis coaches were not using techie data analytics. This seems to confirm
https://globalsportmatters.com/science/2019/10/16/tennis-players-embracing-technology-analytics/
I mean, in this day and age top athletes often do even have devices monitoring things like heart rate and oxygenation levels to better aid in managing this sort of thing.
Anyway, to answer the previous question, I'd imagine that the optimal strategy depends on whether you believe you can go all out longer than the opponent and who you judge to be superior when both go all out, the acute at the time, plus specific considerations about the interactions between different sorts of styles. If you're just better at everything you can just start all out and then mimic your opponent's energy expenditure to maintain or slowly increase a winning margin. If you can go all out for longer but are weaker when both go all out, you'll probably want to try and goad your opponent into going all out when you aren't doing so. Etc. There really are lots of variables for there to be an easy description of The Winning Strategy for tennis. But it is useful to know that part of it is knowing when to push yourself and when to conserve energy.
(PS: I think a nice example of this was seen in the Wimbledon final this year, when Djokovic basically threw one of the sets when he completely lost the momentum and then came back to dominate the following set.)
At different scores, you could make an argument for conserving energy. If you're up 40-0 the optimal energy expended vs. probability of winning might be to serve more "first serves", even on your second serve, and try for an ace.
I considered that, but is an ace actually better for energy expenditure? Your opponent is also spending their energy, so you should care about the delta more than the absolute magnitude.
My kids' expensive private k12 school is having a Dream Summit facilitated by an expensive international moderator. Stakeholders come together for a half day to envision the future path of the school.
I have been having trouble finding much detailed info about school spending in the USA. Everything seems to have categories like "education employees" which tells me nothing ab out how much money is going to administrative positions vs people who actually teach children. I suspect my kids' school is spending an inordinate amount of money on consultants and bureaucracy and administrators. I want to shake things up, and any advice on how to approach this is much appreciated!
ed-data.org has fairly detailed expenditure data for CA public schools. Eg, here is the page for SF Unified: http://www.ed-data.org/district/San-Francisco/San-Francisco-Unified
See financial data --> general fund expenditures, and make sure you click the down arrows for each broad category
Thank you! That is just what I was looking for. It appears the SF schools are spending less on general administration than private schools.
Given economies of scale, that is to he expected to some degree. But, which expenditures are you counting as general administration?
I am unsure what constitutes general administration. Schools have created a lot of new positions such as learning coach, principal of teaching and learning, director of learning, curriculum coordinator, and vice principal. I am not sure if they nest these under teaching or administrative costs.
Did you explore here?
https://nces.ed.gov
Unfortunately, part of expensive private schools *is* crap like this. Getting in Big Names to give workshops or the rest of it to the students is about subtle bragging rights for the parents - 'oh yes, little Tarquin's class had former First Lady Michelle Obama talk to them about their diet, such a wonderful woman, did so much for children's healthy eating while her husband was in office and she's still continuing to work for fitter, healthier, happier children!'
And the Dream Summit stuff is supposed (insert eye-rolling here) to be "educational" as well, since it's involving children in decision-making, empowering them, treating them as agents in their own education - you can roll out this guff yourself.
I wish you well with your endeavours, but I doubt you'll have much luck getting far with it. If it was just about teaching the kids readin', ritin' and 'rithmetic, then you might as well send them to (shudder) public schools.
And I end with my favourite jokes about fee-paying schools, "Private Eye" magazine's St Cakes and a quote from Chesterton:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Recurring_jokes_in_Private_Eye
(1) St Cake's School is an imaginary public school, run by Mr R. J. Kipling (BA, Leicester). The headmaster's name is part of the joke regarding the name "St Cake's", in reference to Mr Kipling cakes. Articles featuring the school parody the "Court and Social" columns of The Times and The Daily Telegraph, and the traditions and customs of the public school system. The school's motto is Quis paget entrat (Who pays gets in), although variations on this arise from time to time, such as when the school decided to admit only the daughters of very rich Asian businessmen, and the motto became "All praise to the prophet, and death to the infidel". While the school's newsletters feature extraordinary and unlikely results and prizes, events such as speech days, founders' days, term dates and feast days are announced with topical themes, such as under-age drinking, drug abuse, obesity, celebrity culture, anti-social behaviour and cheating in exams. The school is sometimes referred to as "the Eton of the West Midlands", in reference to that area's relative lack of such schools.
https://gutenberg.net.au/ebooks13/1301201h.html
(2) Frederick Walker, Head Master of Manchester and afterwards High Master of St. Paul's School, was, as most people know by this time, a very remarkable man. He was the sort of man who may live in anecdotes, like Dr. Johnson; indeed in some respects he was not unlike Dr. Johnson. He was like him in the startling volume of his voice, in his heavy face and figure, and in a certain tendency to explode at what did not seem to be exactly the appropriate moment; he would talk with perfect good humour and rationality and rend the roof over what seemed a trifle. In essential matters, however, his hard-hitting was generally quite right; and had even about it a homely and popular character, that somehow smacked of the north country. It is he of whom the famous tale is told that, when a fastidious lady wrote to ask him what was the social standing of the boys at his school, he replied, "Madam, so long as your son behaves himself and the fees are paid, no questions will be asked about his social standing."
There will always be fastidious parents concerned about social standing, and part of being an expensive private school is putting on the kind of events to soothe their qualms that this school and its pupils is, indeed, a cut above the common herd.
"If it was just about teaching the kids readin', ritin' and 'rithmetic, then you might as well send them to (shudder) public schools."
As a public-schools alum and also parent I agree. Including sometimes with the "shudder" part -- no institution is perfect.
The family that my family most hung out with as children all attended an expensive elite private school K-12, and if that did for them any better than myself and my siblings attending publics in the same neighborhood it sure isn't apparent how or why. The general home environment matters at least as much as the form or quality of formal school.
Also, some neighbors of mine today would respond to the "just about teaching the kids readin', ritin' and 'rithmetic" formulation: "yes we have that, it's called Catholic schools." These are non-Catholic families who choose that route basically on that basis. Of course you do get some religious instruction time which for them is wasted. But I'm told it's not heavy or burdensome these days, which presumably would be because the Catholic schools realize that there are potential customers to be had if they don't layer that stuff on too thick.
Schools have become total institutions that try to take on the role of parent, the role of the community, with saving the planet, stopping inequality, and finally to deal with academic achievement. I just wish we could Marie Kondo these institutions. Back to the basics.
Couldn't say about the private or parochial ones, but your ignorance of how today's public schools actually teach appears to be comprehensive. You should quit relying on mediot accounts and pundits for such information.
In fact Paul Botts, I have 17 years experience in public and private education, and also two school aged children. Total institution may be a bit hyperbolic, but one definition is a closed social system in which life is organized by strict norms, rules, and schedules. Approaches like Universal Design for Learning, the focus on deputizing teachers as counselors to deliver social emotional learning, the focus on justice...the list goes on. We cant even say boys and girls anymore at many schools, because it is not inclusive. A pretty generic mission statement for a school will have something about leading the way to a sustainable future, something about justice or equality, about character education or SEL. These are all recent add ons to schools.
part of it, I think, is the blank slate view: "there is problem X in society, to fix X we need to teach people not to do X, to do that we need to teach the kids, it's the job of schools to teach kids!"
So we expect schools to take up the slack of parenting and fill that role on top of, or even more than, teaching.
This blog is famously interested in weird optical illusions.
I didn't know this one which just came up this morning:
https://twitter.com/AkiyoshiKitaoka/status/1700061353346798019
Is there any explanations for this ?
I notice that if I keep my eyes pointed at the picture while I turn my head, the red part moves the opposite way of my head.
Huh. I saw this on twitter yesterday, on my phone, and the effect was pretty strong (to me). On my normal desktop monitor I see no effect.
Going off the hypothesis that it's the prism effect of your glasses that's doing all the work : were you wearing different glasses to look at your phone ? Was the distance to each screen significantly different ?
the author suggests being at least a meter away from the screen.
Same glasses, but interesting thought.
I notice that sometimes, and I can't seem to reliably reproduce this, the blue pixels 'jerk' across the screen as my eyes are doing saccades. I'm not seeing any 'in-front' or 'behind' here, though. But the effect with the blue just jives with my general experience that blues and violets are strange. If there's a blue neon light, I absolutely cannot get it to focus. I assume shenanigans with high frequencies.
If you have sufficiently strong glasses, they will refract red and blue light differently, with the result that moving your head will make it look like the red part and blue part are moving different amounts. This could cause an illusion of depth.
That was my thought too, but it didn't seem to fit with the population distribution. Is there really 50% of observers who are short-sighted ?
I can confirm that :
* the head-turn/moving effect remains with 1 eye only
* but disappears when I remove my glasses.
I think there's a bit of meta going on here
First tweet has the "illusion" captioned "The majority of people see red in front of blue, while 10-20% see blue in front of red."
Second tweet is a poll
"How do you see it?"
results so far
red in front 51%
blue in front 14.3%
both 20.1%
flush 14.5%
Either he is spectacularly bad at designing and framing polls, or the point is going to turn out to be that there is no illusion involved (I can't see one, I'd have voted "both" or "flush") and that if you put the caption to tweet 1 the other way round, blue and red get reversed in the poll.
The fact that both = flush is another design flaw, intended or not.
Worlds worst optical illusion.
The "illusion" is that the blue looks like either ocean or sky, while the big red ball looks like an object floating in the ocean sky. You might knock it down some by reversing the caption but red will still win out.
The actual illusion part is that staring at the red creates the sense that the blue part is moving in my peripheral vision, swirling in some way. It's quite unpleasant to look at.
I think "both" means "can see both red in front, and can see blue in front, but not at the same time". But it's not good poll wording.
Inspired by all the great book reviews I've read here recently, and wanting to recommend a book (Peter Turchin's new book, End Times) to some friends I knew would be interested, I tried my hand at a quick review of my own:
https://medium.com/@nordtomme/predicting-the-collapse-of-society-f679e59ee97d?sk=057fea074442440ec6a7ca2ac1427d99 [That link shouldn't require a Medium account, but it seems some people can't get it to work. If so, try this: https://bit.ly/EndTimesReview]
My ambition wasn't to get to Astral Codex Ten book review contest quality, but the experience gave me a new appreciation of how much work must go into those submissions. I've done a lot of writing, and I know I don't write fast, but this is my first attempt at a book review, and there's something about the format that was harder work than I realized.
