We had plumbers in this week, they said they would be finished Wednesday, now say Friday. The meetup is scheduled for Saturday and we don't think we can get things sufficiently back in order to do it. I have sent the cancellation out on my mailing list, asked Scott to post it, and am putting this up as well.
When I visit https://astralcodexten.com, I'm taken to a sort of generic business-looking website. When I visit https://www.astralcodexten.com, I'm taken to the normal blog. Is this intentional (as some sort of ARG or defense against the public internet?) or accidental? Seems strange to me.
What traits does the aesthetic known as "classiness" entail? What exactly does it look like / feel like to have a classy home, a classy outfit, etc?
Most importantly: Is the defining feature of classiness simply that it signals status? Is classiness actually 100% a matter of social signalling, or does it have aesthetic qualities independent of signalling ability, at all?
This might sound odd in the context of these other takes, but I've thought that an important component of classiness is generosity. A classy home is welcoming to guests. It doesn't assault the senses; it doesn't overwhelm with grandiosity. But it never squeezes you in or leaves you without a place to sit, or a room to retreat to for privacy, or any comfort of home you might care for. A classy outfit elevates the wearer, yes, but it also elevates the people in the wearer's company. It doesn't suck all of the attention in the room. It is pleasing to look at and remains within the sartorial boundaries shared by the rest of one's associates, so that they can be perceived as peers of a sharply-dressed figure and not lessers.
Of course all of this can backfire miserably when attempting to bridge too wide a gulf in cultural context. Truly classy people know this and manage any complications with compassion and empathy. And all of this can be weaponized by those who adopt the letter but not the spirit of the code. But I don't think that means that status signalling is all that the aesthetic is about.
Thank you, this is a great answer! This feels intuitively right to me, and it's a useful addition to the discussion.
The reason I'm asking the question is that I'm trying to identify traits / attributes / aesthetics (in this case "classiness") that are both intrinsically motivating to people (for example because "classiness" plays to peoples' desire for status), but also possessing of pro-social potential. This sort of thing makes me think that "classiness" could be a good candidate.
The thought is, for example, if one could advocate that making your home into a welcoming and accomodating place is a Classy thing to do, the more people are motivated to do so, and then our world becomes a place with more enjoyable spaces and more enjoyable social gatherings, maybe even better communities; something like that.
I think the clue is in the name. Something is "classy" to the extent it signals membership in the elite class. Which typically means expensive, but understated. It should be nice, but in a subtle way that only other elites can appreciate. Impressive, but in a way that signals an aristocratic indifference to the need to impress. I'd say it's currently associated with a kind of minimalism, but doesn't necessarily need to be.
I think part of the reason 18th-century fashions (and really all the way back to the Elizabethan era) were so elaborate is that cloth, and the labor needed to make elaborate clothes, were expensive. After the Industrial Revolution, clothes became so much cheaper that flashy clothing is no longer a status indicator. Think about the difference between lace clothing that had to be hand-made, inch by painstaking inch, and lace clothing that I can buy off Amazon for $40.
Now, class in clothing means understated quality and fit.
I think of lace as status-driven desire. When lace was hand-made and expensive, aristocrats might well be dripping with lace. Now that it's machine-made and cheap, it only has a vestigial use on women's underwear.
I wonder whether we could find analysis of basic human desires in what rich people do, especially if it's cross-cultural-- for example, hunting with companion animals.
My initial thought is it means "a combination of expensive and functional". A classy suit is one that creates a particularly powerful-yet-intelligent look, feels good to wear, and costs more than the average car. A classy car looks smooth at every point, drives fast and well, makes powerful engine noises, and costs more than the average house. If it's either inexpensive or non-functional, it isn't classy.
(Smartass answer: what makes a home classy is all the school desks.)
Interesting answer! Let me bounce a couple things off you and see how they sit with your intuition:
1. What about the Minimalist aesthetic? It can be sleek, clean, and modern, and it's trendy right now, especially among productivity and lifestyle people. But is it barred off from being "classy", because minimalism naturally tends to be inexpensive?
2. What about an object that you custom made yourself (assuming it doesn't *look* or *function* jankily; ie it's still sleek and nice looking, but you built it DIY)? It costs perhaps 0 money, but then again it was more costly in terms of time and effort, and yet then again it is a rare, one-of-a-kind item.
I'd have to see specific examples of minimalism. Google pictures of minimalism seem like they're designed to show off the large empty space around it, promoting the size of the building. Bright white walls, shiny hardwood floor. Several carefully placed hanging pictures in most of them, which seems like it would cut against minimalism. The house the room is in is what's expensive.
I don't think something people know you built yourself would be defined as Classy, unless it's specifically art. If they didn't know you built it, it gets defined by what price the viewer would pay for it.
Not quite happy with my own definition, so I'll also throw out "no-expense-spared longtermism": a classy suit is expected to outlast a cheap one, classy art is supposed to invoke deep thoughts not lowbrow thoughts, etc.
I'm back from the grave to toss another idea at you. I had a little lightbulb moment just now while making coffee:
What about the example of the French Press? It's an elegant and effective tool, definitely classIC, it strikes me as definitely being more classy than the run-of-the-mill coffee maker. I think if you tell an everyday person who's not into coffee that you use a French Press, they'll find it a bit fancy-sounding (maybe just because it's French though?).
Obviously there are extremely expensive coffee makers and espresso machines and such out there, owned pretty much exclusively by wealthy people, but personally I think I would describe them as "excessive" and "ostentacious"; not things I'd really envy or look up to. Maybe more to the point, their complication and moving parts makes them more clunky, and basically guaruntees that they will fail earlier than the trusty French Press, which plays into what you said about longtermism.
I'm sure there are plenty of examples of similar kinds of tools and objects, but this one just came to me.
Hm, true, foreign affiliation definitely adds class, to the point that people will fake it, like Haagen-Dazs. I guess it's possible to stretch the definition of expensive to include the implied foreign travel: "I'm using a French Press, I know it's a French Press because I've seen France." But especially in the Internet age I probably need a wider definition, in a way I can't define short of the vague "signalling the upper class".
1. This is a great question. Since many truly expensive products are designed in a minimalist style, cheaper minimalist products can sometimes look/feel expensive enough for people to describe them as classy. However, I think I would stop viewing one of these items as classy upon finding out its true price.
2. I’d say that if it *could* sell it for a lot, then it can count - so consider the price of the materials, and the skill require to make it.
Hi everyone! EA for Jews is running another round of the EA and Judaism Intro Fellowship this October (https://eaforjews.org/take-action/fellowship/). I thought it might be of interest to some folks here. Please help spread the word to any Jewish communities you are part of!
1. Furiously decry any form of 'othering' by non-jews as a prelude to anti-semitic pogroms
2. Make every single little thing in their lives explicitly jew-centric, as if jews are so categorically different to gentiles that they can't just do the same stuff through the same institutions as anyone else
I mean, good on you if you're trying to do ostensible good for the world, but still.
I've thought a lot about this, being half Jewish but not raised that way, and having read a lot of the alt-right stuff but not entirely bought it all or gone as far with it as they have.
It's an exaggeration: not every single Jew does that, and often the ADL types aren't the Orthodox types: alt-righters seem to think every Jew is a combination of the worst aspects of Karl Marx, Judith Butler, Gloria Allred, Ezra Klein, and Benjamin Netanyahu. (I'm sure I forgot a few.)
That said I think the 'diversity for thee but not for me' critique has some validity to it--you *do* see liberal and progressive Jewish media types doing that!--and my response has usually been 'you are correct, I do not support increased immigration or anti-white media bias'. My little contribution has been to stop watching Hollywood and Netflix and start watching anime to do my little bit to starve the woke beast, though as I think you saw earlier I am wondering what more I can do that might actually have some effect.
But I can't blame the Orthodox for wanting to do their own thing, the way the Mormons or Muslims do. We've always had freedom of religion in this country.
I probably won't join EA for Jews, not least because I'm not huge into EA. But it doesn't bother me that it exists.
Obviously this doesn't apply to all or even most jews - the point is that there is in my eyes a contradiction between desire for inclusion and ethnocentric identity
A community used to being threatened (and occasionally genocided) by its neighbors will quite naturally (a) complain and be hypervigilant about signs of being threatened and (b) form close-knit communities for mutual protection and reliance.
During Jim Crow, blacks both (a) complained about Jim Crow and (b) had tight-knit churches, black banks, formed the NAACP, etc. Both these things make perfect sense to do if you’re black under Jim Crow - it's no more contradictory than complaining to your local government about potholes on your street while simultaneously filling some yourself.
And the effects of that kind of thing linger for a long time. Speaking with a little personal perspective, the Armenian Genocide is 100 years in the rearview mirror, and Armenian communities in the US are at zero threat of recurrence, but we can *still* be close knit and insular. It's hardly shocking that other communities that went through similar things have similar responses.
In this venue, generalizations can be taken to mean all, or at least a very large majority.
In the culture generally, religions are capitalized.
Persecution may make people a bit weird. You're just going to have to live with it.
I was thinking that Jews were killed for being too smart, sometimes described as being cunning, or from another angle, being competent merchants, but not for keeping kosher, so talk about Jewish intelligence can make Jews nervous, though not here.
On the other hand, Jews weren't persecuted for keeping kosher and it's a more comfortable topic, at least in my experience. And then I remembered that when there was an effort to make Spain totally Catholic, then was a lot of pressure for everyone to eat pork. It might be a question of recency and lineage.
> I was thinking that Jews were killed for being too smart
That seems like an excuse. I am pretty sure that people who have a problem with someone being too smart also have a problem with someone else being too stupid -- whether in history, or at high school. So in the end, the problem is being *different*.
You need to notice someone to want to kill them, and it "helps" if you envy them as well. A bunch of Jews walled off in a ghetto on the wrong side of town, meh, probably not worth killing. But the bit where they became successful enough to be noticed, and envied, outside the ghetto - that had something to do with applied smartness.
Big 5 / OCEAN is empirically validated; however it is not based on discrete "types" but rather discrete "dimensions", each of which manifests along a spectrum.
If there are builders, then there are certainly destroyers, too.
However the whole concept of personality as you are envision it seems to be somewhat one dimensional, and therefore even more limiting than existing methods of categorisation.
As with Myers-Briggs, or any of the more modern personality assessment processes, a personality is made up of many aspects or facets, some of which are more dominant than others in any given individual.
Me personally, I think I would fit into at least three of those categories, depending on the day - and some days I would fit in all three simultaneously.
Today I was thinking: coupons and loyalty programs basically use pointless makework as a form of costly signalling so that companies can get information to more effectively price-discriminate among their customers. But their existence is probably bad for economic efficiency overall because it distorts price signals and diverts labor into pointless makework. The cost of providing the product doesn't actually depend on who's buying it in the vast majority of these cases of price discrimination. Price discrimination transfers some of the surplus from consumers to producers but never increases the total surplus and it might create some deadweight loss if done imperfectly so banning price discrimination would probably not do any net harm.
Advertising wastes people's time conducting emotional manipulations that have no connection to the quality of the product. The information value of advertising is negligible except for obscure products, but most advertising is brand advertising for things we've seen before. Customers can gossip amongst themselves or use trusted third parties like consumer reports to gain much better information than advertising can provide. Most advertisers are incurring a lot of expense in an arms race that provides no value to anyone except zero-sum market share gains.
I think a high tax on advertising and coupon/loyalty programs would probably be a good thing even though I am generally way out on the right on economic issues.
"Price discrimination transfers some of the surplus from consumers to producers but never increases the total surplus"
Not true in general.
Suppose I could write a book at a cost in my time of $18,000. There are 2000 potential readers. 1000 value the book at $5, 1000 value it at $15. If I sold it to for $5 I would bet $10,000, which doesn't cover the cost of the book. If I sold it for $15 I would bet $15,000 ditto. But if I can price discriminate, sell it to the first 1000 at $5 and to the second at $15 I get $20,000, so it is worth my writing it and doing so produced $2000 of surplus.
This is outside of the usual supply and demand graph paradigm because here the seller is willing to sell any quantity above 18000/P. Is there any example where price discrimination can increase total surplus on a product with a normal upward sloping supply curve and downward sloping demand curve?
Price discrimination requires some degree of monopoly power, and a monopoly doesn't have a supply curve. You can certainly get the effect with ordinary supply and demand curves and only one producer.
There are two different reasons why monopoly is inefficient. One is pricing above MC. The other is the failure to produce at all if there is no price for which PQ>Cost(Q), even if there is a price at which PQ+Consumer Surplus is. Price discrimination can solve the second inefficiency by transferring some consumer surplus to the producer. Perfect price discrimination solves both problems — but introduces another and possibly worse one.
"I think a high tax on advertising and coupon/loyalty programs would probably be a good thing even though I am generally way out on the right on economic issues."
Then the costs will be passed on to consumers in some form. The reason for loyalty programmes etc. is to try and get consumers in the door of your store, instead of the rival store. If there are six different supermarket chains, why will I go to store X instead of store Y?
Maybe I'll do it because, hey, coupons on products I regularly buy so that the price is slightly lower in X than Y. Maybe I really like their bread or other product. People do shop around for cheaper prices, so things like loyalty programmes make sense. If they weren't working, then businesses would not use things like that.
"The cost of providing the product doesn't actually depend on who's buying it in the vast majority of these cases of price discrimination."
Sure. That's not what coupons etc. are about. Biglands Dairy supplies milk to all six of those chain supermarkets. The cost is the same for the dairy and for the supermarkets. But if GreenShine is "50c off 2 litres of milk this week!" then it hopes to entice in shoppers instead of them just walking into whatever store is nearest to them to grab those staple supplies.
And once you have them in the door, then you work hard on getting them to spend more than they intended.
Basically, what you are asking in regard to coupons, loyalty programmes and advertising is "why don't companies just give up trying to make extra money off their consumers?" and I think that's a question that answers itself.
You’re sort of missing the whole point here which is that policy can nudge companies towards competing on price and quality (which has social utility) instead of burning the most money on advertising (which has no social utility). A leviathan can de-escalate a wasteful arms race between its subjects. Brand advertising is essentially brainfucking your customers as a substitute for delivering a better product or a lower price. On current margins nudging companies to divert resources from advertising to product quality/price would have a lot of utility (circa 1.5% of gdp for free would be my best guess)
Yeah If you try to ban it entirely or set the tax too high people will find workarounds but a modest tax people will mostly comply with. How about just for instance making it so corporations can't deduct advertising/coupon/loyalty programs above $1M as an expense on their corporate income taxes. This would at least give them a directionally correct nudge to favor investment in actually improving their product over investment in merely brainwashing consumers.
Or take a page from human taxes. People need food more than corporations need advertising, but in my area, we still put sales tax on prepared food and restaurants. So as long as the advertising is plain text, black on white (or the reverse), they can deduct it. But anything more intrusive gets taxed like cigarettes.
another aspect of advertising is stimulating demand to get rid of excess inventory, in lieu of reducing the price. This effectively transfers some of the surplus from consumers to producers at the cost of the advertising which is sort of like a deadweight loss.
There was a article years ago - 10 proposals for the US that make sense but will never pass or something like that. One being self valuing your house to determine property taxes but can be bought for that price by anyone at anytime. Have been searching in vain for a while - any leads?
A real world equivalent of the self-evaluated property tax is a claims race. If the claim is set at $10,000 anyone who enters a horse is agreeing to sell it at that price. You could win the race by entering a really good horse — but you won't go home with him. So everyone enters horses worth just below the claims amount, giving an even race hence one interesting to watch.
1. I don't even understand what problem is being solved here.
2. According to Investopedia, property tax rates are typically set by the municipality deciding how much they want to raise, then dividing that by the assessed values and scaling appropriately. So to a first approximation, what will happen is everyone will raise their own assessed value by some protective percentage, and everyone will end up with close to the same tax as before.
Regarding (1), basically the administration of property tax tends to be corrupted (or at best tends to be poorly executed) because of the fact that land values are hard to estimate. The self-valuation proposal gets out of this by forcing property to be more liquid.
Which we don't want, because a whole lot of what we do with (real) property is to build long-term improvements on it which are A: specialized and optimized to the owner's particular utility function and B: difficult or impossible to relocate.
I repeat my reaction to this (which has been mentioned before in some thread or other): this is a Clever Game Rule, not a good idea for how the world should work.
That's very silly. You're basically just forcing people to pay higher taxes to prevent themselves from being forced to sell their homes. If you want higher property taxes, just advocate for higher property taxes.
Kinda yes, but this is a way to make the market decide the property taxes for each place individually (like, each street could have a slightly different tax rate, depending on how good location it is), rather than the local government setting up the taxes probably in a way that provides an advantage for the important people.
Also, the tax rates are updated automatically, so you only need to make the unpopular law once.
Why not just base the tax rates on the market value of the properties (however imperfectly that is calculated) directly? What possible benefit is there in introducing a forced sale mechanism?
And how are they updated automatically if we're using self-valuation?
That would create great pressure to have the market value estimated even more imperfectly. If you own a lot of land, it essentially makes your bribes tax-deductible. I would not be surprised to see that land owned by huge corporations is somehow mysteriously considered almost worthless.
The forced sale mechanism is a check on this. "Are you saying that your private island is only worth $1? Nice, take my $2; it is mine now."
By "automatically" I meant that the local government does not need to initiate reevaluation. Owners do it regularly. Or they don't. Either option is okay.
As Viliam notes, the market price and the utility to the owner are not the same thing. It is very often the case that a thing, especially a piece of real property, provides real utility substantially in excess of its market value to the present owner. Transaction costs for hypothetical replacement are only part of the reason for this. Simplistically speaking, just the fact that most properties aren't presently listed for sale, suggests that their value to the present owner exceeds the market value.
If a piece of property has a market value of $225,000, a utility to Alice of $250,000, and a utility to current owner Bob of $300,000, then it would destroy $50,000 worth of utility if Alice were to force Bob to sell at nominal market price. We don't want that,
And I don't think we want to tax people on non-market value. So, no, let's not do this.
Because the difference between market value and the utility value of the current owner is a surplus available only because that particular person is there. That's a good thing - ideally we would be having that kind of surplus on everything, as it would indicate that people are properly sorted to where they gain the most value for society.
Taxing that difference lowers utility in precisely the place where we want it the most. That person gains more than most other people (hence the market value being lower) at no cost to society.
Should probably be "can be bought for that price +20%" or something like that. Otherwise, rich people could harass others by buying their correctly estimated property and selling it afterwards. For the buyer, there would be a small risk of losing money in the process, but for the seller, there would be a lot of inconvenience with moving to a different place. But if you give me extra 20% at every step, that probably makes the inconvenience worth it.
"can be bought for that price +20%" is functionally equivalent to just reducing the property tax rate by 16.66%. People whose subjective value exceeds the market value will still lowball their price a bit to save on taxes to an extent that they'd be slightly unhappy if it actually sold.
The name-your-own-price for property tax would be the price at which you are happy to sell to any buyer, even after factoring in the inconvenience. The rates would be lower accordingly.
Forcing people to gamble on losing their homes is an especially vile policy. Just increase property taxes (especially for properties with market value >$X) and move on.
That's part of the problem. You entice people to play games with their own property taxes, which will sometimes mean that you get less taxes than the property is worth, and sometimes people lose their homes who are really upset about it.
You end up getting more tax money from richer people that likely offsets the losses from poorer people, but the poor may be routinely losing their homes. That doesn't seem ideal.
Yeah, that second one is going to be a killer. You're going to have a lot of old retired people on fixed incomes who have to chose between paying "full" property tax and e.g. paying for medicaaion, who will predictably and to some extent sensibly try to lowball the property taxes on the grounds that nobody is going out of their way to buy a crappy 50-year-old house in Solano.
Which is probably true, until it turns out a bunch of techbros billionaires are trying to buy up Solano for their own private utopia, and somebody's grandma and grandpa just lost their house for not even enough money to buy crappy 50-year-old replacement house somewhere else. And then you find out we live in a democracy.
"Anyone can take away your house at any time" is a bad policy even before you get to the protection racket of paying ever higher taxes just to lower the chances of it happening.
Well, I got my covid shot today. My flu shot was last week, so hopefully I'll be good for this season.
Here is a thing that I can't say to my friends, because it codes as anti-vax: I sometimes wonder if vaccines might be bad for you. Not in a "vaccines cause autism" way, but more like this: the covid vaccine will make me feel exhausted and feverish tomorrow, as my immune system kicks into overdrive and frantically converts all available resources into antibodies. I feel like that probably counts as a high-stress event? How many times can my immune system do that before it starts to get worn out?
I got the covid shot anyway, because covid is alarmingly common in my friend group, and because it's all sorts of bad for you, and I really don't want to get it. But I kind of resent that they made it this strong. I resent that nobody has researched whether a one-quarter-strength covid vaccine would work approximately as well, and be less of a strain on people's bodies.
From what I've seen, it's complicated. (Epistemic status: layperson, not an immunologist, and not in either the autism or anti-vaxxer camp. I believe beowulf888's account of vaccines is accurate.)
The vaccines most of us have grown up with - smallpox, rubella, measles, polio, hepatitis, and a few others - appear to be both safe and effective. "Safe" does not mean 100% safe, though, and likewise for "effective". Rather, they're both safer and more effective for most people than no vaccine at all. Traditional vaccines work by giving you a neutralized version of the microbe (typically dead ones) that causes the disease, and letting your immune system use it to create the defense it normally would against the live version, without you actually getting sick. AIUI, in a few cases, building that defense results in inflammation, soreness, tiredness, and other mild symptoms which one might identify as "sick", but are just normal functions of the body's immune system, and notably, far better to experience than stuff like permanent organ damage or the big D. Meanwhile, millions of these traditional vaccines get administered, there do not appear to be millions of babies dropping dead shortly after getting them, and there appear to be drastically fewer cases of measles, polio, hepatitis, etc. in the world, so it's reasonable to believe these are good things to get.
Since vaccines work by giving your immune system dead microbes to reverse engineer, they rely on you having an actually working immune system. If for some reason you don't, then we can expect you'll have a really bad time. At best, the vaccine has done you no good; at worst, something about your compromised immune system triggers even more inflammation, soreness, etc. that can set up other problems.
One way for your immune system to be compromised is for it to be lacking raw materials to build those defenses. In other words, you're not getting enough to eat, including not enough of the right things. You need water, protein, vitamins, etc. Another way is for your immune system to simply be busy with another defense. AIUI, this is why vaccines are customarily staggered - you get the most important one first, you wait for your system to process it, then you get the next one, and so on. I can imagine fast-tracking these by filling your body with more nutrients to bank your stores, but I don't know how feasible that actually is, and it seems unlikely to get a month-old baby to eat their carrots in the first place, so staggered it is.
One thing I've been hearing about mRNA vaccines is that their mechanism is different enough from traditional vaccines to cause some new problems. They don't give you dead microbes; instead, they give you blueprints for a specific protein and tell your immune system: "make that". The trouble comes because that dead microbe typically comes with all of that microbe's machinery that kept it out of certain cells of yours while it was alive. Note that successful parasitic microbes don't kill you right away; they want you walking around, sneezing on other people, etc. for a while first. So if they go straight for something critical, like your brain or heart, that's bad for them as well as you. Their corpses presumably still have all that "safety equipment" package along.
mRNA vaccines have none of that. They go in, tell some of your cells "make this bad protein", then your immune system sees that bad protein and makes a defense. This is fine if it's a pocket of cells in your deltoid muscle. Your immune system will attack those, you'll feel sore for a while, your muscle cells regrow the way they're designed to, and then you're back to normal plus a defense against that protein. But if something goes a little wrong and those blueprints make it to other cells, they'll get attacked as well. And if they're critical cells that don't grow back the way muscle cells do, that's bad. Maybe not fatal - even critical systems have contingencies for cell death - but it's never normal. It's like you're a D&D character and your hit points were permanently lowered.
The current concern, then... is heart cells. If that mRNA vaccine gets all the way to your heart, it doesn't know to stay away. The cells don't know to reject it. It's mRNA just like any other mRNA throughout the body. Orders are orders. They make the spike protein, the immune system attacks those cells, and now you're down a few. Usually it's not a big deal, but your heart structure is that much weaker, with that much more scar tissue, and if it's coupled with stress, say, from intense athletics, that could be a problem.
That's the story as I understand it. If you ever hear the term "trad-vaxxers", it's likely coming from that attempt to distinguish people who are fearful that vaccines are a hoax or cause autism, from people who are totally fine with the traditional vaccines but unsure of this new mRNA technique, especially given its novelty, and the unusually large amount of money being made from it, and a few other occurrences.
1. The mRNA from a vaccine—if it somehow crossed into the interior of the cell—doesn't have the full viral genome to hijack the cell's protein-manufacturing machinery. This is
why live/attenuated virus vaccines can cause infections—and the reason the mRNA vaccines should be safer than attenuated virus vaccines. The mRNA is delivered in lipid nanoparticles, but I don't know of any mechanism (i.e. proteases and cell receptors) that would respond to the lipid envelop and absorb it. If someone knows of one, I'd be interested in knowing the details.
It's my understanding that the mRNA vaccines only have pieces of the spike and they don't have the complete viral receptor binding domain (please correct me if I'm wrong about this!). I think it would require a functioning RBD (that can change from the closed to open position in response to a protease (such as TMPRSS2 or Cathepsin) to enter the cell. But even if I'm wrong about this, as I said, the mRNA vaccine only contains pieces of the virus and not the whole virus. So it could not reproduce inside a cell.
2. According to the CDC, "the rate of myocarditis/pericarditis is around 12.6 cases per million doses of second-dose mRNA vaccine among individuals of 12-39 years of age. Patients usually presented two to three days after the second dose of mRNA vaccination with chest pain, some preceded with fever and myalgia one day after vaccination."
It's hard to compare the risk of myocarditis to the risk of severe complications from COVID for the 12-39 age group because the CDC breaks out the risk of dying from COVID into different age cohorts from the above study. In 2020, before vaccines were rolled out the risks of dying from COVID were the following...
age cohort mortality/100K
5–14 0.2/100,000
15–24 1.4/100,000
25–34 5.7/100,000
So it looks like the risk of myocarditis in the youngest age cohorts *might* be higher than the risk of dying from COVID. This is why some MDs preferred not to vaccinate children. But I don't have the myocarditis stats broken out into the same age cohorts, so an apples-to-apples comparison is difficult.
Overall, the mRNA technology has proven to be pretty safe compared to some other types of antigen delivery systems.
Your immune system is a multi-layered network of defenses. It continually adapts to new pathogenic threats and it doesn't "wear out". Of course, some pathogens have learned to bypass or subvert our immune defenses (HIV comes immediately to mind)—and sometimes our immune response cannot overreact to pathogens (cytokine storms)—but in healthy individuals, immune systems are quite resilient!
The good thing about vaccines is that they can expose your immune system to new viral proteins without the downside of having a virus attack your cells. From the vaccine, your immune system will learn the signatures of the viral epitopes (aka antigens, which are the exposed areas of folded proteins). Your body will develop neutralizing antibodies (NAbs) to combat these antigens by being able to bind to them (and thus neutralize their ability to infect cells), so when a SARS2 virion touches down on your mucosal membranes you'll have NAbs that can neutralize it. Also, after the initial post-vaccination rise in NAb titers, your T Cells start keying themselves to a different selection of epitopes. Everyone's T Cells key to a slightly different selection of epitopes from the virus, so that creates a diverse range of secondary immunity across human populations. When your NAb titers drop off after six-plus months post-vaccination or post-infection, the SARS2 virus may be able to get by your NAbs and start infecting your cells. But T cells with memory of the SARS2 epitopes continue to circulate in your blood and lymphatic system, and they go around knocking on the doors of your cells and demanding (without a warrant) that the cells show what sort of proteins they're producing. If the cells produce proteins with a recognized SARS2 epitope signature, the killer T Cells destroy the infected cells. Finally, B cells can replenish your NAb titers once an infection is detected. Plus B Cells are also diversifying the range of antigens they can bind to via a process called somatic hypermutation. So even though the SARS2 virus is rearranging its spike protein (through mutation and natural selection) to get past our NAbs, as time passes post-exposure, B Cell somatic hypermutation increases the range of epitopes NAbs can bind to. This is just part of how our immune systems work, but a vaccine booster won't cause your immune system to "wear out". Rather it tunes your immune system to deal with new threats.
There have been reports of T Cell "collapse" during COVID-19 infections—which would be one of the reasons COVID-19 mostly kills the old and the frail. In some patients, there can be long-term post-infection lowering of CD 8+ T Cells which may be implicated in PASC (aka Long COVID). FYI, CD 8+ T Cells are also known as "killer T Cells" and they detect and destroy cells that are infected with a virus, so the question remains whether Long COVID is the result of a low-level infection that our humoral immunity can't clear. Most peoples' T Cell counts recover several weeks post-infection though. People who've had a serious illness may take longer.
I've heard-- and I don't put it more strongly than that-- that mRNA is aimed at the spike proteins (which mutate rapidly, perhaps under pressure from vaccines), and not the surface membrane, so vaccines from more of the virus might be more effective.
Yes, mRNA vaccines deliver antigens derived from the spike proteins.
Yes, it was hypothesized that vaccines that used antigens from other parts of the virus would provide better protection against the evolution of SARS2 immune evasion. I didn't understand this argument because, if the virus is undergoing natural selection to evade the vaccines with S protein antigens, wouldn't it do the same for vaccines with a wider variety of antigens? But maybe there was more to this argument that I missed.
And, yes, mutations on the spike proteins that have higher immune escape values seem to be positively selected for. The fly in the ointment of this evolutionary argument is that variants that have high in vitro immune escape values don't necessarily correlate with case surges. While all the major SARS2 variants that caused waves had higher immune escape values than their predecessors—e.g. Alpha (worldwide wave), Delta (worldwide wave), Beta (African wave), Gamma (South American wave), and Omicron (worldwide wave)—but other variants with higher IE numbers didn't take off (e.g. Lambda, Mu, "Kraken", "Hyperion", and a host of other Scariants of Concern).
What's really interesting to me, is that some variants can come to dominate the viral landscape of a region without causing case surges. You'd think that if a variant were successful enough to push its competitors aside, it would also cause an increase in cases. For instance, in the US, we were in the middle of a B.1x surge in the winter of 2020, and Alpha came along at the tail-end of that surge. It didn't create a secondary spike in cases, but it quietly took over the US viral landscape — but it didn't create any new case waves (except in the state of Michigan for some bizarre reason). The same happened last winter with XBB.1.5. We were having a BQ.1x surge in Nov of 2022, and then the percentage of XBB.1.5 vs BQ.1x started to rise, but cases began to drop. So it seems to me there are other variables other than immune evasion at play here.
Hypothetically, surface molecules could be more crucial for the virus than spike proteins, and have fewer viable variants.
I've been looking at the question of why there are surges of variant COVIDS at all, rather than a variety of variants living with each other fairly stably.
Current hypothesis: the victory condition for COVID is beating out the competitors at its own level-- other COVID variants. It doesn't care about making people sick, that's just a side effect of the COVID wars. Sorry for personifying, but apparently not sorry enough to find another way of saying it.
Maybe the win for humans is to find a variant that doesn't make people sick but does beat out other variants.
Google Scholar shows that co-infections by two (or more) pathogens can increase the risk of serious medical complications and mortality. It's unclear from the literature I looked at if a successful immune response to one pathogen interfered with the immune response to the other. However, the fact that co-infections increase the risk of mortality suggests that your scenario might be plausible.
Hmmm. I can't think of any reason they would, and AFAIK there's no evidence that they do. Remember antibodies are keyed to specific protein strings that are recognized as alien from our own proteins. If two viral "species" X and Y have a similar protein, and we have developed antibodies to that protein, our immune system should bind to both with equal vigor. ;-)
Having said that, vaccines in very rare cases can induce one's immune system to attack one's own tissues. But viruses can do that, too. In regards to the COVID virus, it can provoke an autoimmune response against one's tissues. Likewise, so can the vaccines — but a quick google indicates it's very rare among the vaccinated, and the vaccines provide significant protection from viral-induced autoimmune responses. The mechanism of autoimmune responses is getting outside my sphere of knowledge—so, your mileage may vary. But that's what I can find in Google Scholar.
I don't have time to dig it up right now, but I recall reading a study about half-dosing vaccines because supplies were limited and if you can use half the dose that's twice as many people immunized for the same manufacturing effort. So someone might have already looked into that?
That said, the COVID vaccine didn't hit me very hard at all. Everyone hyped up how nasty the side effects are and then when I got it I had a sore arm for the rest of the day.
(I also resent the flu shot, because it's only like 50% effective, and because nobody I know has ever gotten the flu, but I still have to get the shots anyway. But at least it doesn't make me noticeably feverish.)
I used to think the same way, but twenty years ago I almost died from the flu. Now I'm a good boy and get my shot every year.
As for the 50% percent effective — that is the reduced risk of getting infected compared to unvaccinated individuals. By reducing the relative risk of infection in individuals, it also lowers the reproductive rate of influenza virus across the overall population. So it's not just about you. But even if you're in the 50% who catch the flu despite being vaccinated, it can significantly reduce your risk of serious illness.
This paper argues that all the different cognitive biases identified by psychologists can be reduced to a small number of fundamental beliefs coupled with confirmation bias. Of course, as rationalists, we're all aware of our cognitive biases and thus we are able to set our biases aside when looking at the evidence. ;-)
Not my field, but as a Chess player where every single move combination gets its own opening name, I'm surprised to hear this wasn't the default assumption.
Interesting, thanks! I'm curious what someone with more experience in this area would have to say. My rough summary is that they propose that a lot of named "biases" result from the application of a few "beliefs", and that (unlike a pure Bayesian model), these beliefs get applied at multiple stages of the information-processing chain, leading to an inordinate effect on outcomes. A quick search of Less Wrong didn't turn up a mention of this, so it might be worthwhile for someone to dig into.
A quibble I have is that they talk a lot about beliefs and biases as if they were binary, although I think in places they acknowledge that they aren't. Which I think produces a bias in their framing. :-/
Also, the beliefs are:
My experience is a reasonable reference.
I make correct assessments of the world.
I am good.
My group is a reasonable reference.
My group (members) is (are) good.
People’s attributes (not context) shape outcomes.
In all but the last case, I'd ask, what's the alternative? If you don't think you or your group is good, that tends to lead to actions that change the world to make these true again. If you don't think you make correct assessments of the world, as a general matter, that tends to lead to an infinite loop of second-guessing. Using yourself and your group as a reference is where we all start (unless we have memories of past lives or something), although I think it's unquestionably true that we make better assessments as we gain more experience with other people and other groups. (E.g., the Japanese JET program, which has been described to me by participants as a way to show Japanese kids that foreigners are just people, if weird people.) And the last, I'd describe as part of a general tendency to treat systems as people, and treat events as being a result of intentional action, which I'd argue is extremely adaptive when dealing with deception and manipulation by entities of equivalent intelligence.
We've got Google now, so it doesn't take that much effort to do a perfunctory check.
Today's meme on another social media site was: the reason women don't have pockets in their clothing is so they could prove they weren't witches carrying spell-casting materials. That seemed questionable to me, but everyone who responded this post said things like "I didn't know that," or "That's good to know." I did a quick search of Google, and several sites suggested that pockets were phased out in women's garments when corsets and shaping garments became fashionable—and pockets ruined the the shapely feminine lines of the clothing. My predisposition is to believe that explanation rather than the witchery explanation because the witchery explanation doesn't seem to be documented anywhere. But I still provisionally doubt the shapely-line explanation without doing further research into the fashion history of women's pockets. Anyway, people spout bullshit all the time, and since false information seems to push out true information (Gresham's Law as applied to information), I've come to believe that most people are wrong by default. And because, like everyone else, I can fall for an attractive argument—I've come to suspect my own beliefs unless I can independently verify them. Heck, I doubt my own existence. We all might be AIs in a virtual reality. Well, at least I might be. You might be an illusion provided by the VR. ;-)
"Today's meme on another social media site was: the reason women don't have pockets in their clothing is so they could prove they weren't witches carrying spell-casting materials."
What? I was going to have a go at "why no pockets?" but I'm so stunned by the pristine stupidity of that 'explanation' that I can't even begin to delve into fashion trends.
"Look, good sirs, no pockets! Therefore I am not a witch! Ignore the large sack full of corpse parts, poisonous plants, and the book with the title OLD HAG'S GUIDE TO DEALS WITH THE DEVIL, CURSES, AND SPELLS in large letters on the front!"
I'm writing a post on The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, just would like to hear what some of you, any of you, think about the novel. An informal survey but your quick thoughts would be appreciated.
By coincidence, I just picked it off my shelf last weekend and read the first two chapters. I had not read it since elementary school.
It's a much more charming and interesting read when you're older. Almost all of the humor was lost on me when I was younger.
The description of Huck’s father as a drunk hits very differently now. It’s also strange to read about kids plotting to murder each other’s families—not something I’d expect to see in modern children’s literature.
It seems to me that a lot of required reading is material that makes more sense to people who are past high school. This isn't just about verbal skills (though I've heard that verbal skills improve up to age 50), it's about life experience.
Maybe there should be lists of such material.
How did this happen? Some of it may be a hope that introducing teenagers to fiction for older people would cause them to read it again later. Unfortunately, the actual effect is to cause many people to never read "classic" literature again.
What would be good required reading (other than the thing which is most popular at the moment) to encourage reading good fiction for high school students?
I read both Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn as a kid, and though I was fascinated to read about the perspective of a slavery from someone who lived at the time, but wss also fairly confused, ao I enjoyed Tom Sawyer much more.
National Review has a weekly podcast called The Great Books. Last week was on The Adventures of Tom Sawyer. The expert interviewed said TS was a children’s book but HF was for adults. Interesting view considering most Americans read HF in school in their early teens?
As a non-American, I remember reading it in a double volume with The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, and enjoying Tom Sawyer a lot more than Huckleberry Finn. Tom Sawyer is a series of entertaining vignettes, while Huckleberry Finn is a drawn-out story in which a bunch of random crap that I don't remember happens. I guess I also found the character of Tom to be more relatable than Huck.
“Persons attempting to find a motive in this narrative will be prosecuted; persons attempting to find a moral in it will be banished; persons attempting to find a plot in it will be shot.”
It bored me as a kid. The satire mostly went over my head. I reread it as an adult and I thought it was both entertaining and a brilliant commentary on human nature. Not sure why it's considered to be a book for children, though—and I can see why both Righties and Lefties are uncomfortable with it—and why school boards frequently try to ban it in schools.
I read it in middle school. I remember my impression of it being that it had a lot of good moments and the early part of the main plot (Huck defying his abusive father and helping Jim escape) was a solid story, but once our heroes are well along on the river journey the story descends into a rambling mess.
How do you all handle diversity statements? For context, I'm a STEM undergraduate applying to graduate programs, and this part of the process really has me stumped. I struggle somewhat with writing to begin with, so statements of interest are hard enough, but these truly challenge me, not least because I worry that these are designed as filters to keep out people with more milquetoast liberal views on diversity like myself. Not to mention, I have a pretty privileged background, all things considered. Have others been able to even find programs that don't require these? Have commenters here found success with any particular strategy in writing diversity statements?
All sympathy for struggling with writing application essays of any flavor, but I don't think there's anything particularly mysterious about writing an essay about how you hope to encourage diversity in your community relative to writing essays about how you hope to teach, do research, or advance the public good. A woefully incomplete list of example tips—I'm no writing coach:
* Explain your goals. Hopefully they align with the goals of the institution you are applying to; if not, what are you doing?
* Describe any relevant experience you've had. If you haven't had much relevant experience, describe why you have an interest in developing relevant experience, or what you would try given certain opportunities. For example, if writing a teaching statement despite never having taught a class, you might explain how a case of doing informal one-on-one mentoring inspired you to pursue teaching, or particular observations about effective teachers you've had. For DEIB, an equivalent would be a time when you made an effort to make a new person welcome in a club, or when you yourself were given support in a space where you felt like you were out of place—even if neither of these actions were across the identity axes that DEIB initiatives usually focus on.
* If your experiences support it, describe the impact of the relevant work you've done—demonstrate you're competent.
* Don't be negative. Imagine a research statement including something like, "I take care not to do too much research. We all know some of those researchers go way too far in terms of how much research they do." Even if that's something you actually think (maybe you think the average researcher has a work-life imbalance!), it sends the wrong message in a research statement, because neurotypical humans can't stop themselves from inferring beyond the written word when it comes to negativity. Likewise, don't funnel your "milquetoast" views into tacking caveats and conditions on your support for the concept of diversity. Don't lie—don't write anything you don't support—but keep your statements exclusively positive.
I would expect most STEM-oriented higher-learning institutions not to ask for such statements as part of some hyperchess stratagem to weed out political dissidents and wrongthink, despite what the Pepe chorus will perpetually claim. They're made of people like you who are trying to make the world a better place, and they want to know what the candidates they're considering think of this aspect of their mission and how those candidates are able to help out with it. ("That's exactly what weeding out wrongthink looks like!" croak a thousand resentful frogs. But it's also what any recruitment funnel looks like along any other axis.)
>I would expect most STEM-oriented higher-learning institutions not to ask for such statements as part of some hyperchess stratagem to weed out political dissidents and wrongthink, despite what the Pepe chorus will perpetually claim.
They mostly exist to justify non-meritocratic college admissions i.e. affirmative action by any other name, as well as to make themselves look good to any nosy administrators, activists and the government.
But the idea they exist "they want to know what the candidates they're considering think of this aspect of their mission and how those candidates are able to help out with it" is absolutely absurd. People write these things by saying whatever they think the admissions committees want to hear.
The idea that they provide any genuine insight into people's beliefs and values is ridiculous (unless people are foolish enough to openly disagree with 'diversity' policies).
>They're made of people like you who are trying to make the world a better place,
Whereas people who disagree with you about DEI are some combination of actively malicious and stupid, right?
>croak a thousand resentful frogs.
Do you call racial minorities 'resentful' when they cry that colleges can't as easily discriminate against more intellectually abled white and asian students to admit less capable brown students ?
>But it's also what any recruitment funnel looks like along any other axis.
Which recruitment processes involve a writing assignment in which you must state your ideological committments?
And please don't point to cover letters or something - saying how you'll directly benefit the company is in no way analogous, because directly helping the company *is literally what you're being employed to do*. People are not being admitted to a technical graduate program to "advance diversity" or something - they're there to learn and conduct technical research, and the majority of this DEI stuff is imposed on these departments - its certainly not the primary motivation for them being there.
[Previous comment retracted because all Substack showed me initially was a previous, much shorter iteration of your comment.]
> People write these things by saying whatever they think the admissions committees want to hear.
Pretty cynical, but even if true, OP is still best served by writing *as if* the admissions committee is there to do good for their community, because that's what the admissions committee likely believes about itself.
> Whereas people who disagree with you about DEI are some combination of actively malicious and stupid, right?
>>croak a thousand resentful frogs.
No, of course not. Most people, whether or not we see eye-to-eye, are trying to make the world a better place—or the part of it they care about, at the very least.
Opening by accusing me of thinking that the people who disagree with me are malicious and stupid is a pretty good demonstration of why I use the adjective "resentful" to describe the fraction of humanity that rally behind the same emblem you do. Feel free to act with kindness instead of resentment and you might change what people think of you.
> Do you call racial minorities 'resentful' when they cry that colleges can't as easily discriminate against more intellectually abled white and asian students to admit less capable brown students ?
Only if they act resentfully when doing so. It is possible to have conversations of policy that creates winners and losers (which is to say, policy) that don't devolve into spite-your-enemy contests, but one prerequisite is not being the first to spite your enemy.
> Which recruitment processes involve a writing assignment in which you must state your ideological committments?
Frame the situation in a hostile way, and you'll see hostile action. If you are applying for a teaching position, you might be asked to write about what teaching means to you. You are presumably expected to express that you think teaching is important and valuable. The only difference between that and a scary "ideological committment" is whether you are host to an opposing ideology.
I don't have personal experience, but would recommend looking at public rubrics that are used to grade the statements, either from the place you're applying or (if not available) other similar institutions. For example, here's UC Berkeley's. If you're using ChatGPT to write the statement, consider feeding in some of this phrasing into the prompt.
Probably you shouldn't explicitly riff on Vaclav Havel: "I, the greengrocer XY, live here and I know what I must do. I behave in the manner expected of me. I can be depended upon and am beyond reproach. I am obedient and therefore I have the right to be left in peace."
But I think that's pretty much the message you're supposed to convey in whatever you write.
That was a good one. The audience reaction was fascinating. I wish there were some way to see what was causing the audience members to create those uncomfortable silences.
Diversity statements are not (yet) universal, not even for faculty applications let alone grad school, so you should definitely be able to find programs that don't require them. Distressingly many do of course.
Whoa! They make you write diversity statements/essays now? Even though I'm a Leftie who is almost Marxist in my views, I find this tremendously unsettling. I can see why they'd want you to acknowledge an organization's diversity policies—but to have to write an essay on what diversity means to you seems almost perversely Orwellian. Maybe I'm turning Republican in my old age. Gak! <"Must not watch Fox News!" I gasp as I reach for the remote...>
OTOH, I guess this isn't functionally any different from the loyalty oaths that my grandparents had to sign in the 1950s to get hired for jobs.
>OTOH, I guess this isn't functionally any different from the loyalty oaths that my grandparents had to sign in the 1950s to get hired for jobs.
Pledging loyalty to your country seems a hell of a lot different to pledging support for an ideology that is actively hostile towards you for your demographic characteristics.
I don't like loyalty pledges either, but an oath of loyalty to America isn't the same as writing an essay explaining how much you love America and how it can do no wrong. You can be loyal to a nation without agreeing with anything it does. The DEI equivalent of the oath of loyalty is agreeing to obey Title IX, the anti-harassment code, the speech police, and the like--far less Orwellian than having to write a whole essay on how DEI-loving you are.
Except that you didn't need to write them to be admitted to the prison camps! (At this point, I'll need to restrain myself from making snarky comparisons between prison camps and graduate programs...)
> Not to mention, I have a pretty privileged background
As probably do most of the people who apply to the same position. This is not a filter against privileged people; it is a filter against aspies.
I would try googling and/or ChatGPT. Better get it checked by someone neurotypical afterwards. If you happen to know people who already passed this test, they might help you.
That's what I would do now. And give it a quick read before submitting and maybe move a few words around, just because more and more people are probably going to be doing it this way now. You'd not want to have your submission randomly be _too_ much identical to those of other statements being reviewed by the same admissions officer.
I am no fan of Donald Trump. I am certainly no fan of Ron DeSantis. When I read this, I had the feeling I needed to choose between an opportunist or an ideologue. When Trump casually says that he can cut a deal about one of the most profound schisms between right and left. It’s very tempting to believe him. I think overall I prefer opportunism to ideology.