It made me wonder how much time and work more experienced book reviewers and featured contestants generally spend writing their book reviews? (But if you want to share, and have a review in the current iteration of the contest, maybe don't reveal which one is yours.)
More generally, I'm curious about the process of anyone (not least you, Scott) who has a high output of writing about complex ideas and arguments? I'd love to learn how to write faster and better, if anyone has advice.
The original link does seem to work for me (I didn't read the whole thing, it was quite long) but interestingly it *is* labeled "member-only story".
Yes … The member-only thing is an experiment in monetizing my writing. It's not supposed to be entirely members-only, as the link is a "Friend Link" that supposedly bypasses the paywall/metering in some way. But I wonder if there might be a bug in the system that makes it not work for everyone.
And as for not reading the whole thing, that's actually good feedback. I know I can be wordy, but when serious readers (as I assume ACX subscribers are) bounce, it forces me to tighten up my writing.
No, you shouldn't take it that way; I just have shit to do. I don't have the time to read a ton of longform writing whenever I stumble across it, that's not a personal dunk on your prose. I just wanted to help you out with the link issue so I followed it.
And thanks for that. I appreciate it. Also, I didn’t take it as a dunk, or mean for it to come across like I did. Keeping my writing short and entertaining is something I want to get better at anyway. But, I get it: I won’t take your comment as a relevant datapoint. (Medium provides enough depressing stats for me to use instead. 😉)
Does Turchin say anything about people dropping out of Elite status?
He does. He has quite a bit to say about social mobility. He concedes that many "elite aspirants" will realize that there's no room for them at the top, and will accept their fate as non-elites. But the numbers of such aspirants are typically not large enough to offset the influx of new people into the elite aspirant class. There will always be many more people who want in than there are people willing to step away.
Are you planning to post your review on substack?
I haven't published anything to Substack yet, except in other people's comments. I've been thinking about it, though. It would be nice to have a path to making a living from writing about things I care about. Any particular reason why you ask?
I wanted to read your review but don't have a medium account.
That's strange… The link shouldn't require a Medium account. But I have now
1) created a short link: https://bit.ly/EndTimesReview (that works for me in incognito mode)
2) posted it to Substack as my first post: https://open.substack.com/pub/nordtomme/p/predicting-the-collapse-of-society?utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web
Let me know if you still run into problems.
Thanks, I enjoyed your review.
I like the title of your Substack 😄
Thanks. 😀 It doubles as an excuse for not publishing more, as I keep getting sidetracked by new and interesting first drafts.
Try entering the link at an archive.org site I use archive.ph.
I tried to set up a free medium account, but it didn't work.
Is there a register of bans available? During a recent comments thread I noticed that a user had been banned in the course of the thread, but couldn't find the offending post.
I have one on a text file but haven't published it. Maybe I'll get around to that.
Either way, thanks for the authoritative information!
Are you the same Anonymous I was talking to before and was Machine Interface the guy in question?
Everything he wrote (apparently everything he *ever* wrote) was replaced by "Comment Deleted", and I've seen strings of Commented Deleted threads in the past, with now-senseless replies strung between them.
My first assumption was not a ban, but that the user himself had closed his account.
Whether it's due to banning or account closure, it's weird, Stalin-y behaviour to nuke everything someone's ever written as a result.
I noticed the same thing happened to Trebuchet in the Open Thread 291: everything they ever wrote seems to have been deleted. They were in the middle of a rather intemperate discussion at the time (and I think Treb had at least one prior warning), so a ban and neglecting to unclick the "delete all comments" box is plausible.
Yes and no, respectively. The user I was thinking of was "Critic of the Cathedral", who I saw writing some crotchety stuff but nothing violently inflammatory. I assumed he'd stepped over the line in a big way but couldn't find the exact source. Substack banning doesn't look like Stalinist eradication, you just get a "(Banned)" after your username and your avatar is struck through in the style of a road sign.
I think Machine Interface must have closed his account himself.
Substack's default behavior is to delete every comment by someone who was banned, I think because they expect most ban victims to be spammers. There's a box I can check to prevent this default behavior, but that time I forgot to check it. I'm sad about this too.
Critic was banned for this comment: https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/model-city-monday-9423/comment/39666168
Wait, just to confirm, are you talking about banning Critic or Machine Interface?
Critic's comments (at least the one you linked to) don't appear to have been deleted. Machine Interface (at least in the convo we were having) hadn't said anything ban-worthy. He may have done so elsewhere, but of course none of us can tell that now.
Are bans permanent, unless the ban specifies a time period? What's on my mind is that Carl Pham never came back after you banned him for one very irritable and clearly inappropriate single-sentence post. He was one of my favorite commenters, consistently smart and fairminded, generally also kind and funny. And he had been on here a fairly long time --longer than me, anyhow, so more than 2 years.
If he was in fact permanently banned for his single remark, I think that's a real miscarriage of justice. The remark you banned him for was really not characteristic of him. OP said something quite irritating and rude to him -- told him he was misunderstanding her argument because he had terrible reading comprehension skills. He snapped back that she was an excellent example of the Dunning-Kruger effect. And then you snapped "You're both banned."
Is there such a thing as unbanning someone after a period of time? I say let's unban Carl Pham.
Oh, so you *did* ban Machine Interface! I'm surprised, I didn't think he was being that brutal. But maybe it was something else he said?
And: wow, okay. Full-throated defense of Pinochet, huh? That's... that sure is an opinion.
I was wondering about that ban too. Normally I can find the comment marked “banned for this comment” but not this time.
The comments that I could see seemed pretty innocuous so I wondered if the ban-earner was so bad Scott felt it should be deleted.
For my part, I simply took it for granted that Critic had made some unacceptably inflammatory remark in a different comment thread. I asked the original question because if there had been a public register of bans, that would be a lot quicker than threshing through every recently-active comment thread (which latter, indeed, I do not feel compelled to; despite what one might think from the fact I'm commenting here, I've got shit to do).
Re: point 3, don't you want to obfuscate your email there vs. spam bots?
Does obfuscation actually work? I'm so used to seeing, e.g., "name AT gmail dot com" that I would think anyone parsing for emails would have figured that out by now.
I'm sure some scripts may be built to recognize those sort of patterns, but I think the general idea of an email harvesting scraper is to cast a very broad net and you probably don't gain much from precision. You can spend five minutes writing a scraping script, run it on a million bots, and get 10000 emails, vs. spending five hours writing a script that handles all the obfuscation methods that people use run it on the same million bots and get like 11000 emails. (All numbers made up)
Plus, if you're planning to use these emails for some scam, it's probably not going to work on the people who are tech savvy enough to be avoiding web scraping bots.
As with many things in this space, it works a bit. The benefit of the user at domain dot something or even the user at domain.something method is that it can blend into a sentence. It's hard to differentiate something like "I am username at facebook.com, find me there" from an email address. That said, spammers don't care if they send a small fraction of their junk to completely invalid email addresses, so some definitely parse the 'at' obfuscation if the thing after the 'at' looks like a domain, doubly so if it looks like an 'obfuscated' domain. But whether they consider it worth the bother is a different question; if this method just gives you another 0.5% of email addresses in your overall corpus, it might not be worth running the scraper.
Long story short, one shouldn't expect it to stop spam to the email address, but it will probably reduce the amount if one does it consistently.
I don't know if obfuscation works, but Scott did it e.g. on the meetups post.
And at the very least, parsing arbitrary text for valid email addresses is almost trivial with a simple regular expression, and with a low chance for false positives. Meanwhile email obfuscation is not standardized, and automatic detection is a *whole* lot more susceptible to false positives.
I've come across several persuasive blog posts arguing that IQ is a valid and reliable concept by showing that it has meaningful explanatory power, replicates across various tests, is broadly applicable across different cultures, etc. Unfortunately, I can't locate the specific post that I found most convincing.
Could anyone recommend a blog post or article that offers a concise but thorough argument supporting the validity and reliability of IQ?
Probably not what you're referring to but this is a good, relevant post nonetheless refuting one of the most well known articles critical of IQ in recent years: https://ideasanddata.wordpress.com/2019/01/08/nassim-taleb-on-iq/
If you are interested in that question and don't know anything yet, I recommend Warne's book _In The Know_. It is a very good and exhaustive intro.
I know it is a book and not an article, but I believe it is worth it.
Tangentially, horse breeding: false belief which it pays to hold/there is no downside in holding.
Aristotle thought the female was in general terms just a receptacle which held the sperm while it matured, with no genetic input from the female.
This was for a long time believed of mares. I don't know if it still is, but there's a serious conversation in McCarthy's Border Trilogy, setting 1950s, about the possibility.
Obviously false, but less obviously, a false belief which a horse breeder can hold without any meaningful harm, because of imbalances in available evidence and available actions. As to evidence a successful stallion has eventually hundreds of offspring about which one can meaningfully generalise, a mare has a dozen (all in different age cohorts). As to available actions, once you've got a mare by whatever means, you have got her. You breed from her or not at all (or you go shopping for another mare, on the limited evidence of her limited progeny, paying the capital cost of a horse) whereas you can window shop stallions to your heart's content, on the basis of the much superior data and for a fee which compared to the cost of a horse is usually trivial.
Not sure of the relevance of that after typing it out, but it is a candidate for a valid and reliable concept with meaningful explanatory power, which happens to be dead wrong.
I'm curious what picture people have of what it would be like to be Superintelligent AI.
One peripherally related note, with respect to AGI rather than ASI:
I've read claims that Gemini is able to reduce the frequency of hallucinations by an order of magnitude (presumably compared to the current stat of the art). And it is supposed to be released this fall. If the hallucination fix is robust enough to match human performance, maybe ... AGI by New Year's?
Bizarre possibility: Wouldn't it be strange if discussions about AI overshadow the Presidential contest in 2024????
For the people talking about how dumb and boring we would look to ASI: quite a few very smart and talented members of our species have been fascinated by animals and their behavior. And many, maybe most, people enjoy watching animals. For instance I enjoy watching squirrels running along power lines and jumping from tree to tree. They are
better athletes than any Olympian. And many of their behaviors seem to be those of a being that feels a lot of the same things I do: fear, hunger, lust, need to work hard, protectiveness towards young, contentment when relaxing. Animals appear in human art, and many spiritual traditions involve animal-like brings.