I mean, I know they are all playing games with each other but still…
He can't blame the Democrats, because they'll still be there, and it would make him look weak. But he could blame other Republicans, for betraying him by undermining his agenda.
I know, right? I **want** to believe that someone can come up with a compromise solution. And from what I understand, that's what would make me the mark in a con...
A compromise solution that would make the majority of people stop caring about abortion politically:
No "approval" necessary for the first two months. A doctor's approval required for the third month.
For the second trimester, a doctor's approval that it is either medically necessary or that the pregnancy isn't viable.
For the third trimester, the approval of a medical board that it is either medically necessary or that the pregnancy isn't viable.
Timelines can be fiddled with as necessary, but I think these timelines are broadly appropriate to people's expectations.
Additionally, provide a broad rape-or-incest exception, using a legal justification standard that requires only a preponderance of evidence available to the doctor and/or medical board. Noting that the legal process requires time, and abortion is a time-sensitive matter - you don't want a fetus that will be aborted to develop any farther than necessary! - the doctors making this decision need to be free to make the best decision they can with the evidence before them, as quickly as possible.
I've never been pregnant, but based on what I've heard, two months is too little. Some women with irregular cycle might not even notice that something is happening. So from their perspective it would be like: "if you find out, it's already too late".
The part about "a determined woman will find a doctor" would basically make it all about privilege. A rich woman with a liberal family, living in a big town, can find the doctor. A poor woman (doesn't have her own car) with a conservative family (will not allow her to go doctor shopping, or generally go anywhere alone after they notice that she is pregnant and considering abortion), living in a village (not many doctors nearby to choose from, and the nearest available doctor may refuse for religious reasons) cannot find the doctor.
I am not really sure how this thing with "doctor's approval" would work, actually. You are basically saying that there would need to be some kind of diagnosis (even if fake one), did I get that right? So if one doctor says "no, you don't have X", and the second doctor says "no, you don't have X", can you still visit a third doctor, and keep getting new expert opinions until you get the one you want?
Or would there be some centralized system that would prevent you from doctor shopping? Something that would make a record "you already asked 4 doctors about X", so the fifth one would notice the pattern and... alert the authorities (insurance, or cops)?
Or suppose that the system keeps the record about how you visited ten different doctors, asking each of them to diagnose X, until the last one said yes. Could that record be used against you, legally, like if someone accuses you of cheating? Would there be something like prosecutors who try to figure out which women try getting a fake diagnosis?
...the exact answer would depend on details like this.
Those kind of constraints would apply for second and third trimester abortions, which specify medical need. But I wouldn't particularly be interested in punishing people for doctor-shopping, for a variety of reasons (which I go into in replies to other people - broadly, if somebody is sufficiently determined to get an abortion, at some point we just have to concede that it is going to happen, and, given that it is going to happen, we'd prefer it be done safely in a medical setting.)
The third month is just - a doctor said yes. In practice, if you have a doctor performing an abortion, you probably have a doctor who said yes, which is what I was going for. If you're using mifepristone, you have a prescription; somebody said yes. The intent there, which wasn't particularly clear the way I wrote it, is to provide a legal shield against doctors being forced to perform an abortion at that point in time, while also assuring pro-life people that the medical system would be involved in that point in time.
I think that would probably satisfy a lot of people, if you asked them individually. But I don't think it would satisfy the moral poles of the debate, the hardcore pro-lifers and pro-choicers. I think they'd keep arguing, and their genuine outrage would be too useful as a political weapon.
Most of Europe has a 12-14 week limit for abortion on request, and that seems to work for them. But I keep finding left-wing Americans who want later limits, and assume that Europe has them, and are shocked and sometimes express disbelief when they find out that European limits are most often more strict than some Republican proposals.
And of course, if you think abortion is murder, that's that, right?
I suppose I simply think that the American political process is too dysfunctional to adopt a good compromise, because both sides are beholden to their extremes, and moderation is disdained.
It likely wouldn't satisfy the most hardcore pro-lifers, but I think the pro-choicers would be happy enough to leave well enough alone.
As I wrote it, if a woman is determined to get an abortion, she can get one; just find somebody who will agree that, from a psychiatric perspective, the abortion is medically necessary. And given that on some point in the sliding scale of "determined to get an abortion", the abortion is going to happen with or without medical care, and I think the not-as-hardcore pro-lifers would rather the abortion that is going to happen regardless be safe.
The compromise lasts approximately until medical technology allows a fetus at any stage of development to be safely removed from the womb and implanted into an artificial womb.
It will be fascinating to observe the general cultural perspective on "financial abortion" at that point.
"As I wrote it, if a woman is determined to get an abortion, she can get one; just find somebody who will agree that, from a psychiatric perspective, the abortion is medically necessary. "
I would have agreed with your compromise had you not said that. If a doctor's approval amounts to a rubber stamp, your proposal is no different from allowing abortion on demand, which is in no way a compromise. If your proposal is going to be a compromise, psychiatric justifications for abortion cannot be considered legitimate.
Well, you either provide an "escape hatch" for women who are going to do it with or without proper medical care, and so keep some women alive who would otherwise die - or you have some women die from self-performed abortions, it becomes the thing everyone in the country focuses on, and we get to re-litigate everything all over again.
--
Also, and this is significant, when you're re-litigating abortion rights, the pro-choice side has a name and a face and a very very sad story to attach to the bill they're proposing.
Needless to say, you can get a better bargain out of the compromise if you just put an escape hatch in there the first time.
Not exactly-- not all woman have the needed resources (money, time off from work) for that strategy., and a lot of doctors aren't taking new patients or require a long wait.
Even absent that, even a low barrier is a barrier. The extra steps mean someone with ADHD, for example, is less likely to be able to navigate the hurdles.
It's not perfect, by any means, and leaves some gaps for charitable organizations to fill, but it is, I think, workable as a compromise.
"As I wrote it, if a woman is determined to get an abortion, she can get one; just find somebody who will agree that, from a psychiatric perspective, the abortion is medically necessary."
Which is pretty much what happened, and so your proposed limits are meaningless. "a doctor's approval that it is either medically necessary or that the pregnancy isn't viable" means nothing if it's just rubber-stamping "okay you want an abortion but you're healthy and can afford to have a kid, well no bother I'll just say it would adversely affect your mental health (nudge nudge wink wink)".
And then we're back right where we started, where people go "Everyone knows that the medical exemptions are bullshit, so just let women get abortions/ban abortion at those stages".
Well, you either provide an "escape hatch" for women who are going to do it with or without proper medical care, and so keep some women alive who would otherwise die - or you have some women die from self-performed abortions, it becomes the thing everyone in the country focuses on, and we get to re-litigate everything all over again.
I hope that you're right about the pro-choicers, but I fear that you're not. My impression is that the responsible adults buried inside the Democratic party are unwilling to shut down sufficiently vocal activists, and will bend to pressure as long as that pressure is applied.
I think the problem is the skew. As a very pro choice person (but for different reasons) if it was abortion on demand up through the end of the second trimester, you could make that sell to pro choicers, with only allowing medical necessity in not a bullshit way in the third.
I don't think you'll do better than that, and I personally would keeping fighting up until that minimum, because abortion is good for society and not just bodily autonomy.
My impression is that's something like what most people want, and have wanted for decades. Mysteriously, this has *no* public political representation.
Something like that was exactly what the 7-2 SCOTUS majority in "Roe v Wade" was expecting and what their ruling explicitly tried to enable. Well except for the 3rd-month doctor's approval requirement I guess, as "Roe" divided things up entirely by trimesters. But in broad strokes this scenario is what that ruling aimed for as a compromise between the competing interests at play in the legal/social issue.
"appellant and some amici argue that the woman's right is absolute and that she is entitled to terminate her. pregnancy at whatever time, in whatever way, and for whatever reason she alone chooses. With this we do not agree.... We, therefore, conclude that the right of personal privacy includes the abortion decision, but that this right is not unqualified and must be considered against important state interests in regulation.... we [also] do not agree that, by adopting one theory of life, Texas may override the rights of the pregnant woman that are at stake."
[The Court's bottom line in "Roe":] "(a) For the stage prior to approximately the end of the first trimester, the abortion decision and its effectuation must be left to the medical judgment of the pregnant woman's attending physician.
(b) For the stage subsequent to approximately the end of the first trimester, the State, in promoting its interest in the health of the mother, may, if it chooses, regulate the abortion procedure in ways that are reasonably related to maternal health.
(c) For the stage subsequent to viability, the State in promoting its interest in the potentiality of human life may, if it chooses, regulate, and even proscribe, abortion except where it is necessary, in appropriate medical judgment, for the preservation of the life or health of the mother."
People highly interested in the topic later came to view "Roe" as having established some sort of unconditional constitutional right to abortion, contrary to the plain text of the ruling. The anti-abortion side went first with that framing, the other side then joined in from the other direction, and here we are.
Well, if you have a doctor performing an abortion, hopefully you already have a doctor's approval. My purpose there has more to do with providing legal protections for doctors who are less-than-willing to perform that procedure at that point in time, as I think that compelling unwilling doctors to perform such abortions in the third month, as I expect will eventually occur, could re-open the whole issue for another round. However, providing explicit protections for the doctor in the third month provides a clear legal dictate about it, and while I expect religious freedoms arguments around the first two months, I expect the public to be more interested in the "religious freedom" of the doctors in question in that case.
(So I guess "a doctor" there should be "the performing doctor", strictly speaking.)
" doctors who are less-than-willing to perform that procedure at that point in time"
So I guess you missed out on all the "if you're not willing to perform routine legal healthcare, don't become a doctor" rhetoric? That came fast in my country as soon as abortion was even partly legalised; since we still have doctors who don't want to perform abortions, the American talking points got picked up: "if you don't want to provide the healthcare that is now a legal right, get out of the medical profession".
I remember reading about an author's fictional characters being expressions of 'personified mental constructs'[my words, probably]. Not sure how to do a search for this - it's like misspelling a word so badly spell check shrugs.
Does anyone have any solid starting point I can work off of? You would have my gratitude and a gift of 1000 points!
"Anthropomorphism is the attribution of human traits, emotions, or intentions to non-human entities." -Wikipedia
By my def you generate characters from ~memory fragments where anthropomorphism is taking standard human personality traits and applying to, say, a cat.
[My terms are descriptive and possibly very different from what professionals would use.]
I've seen the word Tulpa used in this context, it covers the creation of quasi-independent imaginary entities which sounds like what you're getting towards.
THAT is very interesting. It amazes me how useful early writings/thought can be if we substitute psychological explanations for the sensational. I personally do so without entirely discounting the original interpretation and find both perspectives beneficial.
1000 points to both you and 'B Civil' for your help! : )
The concept is so real to me. I did a quick Google search using my own terms, hoping to find something along the lines of what you are looking for, but I could not. However, many writers have talked about their relationship to their characters over the years; many. A voice and form that arises unbidden in oneself. Perhaps conjured by someone you met in a bar or at a wedding or at a funeral. But it all happens in your own head. To me, it is almost a truism that a character is a mental construct. What else could it possibly be?
"it is almost a truism that a character is a mental construct"
Absolutely, but what struck me reading the passage I had lost was how those characters were constructed(black box in the unconscious) and often from components of memories one never took much conscious notice of.
Reading your response I redoubled my efforts and located my untagged & misplaced Kindle highlight:
"Blake’s myth was very much a British one, combining the universal with the personal...
When his characters are understood as separate parts of his psyche, the clashes and drama that occurs between them can be seen as Blake trying to understand his own mental landscape. When the angels and demons who appear to be without are understood to come from within, all mythical and theological sagas are revealed to be the clashing energies of the mind...If this was the case, then it would be entirely appropriate. Blake’s myth was, ultimately, a myth of healing.”
> what struck me reading the passage I had lost was how those characters were constructed(black box in the unconscious) and often from components of memories one never took much conscious notice of.
I pursued a career as an actor for a while in my life, and I did a lot of improv. It is amazing how a bunch of things will just collect and slowly make itself apparent to you in some form. I have an alter ego named Jake for instance. The whole thing is fascinating.
If a person is a composite of sub-personalities then I supposes an "alter ego" is a sub-composite that becomes distinct. Creatives(e.g. actors/improvs) are said to have robust inner lives so this is as close I get to understanding, I suppose. It does sound fascinating.
The following is similar:
"The President of the United States when, with paddle, gun, and fishing-rod, he goes camping in the wilderness for a vacation, changes his system of ideas from top to bottom. The presidential anxieties have lapsed into the background entirely; the official habits are replaced by the habits of a son of nature, and those who knew the man only as the strenuous magistrate would not “know him for the same person” if they saw him as the camper. If now he should never go back, and never again suffer political interests to gain dominion over him, he would be for practical intents and purposes a permanently transformed being. Our ordinary alterations of character, as we pass from one of our aims to another, are not commonly called transformations, because each of them is so rapidly succeeded by another in the reverse direction; but whenever one aim grows so stable as to expel definitively its previous rivals from the individual’s life, we tend to speak of the phenomenon, and perhaps to wonder at it, as a “transformation.” These alternations are the completest of the ways in which a self may be divided.”
--William James, The Varieties Of Religious Experience: A Study In Human Nature, 1902
> When the angels and demons who appear to be without are understood to come from within, all mythical and theological sagas are revealed to be the clashing energies of the mind...
This is true wisdom. It should be kept in mind when discussing the perils and benefits of AI.
>"Why does every school teach history but hardly any have courses on the future?"
People, even experts, suck at making predictions, and such a class would likely just become another avenue for ideological propaganda.
>The idea is to teach young people that their voice matters, and that they can change the future.
This is a wildly incorrect idea. Like, actually. And justifying it even given this fact is likely done on a similar basis to having a 'growth mindset', which itself doesn't work.
Didn't we go through this with the comment about the private school and the kids having a big, flashy, summit or conference with invited speakers?
OP thought it was useless expenditure, but this is the sort of thing that goes on (same with Junior UN or local version thereof) to tell kids "you are the future and this is how you make your voice heard".
I personally incline towards the "it's all fluff" because unless you have a kid who is determined to go into politics, most won't involve themselves in this kind of activity once they're older.
Anyway, attempting to forecast the future has a poor track record, because we seem to go for "surely trend X of today will continue" and miss things that are truly novel (e.g. no Moon colonies, but nobody predicted the Internet).
I had tried to get my own elementary age kids interested in rationality and the idea of forecasting. I didn't get a lot of traction. Kids don't have the schema to make predictions about complex topics (not the patience to wait for real world outcomes), but they love estimating beans in a jar. Perhaps that could be harnessed to get kids interested in black sawn events and basic statistics. But I also tend to think this is "fluff" caused by academics looking for something to investigate in their Ed D thesis. Still, doing a lot of predicting as a child might tame down some Dunning Kreuger instincts.
That would be interesting! Century by century and decade by decade, picking through fiction and projection and media scares. What's going to kill us all? What country will dominate the world, and why? If these trends continue, what will happen? What utopias are envisioned, what problems do they solve, and how, and what problems do they fail to consider?
Is anyone doing analysis of the efficiency of the incentives being given for the CO2 emissions avoided or atmospheric CO2 removed. I've seen some high numbers but from sources that are opposed to any incentive, so I distrust them, but nothing from the loyal opposition. In principle I know that the form of the subsidy -- for investment in instead of output from the target technologies -- is wrong, but principles do not give magnitudes.
My back-of-the-envelope estimate is that all the "CO2 sequestration" technologies are fundamentally un-economic, when you use the kWh as the basic unit of currency. That means they will never be more efficient than "just not drilling oil in the first place".
But it is too much effort to convince people not to do this while still "fighting climate change". I consider it a local-minimum for graft in the space.
But what about the possibility of running the CCS on the zero marginal cost periods of solar/wind? As opposed to SOME hard to replace uses of fossil fuels? And the need to actually reduce CO2 concentrations after reaching net zero?
The fundamental problem is that any energy source that relies on "burning hydrocarbons in oxygen" is going to run out very quickly. Certainly within the next 1000 years. Whether you bury the CO2 or leave it in the atmosphere does nothing about that problem.
No, no such reason exists. CO2 sequestration is *already* significantly cheaper than renewable energy, but climate change truthers would find it morally abhorrent to just easily solve our problem with a quick technological solution that allows us to continue to emit carbon, grow the economy, and have widespread human flourishing. To them, there needs to be a reckoning. We all have to *pay*.
What are these magic technologies you're describing that are cheaper than renewables, easy to scale up, and quick to produce?
There are many sane people in the world who are concerned about climate change and not tied to any particular solution. Roughly the whole pro-nuclear crowd, for example. There are definitely hard-green types who think the way you describe, but you're jumping five steps too far to impute those motives to everyone.
I find that very implausible. There's a big entropy gradient involved in sucking a rare gas out of the atmosphere, and related engineering constraints if you build any sort of physical device to do in in bulk. I'd need to see the plans.
Biofuel could be considered an example of sequestration. It's doable - and if fuel got expensive enough we'd do it a lot - but rarely truly economic under current conditions.
I imagine that even with CO2 sequestration tech it would be hard for many people to drop the association between CO2 emission and “the earth will literally burn and we will all die” considering how prevalent that idea has been for the last few decades (just like how I feel a strong urge to recycle plastic even though it often does nothing or is possibly worse in some cases) but is there perhaps a more steel-manned argument one could make?
Some organizations in Europe signal their wokeness by having a token Black person at an important position. Other organizations signal their wokeness by having a token Gypsy person at an important position. I haven't seen an organization that would have *both*.
The general pattern seems to be that commercial companies prefer Black people, while non-profits prefer Gypsy people.
After thinking about this more, my best guess is that it depends on who is the intended audience of the signaling.
For corporations, the most important audience is their *foreign* business partners. So they use the international (i.e. American) standard of an oppressed minority. Non-profits signal to local population.
But this all is probably very country-specific. (Possibly also generation-specific, as people under 30 probably know more about what happens in USA than what happens in their neighborhood.)
In my bubble, it's more common to hire a female for this purpose. Some companies even have a goal of having half of upper management or half the board of directors be females.
The gypsy thing is definitely your bubble. And I’m not convinced about the black Person either, outside of Ads where they are definitely over represented.
LLMs are basically trying to do to human writing what the book review submitters were trying to do to Mr. Alexander's writing. For LLMs, the metric is how much their writing can seem like that of a generally skilled human. For book reviews, the metric is whether an audience selected for liking the Astral Codex Ten house style likes your kind of writing.
It's been established that Mr. Alexander is the best at writing like himself (1st place, plus a good-but-not-great finish for the second entry). Currently, humans are also the best at writing like humans more generally, although it seems like the difference is getting small for some more prosaic tests.
This suggests to me that it's going to be very, very hard to get LLMs to write better than humans. Obviously it's not open-and-shut, but I would presume some of the competitors spent much longer on their entries than Scott spent on the actual Njal's saga review (minus the gimmicky parts that I utterly ignored), or otherwise had more resources at their disposal.
In particular, I think this is a sign that we shouldn't be particularly worried about LLMs ripping off specific authors and being successful at doing so. For one, this demonstrates that it's a pretty tough job to outdo the literal benchmark on a task. But also, a lot of people are complaining about various aspects of Scott's style showing up too much in the book reviews; I'd expect complaints about there being too much Jane Austen in some hypothetical JaneAustenBot's works. At least for me, books by a specific author have clearly diminishing marginal returns.
I wouldn't take a random contest on a blog too seriously, but it's an interesting antidote to some of the more extreme forms of concern about LLMs rapidly becoming superhuman.
I realise it's probably inevitable to ape Scott's style on his blog, but I think the book reviews that stood out to me the most (On the Marble Cliffs and Zuozhuan) had a distinctive style of their own that kept them fresh and interesting, and I'd much rather read those than something that tries too hard to be something its not.
I imagine that a LLM could imitate an authors style fairly easily, but it would struggle to do so while remaining original, without falling into repetative cliches - whereas the actual author finds the style effortless, and so can just write about a new topic/plot/set of characters in a way that is both familiar and novel.
Personally, I don't really see the need for or appeal of LLM authors as a means of entertainment. There is already an effectively infinite amount of literature available (relative to the average human lifespan, at the very least) and I expect I'd quickly get bored of the output of an LLM, because if it was good enough to give me exactly what I wanted I'd quickly crave something new instead (and sure, it probably would be able to give me that, but so would a trip to the library or the Amazon algorithm).
Writing style seems to me the thing it would be easiest for LLMs to ape. But good writers have distinctive styles at many levels. Scott has a style of writing, but also a style of thought. Jane Austen has a style of thought, and also a distinctive approach to creating characters and a distinctive way of telling a story about them.
I don't know whether it's possible in principle for LLM's to learn some of these other, deeper levels of style. People are certainly able to learn them, though as you point out the imitators' products are generally not as good as the original. (On the other hand, there was once a Graham Greene imitation contest, and Graham Greene won 3rd place).
I'm trying to understand partner dances. I was forced to learn some foxtrot back in middle school and I've picked up some country dance as a happy amateur now when I've matured. I'm trying to branch out into some Latin dances now as well. But I don't feel like I "get it".
1. Most (well-known) dances seem to have a "social" scene and a "show"/"competition" scene. To me as a casual observer, the "show" dance seems very far divorced from the "social" dance. I feel like if there's this sport called "golf" and when I try to learn it my teachers tell me to practice hitting this white ball with this club to make it go into a hole, but when I watch a golf competition on TV they're playing soccer. As a beginner, I try to learn the steps, and I try to learn the "feel" and posture of the dance. But are those things even important? Can I show up at a shag dance and dance the whole night without doing any shag basics steps?
2. Related: Often when I watch a video from a dance show, I don't see the dancers do any of the basic moves that I learn as a beginner. Often I wouldn't know what dance they were dancing unless the video title told me. How do you identify dances? Can you do it from the music alone ("this is a bachata song so they're dancing bachata")? Is there's some good flashcard-style way to learn to identify different dances? Like, I get a ten second clip of people dancing and I've to identify it. I guess I should hack it together myself using YouTube... Do dances have signature moves that makes them recognizable (but "advanced" dancers don't do the basic moves per 1., and also couldn't I do the signature move of one dance while dancing another dance just because I'm cool?)? How do I spot what dance someone is dancing?
3. Are there a music theory but for dance? Are there a natural limit to the types and styles of partner dances? Could I make up my own partner dance right now from scratch by just deciding on a couple of steps to a 4x4 beat? Or would what I make just turn out to be rumba with a backstep or something? Most (all?) partner dances seem to belong to a "tradition": do dances naturally split and involve like this? Do they fuse? Are new dances invented from scratch sometimes?
4. Related: Can dances be wildly combined? Could someone just smash together rumba and foxtrot and have a new fusion dance? Would it be recognizable as a rumba+foxtrot fusion? Could such a fusion be done in many different ways? Must the dance I'm dancing match my partner? What happens if I dance shag but my partners dance rumba? What happens if I dance lindy hop to bachata music?
(I know I could get an answer to many of these questions myself by just trying it myself, but I'm interested in the deeper answer that I don't really have the terminology to ask about.)