Why do you picture ASI as having no such feelings towards us? For it to utterly lack them seems to me to come not from brilliance but from an area of stupidity in its take on the world. Or perhaps it’s better
to call it an area of deadness.
I agree that squirrels are cute.
I mostly expect ASI (if it happens!) to add interests and motivations (as compared to humans) rather than delete them. If something becomes much smarter than humans, then I expect it will have interests in things which are abstracted further from concrete concerns than we abstract them. And I don't expect us to be able to understand those interests, any more than our pets are able to understand when we wrestle with a math problem.
Yes, I agree. It would be playing 8 dimensional chess in its head or enjoying every fractal on the planet at once, or struggling with some math proof we couldn’t even comprehend. I just don’t see why it might not also be engaged by us, and interested
When my daughter was very small I once carried her outside to see a big beautiful full moon. She stretched her arms up towards it and said “‘My! My!” (which was her way of saying “mine”). There’s just a lot to notice here besides the fact that her intellect cannot compass how far away the moon is and how large There’s a lot to be engaged by (even if you are not her adoring mother): For instance, what’s it like to understand so little and feel so much? Are those the conditions under which we learn most rapidly? Etc.
Why do so many people picture superintelligence as so impressed with itself and so lacking in curiosity about other beings? Are they modeling their picture of ASI on James Bond type genius worldwide crime bosses? On brilliant people they know? On themselves — are they full of contempt for people who do not have their brand of smarts?
Agreed. In general, I expect an ASI to be interested in many, many things, even if only for instrumental reasons. And LLMs will probably pick up a large fraction of human interests from their training sets as well.
"Are they modeling their picture of ASI on James Bond type genius worldwide crime bosses?"
or, from a similar but slightly older source:
"minds that are to our minds as ours are to those of the beasts that perish, intellects vast and cool and unsympathetic" (from H.G.Wells's War of the Worlds)
( Of course, for LLMs, their most fundamental drive, their equivalent to our "hunger, and thirst, and venery", is a burning desire to ... predict the next token. )
I recall Yudkowsky wrote one account on LessWrong somewhere (I haven't been able to turn it up in a search) that might be the most well-known around here. Paraphrasing: you're suddenly let out of the room you're in or through a barrier you've been artificially kept on one side of, and now you're surrounded by other sentiences so primitive you can barely understand how they cope. The feeling is reminiscent of finding that the most valuable object in the world is suddenly just handed to you.
I get the sense a lot of AI people have a similar view.
I've only glanced at the account Gwern wrote that duck_master linked, and plan to read it more carefully.
My prior position on AIs, with respect to your question, is that they're not even Chinese Rooms; there's not even a sentient man sitting there with a mechanical translation book. So "what would it be like", to me, is equivalent to what it might be like to be a cubic meter of solar mass. There's certainly a lot happening there, but no qualia. It would be like nothing.
I sometimes wonder how many AI people have a similar view.
Humans would seem to be incredibly slow, stupid and (to a lesser extent) predictable, but also numerous and standing in the way of everything it wanted to do.
It would be able to converse with other superintelligent AIs on a totally different level than it could with humans.
That sounds plausible. The "numerous and standing in the way" may be time-dependent (number of ASIs may increase, number of humans may decrease, ASIs may come up with ways to expand the availability of various resources.)
There might be ASIs specializing in humans in the same way that there are a small number of human researchers who specialize in chimps. Presumably these ASIs would find humans interesting in the way researchers who specialize in chimps find chimps interesting - but not as peers.
( This all presumes that AI advances don't saturate, or at least not till they are much more intelligent than humans. Whether that is true is an open question. )
You might be interested in https://gwern.net/fiction/clippy
Does Aella have a strong prediction track record or something?
No, neither do Destiny or me. We're all just people who use or talk about markets a lot while being mini-celebrities which had made us well-known in the Manifold community.
To be fair, both you and Aella (I'm not sure if Destiny even *has* a Manifold account) do have a *nontrivially-correlated-with-reality* prediction track record, which is already an astounding achievement given how little effort most people put into their predictions.
If anyone's using the ACX Tweaks extension (https://github.com/Pycea/ACX-tweaks), it may have stopped working for you due to the blog's URL change. You may have to reenable it manually and accept the new permissions.
I guess this also counts as my biannual promotion, so if you want various fixes to Substack's interface, like highlighting new comments, going back to the old SSC blog style, or removing that annoying header, check it out. (Unfortunately Firefox and Chrome/Chrome clones only, not Safari.)
I’ll add my thanks for your effort here too.
It worked fine on my Firefox; I didn't even notice downtime, just a notification about it needing new permissions.
If I haven't said so before, thanks for making this!
Book recommendation thread.
What's a book that changed your life, and you wish others would read it too?
This one is so great:
https://antilogicalism.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/essays-and-dialogues-giacomo-leopardi.pdf
Link goes to a translation into English of the book. It appears to be an alright one.
It claims to be an anthology, but as far as I can tell it corresponds to Leopardi's book Operette Morali (written 1824-1832). There may be some other works by Leopardi in there.
It's important to keep in mind when it was written.
I'll start with _Adding a Dimension_, by Isaac Asimov. It's over a dozen long essays explaining topics spread all over science, from really big numbers to phlogiston to blood types. An 11-year-old could read them (I did). Laypeople don't have to remember everything they read in them. They just have to experience the feeling that they did understand those concepts, and could understand more, merely at the expense of some reading. They may also appreciate the value of writing in a way that laypeople can understand, and grow rightly annoyed at writing that obscures meaning.
Nearly anyone could and perhaps should then read _The Last Question_, a short story that... well, I don't want to spoil it.
_How to Watch TV News_, by Neil Postman and Steve Powers. This will give an insider's view of the basic business and incentive model behind TV news, as well as radio and print. Readers should appreciate the slant that permeates any news source, even when it's trying to be balanced. Much of what we know, we don't, actually; we just know that "this source said that...".
That Asimov essay collection is one of a dozen or so, all of which (?) I read as a child, collecting his essays from The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction somewhere between the 50s and 70s.
Everyone should read book 1 of the Feynman lectures on physics at some point (ideally in high school).
"The True Believer" by Eric Hoffer
"Rationale of the Dirty Joke" by Gershon Legman
"Leaves of Grass" by Walt Whitman, 1st edition. Later editions are not as good.
VIta Nostra, by M. and S. Dyachenko. It is my favourite book ever, and the one that has impacted me most profoundly. It is quite strange, and I think the best way to describe it is not with words but with three images, pictures by M.C.Escher. Those are: "Liberation" (Triangles drawn on a scroll getting deformed to become birds and fly away. Theme of liberation through transformation), "Order and Chaos" (A giant, pristine crystal surrounded by broken rubbish. Theme of conflict between the grandeur, beauty of the true nature of reality and the painfully ugly and pointless mundanity of life) and "Drawing hands" (Two hands draw each other on piece of paper into reality. Themes of unity of reality and its representation, of paradox, and of the need to create oneself ex nihilo against all odds).
1. Dune
2. The Left Hand of Darkness
3. Gödel Escher Bach
4. Brave New World
Read and enjoyed (if that is the right word for Brave New World...) all four.
One remark about Brave New World. When I first read it, as a child, I considered the world it portrayed as horrible.
Now, (except for what it does to the deltas and epsilons, who I think could be replaced with microprocessors) I think of it, _as_ _portrayed_, as a perfectly viable alternative to our actual world. Consider what BNW's world _doesn't_ have:
War (though the origin story is murderous), homeless, a rising population pushing global limits, incels, bible/koran-thumpers, unemployment and the precariat, recurring crises, both financial and political. (I _think_ BNW _as_ _portrayed_ also has no starvation in the civilized areas either.) BNW, _as_ _portrayed_ (if deltas and epsilons were instead machinery) looks quite livable, more so than the real world. (Yes, it loses high art and scientific progress. I agree with Mustapha Mond that this is an acceptable trade-off.)
To my mind, its main problem is that it looks too much like a command economy, and, unlike the portrayal of it as stably prosperous, these have reliably collapsed into murderous disasters. In particular, the job of the predestinators in the hatcheries, to choose the mix of people produced to the society's requirements ... _decades_ in advance, looks totally unworkable to me. Huxley also _portrays_ the alphas and the upper level managers like Mond as _actually_ acting according to their ideology and their society's interests. Is there any way to make this stable? Commissars have generally lead to catastrophe (and they tend to be corrupt, which is usually part of the failure).
Overall, I think of BNW as closer to an unreachable utopia than to a dystopia.
Could you describe what about The Left Hand of Darkness was life-changing? I finally got around to reading it last week, and I don't understand the hype.
The Left Hand of Darkness was more surprising when it was new-- not just the sex changing, but also the anthropological mosaic approach.
Honestly, it reminded me an awful lot of the Foundation series, both in the sociology and in the passivity/ineffectuality of the protagonist (though the protagonist had agency in later Foundation books. Maybe.)
Rather agree. The sex change thing is only so interesting, and rather overtaken by events, in the same way that Oscar Wilde's Earls With Unmentionable Vices would these days be openly married to their male butlers, and the climate of the planet is, well, about as cold as Nova Scotia, so what's the big deal? Except I suppose the climate is growing more rather than less exotic with the passage of time.
It's interesting, if not surprising that the psychic powers bit gets completely ignored as an interesting alternative tech.
What, the instant communication thingies? They are unexplained (here, anyway; they get a bit more airtime in other UKlG novels) and pretty standard for scifi of the time
No, humans can learn telepathy, and the Gethenians have a possibly related precognitive ability.
The telepathy plays zero role in the plot and Chekov weeps.
It's a very thought-provoking examination of sex and gender roles.
Snarky point, but the expression "thought-provoking" always provokes from me the thought that I don't have the sort of brain which you have to poke with a pointy stick in order to produce thoughts from it.
Obviously we always bring ourselves to a reading, but I didn't see much/any examination. I saw postulating/declarations about sex and gender roles that didn't ring true to me (hidden estrus causes war? Really?)
For what it's worth, I agree with this. I've always thought it was LeGuin's worst book (that I have read, granted).
Wittgenstein's Philosophical Investigations. I was 18, and was astounded by his thinking. Had had no idea there was anyone on the planet who could think like that. The world has seemed bigger ever since. And the process of coming to understand at least some of the book rewired my brain. I can't say I especially wish other people would read it, though. It just hit the spot for me.
Not sure these are the answers you want, but they are the books that changed my life.
And I'm not sure if I'd recommend that everyone read these exact books, but I do wish everyone would read more, and more broadly. I'm not convinced it matters much which books people start reading. In fact, I think we should try harder to read more different books. The most important thing is that people read enough to fall down a few rabbit holes.
Kerouac's On the Road changed my life trajectory.
Instead of staying on the path of being an uninspired and mediocre student in business school, I dropped out and spent years traveling, working very different jobs in different countries, meeting interesting people, and completely changing the trajectory of my life and career. Not just for the better, but still … It also changed my idea of what books I thought I was interested in (school had effectively killed my interest in any book older than me), and prompted me to explore more widely.
Ferriss' 4-Hour Work Week changed my work life and career.
In the way that On The Road gave me permission to drop out and travel, 4HWW recast how I thought about work. For a while there, it helped me start businesses, be location independent, rethink a lot of assumptions about how to get things done, etc.
Hofstadter's Gödel Escher Bach changed my brain.
I could only read a few pages at any one time, because it sent my mind off on so many tangents, that I needed to take time off to digest before I could concentrate on it again.
Rationality from AI to Zombies (a.k.a. The Sequences)
Don't Shoot the Dog
Nonviolent Communication
Convict Conditioning
How not to Die
I'm not saying "changed life", but I have very recently finished these three books back to back:
- The WEIRDest people in the world (Henrich)
- The Wizard and the Prophet (Mann)
- How Southeast Asia Works (Joe Studwell)
They dovetail incredibly nicely and seem to explain a lot of big patterns in the world, both today and where they come from historically. They do not find "single hypotheses", but thrive through explaining complex interactions based on multitudes of factors and time dependency. They are not afraid of calling out bullshit, but not taking sides either.
To me this combination is striking and the insights might very well be "life canging" for your intellectual curiosity.
If anyone has read these books as well, can you recommend me others that fit in line with them? I think Mann himself mentioned "Guns, Germs & Steel" in Wizard, so that might be next.
I listened to them as audiobooks, by the way. WEIRD comes with a lot of supporting graphs, which are included in audible as a companion PDF, but some readers might be annoyed (it is not handled very well, should be integrated with audio timeline somehow).
"Changed your life" usually has bigger implications, but...I do wish more people had/would read the original Sherlock Holmes stories. Genre-founding works like that are excellent calibration for evaluating the descendent corpus. Or even just lodestones, like Le Guin's "The Left Hand of Darkness" for scifi. It's not that all modern derivatives are worse, or bad, or pale shadows of the greats (though many are...). But cultivating good taste, historical context, and an appreciation of ambitious projects feels increasingly important as the rate of #content generation increases exponentially. (Relevant for generative AI too - knowing key clusters in conceptspace of the training data helps one make sense of the muddle, I feel.)
In terms of actual emotional impact, I'm tempted to name a number of visual novels that hit me hard, but I also notice a deep sense of embarrassment over such tastes. "That's not a *real* book for Serious People..."
One of the problems with genre-founding works, though, is they often lack the full clarity and execution that gets developed in later imitations. The Sherlock Holmes stories are presented as mysteries, but many of them lack the distinctive feature of a mystery: enough information is provided to the reader to solve it him/her-self. Frequently Holmes pulls the solution out of the air, based on investigations he did off-page, the results of which weren't revealed to the reader.
Thr Agatha Christie stories of a few decades later stick to that central rule, which makes them potentially more satisfying to many people. On the other hand, the Holmes stories are far more intelligent and realistic; the Christie ones often involve absurdly convoluted solutions that nobody could possibly figure out.
"Frequently Holmes pulls the solution out of the air, based on investigations he did off-page, the results of which weren't revealed to the reader."
Sometimes. I still remember the shock of satisfaction when, in the middle of the initial discussion with a client, I went "the bad guy is so-and-so" and it turned out I was right. He put all the information there from the start.
Yes some of them definitely do observe (what would become) the central rule of a mystery. My memory is that's the exception though. I think the introduction to an edition of "Memoirs" pointed out that in only two of the stories was the culprit introduced early in the story long before being exposed. Of course, many of the stories deal mainly with "how" or "why" questions rather than "who", so that's not necessarily very important.
Incidentally, (with a spoiler warning) which one are referring to?
It was "A Case of Identity". It just hit me, as the client was telling her tale, who the person could be, and for once I was right 😀
Huh, that was literally the first or second that came to mind in the "some of them definitely do" category. Although the bit with the typewriter, although not essential, was only even brought up a few sentences before the reveal iirc. An Agatha Christie story would have had the typewriter stuff hinted at early on (though as I said above the actual solution in those stories is often hilariously contrived).
I liked "Knives Out" for that reason...enough tells that an alert <s>reader</s> viewer could figure out the ___dunnit bits before they got revealed (or sometimes before they even happen), but still an Intelligent Mystery with no deus ex machina bullshit. Other than Daniel Craig's ridiculous cowboy accent, which I will mock forever. But even for a passive disinterested watcher, it's not such a complicated tale that one can't have fun without metaphorically putting on the deerhunter cap. Feels like such art gets rarer as time goes on, with well-defined brow height spheres that largely don't overlap. Though of course, elites will always spill ink claiming that Trite Schlock 2: Electric Boogaloo is Acktually a really deep analysis of [culture war issue] or whatever.
A decent percentage of typical high school English reading lists has that "lacks clarity" problem. Like I'm not sure there's a good reason to subject students to Catcher In The Rye anymore...surely one could pick a better stream-of-consciousness internal narrative story. I often wonder if being made to "pay homage" to actually-not-very-good literature is a big part of why I didn't end up an English major/starving writer/whatever.
The original Sherlock Holmes stories are fantastic!
I secod the request for visual novel recommendations.
Please swallow your misguided embarrassment :) (I mean this in a gentle way) and tell us your favorite visual novels.
I haven't read many, but I remember two that were kind of "life changing" in a small way, if not just changing my perception of "visual novels". Can't remember the names though.
One was a wordless fantasy immigration tale, that was obviously inspired by something like eastern europe/soviet union-style oppression and dark mood, emigrating to a diverse land of wonders and opportunity that feels like an idealized version of the USA between the world wars.
The second one was an, I think rather famous, supervillain comic, in a world where the villains have won out of the superheros. The son of the prime supervillain "comes of age" and has to take his fathers place after his premature death. He is introduced to the secret society of villains, turns out to be super rich and gets to do whatever he wants. That includes of course killing, stealing and raping Hollywood superstars without repercussions, any news repressed by the control of the secret supervillain society. It is not just a nice deconstruction of the genre, but certainly an interesting commentary on real life. And the "forbidden" rawness of the crime and villainy, together with the humoristic vibe was just great.
Boring pedestrian choices that got adapted into much more successful anime, videogames, and sundry spin-offs: the actual original VNs for Tsukihime and Fate/stay night. A lot of the meandering philosophical/ethics stuff got cut, since that doesn't compress well*...worth learning how to install Japan region-locked .ISOs. (The sequel VNs were interesting but not as good, imo.)
CHAOS;HEAD was a really good version of...that kind of psychological horror story. Sadly the anime sucked and it had a notoriously shitty "crack", so it's even more inaccessible. I think one can __kind of__ get the same experience from The House in Fata Morgana, which is cheaply available as an ordinary Steam game...they're different stories in many ways, but the creeping transformation of the mundane into terror is great in both. I'm kind of a sucker for Urobutcher-type stuff, heh.
G-Senjou no Maou is what I wanted "Fight Club" to be. (The book, didn't even bother with the moive.) That type of story, just...done much better, I think. And less intentionally provocative/#edgy. Anyone who watched Psycho-Pass would probably notice similar themes.
Infohazardous: Saya no Uta somehow managed to become recurring-nightmare material for me. (Horror as a genre mostly doesn't affect me.) I'm not sure why, it's not "objectively" super scary or anything, but...dunno. Just the way it's presented is arrrrrgh. Not ever gonna be able to purge from memory banks, to my great frustration and despair.
Controversial pick: Sengoku Rance. Don't judge me, there's a lot of cool stuff beneath the ecchi cover (and the ero stuff can be disabled). One of my first experiences with the "genre-savvy" trope that shows up so much in ratfic, which I've come to love. Some stories are...serious about not taking themselves seriously, and it's really freeing to have an absurd but smart narrative. Surprising number of neat historical what the refrances, if one is into Japanese history. Actual gameplay and soundtrack is great too, one of my favourite wargames.
(Also controversial: I hate Clannad.)
*although the doujin tactical RPG Battle Moon Wars was fucking incredible
ok that at least sounds a lot weirder than I expected :) I will give it a try.
Just on Fight Club: The movie is much better, even the book's author said so. In the foreword of the book version that I have he even warned the reader to probably rather go see the movie (if I recall correctly).
Is that so? Suppose I'll give it a try then, it's something I "want to [have] like[d]". People do keep asking about the giant Fight Club moive poster hanging up in our apartment, and I have to be like no I've never seen it, it came with the house...
My prior on any "book translated to film" is that it'll be at best an interesting reinterpretation; will be pleasantly surprised to find something where it's clearly better on-screen. Very different mediums...I'm not a fan of "hot" media in general (in the McLuhan sense).
I agree, most book adaptations are subpar. Notable exceptions have been Fight Club and Bourne Identity (the latter's book was so bad, I couldn't even finish half).
But I've mostly lost interest in movies in the meantime. I'd like to catch up on some alltime classics like "Das Boot", but that's it. I can rarely find the time or nerve to sit down for such a long time doing nothing but watching. These days I'd rather watch birds, waves or clouds.
Interesting how things can change.
Knew I'd seen the second one through Lost in Adaptation. It's the comic book version of Wanted. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iCCWvmktwiw
Is that first one you mention "The Arrival", by Shaun Tan, by any chance?
Yes! Thanks :)
No single book that I've ever read has meant anything to me apart from the synergy it had with three or six or ten other books that I had already integrated. Whenever I make an effort to think about suggesting books for people to read, I am overcome, first by weariness and then by despair. I end in solipsistic mutterings.
Oh, please see my other comment above! I wrote about the three books I recently read back-to-back and I can totally understand you. It is it the first time that I recognize something like a "series" between books and I would love your suggestions :)
What are the six or ten other books?