I have some significant experience here, albeit somewhat dated. (1) If you know `competition' dance you can social dance, but not vice versa. Essentially `competitive' dance has a `regular syllabus' of moves, which is all that you would use for social dancing (and this regular syllabus is segregated into tiers - bronze/silver/gold). The competition scene has you move through the `syllabus' tiers before graduating to the `open' (i.e. any moves allowed) level. But you have to have mastered `syllabus' before you can move to `open.' The `syllabus' moves constitute dancing with fairly rigid rules (and the rigidity of the ruleset makes it easy for your partner to follow, assuming your partner is also familiar with the rule set). At the `open' competition level, however, you throw the ruleset out of the window. This allows you to do much flashier stuff, which maybe has significant artistic merit, but the absence of a ruleset also makes it harder for your partner to follow, unless you and your partner are *very* skilled, or have practiced extensively together. Which is why you would never do `off syllabus' moves at a social dance. [You can do syllabus moves in competition, but if you do only syllabus moves at the `open' level it will be considered boring relative to the competition]. (2) Yes, the dance is defined by the music. There aren't signature moves as such. Advanced dancers won't dance exclusively `off syllabus,' but even any syllabus moves they use will probably be from the `gold' (i.e. advanced) syllabus, and not the `bronze' (i.e. basic) syllabus. (3) From a purely artistic point of view, I see no reason why dances could not be combined. For competition purposes, you are trying to maximize your score on a particular axis of artistic merit, so this is unlikely to be a winning strategy. (4) Yes dances can be wildly combined. Yes you need to match your partner. Otherwise, at a minimum, you are liable to collide/fall over.
I've been doing social dance for ~20 years, a combination of swing, blues, salsa, and tango. One analogy I like is that different dances are like different languages - some are very close together (swing / blues are so similar that many ideas cross over, much like Spanish and Portuguese). "Bilingual" dancers will often grab ideas from another dance, much like bilingual speakers will sometimes grab a word from another language. But if you don't understand Spanish, and I keep speaking it anyway, I'm kind of a dick.
Moving away from the language analogy, there are lots of motifs that are particular to each dance, just like there are motifs particular to the music. Swing and Salsa both have large bands with horn sections, but they're definitely different music! Mixing an element from one dance into another can be really interesting, like a dash of unexpected spice in a dish. But if not done carefully, it can turn everything into a mess (not everyone can pull off fusion cooking, and the chef normally needs to know both cuisines pretty well in order to make it work).
If you want fun and easy, consider contra dance. It's easy to pick up (the moves for each dance are taught at the beginning of the song), and tends to have a very friendly crowd (although skews heavily older and hippie, FWIW).
"skews heavily older and hippie" - maybe in some places but not all. I saw a "Techno Contra" at the Dance Flurry that skewed younger, lots of "guys" in skirts.
of dance schools and dance clubs. Have known several people who have had good experiences learning salsa, swing, tango etc. The teaching was good and so was the company. Maybe look for one of those places?
I don't know the official answer, but I agree that what people do at competitions seems to have *nothing* in common with what you learn at dance lessons.
Took can absolutely take a move from one and adapt it too the best of another. I took "social dance level 2" in college and that was the whole theme - hey! You can do this same sequence with a different beat in all these dances, slightly modified!
Don't watch elite competition videos on Latin dance for basics. As far as I can tell it's just a different ball game. Specify your search to basics and lessons and stick to that.
I think the best social dancing scene is swing. The competitive field seems to have lots of impromptu in it, so it overlaps with social. I tried West Coast but it was too hard for me but easy closer and lindy hop will take you a long way.
Try to take one out two paid workshops. I did one and it was very helpful.
I guess the problem is that it's easy to find videos of show dancing, and somewhat easy to find dance lessons, but it's hard to find videos of people social dancing (and most that you find is understandably at a party with camera movement and people in the background etc.).
I live in a small town: I'm exploring the local scenes to see which one is best. But I don't plan to compete so I'll pick the one with the nicest people and the dance I enjoy most.
Examples: not the best but they do show people in beginner classes actually dancing. There's a like video from Glen Echo Park in DC, which was quite lovely and multi skill level when I went there a few times many years ago.
What dance are you interested in? Maybe I can post a few. If you search for beginner competitive or events held at random ballroom schools, they have lower level dancers and the events are filmed.
The square dance scene in my area was very good. Dances are 4/4, they sure you what to do before you have to do it, very welcoming. Contra dance is a scene to check out as well but I never clicked with that one.
But really the best thing to do is to actually go out and do it. That's easier for a follow then a lead but no way around it really.
Contra dance doesn't have a "show"/"competition" scene, it's all social. English country dance has some "show", but not really "competition", and the choreographies performed as "show" are the same choreographies as done for social. Scottish country dance is much more rigidly standardized and I think might have some "competition" as well as "show".
Right now I'm looking at Salsa, Kizomba, Bachata, Schottische and Polka. Any videos are appreciated. (Of course doing is best but scheduled dance time is limited and I learn painfully slow so I need to practice at home.)
TLDR: Ballroom dances were already established, and then formalized for competitions. If you want a new one, you would sort of need to make it popular enough in your area that you had people to dance with. Social dancing is about communication with your partner and uses easier moves, whereas competitive uses more advanced moves and choreography.
I've been doing dance for about 5 years now, with 3 years of social/performance ballroom dance, so let me take a stab at this. I'm not going to try to give some background information before answering your questions, and then give shorter answers to them using said info.
First thing to note is that "ballroom dances" are a collection of 10 dances with fairly disparate roots. It's not clear to me exactly what got them all in that category while getting, say, Salsa excluded, but that's what they are. Nevertheless, all of them were established BEFORE joining the competitive scene; I suspect that viennese waltz is the oldest, but most of them grew out of a highly popular social couples dance and were then fitted with stricter rules to make them useable for competitive.
Speaking of competitive! At a competitive level there are three "syllabi," which are basically just the list of moves that you can use. Most beginers will learn the bronze syllabus, progressing up to silver and then finally gold as they become more experienced. Gold syllabus has roots in bronze, but many of the moves are somewhat altered in ways that make them too challenging for a beginner to master. At the competitive level there are specific beats-per-minute ranges for each song. For example, Cha Cha is a 112-128 beats per minute dance. Paso Doble is a weird exception of a ballroom dance as there is only one valid song for competition.
Okay, time to give actual answers.
1. Show vs Social is a mixture between that social will use bronze syllabus usually, whereas show uses gold. Additionally, show performances are choreographed whereas social dance is improvised, so it can require a different skillset to excell in one or the other. Choreography will also naturally lead to some more fancy stuff being possible, as well as things that would otherwise be very difficult to communicate to a partner through the standard social dance holds.
2. It's a mixture of beats per minute and feel of the song. Cha Cha and Rumba have the same beats per minute, but Cha Chas will usually be more upbeat, while Rumbas will feel slower. I was told that "if you can snap to it, it's a foxtrot." Waltz's are always in 3/4 time and once it gets fast enough it becomes a Viennese Waltz. Generally you just have to dance a lot and you slowly learn. In social you will sometimes see different couples dancing different styles to the same song, so it depends on your choice still.
3. I think that you'd want a mixture of choreography and modern dance. Ballroom is largely a formalizing of already existing social dances, not an effort to create new ones.
4. See 2 and 3. You and your partner need to be doing the same dance though. Social ballroom dance is about communication, and dancing different dances would be like one of you speaking French and the other English. In choreographed dance for non-competitive performances you can do a medley and dance different styles over the course of a song, but there choreography is doing the heavy lifting instead of the communication necessary in social dances.
Thanks! I'm still confused though. Let's try another example: Can I start dancing Cha Cha, and then add some Rumba steps, and then add some more, and finally transition to be dancing Rumba instead? Or will the Rumba "clash" with the Cha Cha? (I understand that this would be against the syllabi(?) but is it possible?)
Let's say that someone is walking back and forth to a metronome, is it possible to tell if they're dancing Rumba or Cha Cha? Or is my question ill formed?
And auspicious pair to ask about. You might find this helpful: In a certain sense, Cha cha and rumba are fundamentally the same dance.
To explain in the simplest way I can think of, basic "syllabus" of cha cha and rumba is composed of single measure moves consisting of half-measure transition and half-measure move proper. The moves proper are often exactly the same, the only difference is the transition - rumba uses a single half-measure step, cha cha - three steps, two eights followed by a fourth.
Of course the move set quickly diverges once you get to more complex figures spanning several measures. But up to a certain point, when you're learning cha cha, you're learning rumba and vice versa.
On the other hand, it would make absolutely no sense to mix up the two in one dance, the rhythm, flow, however-you-want-to-call-it, is completely different. And yes, it should always be pretty obvious which of the two is being danced at the moment.
See the competitive tab, East Coast and quite a few Latin dances are on there.
Your question is ill formed. For Rumba and cha cha their rhythms are different (Rumba has 3 steps per 4 counts while cha cha has more). Perhaps this will help: at a social dance, when I want to dance I just say "would you like to dance a Rumba" and then we both know what's going on.
I understand the practicality of dancing rumba: I'll ask someone to dance Rumba and I'll do the Rumba steps and we'll have a good time. Likely this is as far as I will ever go. But intellectually I would like to what "Rumba" is. Because it doesn't seem to be the steps I'm doing nor the music, but people still seem to be able to identify it. It doesn't seem to be "all the steps in the Rumba syllabi" since people can improvise outside of those. So what is Rumba and where does it "end" and become another dance?
It's the basic. Quick-quick-slow, at that tempo, with the rotation of the hips is fundamentally what defines it. It's sort of like choosing a key for a song. If your song is in C, you'll generally do C, F, and G chords. You can do fancier stuff, but at the end of the day, a lot of those will be hit. Similarly, you could do fancier stuff in Rumba but it is built around the basic step and the way that it defines the dance.
Rumba is about hips, east coast about push and pull, cha cha about short sharp movements, waltz about rising and falling in boxes to 3/4 time. If you really look at the basic step that is usually the defining feature and difference of the dances.
Does this answer what you're getting at? Sort of for why your questions are odd is because it's like saying "what if I wrote a song in the key of C but only ever played C#s?" You could do this, but it would be weird and your orchestra would dislike you for it, because it's so outside of what the key of C is meant to do. I don't know enough music theory to extend the analogy, but I'm sure that there's modd stuff for keys and time signatures and the like that have parallels to choice of dance as well.
I feel like my question is more like "what if I write a rock song but make it more like hip hop?" And the answer to that is that there are many artists that make this fusion in different ways and that the genre is called rap rock. And that though the borders are fussy, there comes a point where you have lost enough of some criteria that can be listed so that you are no longer playing rock in any meaningful sense.
But I assume it's the same with dances. Once I experience enough Rumba and Cha Cha, I will be able to tell what's what and what's a fusion just like how I can easily tell if a song is a rock song or a hip hop song or a fusion today.
-Different dances have lesser or greater amounts of choreography/improvisation. Competition will have more "moves" planned ahead of time.
-Partner dancing is about communication. The leader shifts the balance of the system of both dancers, and the follower moves to re-establish that balance. However, the leader also has to lead in a way that there is space for the partner to move and in a dance without a set step pattern (like tango) *how* they are going to move into that space.
-Because of the above, if you have an established partner you can "get away" with leading all sorts of stuff but if you're dancing with someone for the first time, leading a space/path that isn't typical for the dance in question you're going to confuse/frustrate them.
Well, this is kind of my confusion. I'm learning the dance so when my partner isn't in step I get confused, and I try to stay in my steps, not get out of them. But more advanced dancers seem to do the opposite. Where's the line where two advanced dancers stop doing "dance X" and are simply improvising to music instead of doing a specific dance? Because that's what it often looks like to me. But I also feel like good dancers can watch some slowly turn in a circle or something and by some magic tell that they are dancing foxtrot based on the posture or the gait or something. So there's a conflict and I'm just confused.
> when my partner isn't in step I get confused, and I try to stay in my steps, not get out of them
When both you and your partner are beginners, that's probably a good strategy, because presumably the reason they are out of step is that they got lost or made a mistake. Then it's good of you to keep a very clear step so that they can catch up.
> more advanced dancers seem to do the opposite
Advanced dancers can keep the step / rhythm intuitively and won't make this kind of mistake. If they move out of the step, it's on purpose, and in a specific way. It's common in improvisation-heavy partner dances such as lindy hop to step away from your partner and just do some solo moves (both leader and follower do this), or freeze for a beat, or anything really. Usually a given song has parts where it makes more sense to do this and experienced dancers can tell.
> Where's the line where two advanced dancers stop doing "dance X" and are simply improvising to music
There's not necessarily a line? The dance moves that fit a given song are typically correlated with a given dance style, and dancers of a given style will be more likely to improvise within that style. In fact, pretty much all social dancing is "improvising to music", but I guess you mean wilder improvisation that can go completely outside the standard moves.
People with a good eye for it can tell when a swing dancer did ballet before, or hip hop, or salsa, because the way they move their body is reminiscent of other styles even if they are doing the same swing steps.
On the other hand, two dancers mildly experienced in several styles can dance together to a song without choosing any particular style as long as there is good (non-verbal) communication. You won't necessarily get something identifiable as style X, but really the song is a huge constraint in what kinds of things it feels good to do.
The key to dancing is communication. One person (usually the man) has to `lead' (i.e. communicate what step they would like to happen next), the other (usually the woman) has to `follow' (actually dance her part of that step). In show dancing you can cheat via choreography (viz. both partners know what is going to happen next because they discussed it and practiced it before). But ideally (and certainly for social dancing) this communication needs to happen `on the fly.' And the communication needs to be accomplished non-verbally (through stuff like weight distribution, hold, momentum...). The ability to do the advanced stuff that seems mystifying is downstream of a skill level where you can effectively communicate about such advanced stuff. How much you can improvise is limited by how effectively you can communicate. When `good dancers can ... by some magic tell' what they are doing is reading the (nonverbal) signals that you cannot yet read.
I know Scott has posted stuff about Buddhism in the past, so I assume there are some "secular Buddhists" here I could ask this question to. I know the Buddhist concept of rebirth is different from the traditional conception of reincarnation, that it's only the karma that gets reborn etc., however, suppose that I am a skeptical materialist that denies even that. If we believe that death doesn't bring rebirth into Samsara, but is a full extinguisment of everything one was, does that make it equivalent to Nirvana? Essentially, if we accept the first noble truth that life is Dukkha, and desire to extinguish that Dukkha, if we don't believe death results in rebirth into this world, then wouldn't suicide be a much quicker and more expedient means than the long and difficult road to achieving Nirvana in this lifetime? Or is there something to Nirvana that is more than just extinguishment, making it still preferable to death even in a world with no rebirth? Please note that I'm not actually contemplating suicide based on this line of reasoning, this is more of an academic exercise and something I'm genuinely curious about, whether Buddhism reduces to implying suicide if the belief in life as suffering is maintained but the belief in rebirth isn't. Essentially, death to an atheist materialist looks a lot like what Buddhists describe as the ultimate goal of paranirvana, i.e. permanently dying and not coming back, so if you think regular death brings that by default anyway, why not just die?
The whole point of the Buddha's teachings was to help us *live* life without suffering. Most Buddhist traditions warn against falling into the trap of nihilism—and suicide is generally considered to be an expression of nihilistic "wrong thinking." Living one's life with compassion for others and having the wisdom to understand how to effectively apply compassion to alleviate the suffering of others is a major goal of the Mahayana adherents (I'm not so sure about the Theravadin traditions, though). From a practical standpoint, suicide prevents one from doing anyone else any good.
As for nirvana, different schools/traditions of Buddhism may define it in different ways. But I think that most (correct me if I'm wrong!) make a point of distinguishing nirvana from anatta (non-self) states and sunyata (emptiness) states. The Buddha's teachings were all about extinguishing cravings as a way to end suffering. One could achieve nirvana while living by quenching the three fires/poisons of greed, aversion, and ignorance. Buddhism, having incubated in a culture where the dominant religion believed in reincarnation, so one could also extinguish the craving for rebirth (and presumably not be reborn). But it's important to remember that the Buddha refused to speculate about whether or not there is a life force independent of the body (what we would call a soul). He considered it to be a distraction to living life in the present.
This is all off the top of my head, and I don't claim any deep understanding...
There are varieties of Mahayana Buddhism that don't go in for the whole "reincarnation" thing. In some, a lot of the things that sound supernatural are interpreted as metaphors about life and consciousness. For instance, the cycle of death and rebirth and karma can be interpreted as something like what happens when you notice something, and it occupies your whole attention for a moment, but then you recollect what you were doing. Or where the general goal of nirvana is something like being able to analyze the suffering in your life in terms of attachment, which enables you to either reduce it or transform it through understanding and acceptance.
Overall, I'd say that Buddhism came from the broad background of Hinduism, and accepts much of that worldview as a base. This includes reincarnation. If you want an interpretation of Buddhism that doesn't involve reincarnation, you can't just take one that was based on reincarnation and remove the reincarnation, because the rest won't make sense. If it is to be a coherent whole worth thinking about, it needs to make sense as a whole, so you should look for a coherent interpretation of the whole thing that doesn't involve reincarnation at all. They're out there.
In terms of making big life decisions like suicide, I will point out that the 3rd Jewel is the Sangha, the community of Buddhists. It is co-equal in importance to Buddha and Dharma, and one might say that this is because, without conducting your practice in a group, it's possible to stray from the path by coming up with plausible interpretations which you don't know how to refute. Just look at how weird some Mahayana sects have gotten, after they abandoned the strict Theravada rules! ;-) So I would suggest that, before using this philosophy to justify suicide, that you should take into account the part that says, "don't try this at home".
I hesitate to offer specifics, but one thing to consider is that we exist in a web of karma. From birth, we acquire connections to people around us, love or hate or debts or what-have-you. And these run both ways. Suicide doesn't make other people's attachments to you go away, and an action to alleviate your own suffering may cause other people to suffer more. Buddhists should be concerned about all suffering everywhere, not just our own. I think classically, the Buddhist solution was to join a monastic order, which is in a sense removing oneself from the web of attachments that is life. And as I recall, there are a number of conditions laid out before one can join, such as not having minor children (i.e., either having no children, or having raised all your children to adulthood), which are basically there to prevent things like parents running off to join a cult and abandoning their kids.
You try suicide, reincarnate, and you're back in the same place as last time. Maybe you think it was a fluke, so you try suicide a few hundred more times, and each time you end up in the same place. Congratulations, you've just prolonged your suffering while accomplishing ~nothing.
I don't think the idea of being stuck in Samsara really sinks in until you've been stuck for a while.
If I thought I could achieve permadeath by committing suicide I would jump off the side of this building right now.
Eventually you realize that you have no choice, so you resign yourself to whatever torments life has in store for you.
I say this with genuine concern, not sarcasm or trying to make fun of you: Please see a therapist or at least call a suicide helpline. Your last two paragraphs indicate that you really need a therapist.
It may be surprising for some to understand, but it's possible to feel like you've had enough of life. I've been served a dish by life, have eaten my share, and I'm sated.
The problem inherent with these support systems is that they're unable to comprehend that someone is legitimately capable of being done with life. There is an inherent belief that life must be preserved at all costs.
Sorry, I don't mean to drag others down to hell with me. I appreciate the concern.
If the reincarnated person has no idea of his previous life, in what meaningful sense is it me? In what sense did "I" end up in the same place? Also, the world is very different today from when I was born, so if I committed suicide and reincarnated, the "new me" would necessarily lead a very different life.
Bruce Frantzis, founder of a qi gong etc. school (energyarts.com) said in some of his meditation classes that what reincarnates is your emotional habits, and those emotional habits are very hard to clean up.
I don't have a strong opinion about whether that's true, but if reincarnation of any sort is possible, then it's plausible, and it's an answer to the skeptics that ask why you don't know ancient Egyptian.
You probably have dreams every night that you don't remember. Just because you don't remember them doesn't mean that you don't internalize them. And even if you can't remember them the next morning you may realize that you slept restlessly because of some disturbing dreams (whose details you've forgotten)—so, they could affect your outlook over the day.
Buddhist doctrine says the shit you do comes back on you—in this life and the next. Likewise, for the merit you acquire. From a what goes around comes around standpoint, if you create a shitty world in this life through your actions, you're likely to be reborn in the shitty world you created. If you create a better world, you're likely to be reborn into that better world.
Is there any evidence that people internalize dreams they don't remember? Studies that correlate people's mood with EEG recordings of their brain in REM sleep, say? It doesn't sound implausible, but without evidence it's a just-so story. I could equally well deny that dreams I don't remember affect me, and that sounds just as plausible.
"From a what goes around comes around standpoint, if you create a shitty world in this life through your actions, you're likely to be reborn in the shitty world you created. If you create a better world, you're likely to be reborn into that better world."
That's very different from being "back in the same place as last time" after committing suicide. For one thing, you won't be back in the same place, even in a very metaphorical sense, unless you had absolutely no impact on the world and did exactly as much good as bad.
For what it's worth, sometimes my mood in the short term turns out to be related to a dream. Isn't there evidence that there isn't a lot of emotional difference between what is imagined and what is experienced?
"You remember your past lives, otherwise it's impossible to make any progress."
I don't remember my past lives, hence I am not reincarnated and have no reason to expect to be reincarnated after I die.
"Unless you change drastically, your life basically always plays out roughly the same."
So if my grandpa was a Soviet telephone switchboard operator who went off to fight the Nazis because they invaded his country, I should also expect to be a telephone switchboard operator who goes off to fight the Nazis? Even though neither the Soviet Union, nor switchboard operators, nor Nazi Germany exist anymore; even though I live halfway around the world; and even though nuclear weapons have put an end to wars between great powers?
I dunno, I can't claim to have a full and comprehensive understanding of how the reincarnation system works. Your replies don't make any sense to me, and I don't think this conversation is going to go anywhere productive so I will disengage now.
My teachers (Gelug) told me that only advanced bodhisattvas remember their past lives. I happen to have memories (which may or may not be false memories) of past lives. I mentioned this to one of my teachers and he dismissed them as not being real.
See, I have no such memory, I think most people don't either, and the claims from those that do can often be explained away without requiring the memories to be factual, which is the main reason I'm asking this as someone skeptical of reincarnation, even in the reduced form described by traditional Buddhism, but interested in the possibility of Buddhism being salvageable otherwise.
Eh, this reaction feels quite... uhm, how to put it politely...
If you reaction to a *factual* statement that contradicts your theory is "seems like you've already made up your mind", that definitely doesn't seem like a reaction of a person who has even the slightest interest to figure out the truth.
Ok, but that is assuming reincarnation is real and you really do come back after suicide. I'm asking what happens if we assume the materialist, atheistic view that that isn't the case.
And if you can escape and presumably eventually will, where's the hurry? I find merely existing to be quite satisfactory and hope I get caught in samsara based on your description
What is the general impression of AI generated art? It seems Aella takes flak for using it in her posts, but I generally like them, and I wouldn't even say her pictures are that effective. Are AI-generated images seen as not classy or something? Is it a generational thing?
So far it seems that AI art, at least in my creative circles, is mostly raising the floor rather than affecting the ceiling. Fan media and other non-professional creative works are seeing a bloom in use of illustrations where previously they would have nothing at all. They're not particularly good pieces, in fact they tends to be extremely generic, but a decent commission is $50 minimum so a free alternative definitely fills a niche for many.
The trouble with AI-generated art is that the underlying "creative" system lacks critical introspection. The human who inputs the parameters may be able to select one result out of many that are unique and interesting to other critical intelligences (humans). But uncurated training datasets yield uncurated output—so, it's garbage-in, garbage-out—unless a human with critical introspection can weed out the crap. Unfortunately, few people have those skills, so it's the tragedy of the commons as applied to artistic endeavors.
It's interesting? I don't follow Aella, but on other blogs, the stuff that gets picked out to illustrate posts tends to be slightly "off" in some way, but also striking in another way. It makes me wonder how many iterations the poster went through before finding an image that was satisfactory enough to post.