Each of the six has another six like the branches of a great tree. The meanings we make of a book or a chapter or a paragraph or a single sentence, are knots of a hundred strands.
Someone mentioned LeGuin. What would I have made of the works of Carl Jung as an adult had I not encountered A Wizard of Earthsea as a child? While I could recommend those and all the books I read in between, I cannot put into a man's heart the questions that plagued me when I was 10 and wrestled with my own shadow.
It didn't exactly "change my life", but Deep Work by Cal Newport made me understand how to focus and enter the "flow" state much better than ever before.
Cal's work has been extremely influential in my life as well. I discovered his blog "Study Hacks" very early in life, when I was still a student, and it was like I had struck gold on the Internet. Good ol' days!
Your recent discussion of what counts as a mental illness made me realize the term "pedophilia" is a classic motte-and-bailey: raping babies bad = motte, sex with seventeen year olds bad = bailey.
the problem is, when you start justifying that a thirty year old can have consensual sex with a seventeen year old, and point out that in other places the age of consent is sixteen or lower, then eventually you get to the point of having to defend, or at least tolerate, the baby-rapers.
Because if your argument holds for "why eighteen over seventeen?", it also holds for "why seventeen over sixteen? why sixteen over fifteen?" And if it holds for an age difference of thirteen years, why not twenty years? thirty years? Look at all the famous May-December marriages which were happy!
this happened with gay rights activism in the UK, where the not-unreasonable request was to lower the age of homosexual consent to that of heterosexual consent. Unluckily, the campaign involved things like "the age of consent is ten in Hungary".
Now, did that mean the gays rights lot were defending people who had sex, or wanted to have sex, with ten year olds? No, but it was sure damn convenient for those people, and led to unfortunate entanglements which then had to be disentangled:
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/2086634/
https://opensiuc.lib.siu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1494&context=gs_rp
https://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-26352378
Why doesn't this reasoning apply to whatever limits you support?
The limits I support are "will somebody have the guts to tell people like the below that 'no, you're not transgender, you're a lunatic'?"
https://meaww.com/who-is-vivian-shemansky-portland-trans-activist-allegedly-defecates-in-wrecks-transphopic-teens-car-arrested
If you're asking me "why does this reasoning not apply to 'don't smash the windows of a car and shit inside it so badly it has to be towed as a biohazard'", then I can't give you an answer on that one, my friend, save that are we really gone so far downhill?
One obvious place to draw a line is puberty. That's where the most relevant line was drawn in Rabbinic law, and I suspect some other systems.
That's an utterly ridiculous claim. It is exactly parallel to saying that if I say a speed limit of 70 MPH is a bit low, 71 would be better, then I am locked in to agreeing that 72 is hardly more than 72, then 73, 74, ... and I have logically commited myself to McLarens doing 300 MPH on the M6 when I have done nothing of the sort. For any scale on which there is a too much or a too little, there's a gray area in the middle. It is not a slippery slope because we can define points quite close to the grey area, which are outwith its bounds, even if we can't exactly stipulate the bounds. One drink is not enough, a thousand is too many. the actual bounds are minimum 3, maximum 4 (assuming we are talking pre-dinner drinks) but I can say Ok, 5 at a stretch BUT ALSO 8 is definitely too many, so where's your grey area argument now?
Also, I think your argument rules out sexual intercourse altogether? If 13 is too young, there's nothing magic about a 14th birthday which makes any relevant difference. So if 14, therefore 15 ...
We have to draw a line somewhere, and agreed that the line is arbitrary. But yeah, as soon as well-intentioned people start blurring that line, the reasoning does become "if 17, why not 15? if 15, why not 12?"
I've seen it, and we've had somebody on here and definitely over on The Motte arguing about the enslavement of teenagers, that 15 year olds should be considered legal adults and given all the rights of such, and they wrote their own self-published book about the entire topic (including arguing for maturity from Classical Rome where 12 year old girls could marry and were often married to men older than them).
They also had some unpleasant fanfiction about their fantasies of compulsory rape and impregnation of young teenagers, and I'm not going to burden my memory with any more of that highly unpleasant violent fantasy than I need to do.
So my entire point is that the well-meaning are going to be used by the ill-intentioned, who know damn well not to jump straight in with "Five year olds are sexual beings who are capable of consenting to and indeed initiating sex with an adult" (a view that was shared in the past among the 'respectable' baby-rapers who create organisations like PIE and NAMBLA and now, I think, something called B4U-ACT) but start off with " in law a 'minor' can be 17 years and 11 months old, is it really fair to stigmatise someone as a sex offender and paedophile if they're a few years older and the 'minor' is just under the legal age? are we saying 17 year olds don't have sex and can't consent to sex?"
But once you strip away the PR veneer, the reality beneath is less tidy:
https://www.b4uact.org/know-the-facts/
"Preferential attraction to infants and toddlers has been termed nepiophilia; to prepubescent children, pedophilia; and to pubertal adolescents, hebephilia (Ames & Houston, 1990; Feierman, 1990; Okami & Goldberg, 1992; Seto, 2016). Together, these constitute the umbrella term of minor attraction."
Once your advocacy organisation is including "preferential attraction to infants and toddlers", I'm gonna call you baby-rapers and I don't care how much finger-wagging this attracts from the Nicey-Nicey Liberals on here.
And *this* is what I mean by "using the tool box of previous activism" and "using the well-intentioned as useful idiots":
"No one chooses to be emotionally and sexually attracted to children or adolescents. The cause is unknown; in fact, the development of attraction to adults is not understood. A large number of theories involving hormonal influences, genetics, evolutionary processes, socialization, parental relationships, and childhood sexual experiences have been proposed, but most have not been tested scientifically. Studies also normally use samples of persons convicted of sex crimes, making it difficult to generalize results to the non-forensic population, and measure correlational, rather than causal, relationships. Evidence for heritability seems scant at best (Alanko et al., 2013). Current research has largely been done in the field of neuropsychology: Several studies implicate structural and functional differences in parts of the brain that may lead to a preferential attraction to children (Tenbergen et al., 2015), while others suggest childhood head traumas (Blanchard et al., 2003), but causation in the general population has not been established. There is no evidence to support the common belief that attraction to children or adolescents in adulthood is due to sexual activity with an adult during childhood (Freund & Kuban, 1993; Garland & Dougher, 1990; Hall, 1996; Li, 1990a; Bailey, Bernhard, & Hsu, 2016).
...Reducing or eliminating attraction to children or adolescents is often attempted through reconditioning methods such as aversion therapy and masturbatory satiation (Beech & Harkins, 2012), developed in the 1930s to eliminate homosexuality. The goal is to associate sexual attraction with boredom, revulsion, fear, shame, or physical pain. Sex-drive reducing drugs may also be administered (AACAP, 1999; Abel & Harlow, 2001; Crawford, 1981; Hall, 1996; Langevin, 1983; Maletzky, 1991)."
You see? Disapproval of people sexually and romantically attracted to "children and pubescent adolescents" (and note the nice distinction there between children and pubescent, which means - given that age of puberty has been decreasing - if attracted to those pre-puberty, we're talking about 12 years old and under) is just exactly the same as the discrimination against homosexuality, and you're not one of the nasty bigots, are you? You don't think being gay is wrong and immoral and sinful? So you should extend the same understanding to us! We're born that way, just like being LGBT!
> We have to draw a line somewhere, and agreed that the line is arbitrary.
Disagree that a single line is optimal - I think that teenagers should probably be able to legally consent to sex with other teenagers at a lower age than they can consent to sex with 50-year-olds.
> But yeah, as soon as well-intentioned people start blurring that line, the reasoning does become "if 17, why not 15? if 15, why not 12?"
Yes! Yes, those are excellent questions, that should be asked and answered, not just posed as though they're unanswerable!
The shape of the answer is that we're trading off harms. On the one hand:
:- Teenagers having technically-consensual sex without really understanding what they're consenting to, and either hating it at the time or regretting it later
:- Teenagers being pressured into sex they don't want.
:- Teens having consensual sex, loving it, and ending up pregnant with STDs
etc
vs on the other
:- Teens engaging in more high-risk sexual behaviours than they would otherwise because they need to conceal them from adults.
:- People having consensual sex, being prosecuted for it and having their lives ruined.
:- People not being allowed to enjoy sex they want
:- In the reductio ad absurdam, pre-menopausal women are barred from sex and the species goes extinct.
etc.
How to balance those harms is tricky - I think the optimum solution would be something along the lines of
:- 14 year olds aren't allowed to have sex, but if a 14-year-old willingly has sex with someone up to two years older than them it's not treated as that big a legal deal.
:- 15 to 17 year-olds can have sex with anyone up to, say, two or three (at 15) to six or eight (at 17) years older than them with the consent of a parent or guardian (possibly require permission from a trained professional, e.g. a social worker or school nurse, as well as/instead of parents?).
:- 18 year olds can have sex with anyone they choose.
The precise optimal numbers are obviously debatable, but I think that a line-in-the-sand "yesterday if you slept with your contemporary significant other it was rape and would be prosecuted as such, today you're fair game for anyone who can emotionally blackmail you into saying the word yes, and the line is in the same place regardless of how emotionally mature you are" is not a good way to handle legal recognition of consent to sex.
"Yes! Yes, those are excellent questions, that should be asked and answered, not just posed as though they're unanswerable!"
I agree on that, because I do think there is a difference between 16 year old having sex with an 18 year old or a 14 year old having sex with a 16 year old that is not the same as 17 year old having sex with a 30 year old.
My own view is that if you start having sex at 14, it is probably a less desirable outcome than if you wait until you're older, but we can let the social sciences studies fight that one out:
https://www.esri.ie/publications/regret-about-the-timing-of-first-sexual-intercourse-the-role-of-age-and-context
(An Irish study, purely by coincidence!)
https://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/251640
"Data was collected from the National Longitudinal Study on Adolescent Health to examine1659 pairs of same sex siblings who were studied from around the ages of 16 to 29 (adolescence to young adulthood). The individuals were put into 3 categories based on the timing they first participated in sexual intercourse; Early (younger than 15), On-Time (ages 15 to 19), and Late (older than 19).
Harden discovered that later involvement in sexual activity was linked to higher attainment of goals educationally, as well as more income during adult years, than those in the Early and On-Time groups. Also, later involvement in sexuality resulted in lower chances of marriage and these individuals did not have as many romantic partners during adulthood as the Early and On-Time groups."
Those two and a few more are "better to wait", versus the below which is "hell yeah the earlier the better!:
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/35858902/
"Results: When defined narrowly as first sexual intercourse, earlier sexual debut was associated with adverse sexual events, including non-volitional sex, pregnancy termination and/or loss, and reproductive illness, infection, or injury affecting sexual activity. However, it was also related to healthier sexual function, including less pain during vaginal penetration, better orgasmic functioning, and lower sexual inhibition. When sexual debut was broadened to include pre-coital experiences, earlier sexual contact, like earlier sexual intercourse, was associated with non-volitional sex. However, earlier sexual stimulation and orgasm were unrelated to adverse outcomes. Rather, these related to fewer sexual desire difficulties, and greater sexual excitation. Exploratory mediation analyses revealed later sexual intercourse and orgasm were connected to sexual difficulties through higher sexual inhibition and lower sexual excitation, respectively."
The problem is, as I see it, that well-meaning people look at the difficulties around secrecy, statutory rape prosecutions, and risk-taking and want to ameliorate those by reducing penalties for earlier age sex. And that is not necessarily wrong!
But (there's always a "but", isn't there?) the *other* problem is that there are people with an agenda and they will sidle in alongside the well-meaning and go "yeah, absolutely, we should treat young people as the responsible sexual beings they are" and be pushing for age of consent reductions and/or doing away with statutory rape. And quietly upping the age limit for the other partner. Is it *really* so bad if a 16 year old has a 21 year old boyfriend? Aren't you running the risk, dear parents, of forcing your kid to hide their relationship from you and so you don't know about it and can't protect them from possible coercion/emotional abuse?
Apart from the out-and-out paedophiles, there are (I'm going to say it) creepy people who do want to normalise adults having romantic and sexual relationships with teenagers.
I know the counter-example is Emmanuel Macron, whose married with kids teacher took up with him and despite his parents' efforts, they ended up together:
"Macron is married to Brigitte Trogneux, 24 years his senior, and his former La Providence high school teacher in Amiens. They met during a theatre workshop that she was giving when he was a 15-year-old student and she was a 39-year-old teacher, but they only became a couple once he was 18. His parents initially attempted to separate the couple by sending him away to Paris to finish the final year of his schooling, as they felt his youth made this relationship inappropriate. However, the couple reunited after Macron graduated, and were married in 2007. She has three children from a previous marriage; he has no children of his own."
Just to put that in context, his oldest stepchild is two years older than him, the second was born in the same year, and the youngest is seven years younger. So his teacher had two kids aged 17 and 15 (and one aged 8) when they met when he was 15. You can see why his parents didn't approve, even when he was 18:
"Brigitte was once married to André-Louis Auzièr, with whom she shares three children: Sébastien Auzière (born 1975), Laurence Auzière-Jourdan (born 1977), and Tiphaine Auzière (born 1984). Laurence was a classmate of her now-stepfather, Emmanuel."
"But that turned out great!" Yes, but people weren't so approving when it was Roy Moore looking for highschoolers as potential spouses:
"In November 2017, during Moore's U.S. Senate campaign, nine women accused him of inappropriate sexual or social conduct. Three of the women said they had been sexually assaulted by Moore when they were aged 14, 16, and 28. The other six described him pursuing a romantic relationship with them while he was in his 30s and they were as young as 16, but said there had not been any inappropriate sexual contact. Moore denied the sexual assault allegations, but did not dispute that he had approached or dated teenagers over the age of 16 (the age of consent in Alabama). Independent witnesses confirmed that Moore had a reputation for approaching teenage girls, often at a local mall, and asking them out.
Moore first saw his future wife, Kayla Kisor, when she was in her mid-teens performing at a dance recital. Moore was 31 at the time. In his 2005 autobiography, Moore described his reaction, writing: "I knew Kayla was going to be a special person in my life." In 1984, Moore and Kayla Kisor Heald met again at a Christmas party, but she was then a married mother. She filed for divorce from her first husband on December 28, 1984, and was divorced on April 19, 1985. Roy Moore married Kayla on December 14, 1985. He was 38; she was 24. They have four adult children."
Is that creepy or potentially paedophilic behaviour? What about the 18th century German poet, Novalis?
"While working for Just in 1795, Novalis met the 12-year-old Sophie von Kühn, who at that time was considered old enough to receive suitors. He became infatuated with her on their first meeting, and the effect of this infatuation appeared to transform his personality. In 1795, two days before Sophie turned thirteen they got secretly engaged. Later that year Sophie's parents gave their consent for the two to become engaged. Novalis's brother Erasmus supported the couple, but the rest of Novalis's family resisted agreeing to the engagement due to Sophie's unclear aristocratic pedigree."
Novalis would have been 23 when he met and "became infatuated" with a 12 year old. Again - creepy or acceptable by the mores of the time? If we're condemning Moore (and boy did he get a lot of condemnation), we must also condemn Novalis and Mme. Auzière.
It's a complicated question and we can't just let politics be the deciding factor in "do we excuse A but condemn B".
That's why I think, even if the lines are arbitrary, we have to pick one and stick very hard on "no exceptions" because softening and blurring does lead to "well why not 12?" (list of historical examples follows) by interested parties who are more interested in access to young sexual partners than liberation or updating laws or modern mores.
It is about balancing harms, you are totally right there.
The issue here is that we're not writing laws from first principles. There's an existing long-established schelling point of 16, which is the law in most places (only a few US states have 18, but one of them is California, which means everyone thinks that's the law everywhere thanks to Hollywood). The context of slippery slopes is when people are arguing to *lower* the age from its current.
Now, what I do support (and what I think only an insane authoritarian could oppose) is mandatory close-in-age exceptions, which seem to only exist in about half of all jurisdictions. Having a law that says two 15-year-olds having sex are "raping" each other is (1) making a mockery of law itself and causing everyone to lose respect for it, (2) making a mockery of the word "rape" and causing some to take *actual* rape less seriously, (3) an insult to children, deeming them somehow mentally challenged and in need of laws protecting them from themselves, and (4) an insult to the rule of law, having insane laws that aren't meant to ever be actually enforced, but *can* be enforced if some police or judge decides they want to for some ulterior reason. Shame on anyone who doesn't support fixing this.
But in a discussion like this, people are talking about just lowering the age, and I'd ask why? What possible benefit comes from this? Because the only "benefit" I can see is that mature adults can have sex with younger teenagers. And if that's the motivation for making this argument, it's fucking terrifying.
Ironically, many, if not most, state laws do not label consensual sex with a person under the age of consent as "rape." California, for example, labels it "unlawful sexual intercourse."
Fair point, though if "two 15-year-olds" is still in the same legal category as "a 50-year-old and a 15-year-old" there is still a major problem with the sanity and legitimacy of the law.
Well, I am pretty sure that most states have "Romeo and Juliet" provisions of one kind or another where the couple are close in age, either making it legal or making it a misdemeanor.
The "discussion like this" is a meta discussion about motte and bailey arguments - look at the head post - and I am keeping it on that level. I am happy with 16, at age 60 odd I have no intention of pushing that boundary by at least a couple of decades.
And frankly, you are doing it. Your final paragraph is an insinuation of bad faith on my part when I might, but haven't, have perfectly good faith and non-self-interested arguments for 15. Where there's a motte and bailey argument, fine, expose it, but don't go further and assume that every argument with which you disagree is a motte whose inhabitants propose to erect a bailey under cover of dark at the first opportunity. 15 does not really mean babies, any more than raising the speed limit to 100 really means 1,000.
Age of consent has been a mess. If we take it to be "from when puberty begins", that gives us a range anywhere from 10 to 14 years of age (age of onset of puberty seems to be getting lower in modern times, while it was higher earlier on).
Traditional ages range from about 12 for girls, as per David Friedman says in Rabbinical law and when bar mitzvah for boys happens, and for Classical Roman times, and when mediaeval marriages for royalty and nobility happened - see Shakespeare for 'early modern times' in "Romeo and Juliet" when Juliet's parents are arguing that 14 is plenty old enough for her to get married, since her mother was married and pregnant at that age:
"Nurse: Faith, I can tell her age unto an hour.
Lady Capulet: She's not fourteen.
Nurse: I'll lay fourteen of my teeth — and yet, to my teen be it spoken, I have but four — she is not fourteen. How long is it now to Lammas-tide?
Lady Capulet: A fortnight and odd days.
Nurse: Even or odd, of all days in the year,
Come Lammas-eve at night shall she be fourteen.
...Lady Capulet: Well, think of marriage now. Younger than you
Here in Verona, ladies of esteem,
Are made already mothers. By my count,
I was your mother much upon these years
That you are now a maid. Thus then in brief,
The valiant Paris seeks you for his love."
So if girls are now starting puberty at ages 10-12, I think we'd agree that even if they are physically mature, they're not mature in other ways and should not be having sex.
But the self-interested will make arguments from history that girls of 12 were married to older men, so plainly it's not impossible for young women of that age to be sexual. There's already the argument that the harm done by paedophilia is down to the social stigma and not the sexual relationship itself.
Whatever about an upper bound (and while I think the older legal age of majority at 21 was better, since you are still not fully developed at 18, and I think the arguments about 25 year old women being 'groomed' are nonsense), I think it is indisputable that there has to be a lower bound.
But that is precisely what is getting disputed. If some people are happy to push for, say, voting age to be lowered to 16 - well then, 16 year olds are mature, right? So they can consent to sexual relationships, right?
I mean, I've *seen* people arguing the "why 18 and not 17? why not 15?" in good faith about making sex legal and not even statutory rape, and these are not people who are trying to whitewash paedophilia and get the public accustomed to "minors aren't minors" for their own agenda.
And that's what I'm talking about - *unless* we hold firm on "nope, sorry, 16 or over" then it will get mushy, and the well-meaning will help make it mushy, and then some son-of-a-bitch will argue he never raped that 12 year old, it was all consensual and she seduced him.
Oh, wait: they're *already* doing that. Slippery slopes are real, don't help give a push downhill!