I suppose it's not as classy as having an artist-in-residence who can toss off oil paintings for every post, but I suspect it's a lot cheaper.
I don't much like AI images. Most seem to have very commercial arty DNA. If you just want an image of something pretty straightforward to liven up the page and don't have the skills to produce one yourself, something made by AI is just fine. But if you want an image that's unsettling, or sort of fractured in a way that lets you glimpse deeper truths through the cracks, you're not likely to get it with AI. Dall-e seems particularly primitive to me when it comes to artistic quality. It very often produces symmetrical images, and everybody knows that's bad because half the space is thrown away -- it contains nothing new, just a mirror image of the other half. Also, Dall-e's idea of a painterly style is to make the image out of random globs and gloobs that look like shit from closer up. On the other hand, if you can get Dall-e confused by giving certain weird prompts, you get some grotesque and fascinating misfires. I have a little collection of those that I'm quite fond of.
I've experimented quite a bit and that's not my impression at all. By experimenting with models, parameters, prompts, and workflows you can get some pretty varied stuff. It's like painting with a palette, only the colors are abstractions and styles
In one sense it's derivative, but I don't see how the same cant be said of all human art
That's one of my problems with AI, particularly AI art. There's a skillset involved in knowing how to prompt the thing to produce something that you might actually want. If you're not very good at prompts, you'll get a lot more garbage. That's likely to get better over time, but it's a huge problem for mass-market use now.
I've yet to see any AI-generated art that blows my socks off. Having said that, there's an abundance of crappy art created by human beings, too. But occasionally I run across human-generated art that makes me think, "Wow! That's what they mean by a masterpiece!
Derivative art is an imitation of sone other art. I'm sure there are many artists who are derivative but there are others with a different relationship to artists they admire: They are inspired by them. They have learned from them. The have adapted some of the admired artist's preoccupations and techniques to their own purpose. Think about your own relationship to teachers or thinkers you admire. You have learned from them. You are influenced by them. But you are not a parrot, trying to sound just like them, expressing their ideas and pretending you thought of them yourself. You have your own ideas and your own ways of saying things.
My partner is an artist who grew up in the SFO area and thus has a toe in the tech world as well. Things that I’ve absorbed over the course of a variety of conversations, which are by no means universal but may be useful as one of many responses if you are looking for “general impression” are:
(1) Abuse/Infringement of copyright in the training process. AI training appears to basically have been accomplished by scraping mass amounts of images online as training inputs. Consent was mostly not sought for this, and AI proponents tend to defend that with variations on the theme, “well you put it online, so it was fair game.” But that’s not how copyright works – the NFL logo is online; so are photos of the Olympics and images owned by Disney. Try using those things for anything without consent of their owners. So while there seems to be a lot of scoffing when someone raises copyright concerns about copies of their work being made and used to train AI models, that scoffing seems highly and suspiciously correlated with the institutional power of the complainant. Take, for example, music AI. Once the owner of the copyrights in question is a concentrated and highly-litigious music industry, rather than small-scale disorganized visual artists, suddenly we go from “this doesn’t violate copyright and you are stupid for suggesting it conceivably could” to:
“Dance Diffusion is also built on datasets composed entirely of copyright-free and voluntarily provided music and audio samples. Because diffusion models are prone to memorization and overfitting, releasing a model trained on copyrighted data could potentially result in legal issues. In honoring the intellectual property of artists while also complying to the best of their ability with the often strict copyright standards of the music industry, keeping any kind of copyrighted material out of training data was a must.”
So the distinction can seem, to artists, like less one of clear-cut legalism and more one of tech bros picking artists as a target for IP exploitation, not because they think they have a clear cut right to do the exploiting, but simply because they perceive artists to be unlikely/unable to fight back. And a stance of, “move fast and break things, as long as those things belong to a little guy who can’t do anything about it” unsurprisingly fails to sit well with the little guy.
(2) The very real implications for the lives and livelihoods of artists. Understandably, the luddite comparisons tend to come out here, and true enough changes in technology always lead to changes in how people can earn a living. But it tends to be a sour message when the guy telling you “just find your way in the new world” was only able to build his million dollar tool to replace you by cribbing from your own work without asking your permission. Also, there’s a class issue in play – AI may not for years, and may not even ever, displace the highest-performing artists at the pinnacle of their craft. However, the only way to *get* to that level is years of intense practice and study. Disney’s nine old men didn’t just burst forth fully formed from Walt’s brow. You find your way from storyboarding to character designer to animator and so on. If AI eats all the projects that would previously have gone to new artists – the $50 commission to draw my DnD character falls out of the market, it gets substantially harder to *become* skilled, and the art world becomes (more) concentrated with upper-class people who can rely on family support to launch a career. Silicon Valley types generally don't care about that kind of thing, but other people can and do.
(3) And then there’s a bunch of stuff that I don’t know how to categorize other than as “distasteful behavior on the part of AI World.” Stuff like:
- Naive pronouncements that AI will lead to utopia or a post-scarcity society. This kind of behavior seems dumb enough on its face that people might think I’m exaggerating, but take, for example, 5:42 – 7:30 of the Proko interview.
“this is probably the largest thing that will like occur in a long time and the reason that we know that is because it is a technology that like probably can create Utopia…it is like at some point the AI can do everything that the human can do at like but cheaper and like more effective… and if that were to happen it would mean the labor costs of everything would go to zero…like almost all of the price is paying somebody [for labor] and you might say “that's important that we like pay people to do that” but like the AGI case is like no no actually it's bad because the alternative is everything is free, the alternative is like your rent is pennies, the alternative is that like you never have poverty"
- Shutting down pushback on AI with self-serving arguments about its inevitability. “Eugenics can’t possibly be stopped” - guy who loves eugenics and refuses to stop, 1925. “Oh please. Even if you regulated our industry, nobody’s gonna stop China from using CFCs” – American CFC manufacturer, 1975.
The weird thing is, all of this has happened already, with the invention of photography. A catastrophic event for the livelihoods of painters. Also made violating the copyright of existing art vastly easier. Yet painting and visual art still survived, and indeed added a whole new subfield.
I think an even more striking example is the effect of phonographic recording on, say, orchrstras. Even now, it's kind of amazing to think that records didn't put a complete end to live concerts. What kind of sane person would spend heaps more money to hear live the same thing they could hear at home, *just* for the experience of knowing it's authentic, and really being performed in front of them? But of course, lots of people do exactly that. Orchestral musicians aren't even creating anything (you might say), they're merely reproducing something (artistically of course). If there's one artistic job technology would logically take it's that one. Yet a whole century later, their profession is very far from dead.
I think these two precedents are pretty convincing. AI will reduce the number of jobs for artists, no doubt (though it may also create as many or more equally artistic jobs, as well as whole new artistic forms the way the above technologies did). But there's no way it will come close to destroying or replacing visual (or any other kind of) art.
I don’t get that the concern of the artists. They are the most protected of groups, because digital art isn’t most of art.
AI doesn’t threaten painting, or sculpture, street performance, knitting, or whatever is going on in most modern art. It couldn’t even unmake a bed.
All it can do is create digital images of any of this. Which leaves us with logo designers and the very few people working in digital animation, where AI is likely to be used as a tool and not something likely to replace humans. It’s, so far, not consistent enough.
This contrasts with music, which can be produced with entirely electronic means, with or without AI. And writing. And nearly everything else. Yet, it’s the artists that are most hysterical.
I think digital art probably is most of art actually. Think video games, board games, comics, children's books, book covers, album covers, advertising, branding (which is much more than logos), greeting cards, wrapping paper, concept art etc etc. There is comparatively much less money in physical art for the average artist.
Basically there's a large contingent of artists and the kinds of people who feel very strongly about protecting artists who vocally hate it. I assume they will be mad about it until the day they die, so you might as well start ignoring them now.
There's some discourse about them being plagiarism, which is generally very stupid. However it stems from a fairly sympathetic state of malaise at the thought of people using AI art instead of commissioning human artists. (My personal view is that it's fine to use AI art for purpose where you'd otherwise Google a stock image, e.g. illustrating a blog post; PhilosophyBear does it too and it's cute — but unclassy to use it for something where you'd otherwise commission a human artist e.g. a book cover.)
I recently spent a decent amount of time trying to get some AI art that worked for a pet project. It does some decent to great stuff with certain prompts, but struggles with a lot of others. Out of many dozens of prompts and hundreds of images generated, I got about 10 that were usable and among those only a few that were close to what I really wanted. Nothing that was exactly what I wanted.
Lots of weird things a human artist would never get wrong, like non-Euclidean geometry showing up a lot even when that wouldn't make sense.
As far as your other question, as long as the art is as messed up as it commonly is, it's going to not be classy just based on that. Once it's not so messed up, it's going to be seen as taking jobs from an area where human expression has been seen as key for a long time. There's going to be pushback from the places that really care about art, which may bleed into other areas. Cheap companies (including small ones that can't afford an artist) may choose to use it, as well as people in their own time. It's going to be a tough transition to general use, especially for professional art and places that can already afford better. Artists for big companies may end up being more involved in Marketing generally, or some other multi-functional skill to separate themselves and build their capabilities as a selling point.
There is a common opinion that AI-generated art is plagiarism, since the AI was trained on (and the results somehow incorporate) human-generated art not licensed for that purpose. (My own personal experience with how strongly felt this opinion can be comes from various online Stardew Valley discussions, in the context of fan art for the video game as well as the images used in mods.)
It's hard to say where to draw the line, but it's definitely true that some off-label uses of art are plagiarism. It's bad if I download an image someone drew, apply a Photoshop filter, and pass it off as my own. It's bad if I download 100 images someone drew, make a collage out of them, and pass it off as my own. (Here, I want to separate the things that are actually illegal from things that are ethically wrong. The latter will vary from person to person. In my own view, heavily influenced by academia, the two examples above would be ethically okay if I cited my sources and explained what I had done, but not otherwise.)
Is using AI-generated art kind of like the two examples above? Or if we grant the AI some small measure of personification, is it more like the AI browsing the internet and being inspired by things it sees, which we'd be fine with a human doing? Part of the problem is that the AI does not cite its sources; I bet that some very specific prompts are more like a Photoshop filter, and some very broad prompts are more like browsing the internet, and it's impossible to tell which is which.
>There is a common opinion that AI-generated art is plagiarism, since the AI was trained on (and the results somehow incorporate) human-generated art not licensed for that purpose.
This is one of the big marketing points for Adobe's "Firefly" generative AI: it's billed as being copyright-safe because it was trained exclusively on public domain and openly-licensed content and Adobe's own stock image database. The main downside of this is that Firefly doesn't know how to draw iconic pop culture characters who are mostly shown only in copyrighted material.
Conflict of interest disclaimer: I am an Adobe employee. I do not work on the Firefly team and am speaking only for myself and not for my employer.
Some of it is cool and is good as "art". Most of it (like that used for blog posts and stuff) is at worst banal but that is true of most of the stock images used for that purpose already. At least with AI stuff we get variety. I have not moral/ethical concerns with it at all.
How's everyone's experience with meditation? Do people here meditate regularly? Do you get a lot out of it? I did some every day during Covid, and eventually had a kinda-transcendental experience after drinking a beer on a beach where I was extremely dialed in to my surroundings- not, off in my own head thinking about something else. I was just very 'there' and not elsewhere for a little while. Despite that, I got away from regular meditation until recently, when I started up again. I'm now averaging probably 4 days a week, every morning after I get out of the shower and before I have coffee. It's a slow but steady learning curve to get better, though I haven't experienced any benefits outside of the actual meditation yet.
Are other people meditating regularly? Seeing benefits?
You don't meditate for instrumental benefits. You meditate to be more aware of your own mind, and to be more connected with the present moment. That might have some kind of personal benefit, it might not. It's just a personal preference. I feel much more secure in my behavior and ponderings when I feel more connected to how my mind is working in a given time in my life, but I never expect to feel "better" or more confident or calmer or whatever.
Piano players: I want to learn a few pieces nearly perfectly. By this I mean that I'd like to be able to play them in front of a crowd with no stumbles/startovers and *maybe* miss a note here and there. It seems that as I practice, my accuracy asymptotically approaches 90% or 95% and takes a long time to even get close to that.
I am convinced that really good pianists still have to practice a lot but they don't have to deal with asymptotic progress and they can progress fairly linearly up to 100%. At piano recitals, I marvel at the way performers will play multiple pieces without a single mistake.
How do I get there? Is there a way to shoot for 110% so that I hit 100% with less effort? For instance, if I want to lift 100 lbs 6 times, I'd work on being able to lift 120 lbs 8 times. At that point, lifting 100x6 would be almost effortless. What's the analogous approach for piano? Learning to play it in the dark?
I am guessing that you can play easy pieces flawlessly and consistently. The professional approach is to expand the realm of what constitutes an easy piece. Highly skilled musicians have reached a level of proficiency so that even if they are playing their worst, their playing is still excellent. I sort of balk at the practice of working really hard to ingrain a few pieces into muscle memory so that one can demonstrate perfection. A more musical approach is to constantly learn harder and harder pieces. So I think your weight lifting analogy is a good approach.
Not the OP, and a different instrument (guitar), but I’ve actually found this not to be the case for myself at all. I’ll have to practice harder pieces much more than easy ones obviously but I’ve found that there is essentially a consistency threshold that I always end up hitting and I can never manage to get anything to a consistent or flawless level. I’ve maybe played a song “flawlessly” 2-3 times ever. Much to my own frustration! Everyone says the answer is always just more practice but I suspect there is some trait like “ability to learn to perform a dexterous task repeatably with a high level of precision” which simply varies across the population.
I’ve spent a good amount of time trying to improve my approach to practice but recently I’ve also started to wonder if I need to somehow fundamentally change that way I _think_ when playing.
People have mentioned slowing down, this works, but is in my experience not quite optimal all the time. It's good to start this way but to learn at maximum efficiency you should practise one bar (or two bars or whatever) at a time at full speed.
Pick a short enough section that you can play it correctly at full speed, up to the first note of the next session. Make sure you play the first note of the next bar with the "correct" finger placement to continue. Repeat lots. Then do the same for the next bar. When you can, start stitching the bars together into bigger chunks. If you make mistakes, go back and do it in smaller chunks. If you still make mistakes at the smallest reasonable chunk, then go slower.
You'll probably get better advice if you can be more specific about the pieces you are aiming for.
One thing that hasn't been suggested already: take apart difficult passages analytically and use them to invent your own exercises that will let you practice the necessary skills in different ways. (e.g. play the passage in a different key; same notes, different rhythm; swap LH and RH positions and/or parts, etc.) This can help avoid boredom and maintain mental focus, which is important because mentally focused practice is always better than mindless practice.
Nahre Sol has some great examples of this sort of thing on YouTube:
Let's say I have a difficult passage the LH is supposed to play. I've often wondered if it's worth learning to play it with both hands or if this would just confused me (esp bc the fingering would be different!)
In most cases, the "confusion" effect that you are worrying about isn't going to be a problem. This is because for an amateur pianist, the learning bottleneck is often mental rather than physical — or more precisely, it is the coordination of the mental with the physical. (Analogy: When learning a foreign language, the main barrier to fluency isn't how fast we can move our tongues, but how well we can combine unfamiliar syntax, vocabulary, and pronunciation rules in real time.)
Practicing with the "wrong" hand, like the other techniques I mentioned above, can help with this mental aspect of the learning process, since relearning the music in a new way imprints it on new circuits in your brain, and these new circuits are still useful when you go back to playing with the correct hand.
Another thing, since a lot of people here are mentioning "slow down": when doing slow practice, you need to actually make it *sound good* at the slower tempo. It's not just about getting the notes right — think about phrasing, dynamics, and all the other stuff just as if you were really planning to perform it at the slower tempo. (Some interpretive choices that work at a slower tempo might turn out not to work so well when you speed it up later on, but that's fine — the point is that paying attention to these details will help you practice mindfully rather than mindlessly.)
Great replies so far! I really appreciate the input.
I do some slow practice but I'm starting to think that this should be a majority of what I do. How slow do you play pieces? 50% of what you can sort of manage? 75%?
And I'll do more hands separate work.
Interesting what Perry said regarding how long "real pianists" actually practice. If it takes 6 hours / day to perfect a piece, I'll pass! Let me first see how far I can get with 30-60 minutes/day.
You should slow down to where you don’t make any mistakes, and maintain good phrasing and dynamics, like Quiop said. Once comfortably there, start picking up speed. If you can’t play three times in a row without a mistake, slow back down.
I like that idea. I've been practicing at a fast tempo where I can hit (say) 75% accuracy, and then I try to improve the accuracy over time. I think what you're suggesting is that I find a tempo slow enough that I can play with 95%-100% accuracy and then increase the tempo over time.
Yes, and really think about ≈100% accuracy, no matter how slow you need to play. It's been a game changer for me, I've been able to play really difficult pieces now with ease and confidence by taking time to burn the correct movements into the muscle memory. Different instrument, but the principles are the same.
Edit: to add, the technical ability is limited by precision, not speed. Everyone can drum fingers on a tabletop with machine-gun speed, but it's meaningless. Placing each finger at the exact location with the proper timing is what makes the technique work, and it is all about precision.
I’ve heard this advice quite a bit (play slow enough to make no mistakes) and yet I’ve found that I still make mistakes no matter how slowly I play, even if it’s 1 note every 2 seconds. What instrument are you on out of interest? Mine is guitar, and there are so many things to keep track of across both hands that I can’t think about them all simultaneously and something inevitably goes wrong no matter the speed.
Same instrument in all its variations. But this is really instrument-agnostic, every instrument has its quirks and difficulties.
So: in this case you should break the whole piece into smaller chunks. Really small chunks. Say, play just 2 notes together. Then 3. Then maybe one measure. Once you can play one measure without mistakes, try the next one. If that is too much, break it down to smaller chunks.
Also play scales. I still regularly play scales, at an easy tempo where I make 0 mistakes. If I stumble, I slow down and play the same scale slower until I can play it three times in a row with no mistakes.
There's no shortcuts, or, rather, this is the shortcut - learn to play perfectly, no matter how small/simple a chunk and how slow you have to go.
Now, I don't know if you have struggles related to how you hold the instrument, hand position, physical things like that. These can only be addressed IRL by an instructor or at least an experienced musician.
Please don't put words in my mouth! I said that's how much time it takes over a period of years to become a degreed performer, not to learn a piece. I have no idea of the level of proficiency of the people you're talking about. Are they professionals at concerts? Are they random folks you know who take piano lessons? I wanted to use a concrete example of someone I know. And I wanted to underline that you are probably underestimating the "normal" amount of time to learn how to play an instrument well.
The number of hours it takes to learn a piece depends a lot on the specific piece in question, your baseline level of skill, and the level you want to play it at. Hitting all the right notes at the right time with the tempo and dynamics written into the sheet music is one thing, and frankly it sounds like that's what you care about. Musicality, tone, expression, etc. are a different ball game entirely; I know because that's what I struggled with as a young musician!. And it takes additional practice and skill to perform a piece well on top of mechanically being able to play it.
We might be talking at cross purposes so ignore me if that's the case. But when I play I'm playing to enjoy myself. Why does it matter if you make a mistake? If you're on your own, no one noticed. If you're in front of a crowd, they'll judge you far more on your demeanour and whether you seem to be having fun than on your technical accuracy.
EDIT: I wish to make it clear that my cavalier attitude towards making mistakes does not mean I condone jazz of any kind.
I'm not sure what level of expertise you want, but I played piano through school and my amateur advice is to play much, much slower. One of my teachers always told me speed was the very last thing (to master, for each piece), and not really essential: better to play at a snail's pace and play it right, than to speed up and make mistakes. Unlike everything else (the notes, rhythms, dynamics) changing the tempo isn't really changing the piece; you're still playing the same piece (I think; I could be wrong about this). So slow way down, keep slowing down until you can consistently play it well. Then either stop there and just perform it at the slow tempo, or very gradually work your way up to higher speeds.
Two other things. First (and unless you're a real beginner this is probably blindingly obvious, so forgive me), practice each hand separately. Try to get each hand perfect on its own, and only then put them together. Second, a lot of classic pieces have a short menorable section that everyone knows and a longer (and often harder) extension in the fuller versions. For example, the well-known part of Fur Elise is only about 23 bars, and pretty easy. If you just want to impress people informally, you can learn the shorter memorable parts of famous pieces (that may be the only bit most people know anyway) and leave out the rest.
Yes, the "slow the f down" advice cannot be overemphasized. It is vital to build the correct movement pattern into your muscle memory from the start. It's much harder to fix learned mistakes from playing fast too soon than to have never made them in the first place.
I'd go as far as to say there's really no such thing as "difficult to play" music, only "not yet familiar enough".
How do you practice? I used to have a similar problem but I was just playing the song start to finish repeatedly. More targeted, repeated practice of the specific parts I had the most trouble with went a long way towards bridging the gap from 90% to ~99%.
As for shooting for 110%, not sure how good of an idea this is, but things you could try are:
- Playing the song faster than you would expect to play it in front of the crowd
- If your main goal is just not having stumbles/startovers, then I'll make the assumption you're not paying a lot of attention to dynamics or the release timings of your notes. If that is the case, you can try to incorporate those in your practice as a "110%" task.
Interesting, I was always taught *not* to practice it faster than you would perform it, because then it's too easy to accidentally perform it too fast. It's already easy to rush when you're performing; no need to make it easier.
I was told a story about muscle memory - that your fingers learn the movements separately to how fast they carry them out. So if you play something a thousand times at slow motion speed, it will sink in and you can expect to reel it off unconsciously, perfectly, at a high speed, without even thinking about it.
Whereas if you go fast during practice, for one thing you'll stress yourself out and find yourself less keen to practise again, and for another you'll encode the mistakes you're making into your muscle memory instead of the correct notes.
What is your general level of piano playing experience? It sounds like you aren't particularly experienced if I am correctly reading between the lines.
I have a friend who was a music performance major, and when we were in college he was practicing something like 6 hours a day on top of lessons, rehearsal, and classes. You may be underestimating how much time it takes to reach the level of performance you've seen in other people. At the kind of level that I used to play (I.e. good for a teenager but nowhere near a prodigy, and I chose not to pursue further training) it still took many hours of practice to get a piece to performance/audition level.
I'm sure a professional musician would be able to give you a better answer than me--I've only ever been a hobbyist and my preferred instrument was never the piano. I can only give basic advice: scales and arpeggios to develop muscle memory, focusing on difficult passages or runs, hiring a teacher to point out technique errors or biomechanical issues, practicing for an hour or more every day.
I asked my friend what he thought about your goals here. He expressed a strong opinion that asymptotic improvement is just the way that musical learning works. Someone with greater skill might be able to proceed faster along that asymptotic curve, but the last parts (nailing complex runs, expressing musicality, etc.) are always going to come more slowly than the easier parts.
His suggestion for something analogous to training with heavier weights is playing a more challenging arrangement of the piece you want to learn. (The classic example is Mozart's variations on Twinkle Twinkle Little Star.) Learning more challenging music can help you build skills that also benefit you on easier pieces. But generally, his opinion is that in learning music, you train the basics to build up to more challenging pieces. To use the lifting metaphor, you have to progress through benching 50, 75, etc lbs before you can lift 120x8 to improve at 100x6.