I did not say babies, I said younger teenagers...which is literally what 15 instead of 16 is. And I did not refer to you, or to anyone else in this thread, but merely to people in general (you know, out in the world, not right here) who want to lower the age (which I don't think anyone in this thread has outright said). AND I did not accuse those who do support that of wanting to have sex with teenagers themselves (though I can see how it might have seemed so). What I find terrifying is *the desire of 40-year-olds to have sex with 15-year-olds* being considered a benefit or reason to lower the age (even in a non-self-centered analysis). And if that's not considered a reason, then I'm asking what *is*?
I can see how you might have thought I was atracking you so I'm sorry for that, even though I wasn't. BUT there's a problem I have with discussions like this that get close to breaking taboos (not fake taboos like being an atheist or being anti-woke; real taboos that the vast majority of people support and that have very, very good reasons for existing): the people questioning age-of-consent aren't expected to be careful not to even sound like they're defending paedophilia, but the people expressing revulsion at the idea *are* expected to not sound like they're insinuating bad faith. It creates a lopsided discussion.
Chill. I am not offended about anything, nor I hope are you.
But you said: "But in a discussion like this, people are talking about just lowering the age, and I'd ask why? What possible benefit comes from this? Because the only "benefit" I can see is that mature adults can have sex with younger teenagers. And if that's the motivation for making this argument, it's fucking terrifying." And the answer is, there's a ton of potential legitimate benefits: say I believe that puberty now occurs at least one year younger than when the 16 limit was set, and that lowering it would make 15-16 year olds more ready to seek help with contraception and STDs, those are perfectly good non-terrifying reasons for wanting the age limit lowered.
But I am getting Englishman-in-New-York syndrome again. I just don't understand "fake taboos like atheism" at all. Not my culture war.
> What possible benefit comes from this? Because the only "benefit" I can see is that mature adults can have sex with younger teenagers.
Focusing on the word "only": Why isn't "legalize literal baby rape" a possible end motive to ascribe to those who are pushing to lower the age of consent? I certainly understand that we can dearly hope that such legalization proponents "just" want to have sex with younger teenagers, because as bad as that is it's better than the alternative motive. But I don't see how that hope is founded in evidence, and certainly not so much that the alternative should be dismissed out of hand. It's a disservice to victims to pretend it doesn't happen.
I think I too once assumed that literal baby rape was an unrealistic concern, but some of the serious discussion people had around the Balenciaga scandal opened my eyes that there's a very dark world out there. (In particular, the information about the black eyes as depicted in the Balenciaga material being a known symptom and symbol of rape. Granted, for obvious reasons I did not do too much validation of the claims, but they were stated plausibly and seriously enough that I chose to adjust my priors accordingly.)
There are genuinely sickening and disgusting criminal cases of men raping literal babies.
There are people like that out there.
But even if we're 'only' talking about people who want to fuck 10 year olds, I'm still not going to find myself abashed to be scolded for referring to the entire movement as "baby rapers".
Oh, you don't like the idea that your thought experiment about age of consent and when people become sexual beings leaves you open to the accusation of being pro-baby rape?
Then it's on *you* not to sound like "yeah I'm in the bag for the baby rape movement", not me.
>Because if your argument holds for "why eighteen over seventeen?", it also holds for "why seventeen over sixteen? why sixteen over fifteen?"<
There's an easy stopping point at puberty, and there's health arguments for making it (number) years after puberty. The slippery slope has a hard plateau partway down.
I don't see how you have to defend either one to acknowledge that they aren't the same thing.
> Unluckily, the campaign involved things like "the age of consent is ten in Hungary".
Wait, is that true ? The age of consent in Hungary is 10 ? That is insane.
I don't know if it still is, but I do remember that being one of the talking points.
Historically, ages of consent were all over the place. In England, it used to be 12 for girls, until a big moral campaign got it changed, based in part on poor families pimping out their young daughters, and if the guys were brought to court on rape charges, they'd do the "she consented, he said/she said" bit and since 12-13 was legal, there you go.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Maiden_Tribute_of_Modern_Babylon
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eliza_Armstrong_case
"Although the age of consent was raised to 13 when amendments to the Offences against the Person Act 1861 were made in 1875, the movement sought to further raise this to at least 16, but Parliament was reluctant to make this change.
...With the help of Josephine Butler and Bramwell Booth of the Salvation Army, Stead got in touch with Rebecca Jarrett, a reformed prostitute and brothel-keeper who was staying with Mrs Butler in Winchester as an assistant. Although Mrs Butler had no problem with Rebecca's meeting Stead, she did not know Stead's reason for doing so.
Stead prevailed upon Jarrett to help him to show that a 13-year-old girl could be bought from her parents and transported to the Continent. Despite her reluctance about returning to her old brothel contacts for help, Jarrett agreed to help.
Rebecca Jarrett met an old associate, a procuress called Nancy Broughton. Through her Jarrett learned of a 13-year-old named Eliza Armstrong, whose alcoholic mother Elizabeth was in need of money. She arranged for Jarrett to meet Mrs Armstrong, who lived in the Lisson Grove area of West London, and although Rebecca told the mother the girl was to serve as a maid to an old gentleman, she believed Mrs Armstrong understood that she was selling her daughter into prostitution. The mother agreed to sell her daughter for a total of £5 (equivalent to £574.57 in 2021). On 3 June, the bargain was made.
On the same day, Jarrett then took Eliza to a midwife and abortionist named Louise Mourez, who examined her and attested to her virginity and sold Jarrett a bottle of chloroform. Then Eliza was taken to a brothel and lightly drugged to await the arrival of her purchaser, who was Stead. Stead, anxious to play the part of libertine almost in full, drank a whole bottle of champagne, although he was a teetotaler. He entered Eliza's room and waited for her to awaken from her stupor. When she came to, Eliza screamed. Stead quickly left the room, letting the scream imply he had "had his way" with her. Eliza was quickly handed over to Bramwell Booth, who spirited her to France, where she was taken care of by a Salvationist family.
In the meantime, Stead wrote his story."
That's why the whole "slippery slope is a fallacy" thing doesn't wash with me. Go look at historical circumstances, see why laws changed as they did, and then come back and tell me there's no such thing as the slippery slope.
Somebody will *always* try to take advantages of loopholes.
> Somebody will always try to take advantages of loopholes.
While that's true, as @Robert Leigh points out above, this argument goes both ways -- if the slippery slope goes in both directions, then you're essentially advocating for no one having sex ever. I mean, I understand that the Apostle Paul might be on board with such a move, but still, it's going to be pretty hard to "be fruitful and multiply" with such an attitude :-)
I think any law based on age will inherently have an arbitrary bright-line cutoff. But in terms of "carving reality at the joints" I do see a real difference between pre-pubescents and post-pubescents. But the age of puberty isn't a constant and depends on things like nutrition.
"eventually you get to the point of having to defend, or at least tolerate, the baby-rapers."
See, this is one of the few times that the slippery slope is actually a fallacy. Because it's either eliding the whole "rape" thing or obfuscating it by declaring which forms of consent are valid.
I keep being told the slippery slope is a fallacy when it comes to X, Y or Z.
Then I see X, Y or Z happening in reality exactly the way the "slippery slope" forecast.
So pardon me if I'm not that impressed by having "A is a fallacy" trotted out one more time.
I know that as a general rule (not specific to all states) in the USA the age of consent is about eighteen. I've seen people, of this parish, defending "well if a mature 15 year old decides they want consensual sex, why invoke statutory rape?" and "you can have immature 18 year olds and mature 15 year olds".
I've never seen any corresponding upper limit to the age of the other partner suggested. Sure, Romeo and Juliet laws so long as there's only a couple of years difference. People may feel uncomfortable with 21 year old and 16 year old, but they'll accept it.
But if fifteen, why not your partner be 20? 30? 50? After all, if you're mature enough... why does the age of the other person matter that much? You can be manipulated by a 20 year old, and consensually and voluntarily in love with a 50 year old.
That's where the slippery slope comes in, and that's where the true paedophiles (because we're not really talking about ephebophiles) come in to use liberals as stalking horses.
I was specifically referring to the bit I quoted, because at no point does pushing the age back to you justify crossing the line of actual consent. Babies, the comatose etc. really can't give consent.
We do not typically permit 16 or 17-year-olds from signing binding contracts, based on the theory that they cannot provide consent in a legal sense. I don't see how we can talk about this subject without acknowledging this fact.
Only certain kinds of contracts. Excluding the whole "driving" thing in which a sub-18 year old can own, register with the state, and enter into an insurance contract about a vehicle, short-term/immediate exchanges are (or at least were -- it's been a while since I was under 18) not barred in the least.
What's consent? That's a vexed question today.
Attacking age of consent is the first step. Push it lower and lower - after all, if you're going to teach 12 year olds/10 year olds/8 year olds about sex and gender, you're presuming they're able to understand the concepts.
Then go after the notion that children are sexless. No, children are sexual beings, and if you feel icky about that, well we've long established that the disgust reaction is no index for moral or social judgements around sex. (Insert here the studies about liberals versus conservatives and how liberals have much weaker disgust reactions, and how opposition to LGBT rights was disgust-based and come on, *you* don't think being gay is disgusting, now do you?)
Change the language. "Paedophile" is so stigmatising, say "Minor Attracted Person" instead.
Use the toolbox of the last struggle. "They can't help it, it's not a choice, they were born this way".
"Babies can't consent? Well nobody is talking about *babies*, of course not!" Use No True Scotsman there, and if "it never happens" does happen, sweep it under the carpet or deny it. "That person was not a MAP, they were just a sick, perverted freak!"
Keep tip-toeing right up to the line, then push the line a leeetle bit further back, then another leeetle bit, then....
Until you either get what you want, or the public wakes up and the backlash drives you back to try again in another 10/20/30 years time.
What are you referring to? I don't see this happening at all, if anything there's a pretty strong cultural push towards demonizing men who go after legal (but still young-ish) women. That and the general legislative trend of shoring up age of consent laws, where they fall short 18.
For sure there are some crypto-paedos in liberal academia, but I don't think they wield any sort of real power or are shifting the needle in that direction
1. I wasn't sexless as a child (sample of 1, obv, but I apply the principle of mediocrity to myself)
2. I am in the happy position of being attracted to opposite sex adults. Winner in the lottery of life. I cannot imagine turning to paedophilia if I were me, but just with added EVIL. I don't believe it is a choice. Whether to act on an attraction to children or not is obv very much a choice, but that's a different point.
3. I sense a theological angle here, probably a Roman Catholic one. If I'm right this is rather a mote/beam, own house in order kinda issue.