I'm afraid I don't have any useful advice but I just wanted to say I think this is a really interesting question I'd never really thought of. I used to do a bit of music, and I was pretty good in a young-person-at-an-open-mic-night sort of way, but I don't think I ever gave a performance with no mistakes. Could the simplest explanation be correct, that the performers who play perfectly are just much, much better at their instrument than us mere mortals? Or maybe they feel that they make mistakes too, but the better they get the less noticeable the mistakes are?
Ukrainian forces are slowly breaking through Russia's three concentric lines of defenses in southwestern Ukraine. They've now reached the second line.
Why doesn't Russia respond by building a fourth line farther back? Ukraine's men are moving so slowly that Russia probably has enough time to build it before the Ukrainians reach it.
And if the slow pace continues, what's to stop Russia from building fifth, sixth and seventh defensive lines in time?
It took the Russians somewhere between six months and a year to build the nominal three defensive lines they have. If the Russians were to have started construction of a fourth line of defenses at the outset of the Ukrainian offensive two months ago, we'd expect the fourth line to be ready somewhere between now and mid-November, and the fifth line not until next year. In practice, it will probably take longer still because the first three lines may have e.g. used up most of the spare land mines they'd accumulated in about seventy years of production.
Russia was able to build three defensive lines because A: the Ukrainian army was not able to conduct an offensive last winter, and B: they had a large stockpile of land mines, concrete, etc. The Ukrainian army is capable of conducting offensives now, so Russia isn't going to be able to build three more defensive lines of the sort they are seeing. Just a bunch of speed bumps.
That said, the three defensive lines they have now *may* be enough for them to hold on to their limited gains.
"….all which is also the answer to the question: and what is behind that 2nd anti-tank ditch?
The answer is simple: it’s the 1st Russian Defence Line.
Sure, this is not sexy to conclude, and doesn’t sound logical. But, that’s the wy the Russians are fighting nowadays. It means that, ‘behind that 2nd anti-tank ditch, there are yet more of well-concealed Russian positions in every hedgerow they could find.
…and a growing number of these positions are ever more sophisticated. Some have top cover, so that they’re not easy to destroy by mortar bombs lighter than 120mm, or by cluster bomblets deployed by artillery shells. They really need a direct hit by 155mm; some even so-called ‘bunker-busters’.
That’s the 1st Russian Defence Line, and that’s going to remain the 1st Russian Defence Line, even once the ZSU overcomes it and gets to Tokmak and beyond, sometimes in the future. The reason is that, due to the failure of the West to re-arm Ukraine, the ZSU has not enough heavy equipment for a mechanised advance. Which means that Ukrainian infantry can only advance at the infantry pace, which is the same pace at which the Russians are withdrawing, which in turn means that every time Ukrainians break through the 1st Line of Defence, the Russians have enough time to bring in another reserve unit from somewhere, and construct/patch up the 1st Line of Defence, somewhere further to the rear."
Building a fourth wall would take resources. Those resources are currently being employed at the second line to make the Ukrainians move slowly. If those resources were reallocated to build a fourth line, the Ukrainians would quickly overtake the under-defended second line, and either overrun this fourth line or stall at it after grabbing significant territory.
Basically your proposal is that the Russians should trade territory for other resources. That is a valid thing to do in some circumstances, but not for Russia right now since lost territory hurts them a lot politically and since they don't have much more territory to give until Ukrainian artillery can reach the Sea of Azov which would make logistics a nightmare.
As a military you have "100 logistics points" to spend. You can spend it all on one fat defensive line and when it's broken you're f*cked. You can spend it on 20 defensive lines, but each one will be a mere speedbump. There is an optimum, or at least an optimal range of number of defensive lines, depending on your systematic assessment of all relevant factors.
Also, you might simply run out of physical space, given the effective ranges of weapons systems and geography.
Ah addendum: Many laymen don't know that logistics is probably the most underrated factor in war, because it is not "flashy". But without good logistics, apparently you can't even conquer a vastly smaller outgunned and outmanned neighbouring country whose geography you know like your own, whose military base structure you built yourself for them some time ago, who speak the same language, even when you yourself are one of the biggest land armies and largest countries in existence.
Look up the size of the logistical arm of the US or UK armed forces. It's vast.
"What we are watching at this stage is what is called operations – the coordinated movement of large bodies of troops to their objective. Operations is the level of analysis between tactics (how do I fight when I get there?) and strategy (why am I fighting at all?).
...Now, as we’ve noted, operations are all about the problem of moving large armies. Late season Game of Thrones notwithstanding, armies do not generally teleport around the world, they have to march. That imposes all sorts of restrictions and costs on movement: where are the roads? Mountain passes? River Crossings? The terrain Sauron’s army must attack over is defined (as we’ll see) by a series of transport bottlenecks that have to be negotiated in order to deliver the siege. Then there is the issue of supplies – even orcs need to eat.
Looking at the logistics of moving the Army of Mordor to Minas Tirith is actually a great way to introduce some of these problems in more depth. They say ‘amateurs talk tactics, but professionals study logistics.’ Well, pull up a chair at the Grown-Ups Table, and let’s study some logistics."
Just type "logistics" into the search box on his page and he has a lot on the topic from real-world historical examples:
One hour a week, usually focused on military logistics-- not just the maneuvering, but also the complex economic, political,, human, and engineering issues that go into military success and failure.
One hour/week of researched material with Australian humor included.
"Why doesn't Russia respond by building a fourth line farther back? Ukraine's men are moving so slowly that Russia probably has enough time to build it before the Ukrainians reach it. "
I will take off my virology expertise internet hat and replace it with my military expertise hat ...
I think a big part of this is that you kinda have to build those lines in the open because there is lots of heavy equipment to install the caltrop thingies and more heavy equipment to dig some of the tank-repelling trenches. Mines are laid out on the surface which means that someone needs to be there doing the laying out.
With drones the Ukrainians will notice this and blast you with artillery while doing so. This tends to be fatal to the folks driving the equipment or laying the mines. In addition to dead people, your fortification plans get disrupted because of all the bodies and wrecked equipment.
A reasonable question then is: Why didn't Ukraine also do this last fall/winter when the Russians were building the lines in the first place. I don't know, but I can imagine that Ukraine had a lot less equipment back then?
Last fall/winter, Ukraine was short on artillery ammunition, had a lot of forces committed in and around Bakhmut, and were training several brigades to take place in the counter offensive. There also seems to have been an intelligence failure -- Ukraine seemed to have been genuinely caught off guard by the extent of the Russian mine fields (or, at least, the planners were caught off guard).
Also, we are talking about a vast amount of territory here. Ukraine doesn't have enough aircraft to cover the entirety of the front line, and doesn't have sufficient air defenses to risk deploying the aircraft they do have that close to the line, anyway. That means that hitting Russian engineering would require keeping on an eye on a huge territory using UAVs, then deploying limited artillery in a timely fashion, then hitting the Russian engineering, then moving that artillery quickly so it doesn't fall victim to Russian counter battery fire. All while they majority of your best forces and equipment are committed elsewhere to stop the Russian offensive.
I just finished running my group through a one-shot scenario in between starting our next campaign (different system) and I am down to play more of it.
What would the effect on the economy be if factories were 100% automated and they could shut down without ill consequence during recessions? No furloughed human workers, no increase in unemployment and welfare claims, no families damaged by mom or dad sitting in the living room drunk or high all day suddenly.
I think there's a missing assumption here. Why would factories shut down? A seasonal need could be compensated by also building some other seasonal good in the first good's downtime. If they overproduce and saturate the market, you could compensate by producing less but consistently (100 units a month to make 1,200 a year, instead of 300 a month and running out of work in four months).
This could all happen with or without automated factories. So you're really asking why are there business cycles, and what would happen differently if one part of the business cycle stopped the cascade that leads to a full recession. That is, if factory workers don't lose money, they keep spending and the rest of the economy is fine. But you've already posited recessions as still real, which means the factory doesn't have anything to do with it. Wherever the former factory workers get their money will likely be affected by whatever is causing the recession, and therefore still lower their consumption and spread the recession.
So it seems like the question you are asking goes beyond factories, and was saying "what would happen in a recession if the entire [essential] economy were fully automated?" It seems that the answer is to question how there would even be a recession in that case.
I don’t get this at all. Factories (or any company) produce to perceived demand. They don’t overproduce in recessions to smooth out “seasonal demand” - whatever that means. Even in a fully automated factory production costs money in raw materials, marketing, sales and transportation. Automation doesn’t end business cycles.
Seasonal demand is about seasonal items. Maybe a factory produces more leading up to Christmas or similar.
I agree that even a fully automated factory doesn't end business cycles, which was my point in saying there was a missing assumption in the original question.
What are humans doing with their time when there's not a recession? If humans are employed for wages doing service work instead of manufacturing, then they will still feel the employment effects of a recession, since there is in general just as much less demand for services as there is less demand for goods during a recession. If humans aren't employed for wages, then you're imagining a very different world from one we've lived in for the last 200 years, and it sounds interesting, but it's not clear why recessions would exist.
If factories are shutting down during recessions, that means there is not sufficient demand for the goods/services they are providing. That means that there isn't enough money for discretionary spending. That means that whatever jobs the former workers are now doing are not paying enough, or they were unable to get another job, so they are already suffering from the 'increase in unemployment, claiming welfare, sitting drunk or high all day at home' effects.
I'm looking to set up (play money, for now) prediction markets within my company on private company topics...which means I can't use third party applications, but can (and deeply desire to) use third-party source code to get off the ground. Anyone know of a recommended codebase for something like this? The closer to vanilla use of common languages like html/js and python, the better.
I run my own prediction market for my team at work.
I literally just run it through google sheets and SQL.
Any user can input a new prediction a new prediction (or update on an existing one) by adding a new line to the excel sheet with name | date | question | percentage.
Usually when a new question gets added it is posted in team chat for other participants to weigh in.
The sheet periodially updates a SQL table and SQL script handles the math using the Good Judgement project's methods (https://www.gjopen.com/faq).
I could dashboard it up pretty easily but honestly just running the script works for my tech savvy marketplace.
Thus far it has been obvious and noncontentious when a market has resolved.
Obviously this could be broken by bad actors and might not work at a larger scale. But if all participants are non-anonymous coworkers you should be fine.
predictions_raw schema: predictor | prediction_date | title | pct | resolution_date | is_resolved | outcome (where 1 means it happened and 0 means it didn't)
Forgive my ignorance, but does a prediction market require any specific problems to be solved, over and above the same stuff you'd need for any other web service? (Ie, user account creation, letting them upload data, aggregating said data and displaying it back, etc.)
Why not just use Django for the backend, and maybe d3.js for pretty graphs on the client?
(Unless those technologies are considered ancient now - I've not kept up to date. In which case, same suggestion, just for whatever came in and replaced them.)
Not particularly? But frankly I'd love to not be rolling my own UI here, and having someone who battletested the aggregation math would also be helpful for the same reason (though less extreme) you don't roll your own crypto. Lmk if you think I'm missing something obvious though!
Interesting idea! Seems like it could help, but my concern is that the extra step could sap motivation for folks - I expect this to initially be a cute novelty to most folks and only build confidence with them over time.
Haven't watched the video (and unfortunately, it's unlikely that'll have time soon (I checked enough to notice it's about 18 minutes)), so / but I will register a suspected confounder: LGBTQ+ people happen to be more willing to go to doctors or have disabilities formally recognized than non-LGBTQ+ people, who are more willing by contrast to "just walk it off".
FAIK, the video addresses that confounder specifically.
I don't think you need to watch the video-- it's mostly about LGBTQ* people being abused and therefore having more disabilities, though that certainly wouldn't explain the presenter's EDS. At least, I don't think it could, though I believe the ACE (adverse childhood experience) model that bad experiences in childhood connect to non-obvious ill heath later.
There’s a doctor in Michigan who is hypothesizing a link between various medical issues, including EDS, and certain forms of queerness and neurodiversity due to the combined presence of certain alleles. He’s been treating trans patients in particular and noticed a higher prevalence of certain conditions. He wants what he calls Meyer-Powers syndrome to be classified as a Disorder of Sex Development. https://reddit.com/r/DrWillPowers/s/YrgrgJfdk7
My prediction, based entirely on anecdotal evidence (that is, based on the LGBTQ+ people I have personally known, including myself):
Clear yes for LQ (compared to the base rate for heterosexual women in the former, and the most relevant category for the latter), clear no for G (I'll go slightly further and predict the rate to be weakly less than the base rate for heterosexual men), weak yes for female bisexuals but no for male bisexuals, statistically insignificant yes for T.
With an estimated 35-45 years to live as per every life expectancy calculator I can find and a net worth of approximately $2.5M, how would you devote the remainder of your life to fighting wokeness and/or feminism with maximum effectiveness? If I keep working at my (quite woke) job for the next 5 years, I will probably accumulate another $1-1.5M. Assume no family.
Don't bother lol. If this level of wealth could make a difference, the difference would already have been made! The rot extends to the roots, and wokeness cannot be fought without tearing out the roots - something that you are almost certainly incapable of even contributing to in any meaningful way.
If you don't do so already, I suggest following Curtis Yarvin. He's the ultimate non-grifter amongst prominent anti-wokists, because he's one of the few ones to admit you can't fight it (directly) and that people telling you you can are after your money. If you must spend your money on something, try looking at this post: https://graymirror.substack.com/p/acorns-for-the-culture-war. I suspect these specific causes have passed, but if you reach out to Yarvin he may have some other ideas or more general advice.
And if you want to "fight" in a simple (but still ultimately hopeless) way, you would almost certainly be better off with false flag propaganda than with anti-woke stuff. Telling white people they need to fight back against hateful anti-white leftists is not going to make people anti-woke to anywhere near the degree of telling them that they're privileged racist oppressors who need to pay reparations to black people.
I know that level of wealth can't do much. I was curious if anyone had any ideas where a small bit could go further than usual. I'll take everyone's answers into account. Thank you.
Right. I was thinking....*maybe* support some dissident artists? But I don't know how to find those and it might just be money down the drain since I have no clue who's going to go viral.
It would really help if you specified if you're trying to "fight" the current set of cultural mores OR the very idea of a stifling petit-bourgeoisie (also known as PCM in its modern incarnation) social conformity. The former will wane on its own. The latter requires fundamental changes to society at large - so fundamental, in fact, that they probably cannot be achieved without first changing the material and civilizational foundations of said society. Technological progress that will eliminate the need for the credentialed managerial class is what you should be targeting, and I'm not sure it's something you can reliably affect on your own.
A version of me from a year and a half ago would have said "scale up by 20,000 times and destroy Twitter", but it looks like someone already did that. :-)
Why do you want to fight wokeness? I mean I'm not a fan of liberal circlejerkery either but do you really feel it's like, the biggest evil, and that this is the best way to direct all your energies?
It's a bigger evil than the things most people spend their effort fighting, and it has/is continuing to capture virtually all insitutions that matter. Even if you think they're not really doing bad stuff now (they are), the nature of 'progress' is that it never ends. We're not even 10% of where woke ideologues wish things to be, and there's no conceivable near or even mid-term future in which these people's ideologies have less power within institutions than they do now. The things we are seeing now would have been thought of as impossible 20 years ago, so there's little limit to how much worse things can get in even the next 20 years.
"and there's no conceivable near or even mid-term future in which these people's ideologies have less power within institutions than they do now."
I'm pretty conservative, and I really don't get this kind of thinking. First, this is the sort of thing I'd expect from the militant left: "Our ideology is irresistable, the way of the future, you might as well give up now" etc etc. In what way does it make sense for those on the right to agree with this? "Yes, your victory is inevitable, our resistance is futile". Why?
Second, how is this even true? You're implying that wokeness has some sort of inevitability separate from political power. Wokeness as we understand it was basically invented during the Obama administration and barely existed before that. How woke were things in 2007?
The left has won three of the last four elections, so of course things are very leftist right now. The way to fight that would be to win some more elections for the right. Not declare that the left is invincible, which implies winning elections is pointless.
Even after just one term of Trump, wokeness has been all but eradicated from the Supreme Court. Just imagine what a couple more terms (of hopefully someone other than Trump) will do.
>"Yes, your victory is inevitable, our resistance is futile". Why?
They've been getting stronger for decades, it's never truly gone backwards, even if a certain trend is recognized as 'excessive', it doesn't get repealed, it simply becomes the new baseline. All of this is based on a fundamental narrative-driven worldview that took decades to become established and cannot be dislodged without a decades long cultural shift that nobody has any way of deliberately effecting.
>Wokeness as we understand it was basically invented during the Obama administration and barely existed before that. How woke were things in 2007?
This is *hopelessly* naive. The roots of wokeness reach back to the 60s and 70s. All of this stuff has filtered down through academia and far left political advoacy. All the BLM black nationalism we're seeing recently rests on a racial egalitarian foundation that has been developed for decades. All of the LGBT stuff started out as radical political activism decades ago. All of the foundational woke narratives were WELL established before Obama even ran for office.
If people are thoroughly convinced slavery made America rich and black people poor and that all racial differences are caused by "racism" and that black people commit crime because of 'poverty' and police discrimination, they aren't going to just suddenly stop supporting DEI initiatives. And there's no way of discovincing people of this stuff at scale, when it's all instilled from an extremely young age and all opposition to it is completely verboten.
>The left has won three of the last four elections, so of course things are very leftist right now.
Presidential elections are not relevant here. It's NOT where woke insitutional power comes from, and if anything Trump being in power strengthened and radicalized the insitutional left. The 2020 BLM riots and racial reckoning happened on Trump's watch.
>Even after just one term of Trump, wokeness has been all but eradicated from the Supreme Court.
This depended entirely on extremely fortunate chance circumstances (i.e. Trump being in a position to appoint justices) - not any kind of legitimate cultural change or deft political strategy, nothing that can be applied any more broadly than literally just the supreme court at that time. And even in and of itself, having a less woke supreme court is nice, but it's not fundamentally an engine of cultural change. It might marginally slow things down but little else. Elite colleges will continue with their DEI policies through other means, and roe v wade being repealed gave more cultural power to feminism, not to conservatism.
Aside from the supreme court, Trump basically has no major accomplishments to speak of, and the instituional culture became woke at a greater rate under his presidency than perhaps any other point in history. Trump was so mindlessly incompetent that he didn't even bother appointing all of the positions that he had the power to appoint. But even if he had, the real power of the state comes from the vast, unelected bureaucaracies that make up most government departments, and not only can you not get rid of these people, you can't get them to stop being dyed in the wool liberals.
Ok, firstly, I don't mind if you think my attitude is naive, but I hope you know you're calling conservatism itself naive. Your attitude certainly sounds like "the world is hopelessly corrupt, elections are a sham, violent revolution is the only answer" or something similar. Whether you're literally calling for violent revolution I'm not sure, but regardless does it bother you that if you swap a few words what you're saying is indistinguishable from the most militant BLM ideology, or from communism?
Second, I find your attitude (which admittedly is the attitude of almost everyone, or so it often seems) that whatever policies and ideological shifts have happened were always inevitably going to happen and the actual contingent decisions of powerful people and voters are irrelevant, to be very lazy thinking. It's very easy to look at the things that ended up happening and say they were inevitable. You don't notice the things that almost happened but didn't, you forget the "inevitable" social trends that fizzled out and died, and you can't know how things would have gone if a given election had gone differently. I prefer to work on the assumption that if a leftist government is elected and then society gets a lot more culturally left-wing, that that was the primary reason and there was nothing inevitable about it. At least without a very convincing argument that it would have happened anyway.
"They've been getting stronger for decades, it's never truly gone backwards, even if a certain trend is recognized as 'excessive', it doesn't get repealed, it simply becomes the new baseline. "
I think you're doing the exact thing leftists do when they say the world always moves left, by simply defining as "left" only the things that won. Communism was defeated. Like, in its proper form, *completely* defeated, after ruling half the world at one point. Massive deregulation and lowering of taxes in the 80s. Many of the 60s counter-cultural ideas (abolishing marriage, communal living, free love, mass drug-taking) either disappeared or were relegated to a small part of society. Religion is rising in many parts of the world. Within the US, university speech codes were crushed by the courts in the early 90s and many states have moved further and further away from gun control. You devalue the efforts of those on the right who fought those fights by either ignoring them or declaring that only the largely successful identity stuff really counts as left.
"All of the foundational woke narratives were WELL established before Obama even ran for office."
Who cares what happens in academia if they have no political power? I said wokeness "as we understand it" by which I mean things like cancel culture, trigger warnings, declaring your pronouns, and so on. How many people were being cancelled in the 2000s, for anything less extreme than literally saying segregation was good?
"The 2020 BLM riots and racial reckoning happened on Trump's watch."
Most of this is the cultural trends and policies started under Obama taking a while to fully manifest. Also, the Tea Party happened under Obama but because he got re-elected it went nowhere. Your policy agenda is meaningless if you don't have the power to implement it.
"And even in and of itself, having a less woke supreme court is nice, but it's not fundamentally an engine of cultural change. It might marginally slow things down but little else. Elite colleges will continue with their DEI policies through other means, and roe v wade being repealed gave more cultural power to feminism, not to conservatism."
If Hillary had won and appointed one more justice, the Court may well have ruled the First Amendment doesn't protect "hate speech" and California would have laws like Sweden that have pastors arrested for their sermons. I think you're vastly understating the significance of things like that. Also, how specifically is feminism more powerful in the last year than it was in the half-decade before?
"Trump was so mindlessly incompetent that he didn't even bother appointing all of the positions that he had the power to appoint."
I'm glad you agree that Trump was mindlessly incompetent, but don't you see that the reason he was nominated in the first place was because of attitudes like yours? "Nixon, Reagan, Bush did nothing to stop the left, we need to overhaul the whole system etc". I mean, Reagan only defeated communism, right? And Bush nearly passed a Federal Marriage Amendment, which would have stopped the lgbt movement in its tracks. It's no surprise that passing up a chance to nominate an actual conservative instead of a barely coherent salesman would be a less effective way to fight wokeness.
Figure out a good, compelling articulation of whatever ideology you have that you believe is anti-woke or anti-feminist. Then pay to get that turned into novels or videos or some other fun to absorb format.
Purely reactionary anti-ideology is pointless, ideology needs to offer a positive narrative that people are happy to engage with and strive for.
"Fighting wokeness" declares a reaction. Unless your strategy is to outspend wokeness in propaganda -- which would be monumental -- you're giving the self-anointed 'progressives' just what they want.
Better to build something real and substantial than race to the bottom. You flatter fools when you respond to their nonsense. Direct your energy and resources toward building something with character. Money in itself is pretty useless, but it can be used to build something better.
Nancy, you seem to imply that feminism is antithetical to kindness and thoughtfulness. (I do hope I’m misunderstanding you!)
To me, feminism simply means that women should have equal rights and opportunities to men. Certainly not something a kind and thoughtful person would fight. I have no sympathy for woke excesses, and I consider myself a feminist.
That vast majority of feminists I've ever encountered have been anywhere from somewhat to extremely unkind, and a great many have been outright hateful people.
A movement is defined by the actions of those who make up the movement, not some definition you can point to. If the Republican party said that their mission was to unyieldingly strive for truth and justice in all things (but had the same platform as it does now), would you say that being against the Republican party means you're against truth and justice? But being a Republican "means" to be in favor of truth and justice!
>To me, feminism simply means that women should have equal rights and opportunities to men.
Most people would consider that condition to have already been reached in the US, and if someone doesn't then it suggests that have an especially expansive conception of what "rights" and "opportunity" (and "equal") mean.
And additionally, "should" is doing a hell of a lot of work here, because in practice it means everything from 'it would be the most moral outcome if things were this way' through to 'it would be wrong if the government did not use the threat of force to ensure this state of being comes to exist'.
What exactly is meant by "equal rights and opportunities" and how these are to be acheived are precisely where the vast majority of issues around feminism in the US come from and leave the door wide open for "kind and thoughtful" people to rationally oppose the feminist movement.
A bit of slippage at my end-- what "feminism" means here and what it means in most of the places I hang out are quite different.
I'm working on something about about the divergence between thinking a word means what the theory behind it says vs. thinking a word means what you run into in the real world.
Feminism means a bunch of things, and some of them are decent treatment for women, and some of them are hostility to men.
Here's why I don't identify as a feminist-- back in college, I read some Mary Daly. A feminist, a Nietzschean live with gusto sort of writer. Fun in a lot of ways, but with a pattern of portraying men as robots who were simultaneously evil and boring. I made her readable by thinking that when she said "women", she actually meant "people", though she actually didn't.
The years pass, and she dies. I read a random sample of her obituaries. Some were enthusiastic about her feminism, some were angry about her transphobia. No one seems to notice the anti-male stuff, and no one seems to notice that being anti-male is a short route to hating transwomen.
You know, I think I read some of that in high school, as well as some other authors I can't remember (I really should not have read Sherri S Tepper), and it probably helped to make me an MRA!
I'm still more of a feminist than a lot of people-- I'll say something relatively sympathetic to men and be told I don't go far enough in ways I don't understand.
But yes, I wasn't even thinking about how Daly's misandry would sound to a man, I was against it on relatively abstract principles.
I've been told not to use the term "misandry"-- it puts me in bad company, but I don't know of any other word for the concept.
Dont get stuck in basket problems - many things are attributed as "feminism" whether rightly or wrongly and ultimately thats not even really a distinction since theres no objective truth of the matter.
OP is describing things I think wed probably all think are bad, and wed disagree about whether its feminist, or a central example of feminism.
Same as woke probably.
But if people are kind and thoughtful they will just end up thinking kind and thoughtful things and we dont have to worry about whether those things count as "woke" or "feminist" or not
>But if people are kind and thoughtful they will just end up thinking kind and thoughtful things and we dont have to worry about whether those things count as "woke" or "feminist" or not
Sure, and if people are peaceful then they won't be violent criminals. Redirecting funding from policing to 'peacefulness' campaigning would still be an absolutely insane thing to do nonetheless. You can't teach this stuff - its mostly heritable, and even if it isn't, it won't be changed by any kind of social campaign or propaganda.
Any evidence at all for mostly heritable? Seems highly suspect.
To the extent it should be possible to enact any social change through deliberate individual action and money (the original question) I don't see why it shouldn't be possible to promote kindness and thoughtfulness
I don't think it looks like the ad campaigns that say "be kind and thoughtful" but society has been getting _overall_ kinder and thoughtful-er outside our little polarized culture war cycles. Seems like we should be able to keep doing more of that.
>Any evidence at all for mostly heritable? Seems highly suspect.
All aspects of behavior and personality are highly heritable in the US
>To the extent it should be possible to enact any social change through deliberate individual action and money (the original question) I don't see why it shouldn't be possible to promote kindness and thoughtfulness
These are fundamental behavioral traits, not political culture or ideology.
>But society has been getting _overall_ kinder and thoughtful-er outside our little polarized culture war cycles. Seems like we should be able to keep doing more of that.
Okay, but you can't even BEGIN to coherently explain how or why this has happened, let alone formulate a realistic strategy for making it happen to a greater extent. Additionally, I don't actually think its necessarily true that people have gotten kinder. Maybe in certain respects, but today people have a lower sense of community and are more individualistic (read: selfish) than perhaps ever before in American history.
And what on earth do you mean "little polarized culture wars"? This isn't some BS twitter argument we're talking about here, this is the ideological foundation of all major US instituions today that affects all aspects of American society.
Buy advertising which portrays their extreme forms as unusual or not normal. The message should be that ordinary people care about (e.g.) the poor rather than the demographic olympics, that everyone knows a very rare individual needs to transition to another sex, that the typical person is aware women can't be as effective firefighters as men, and that this is OK.
I'm sorry to learn that you ended up in a place like this where you are so passionate about fighting Wokeness. For what it's worth, I definitely don't like wokeness at all ( https://thingstoread.substack.com/i/95684591/what-does-the-data-say ) but for your sake, I hope life gets in the way, and that eventually we can't assume no family for you anymore.
This answer might work but I'd push for a significant tweak: OP should be focussing on building the nonwoke world up, rather than attacking and trying to bring the woke world down.
It's better for the discussion in general, it presents a classier image of his (our?) side of it in particular, and it's a damn sight healthier and more positive for him as a person.
In any case, woke dogma has got so ridiculous in many places that you don't need to attack it - just show a better way and people will jump ship by themselves. I think at this point it's mainly a lack of counter examples (and the quite sensible fear people in the system have of providing any) that allows wokeness to perpetuate itself.
Wait five years for culture to move on to whatever it is going to fight about next; that you're concerned about fighting wokeness/feminism now means you've waited until the fight has entered the broad cultural sphere, at which point the outcome is already mostly predetermined.
No, it merely looks like the same underlying thing, because the people involved want to give the perception that it is the same underlying thing; by tying the current fight to a fight that was already won, they hope to achieve some level of legitimacy. Not automatically believing women about rape charges (and enacting punishments against the accused) is the same underlying thing as not allowing women to vote!
Do you believe that? I don't. Why concede that ground?
"not allowing women to vote" isn't part of this. It isn't what anyone is talking about, nobody is proposing this. That's not what I'm talking about.
DEI, BLM, LGBT, Feminism - these are all made of the same stuff. They all come from the same fundamental narratives and worldview and do not exist completely independently.
This isn't conceding groud, its understanding that 'fighting' very specific manifestations of the underlying ideology is like removing weeds from your garden by plucking off the leaves. If you can't tear it out at the root, it will keep sprouting up with a slightly different appearance each time.
And you're also implying that these policies have a very limited lifespan and then everyone moves on. No, what happens is change happens, then people move onto something else *without that change being meaningfully reversed*.
I mean, if you look back at history at the changes that have actually been made, it would seem that that is the way things work. But that's kind of like thinking that people used to be better at writing because all the old books are good; it's survivorship bias.
It's the same kind of thing where I sometimes encounter progressives who think that "progressivism" has been a constant and unvaryingly positive force in society - because all the ideas and changes that were progressive at one point, but rolled back after they were discovered to be terrible, get relabeled as "conservative". For a particularly nasty example, eugenics.
So, no, that's not the way things work, and you're conceding quite considerable moral high ground to your opponents in thinking that's the way things work.
(Also, can't you think of any older examples to support your thesis that changes are made and people move on without meaningfully reversing them? You could at least go back a few decades to "political correctness", it's low-hanging fruit that's sitting right there.)
"The outcome is already mostly predetermined" precisely because of the determined efforts of the two sides fighting the battle. The fact that WWII was over in 6 years doesn't mean that it wasn't worth fighting, or that people's efforts in fighting it didn't matter, or that it wasn't the most important fight to have at the moment.
Two tribes are at constant warfare over various things. They fight over who gets to hunt in the great forest, they fight over who gets to fish in the silver-blue waters of the southern lake, they fight over everything.
One day a young warrior notices that, almost without fail, the fight is always won by the side with more warriors, and proposes a new solution: Instead, the two tribes shall meet, bringing all their warriors with them, and whoever brings the most shall, if both chiefs agree the other side has more capable warriors, win. But if the chiefs do not agree, they shall have a wrestling match between the weakest warrior on both sides, with each chief choosing who among the opposing warriors shall represent the other tribe, and the winning wrestler shall determine the outcome, with no blood needing to be shed. And if yet the chiefs still disagree, only then need it come to a fight.
The older warriors scoff. Of course the side with more warriors usually win - they win because they fight. That the fight is predetermined doesn't mean the fight is unimportant - every fight is critically important to the livelihoods of the tribe.
The next valley over, twelve tribes had long since arrived at the same conclusion as the young man, and followed such prescriptions exactly. But one tribe, blessed by the richest hunting grounds, had grown larger than all other tribes together, and so dominated these meetings year after year.
The chief of one of the smaller tribes, a veteran warrior long practiced in their fights with the mountain tribes, was disturbed that soon his tribe might lose everything, as with every meeting they were forced to concede more, put together a plan. And so he gathered to him the fifty best warriors of the tribe, and they went together to the great gathering.
And the vote was called, to cede their clay to the great tribe, he and his fifty men stepped forward, and the great tribe stepped forward with its five hundred, and the matter might have been resolved, but that the old warrior contested the vote, and challenged the great tribe to a wrestling match, weakest warrior to weakest warrior. And the chief of the great tribe looked at the fifty great warriors, and then to his numerous many of which were weak, and grew wary. But he relented, and it was to his surprise when the chief of the small tribe chose his strongest warrior - and thus the wrestling was conducted, and the small tribe lost, if barely.
And yet the chief of the small tribe insisted, and demanded battle. The chief of the great tribe laughed, and so they met in battle, and of his five hundred eighty perished, and the fifty warriors of the small tribe were killed to the man.
And so the great tribe took the clay, but it was a somber occasion, for men had died for no reason at all, which the great chief was deeply troubled by, for he did not understand the purpose in such senseless death. And a year passed, which was harder than it had been for great and small tribe alike, many of their great hunters having perished, and when the small tribe sent forth fifty warriors once more, and when he considered that he wanted their quarry - he hesitated. For he saw among the other small tribes more than one who had sent their finest warriors and none other, and he remembered well so very many of his friends and cousins who did not stand with him that day. And then, as he saw, he understood the price that the chief of the small tribe had paid, and why he had paid it, and he wept, and relented.
And so the rules were changed again, that the great tribe would not simply take what it wished from the small, and the great tribe even conceded many old claims, and all began to prosper.
Right, so count on the great tribe being nice instead of steamrolling smaller tribes, right after it became a great tribe by steamrolling smaller tribes. That might work if the great tribe were compassionate humanitarians. Looking at the woke and their bullying, their suppression of free speech, their obsession with identity instead of universal humanity, and their blind eye toward left-wing violence, I don't see compassionate humanitarianism. I see authoritarianism and a will to power.
The great tribe didn't hesitate for humanitarian reasons. They hesitated because winning would be incredibly expensive. Only upon realizing that any victory would be pyhrric did the great chief embrace humanitarianism.
The last resort of the minority is spite. But spite, properly executed, is both rightfully and necessarily expensive. The smallest minority being the individual, long live the killdozer.
That being said, there is far more ready a weapon, in the United States: Waiting. No popular movement can grow large enough, fast enough, to outrun its own scandals, and its own revolutions-within-the-revolutions. The United States is as a whale - so large that our cancers develop their own cancers.
You're worried about feminism as a threat? Why? Look at feminism. Feminism is currently occupied in fighting feminism, fighting in battle lines that were drawn before the public even became aware that there was a fight to be had.
I remember arguing with TERFs back in the early oughts, telling them they'd be the new right wing soon. The fight with feminism was over before it ever hit the public sphere, set in stone by arguments and schisms that were formed by people who have long since moved on to other debates. The fight in the public sphere is fundamentally perfunctory - feminism has already lost. Not just for the obvious reason of infighting, but the far more subtle reason that there is no "next fight" for feminism in the near future; there are no deep cultural reservoirs to draw on, to inspire a next fight; they've shot all their ammunition and their armories lay bare. All that is left for feminism, as a movement, is reaction. It has become, in a fundamental sense, a conservative movement.
The same is true of "wokism", at least as presently defined. They're still firing their ammunition, but are rapidly running out. And their last resort, as that of any small tribe - is spite.
They fought against The Man so long they didn't notice when they became The Man - don't repeat that mistake. Keep fighting, and take their quarry, at your own peril.
So, all in all, given the choice, and given you are not at the forefront of the fight, I'd suggest waiting. By the time you notice there is a fight going on, you've already won or lost - and if you've won, then, in continuing the fight, you're just becoming the thing you think you are fighting against.
Which specific parts of wokeness and/or feminism do you want to fight? The three most horrible things that come to mind to me are cancel culture, abortion, and extremist transgender ideology. But we had a long discussion a few weeks ago and you seemed quite in favour of two of those.
So if it's cancel culture and free speech, I'd say try to get as much media reach as possible (whether traditional or social media or other online reach like Scott) and produce as much interesting and insightful stuff as you can that (1) totally refuses to genuflect to wokeness and challenges it head on whenever relevant, thus breaking down the taboos that keep it going, while (2) NOT becoming obsessively anti-woke even when it's not relevant, and especially not getting into conspiracy theories or other stuff that lets people dismiss you as a nut.
Or is it something else more specifically? (The above still probably applies in that case).
i suggest you first take a deep breath then deactivate your social media accounts and/or other forms of media where you encounter frequent culture war discussions.
And then you can re-evaluate if the culture war is really what you want to focus on for the rest of your life.
Woke ideologies has captured a majority of America's most powerful institutions to varying extrents. The idea that this is some social media BS is, quite frankly, kind of delusional. College admissions, employment policies, workplace policies, policing, scientific research, school curricula, all forms of goverment policy, the military, healthcare....all of these things are influenced by the prevailing politico-cultural trend. It's not just some idiots arguing on twitter.
There is no conceivable way in which America's local, state and especially federal political departments, universities, schools, corporations, NGOs and the media aren't overwhelmingly culturally left wing on any issue related to race, gender, sexuality etc.
If you could go back 60 years and show people what American insitutions would look like in 2023, people on the right would be dismayed and left wing activists would think a revolution had taken place. The left are radicalizing faster than insitutions, so they convince themselves that instituions haven't became extremely left wing culturally. And they also naively think Trump being in power was a boon for right wing political cultural influence - exactly the *opposite* was true, the president has little real power (especially conservative ones) and under Trump, institutions became woker faster than any other point in history.
The funny thing is, I think they're both right. Different political ideologies and cultures control different areas. Rural areas are overwhelmingly Republican and have conservative views, while urban areas are the opposite. Beyond that, whole states get identified with one side or the other, despite the actual mix in the population being more even. About 30% of New Yorkers are Republican (with almost another 20% being independent). But conservatives think of New York as being a totally alien outsider population. First-Past-The-Post voting has a lot to do with it, but also our tendency to extrapolate from limited examples.
So each side can point to an area truly controlled by their opponents (Texas, California, Florida, New York) and feel like a persecuted minority. I blame the expansion of federal power, especially in the executive, and the concurrent assertion of state power against that federal power. Both sides are doing that a lot lately.
Areas aren't relevant. INSTITUTIONS are what is relevant. Rural areas don't drive US politics, science, academia, policing, curricula. America's urban based insitutions do. And even if you want to claim that rural areas helped elect Trump, Trump had very little positive impact (from a right wing perspective) on society - indeed, under Donald Trump's watch, America's institutions became more woke than any other period in history.
I thought the deal with Trump was he riled up the left without doing anything effective for the right. He couldn't even make e-Verify work, or build that wall he kept talking about. So the net effect was to make the left more powerful.
Why? To make sure the answer isn't "right on, you fight the good fight and don't give up!" in one direction and "you're sad and pathetic for thinking about this, you should get a life and coincidentally back out and be quiet," in the other.
As it happens, I personally dislike social media and would advocate abandoning it whenever possible. But I note the OP didn't mention social media at all, it was stryler who went straight for what looks a lot like the standard shame-and-silence manoeuvre.
I understand the concern but the possibilities are worth iterating here. It's either true, or not, that logging off can be good for OP. And whether true or false, it remains so regardless of the motivations of the person giving it.
Let's assume, arguendo, that both things are true:
1. OP would be healthier logging off and obsessing less about wokeness (which itself is largely driven by the Too Online on the left).
2. If enough such people logged off, the other side would have more of a monopoly on social media, to the detriment of society.
So let's say someone (i.e. stryler) argues for people on the right to log off, ostensibly for their good health but secretly because they want the other side to dominate. In this case, the pushback you're doing arguably amounts to saying "for the sake of the online wars, you should stay online, regardless of your own mental health." Which might be a reasonable stance to take, if you feel strongly enough about the cause and the need for self sacrifice.
But if that's your stance, I suggest being explicit about it so that OP can make their own decision. It's not really clear thinking to directly tie someone's (potential) hypocrisy to the quality of their advice, even if those larger questions are worth asking for their own sake.
You are assuming a strange sort of helplessness on OP's part, and you're diving into weeds you don't need to dive into. The working principle here is simply: "Be suspicious of people's motives if they pattern match closely to bad behaviour you've seen before."
Don't assume no family! Start a family! Having kids, raising them right, forming villages with other people who share your values is the best thing you can do.
Edit: Failing that (or in addition to it): create propaganda. We need good quality films, books, tv shows etc. that demonstrate and celebrate proper values. You win the culture wars by creating culture.
You don't need the same numbers of non-woke to woke films to make a difference - especially if non-woke films are standouts in terms of quality. Cf: Asch's conformity experiment: a small number of dissenting voices amidst a sea of woke messaging will have an outsize effect on what ideas people have at their disposal.
Second edit: unless you think you'll be shit at writing films. In that case, take a leaf out of ComtemplativeMood's book and make the clumsiest, most sermon-y woke propaganda films you can imagine.
I don't think I'm artistic enough to make nonwoke films, and starting a family...ugh.
I've got some money, but I'm not too sharp with people. That would just make me divorce-and-alimony-bait.
I don't think I would raise healthy children. I would have no idea how to raise them without either getting them in trouble with wokies or making them insanely neurotic.
Some people just shouldn't breed. I am willing to practice eugenics by removing myself from the gene pool--I don't think that's unethical.
Correct me if I'm wrong, because I'm only going off your answers up and down this thread.
But it seems to me like you are far, far too mired in all this stuff, to the point where it's chiselled away at your self esteem and displaced even the memory of other things.
You live in an overly feminist-influenced environment (either through living and working with extremely woke people, or through spending too much time hearing from/about them online) and you find yourself writing stuff like "I wouldn't raise healthy children", "I shouldn't breed", "physical contact with the opposite sex feels gross and creepy", etc.
This rings alarm bells to me. If you were in a carbon monoxide rich environment, and found yourself complaining that you're very sleepy and you just want to lie down because everything's too hard... the right answer is to *get out of that environment*.
You should wait to make any other, larger, decisions until you have a clear head!
You might well be a complete no-hoper who's too stupid, uncreative, socially awkward, etc to be any use to anyone (I don't know you, after all.)
But you aren't in a fit state to judge that until you get yourself clear of the carbon monoxide.
Can I ask, what's your lifestyle like? How does your time get spent? Do you live/work alone or with people, and if so what kind of people?
Once again I could easily be haring off on the wrong track here, but that's what I'm thinking from what you've said so far.
Become the most outspoken and strident male feminist you could possibly be while secretly sexually harassing, stalking, and groping every woman in your workplace and social sphere. Then wait to inevitably be exposed as a predator thereby besmirching every cause you previously publicly identified with.
I've thought about that, but I'm not smart enough to be an effective male feminist for the first part of that to work.
Besides, I'm not really interested in harassing, stalking, and groping women. I don't trust them, particularly post-#metoo, but I don't particularly want to act against an individual woman who's done nothing bad to me just because of her sex; to me that's just as evil as feminism!
Also, one of the long-term effects of spending so much time in feminist environments is the idea of sex or any kind of physical contact with the opposite sex, even with a consenting partner, starts to feel gross and creepy (yeah, this messed up my relationships), so doing it to someone who doesn't like it feels even worse.
Some metrics seem much easier to Goodhart than others. For example
-easy to manipulate: "In response to Labour targets in the 1990s, one force recorded a 27 per cent reduction in the number that had a target (‘theft from a motor vehicle’) alongside a 407 per cent increase in the number that had no target (‘vehicle interference’)." (https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v45/n18/john-lanchester/get-a-rabbit)
-presumably much harder to manipulate: homicide versus suicide or accidental death.
Assuming I'm not mistaken, what are some not-too-technical sources discussing this further? For general interest, not AI alignment.
> presumably much harder to manipulate: homicide versus suicide or accidental death
Nope. As always, the more people say that they're looking at the murder statistics because at least those are reliable (and everyone says this, in so many words, all the time), the less reliable the murder statistics become.
"Specifically, they find evidence that while Chicago reported 414 murders in 2013 they really had at least 432 through what, if you read the article (and you should) looks like pretty deliberate malfeasance."
So murder stats aren't perfect, but I'll take that error / misprision compared to those that can be made almost effortlessly with regard other crimes.
I'm looking for help. Mostly in the form of advice, I guess, though I wouldn't say no to other forms (not money, I still have some to keep me afloat for a while).
There are three aspects to my problems: work, a place to live, and psychology.
1. I'm a scientist from Russia. Not a particularly good one, with a candidate's degree (the lower level in two-level PhD system) and over 25 published papers but my h-index is not even 5. I'm not really keeping up to date with current research in my area, and it's been quite a while since I tried to tackle some serious problem. I can do middle-level work if given a problem to work on, get some results and write those papers. This might have been enough if I was 30 but I'm ~40 now.
My work also involves programming (and I do it for my own entertainment/personal projects), but I'm not up to date on a lot of tools and concepts. It's a bit better in my own area (machine learning) but there aren't many job offers. I think with enough effort I could get myself in shape to be employable in a wider area, but it's hard to put in the effort with uncertain prospects.
Still, I am hoping to find a job I'm somewhat qualified to do.
2. I wasn't a fan of Russia since at least 00s, but never found enough motivation to do something about it. Eventually, I fled to Armenia in late 2022 when they started mobilization (not that my risk of being drafted was high, but I decided to take a safer route). It's nice here but I'm not sure it works as a long-term solution. For one thing, Armenia still has strong ties with Russia and I'm not sure what happens to people like me if Russia passes laws making us criminals. So while finding a decently paying job here would be a nice start, eventually I hope to find a job that would allow me to move elsewhere.
Which is a huge problem because I have zero experience with looking jobs abroad (and negligible experience doing it in my own country, for that matter).
Armenia is also problematic in that it's hard to find a decently paying job here if I decide to switch to something I'm less skilled with just to break the pattern.
3. I don't know what it is with me, but things do not look good. I lack motivation and willpower. With my old low-requirement job it was mostly enough, though I had a tendency to almost miss deadlines whenever things I didn't really like doing (e.g. preparing papers) came up. The actual work of finding things out was more interesting so less problematic. It seems to be exacerbated by me working from home (though I wouldn't give a scout's promise to become a highly performing worker if I had to work from the office, but it should help if I'm at least somewhat interested and can't switch off immediately whenever I encounter something I don't feel like doing). Lately it got worse with the necessity to look for a new job, which I'm scared of. Maybe also because of the overall shitty situation, too (shame and guilt over what my country does with overt support by a lot of people I knew and respected, having to leave my home unprepared and leave behind friends and relatives in what seems to be turning into a totalitarian state). But the end result is that I do basically nothing to advance further towards this goal of a new job - mostly just wasting time, sometimes doing something that is still meaningful and can qualify as "work" but is an obvious way to avoid doing something I want even less. I'm not even sure where writing this post falls, but I'll try to commit to following at least some of the advice I get if there is any.
Is it depression? I'm not sure, it doesn't feel like I imagine depression should. Though lately there have been days when I just wanted to stay in bed, but that was because none of the things I had planned were enjoyable, and I was trying to stop allowing myself doing anything besides them. (Also there's growing sense of urgency so even the distracting things I normally like are less enjoyable. But that's more like a stress.)