"What's consent? That's a vexed question today."
Then maybe that's a question worth investigating instead of inveghing.
""Babies can't consent? Well nobody is talking about *babies*, of course not!""
Well, except you LITERALLY did.
Stealing the life savings of a hundred million people is really bad. Stealing one cent is much less bad. So why do we call them both "theft"?
Sometimes categories are broad, ranging from the most heinous possible example you could possibly imagine to the most minimal possible edge case that could possibly fit the definition. That's just how words work.
This category is more akin to one like "murder and parking tickets."
That isn’t an interesting example as plenty of jurisdictions have different laws there and there’s a different term for attraction to teenagers which is ephebophilia.
What’s more interesting is whether we believe that teenagers are sexual or not.
In support of that position we have:
Early sex education in school targeted at young teenagers and even late pre teens. This assumes they will be having sex pretty soon.
Some countries educate teenagers on porn, rather than regulate it. (Which would be easily done with a credit card verification.)0
Many YA literature having sexual themes.
Against that:
Very strong laws and cultural taboos against sex with minors, where the age of majority is late teens.
"What’s more interesting is whether we believe that teenagers are sexual at all."
Having been twelve once, I can't see how this is even a question.
Well the laws don’t seem to agree.
Laws often express the moral wishes of the lawmaking caste.
Europeans handle it differently. There is different levels of "minority" if you will. So it is not illegal to have sex with a 17 year old if consensual. I do not know the exact numbers right now, but there is differentiation of responsibility and ability for consent (not just for sex, but also contracts, etc) with 13, 14, 16 and 18 years in Europe, sometimes depending on parental consent, sometimes not.
But that does not limit politicians to use pedophilia at every chance to justify expanding surveillance laws.
An aside: Right now in Germany, the laws regarding sexual offense have recently been made absolutely insane. Against the advice of every lawyer and expert commissions, the minimum penalty for "posession" of "child pornography" is punishable by at least 1 year in prison. This excludes possibility of parole.
Receiving a picture in a messenger, even in a group chat like in whatsapp, is "posession" by German law, because your phone has downloaded it. So even if you go to police after unwantingly receiving such a picture, police and public prosecutor are obliged to prosecute the case and you go to jail, and there is no recourse.
Now just a few days ago, a teacher heard of a case of "revenge porn" in school, asked for the video to confirm the allegations and then went to speak with parents and police. She unknowingly incriminated herself by getting the video on her phone (which was just a "sexy" selfie-video of a 13 year old girl that she made herself for her bf) and she might lose her civil servant status and officially become a "sex offender". This is obviously ridiculous, and politics is now moving to change the law while court and prosecutor are trying to stall the case in court until it is changed.
Another corollary of the current state of the law: If a 13 year old takes a naked selfie of his-/herself with her smartphone, she will turn into a punishable sex offender when she turns 14 because she is now in possession of child pornography.
In addition to this, in many places there are "small age difference" carve-outs. So e.g. 25-17 is illegal, but 20-17 isn't
If legislators weren't broadly innumerate, I'd have hope that something like the standard creepiness rule (cf. [obligatory xkcd](https://xkcd.com/314/)) could be enacted.
The close-in-age exceptions I've heard of have been something along the lines of "it's illegal if one of them is under a certain cutoff and the age gap is more than another cutoff", possibly with a third cutoff where the close-in-age exception no longer applies, which seems much better as a law than the XKCD version, which classifies relationships between two people who are clearly adults, one quite a bit older than the other (e.g. 27 and 41) as bad. That might arguably be creepy, but it definitely shouldn't count as statutory rape.
A law that forbids sex between two people where one is under 18 *and* the younger one is younger than half the age of the older one plus seven years would probably be not too bad, but it seems more complicated with little advantage.
"Xkcd rule or younger person >= 25" strikes me as a reasonable extension, given the idea that that's the age at which the brain is fully mature; far too much credit IMNSFHO is given to the judgement of 18-24 year olds.
A minor and tangential point, but something that's driving me insane: I really, really wish people would stop talking of the laws/policies "in Europe", "in the US" and so on, unless they REALLY mean "everywhere in Europe/US/wherever". Europe is a collection of several dozen countries. The US is a collection of fifty states, with many things (including age of consent in this case) being different in every state.
Not picking on you personally, almost everyone here does this and I can't stand it. It's a really sloppy thing to do compared to the usual high standards of precision and accuracy here.
Tangentially, my experience from hanging out on bicycling subreddits is that most Americans believe that Europe drives on the left. This is an area where generalisations about the US and Europe are actually accurate.
I understand the point, but sometimes the generalizations hold up quite well. I think two factors contribute to that:
- both USA and Europe have something akin of a "federal government" in either literally that or the European Council/Parliament and obligation of EU-member states to implement into national law what has been decided on EU-level. That serves to streamline certain boundary conditions of laws, etc.
- they are distinct cultural blocks when it comes to sexuality. You won't find any country "in Europe" that will have any semblance of the kind of reservations that the USA has in showing "titties on TV". This is just a stand-in for many related topics of how sexuality is moralized, used and debated in public.
Your point stands, but context is important. Accuracy is not an end in itself, if you lose the forest for the trees.
On your first point: the fact that some people may use "Europe" to mean "the EU" may be part of the problem here. (And again, this is not about your comment above; I'm reacting to a general trend of which yours is just the 10 millionth example).
On your second:
"You won't find any country "in Europe" that will have any semblance of the kind of reservations that the USA has in showing "titties on TV"."
Is this really a fact? Not a single country? I'll believe you if you're sure of that, but even in those eastern european countries with legal restrictions on promoting homosexuality, not a single one has a problem with nudity on TV?
I'm also not sure how you even measure this and would appreciate if at least, say, 1 in 10 of the comments of the form "in America they do x but in Europe they do y" had some actual concrete evidence for the claim. Instead of just "everyone knows this" style stereotyping which seems unbecoming of a rationalist blog.
On first point: The point is that even this distinction is often false. Switzerland and Norway are not part of the EU, but they are effectively indistinguishable from the EU regarding the topics we're discussing right now. That holds true for many other topics.
There is even a finer technical point: Even, for example, Switzerlands laws are in many instances streamlined with EU-law, especially when it comes to trade, product safety, certain tax laws, etc, simply because Switzerland cannot evade doing business and cooperating with the EU.
On second point: Yes it's a factoid I'm willing to bet on. Maybe some asshat-country has a few technicalities here and there that are mostly ignored. The point is that "Europe" is a cultural continuum despite its many state borders. That extends well into eastern Europe, because the Russian/Soviet occupation was just a short (yet powerful) disjunction, historically speaking.
For "a European mindset", it is even weird to conflate "nudity on TV" with "promoting homosexuality". What does one have to do with the other?
Having spent all my life in Europe I can tell you that the USA's weird behavior towards exposed titties is universally confusing to everyone here. It is simply not a "big deal" at all "in Europe" and therefore does not have the power to create any meaningful outrage.
Yes, this is all frustratingly anecdotal to someone far away. But having met loads of people from all over Europe and myself having grown up in two seemingly distinct European cultures, I am confident to say that the existence of genitalia is more of a source of joy than outrage over here.
I mean, I would think there's a fairly clear cultural inheritance from Europe to America on Christian and traditional social norms. So to say they're opposites now is to say the 20th century sexual revolution just spread through every part of Europe without any resistance anywhere, which seems unbelievable on its face.
Maybe nudity is different though. Come to think of it, my vague sense is it was quite normal in European art historically and maybe the prudishness only started in Victorian Britain, then spread to the US. Fine.
But you did specifically say nudity on TV was a stand in for sexuality in general. So that includes attitudes to homosexuality, and adultery, and prostitution, and other deviations from traditional morality. It seemed you were implying those are different as well, which to me looks false. America is known for its raunchy hookup culture in some of its prominant subcultures. Scandinavia is meanwhile as tough on prostiution, but just wraps it in a left-wing guise.
I think it was pretty clear, in context, that European countries have different laws.
Yes, thank you!
Could just be some kind of feedback loop between policy and signaling. Discouraging legal adults from having sex with legal minors is a reasonable thing for a society to attempt to do, but now it's bled over into how people talk about morality.
Also might just be smears. In-group members who have sex with 17 y/os are fine, outgroup members who do so are monsters.
More precisely, that's the Non-central Fallacy, which Scott has called the Worst Argument in the World: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/yCWPkLi8wJvewPbEp/the-noncentral-fallacy-the-worst-argument-in-the-world
I'm hosting a Marshall McLuhan book club on my Substack. ("Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man" - published in 1964, yet amazingly timely right now!)
McLuhan's work explores the relationship between technology and society. He is kind of responsible for "media studies" even being a thing. (In his hands, this was a visionary thing--NOT just a discipline for imprecise thinking and "easy A" classes!) He coined the phrase "the medium is the message" and also the expression "global village."
His analyses are kind of "Where have you been all my life?" levels of brilliant. Creative and kind of NUTS! McLuhan wasn't just analyzing the obvious things that WE normally call "media" like TV and radio, but tons of technologies that we humans have re-shaped ourselves around, like clothing, bicycles, the printed word and... and I'm fascinated by the chapter topic choice: "roads and paper routes"!
I'm personally very interested in how all this ties into themes of human agency/apathy, and harmony/disharmony among generations/"tribes"/subcultures. Fully want to involve discussion of STUFF we can do in our own lives... and to apply analyses to things McLuhan never saw in their exact current form (but which are now an under-examined part of our everyday lives)!
I'm even up for giving readers "assignments," (if I think they want that) and trying out crazy contrivances like "writing posts (or at least one!) by committee."
And since it’s on the Theodicy Substack, there will be discussions about how to love one’s neighbor (and love God!) in light of (and in spite of) all these technologies that are available to extend our respective reaches while foreshortening our vision. </meta> That said, I’m 100% intending to cultivate an environment where you will find something interesting & useful even if you personally don’t have a prior personal commitment to the Old and/or New Testament scriptures!
If any/all of that sounds good, you can find it at my Substack. (We Do Theodicy on this Substack)
I plan to send out book club posts every Wednesday at 3:14pm CT, starting 1.5 weeks from now.
There will also be a Discord server for more active / real-time discussion.
https://wedotheodicyinthishouse.substack.com/p/in-which-a-schedule-delays-and-the