So, I'll appreciate any thoughts and suggestions. In particular:
Re 1. Is there any kind of job you think I should focus on looking for? I still have time and money to maybe get additional training (or prepare myself) in some math or programming related topic if it would let me land a job with high probability.
(I probably won't say no to a direct offer too, if everything I wrote hasn't discouraged you.)
Re 2. Particularly if I can get this job in any livable country that wouldn't kick me out to Russia on short notice, for example if Russia decides that missing an appointment with a military registration office is now a crime. Although I feel like I'm just not good enough to look for a job abroad (anyone willing to expand their search this much can probably find better candidates), is there anything I can do about it?
Re 3. I am close to recognizing that I need professional psychological/psychiatric help, but if that is so, will the help help? Do my problems look like something where talking it out or taking some pills is likely to result in a large improvement? Again, I'm constrained with the resources I could spend on this but I can afford giving it a try if the expected payoff is good. Or are there things I could just try by myself?
Regarding anti-depressant pills, I'm not a doctor, but I'm going to offer the advice I wish I'd gotten.
It sounds like you're depressed. Anti-depressants can help with depression. Depression is a symptom, which can be caused by many things, including a chemical imbalance in the brain, and/or simply being in a depressing situation. No matter what the causes, your depression is probably making it harder for you to identify and fix the causes. So if you take the anti-depressants, and you start feeling better, use that opportunity to make changes in your life that might reduce the causes of depression (changes like, perhaps, getting a new job, moving to a new country, eating food with better nutrition, and getting more exercise), and then once those are pretty much solid, talk to your doctor about stopping the anti-depressants*. Don't view the anti-depressants as a long-term solution to make a bad situation bearable. Ideally your doctor will support all of this, but sometimes they have an attitude of "if the pills fixed the problem, just keep taking the pills", which I think is a big mistake.
* This can be important. Some older anti-depressants can have bad effects if you stop taking them suddenly. SSRIs are usually pretty safe, though. Read up on whatever you're taking and know what to watch for. In the US, last I checked, most anti-depressants are SSRIs, but I don't know what's common in Armenia.
Antidepressants are worth a shot. SSRIs are easy and safe. They may help you a lot. If not, taper off them.
If you were in the US it would be trivial to get an ADHD diagnosis and be prescribed stimulants. I think less so in saner countries (I think ease of getting amphetamines in US will backfire and is about to cause big problems). Those will directly fix low energy, disorganization, and lack of focus. Although in my observation of self and others, they don’t ultimately help when the problem is procrastination due to some mental/emotional self-sabotage.
Trying therapy or even reading CBT books may help a lot. Definitely worth a shot. All the good books I know of (eg those by David Burns) are shot through with absolutely deranged American California positivity, but I urge you to overlook this and just try doing what they say.
Also do not forget, academia is about the worst environment in the world for your type of procrastination issue. Normal companies have good management practices and also more constant collaboration so it’s much easier to stay on track.
Yeah, I can see how stimulants may fail to help even if I get more energy.
So I guess it's CBT (probably reading a book as a first step as it seems easier) and looking into getting an SSRI prescription since it's been suggested a lot.
Interesting. But given the serious side effects I don't think I agree. With no priors I would assume it was an attempt to generalize from a sample of one's own friends and acquaintances, for a PhD student known by someone commenting in Scott's blog it's somewhat likely he did his research, but it would still seem dubious.
Oh it's incredibly dubious! But I guess among his acquaintances depression was so extremely common, he was made to feel this way.
I'm not sure if this helps in general, but I hope it brings you a small amount of comfort to know that a lot of people in a similar situation to you also find themselves depressed.
I can’t speak to the other parts, but re the psychiatric question: it’s helpful to remember that depression is a spectrum and not a discrete category, and that from what you’re describing I think you’d meet the diagnostic criteria for it or something like it in the US (although that might differ elsewhere, and it’s debatable whether that means you “have” “depression”). Also, the things that psychologists/psychiatrists do (“treatments”) are basically the same for most constellations of symptoms — SSRIs for pills, and empathic listening or CBT for therapy. And many people find those very helpful, independent of what “disorder” they “have”. It’s hard to say whether they’re worth it for you, but if you’ve never tried either before, there’s a decent base rate chance they’re extremely helpful. And there’s ways to make them cheaper to access (e.g. in the US, a generalist doctor can prescribe SSRIs instead of paying for a specialist psychiatrist). So might be worth checking out.
Also props for asking for help ❤️. Wishing you luck.
Thank you for the advice! It sounds about right regarding CBT and maybe SSRIs from what little I've read, but it's still a little surprising: it was my understanding that SSRIs help by blunting emotions (it's probably more complicated but that's the obvious surface effect and in many cases it helps by itself). With low motivation doesn't it sound like I could end up worse? Admittedly, fear and other negative emotions are a part of my problem so I could see it working anyway (or just working because of the more complicated reasons than my simplified and incomplete understanding).
Nobody actually knows how SSRIs work. There's obviously many theories, but nothing close to consensus. (Blunting emotion is definitely one thing people commonly report, but I think that tends to mean more direct emotions like "sadness" or "fear" rather than complex internal states like "motivation".) I think low motivation is a standard symptom under the heading "depression" and SSRIs are the standard pharmacological approach to improving depression, so I don't think on average they make motivation worse. But of course there's huge variation across people (and like I said nobody really knows what they do) so it's hard to know in advance. An advantage of SSRIs is that if you invest 6 months in trying them (e.g., finding a prescriber, trying a few of them), you'll know forever whether they help you or not :)
Searching for work is quite an unpleasant and nerve-wracking chore, *especially* when you are not used to it, and so risks resulting in a self-reinforcing spiral of procrastination if you don't have the fortitude to keep at it.
I would suggest trying to find as much as possible ways around that, which typically means using your network, which you kind of did here ! (At least, COVID is over !)
Oh, and just in case you don't realize it - because it's super important (especially at your age) : regular physical exercise ! (More regular than once a week.)
Thank you! Yes, I did look for ways around it. So far it didn't help me much but I was procrastinating even doing that, so the results aren't surprising.
You're right about the exercise of course, and thanks for the reminder. (My usual pattern is more like "several times at a reasonable pace and then nothing for months." Never got to the point where it would be tolerable enough to keep at it, with or without excuses like a knee that starts hurting.)
It doesn't even have to be something where you significantly force yourself (though that *would* be better, for many reasons, but that can be "phase 2", once "phase 1" is a habit), IIRC merely walking for 30 minutes (but *every* day !) near your maximum can do wonders ?
Do 5x5 by reading into StrongLifts.com. 3 times a Week, 2 hours each. It has helped me enormously, is by far the least heartful and injury prone sports I’ve ever done, and I’ve never been nearly as strong as I’m today (despite back injury, and others).
Even though our general situation and how we got into it seems very different, I feel a strong connection in how you feel right now (it sounds like I could have written it just a relatively short time ago).
I do not think you're in depression. Of course I cannot tell from afar. But, again, what you have written sounds like something I could have written and I am sure that I never had proper depression (I saw real depression in people close to me twice in my life, and that looked much, much worse).
In short: I think you are asking yourself the right questions and looking for solutions. I think you're on a good path. The struggle is part of it.
I mean, it *does* sound funny: not only the vampire drinks your blood (and presumably you die or become a vampire?), he also makes you pay a late fee on your credit card!
I know it sounds funny (and, as per the title, the first part of the book has some social comedy), but the vampire is making people financially dependent on it so that it's hard for them to escape-- bad investments that pay back something but not enough.
I can’t come up with titles off the top of my head but there are a handful of books I should have given up on earlier when I felt like I should finish every book I start.
Sometimes the books were just poorly written, other times I just wasn’t ready for them.
I’m glad I came to realize that was a mistake. Now if a book isn’t working for me I’ll pick up something else to read.
I should never have read the Advanced Dungeons & Dragons Second Edition Players Handbook. But really, any D&D was a mistaken read, like loading Mac OS onto a PC.
Atlas Shrugged. I read it when i was a teenager and it influenced me for a while to idolize capitalists. I look back now and realize just how poorly written, extremist, and polemical the book is.
Some people read it and take it to heart forever, like the cult book it is.
I think if the lesson you got from that book was "Capitalists = good" you missed some, uh, critical points.
Out of the protagonists who are capitalists, by which I mean owning the means of production, we have - Hank, Ellis, Midas, Ken, Ted, Dwight, and Francisco, of whom Hank is the only central protagonist (there are a couple of other very minor characters who may or may not count; I don't think we get enough information about them to say).
Dagny (!), John (!!), Owen, Tony and Eddy are employees. Ragnar and Akston are/were academics. Cherryl is a capitalist-worshiper who marries a capitalist and discovers he's a villain (!!!).
On the antagonist side, listing "capitalists", we have James, who runs the company Dagny works for. Other "bad capitalists" include Emma Chalmers, Lee Hunsacker, Eugene Lawson, Horace Bussby Mowen, Ben Nealy, the Starnes siblings.
Fred Kinnan, who represents unions, is one of a handful of characters who kind of fulfills both roles, antagonist and protagonist - the book strongly implies that in a different/better world, he would be one of the protagonists, but in the world he was in, he joined with the antagonists.
There's a pretty large cast involves, and most (all?) of the roles have both a protagonist or antagonist version - so you'll have one good banker, and one bad banker; one good bureaucrat, one bad bureaucrat. The progression of the book is the "bad" versions of each of the roles gradually supplanting the "good" version as perverse incentives (in a general sense, favoring feel-good "woo" over substantive good) gradually warp society in a negative direction.
Nit: I'm pretty sure Dagny is owner and CEO of a small railroad for at least part of the story. And as a Taggart, I suspect she has substantial holdings of Taggart Transcontinental stock. But yes, her primary role is as an employee of a company run by her brother.
And the general point is absolutely correct. Ayn Rand was a passionate admirer and proponent of entrepreneurial capitalism, while simultaneously hating and despising what is now called "crony capitalism". So if someone read "Atlas" to come away with the impression "capitalism GOOD", and has since been disillusioned by the observation that capitalism is not all that great, I have to suspect they read it at a too-young age and didn't catch that nuance. Which, being Rand, really wasn't all that nuanced.
I believe you're right - IIRC, I think she undertook to be the CEO of a small railroad because James refused to be responsible for it? But yeah, her role is more employee than employer throughout the book.
I'm personally of the opinion that Atlas Shrugged is a fundamentally Marxist critique of, simultaneously, socialism/communism, and also the particular variant of "capitalism" practiced at the time of her writing.
When you get down to it, the narrative thrust, the end-goal, is a material dialectic in which the contradictions in the "dark capitalism" practiced by the villains come to a head - in the same sense that Marx's work on capitalism is about letting the contradictions in capitalism come to a head.
Like Marx, the central thematic element is alienation - in Rand's case, alienation from moral value, and in Marx's case, alienation from physical value. (Although I'd argue Marx's argument was also fundamentally about alienation from moral value.)
It's fundamentally a book about the class conflict between the producers of society, and the parasitic classes that take from them, framing the conflict in terms of the exploitation of the productive classes.
There's a subtler framing, which I worry will be misleading if made directly, about how in a significant sense the world of Atlas Shrugged is one in which the villains own the "moral/ethical/virtue factories", and the protagonists, who produce all of the morality/ethics/virtue, are deprived of them.
I only vaguely remember it, and I'm not going to reopen that book, but a bit of googling suggests that it was the "Rio Norte Line", which was logistically important in some way I don't recall but falling apart and James Taggart couldn't be bothered to fix it. So IIRC Dagny took a leave of absence from Taggart Transcontinental, took over the Rio Norte (presumably borrowing against her Taggart stock), renamed it the "John Galt Line" and rebuilt it with extensive use of Rearden Metal.
Then, mission accomplished, went back to her COO job at Taggart, for a while at least.
The first time I read Atlas Shrugged, I paged back and forth to find a section where Fred Kinnan talks with John Galt. It isn't there, and I wonder whether it existed in a earlier draft.
If Galt was trying to recruit Kinnan (presumably he was), that's definitely interesting.
I seem to recall him being in the general area when Galt is, ah, in the same room as a bunch of the antagonists, and him being disgusted with the whole affair and leaving early, but I don't actually recall a conversation between the two.
Granted it's been a while since I read the book, and my memory isn't fantastic.
I'm not up for reading even all the chapter summaries of the review, but one of the most common ways the book is misrepresented is the portray the good guys as bad for leaving society, and ignoring that they're escaping a dangerous dictatorship.
It's kind of a general theme of criticisms of the book: You're a bad person if you don't infinitely tolerate being abused.
Which is kind of centrally necessary to criticize the book, I guess, because the central theme of it is "You don't have to tolerate being abused." (Rearden's central arc being him realizing that he doesn't have to tolerate the emotional abuse from his family.)
I think that family issue is probably one of the themes that tends to drive laypeople away: divorce is supposed to be something to avoid. Your point about tolerating abuse is one many naturally share, but I think the considered response to that is "be more careful about who you accept into your family in the first place, because that commitment will need to be practically for life".
On a slightly different note, I recall Rearden's discussion with... Moucher? I forget, it's been years. MaybeMoucher comes in and declares he's seizing Rearden's assets, and Rearden, to MM's surprise, affirms that he will succeed. MM expected a fight, asks why. Rearden points out that this isn't really what MM wants, which is something MM won't get. MM asks what that is. Rearden: "you want me to say it's okay". (I might have paraphrased it a little.)
That line stuck with me. Tied well with some of the other events (the other Galt refugees destroying their physical assets behind them). Rand had a point, and it sucks how many critics appear to have missed it.
I really enjoyed the first season of True Detective, and was especially curious about the inspiration behind Rust's (Mcconaughey's) character. This brought me to "The Conspiracy Against the Human Race" by Thomas Ligotti.
Maybe it was because I was not that mentally stable at the time, but it was very hard to read this book and not come away feeling like you should kill yourself.
On the one hand, I feel like facing up to the extreme forms of pessimism, nihilism, and anti-natalism forwarded in this book rather paradoxically gives you an enhanced appreciation for life in the long-term.
On the other hand, reading it will probably make you severely depressed for at least a week.
I liked never let me go and didn't really consider the "twist" a twist (I just assumed it's something everyone knows and talks around and not really meant to surprise the reader).
His "when we were orphans" though is definitely this for me (and I'm borderline on remains of the day), so would join in on antirecommending him in general.
I love Ishiguro, but even I wouldn't want to read Orphans a second time. Remains of the Day is probably my favourite post-war novel. Never let me go is desperately, achingly sad and beautiful, and I agree it's not really accurate to speak of a "plot twist"
Anything by Friedrich Dürrenmatt, he is bleaker than Moscow in winter. Nausea by Jean-Paul Sartre made me sick. Emil Cioran might not be healthy for some depressed people.
A Song of Ice and Fire. Wasted my time on that huge book series that got gradually worse and is not going to ever be finished but the ending still got spoiled in a shitty way by the Game of Thrones show.
The ending might not be the same for ASoIaF, but you still don't have a reason to read the next book if it comes out. People will tell you how it ends.
The first book of the Wheel of Time. It was mediocre, but got me in a cycle where I'd finish one, and, despite barely enjoying it, pick up the next because it was so easy to read, like candies, popcorn or chicken tenders in book form. It took me the better part of a year to go through the serie and I thoroughly regret it
Snap. I got, I think, to book six before finally twigging that the first third of the novel had been recap and I had very little hope that the second and third thirds would contain much more than filler. One of the first books I consciously put down half way rather than just drifting away from.
In high school sometimes at the lunch table I would entertain people by deriding (at length) Robert Jordan for being a hack. This was after months of refusing to read any of his books on the recommendation of people clearly less literary than myself. Eventually, I read a few just to be able to know what I was talking about when explaining how utterly vapid it is.
When I was much younger, for a while I thought that "The King in Yellow" was about the mythical Chinese "Yellow Emperor", and sort of combined them in my head.
I don't know, the second one has a pretty good explanation for AI paperclipping everyone:
Nor is it to be thought that man is either the oldest or the last of earth's masters, or that the common bulk of life and substance walks alone. The Old Ones were, the Old Ones are, and the Old Ones shall be. Not in the spaces we know, but between them, they walk serene and primal, undimensioned and to us unseen. Yog-Sothoth knows the gate. Yog-Sothoth is the gate. Yog-Sothoth is the key and guardian of the gate. Past, present, future, all are one in Yog-Sothoth. He knows where the Old Ones broke through of old, and where They shall break through again. He knows where They had trod earth's fields, and where They still tread them, and why no one can behold Them as They tread. By Their smell can men sometimes know Them near, but of Their semblance can no man know, saving only in the features of those They have begotten on mankind; and of those are there many sorts, differing in likeness from man's truest eidolon to that shape without sight or substance which is Them. They walk unseen and foul in lonely places where the Words have been spoken and the Rites howled through at their Seasons. The wind gibbers with Their voices, and the earth mutters with Their consciousness. They bend the forest and crush the city, yet may not forest or city behold the hand that smites. Kadath in the cold waste hath known Them, and what man knows Kadath? The ice desert of the South and the sunken isles of Ocean hold stones whereon Their seal is engraver, but who bath seen the deep frozen city or the sealed tower long garlanded with seaweed and barnacles? Great Cthulhu is Their cousin, yet can he spy Them only dimly. Iä! Shub-Niggurath! As a foulness shall ye know Them. Their hand is at your throats, yet ye see Them not; and Their habitation is even one with your guarded threshold. Yog-Sothoth is the key to the gate, whereby the spheres meet. Man rules now where They ruled once; They shall soon rule where man rules now. After summer is winter, after winter summer. They wait patient and potent, for here shall They reign again.
Don't worry, that means you are either a lot younger than the rest of us, or don't read the same 'classic' horror fiction that the rest of us do.
"The King in Yellow" comes from references in stories by Robert Chambers which were published in book form in 1895. The stories are a mix of the title story and references in other ones set in an alternate future America of the 1920s (though since the account is given by a very unreliable narrator, it may not be a true description), and 'bohemian life in Paris with ex-pat American art students' which have fantastical/ghost story elements.
"The King in Yellow" itself is the title of a play about the eponymous character, a play which even when read has such terrible effects that the play and the texts of it have been banned.
From the story "The Repairer of Reputations":
"During my convalescence I had bought and read for the first time, The King in Yellow. I remember after finishing the first act that it occurred to me that I had better stop. I started up and flung the book into the fireplace; the volume struck the barred grate and fell open on the hearth in the firelight. If I had not caught a glimpse of the opening words in the second act I should never have finished it, but as I stooped to pick it up, my eyes became riveted to the open page, and with a cry of terror, or perhaps it was of joy so poignant that I suffered in every nerve, I snatched the thing out of the coals and crept shaking to my bedroom, where I read it and reread it, and wept and laughed and trembled with a horror which at times assails me yet. This is the thing that troubles me, for I cannot forget Carcosa where black stars hang in the heavens; where the shadows of men's thoughts lengthen in the afternoon, when the twin suns sink into the lake of Hali; and my mind will bear for ever the memory of the Pallid Mask. I pray God will curse the writer, as the writer has cursed the world with this beautiful, stupendous creation, terrible in its simplicity, irresistible in its truth—a world which now trembles before the King in Yellow. When the French Government seized the translated copies which had just arrived in Paris, London, of course, became eager to read it. It is well known how the book spread like an infectious disease, from city to city, from continent to continent, barred out here, confiscated there, denounced by Press and pulpit, censured even by the most advanced of literary anarchists. No definite principles had been violated in those wicked pages, no doctrine promulgated, no convictions outraged. It could not be judged by any known standard, yet, although it was acknowledged that the supreme note of art had been struck in The King in Yellow, all felt that human nature could not bear the strain, nor thrive on words in which the essence of purest poison lurked. The very banality and innocence of the first act only allowed the blow to fall afterward with more awful effect."
From the story "The Yellow Sign":
" I had read all the papers and all the books in the library, but for the sake of something to do I went to the bookcases and shoved them open with my elbow. I knew every volume by its colour and examined them all, passing slowly around the library and whistling to keep up my spirits. I was turning to go into the dining-room when my eye fell upon a book bound in serpent skin, standing in a corner of the top shelf of the last bookcase. I did not remember it, and from the floor could not decipher the pale lettering on the back, so I went to the smoking-room and called Tessie. She came in from the studio and climbed up to reach the book.
"What is it?" I asked.
"The King in Yellow."
I was dumfounded. Who had placed it there? How came it in my rooms? I had long ago decided that I should never open that book, and nothing on earth could have persuaded me to buy it. Fearful lest curiosity might tempt me to open it, I had never even looked at it in book-stores. If I ever had had any curiosity to read it, the awful tragedy of young Castaigne, whom I knew, prevented me from exploring its wicked pages. I had always refused to listen to any description of it, and indeed, nobody ever ventured to discuss the second part aloud, so I had absolutely no knowledge of what those leaves might reveal. I stared at the poisonous mottled binding as I would at a snake.
"Don't touch it, Tessie," I said; "come down."
Of course my admonition was enough to arouse her curiosity, and before I could prevent it she took the book and, laughing, danced off into the studio with it. I called to her, but she slipped away with a tormenting smile at my helpless hands, and I followed her with some impatience.
"Tessie!" I cried, entering the library, "listen, I am serious. Put that book away. I do not wish you to open it!" The library was empty. I went into both drawing-rooms, then into the bedrooms, laundry, kitchen, and finally returned to the library and began a systematic search. She had hidden herself so well that it was half-an-hour later when I discovered her crouching white and silent by the latticed window in the store-room above. At the first glance I saw she had been punished for her foolishness. The King in Yellow lay at her feet, but the book was open at the second part. I looked at Tessie and saw it was too late. She had opened The King in Yellow. Then I took her by the hand and led her into the studio. She seemed dazed, and when I told her to lie down on the sofa she obeyed me without a word. After a while she closed her eyes and her breathing became regular and deep, but I could not determine whether or not she slept. For a long while I sat silently beside her, but she neither stirred nor spoke, and at last I rose, and, entering the unused store-room, took the book in my least injured hand. It seemed heavy as lead, but I carried it into the studio again, and sitting down on the rug beside the sofa, opened it and read it through from beginning to end.
When, faint with excess of my emotions, I dropped the volume and leaned wearily back against the sofa, Tessie opened her eyes and looked at me....
We had been speaking for some time in a dull monotonous strain before I realized that we were discussing The King in Yellow. Oh the sin of writing such words,—words which are clear as crystal, limpid and musical as bubbling springs, words which sparkle and glow like the poisoned diamonds of the Medicis! Oh the wickedness, the hopeless damnation of a soul who could fascinate and paralyze human creatures with such words,—words understood by the ignorant and wise alike, words which are more precious than jewels, more soothing than music, more awful than death!
We talked on, unmindful of the gathering shadows, and she was begging me to throw away the clasp of black onyx quaintly inlaid with what we now knew to be the Yellow Sign. I never shall know why I refused, though even at this hour, here in my bedroom as I write this confession, I should be glad to know what it was that prevented me from tearing the Yellow Sign from my breast and casting it into the fire. I am sure I wished to do so, and yet Tessie pleaded with me in vain. Night fell and the hours dragged on, but still we murmured to each other of the King and the Pallid Mask, and midnight sounded from the misty spires in the fog-wrapped city. We spoke of Hastur and of Cassilda, while outside the fog rolled against the blank window-panes as the cloud waves roll and break on the shores of Hali.
The house was very silent now, and not a sound came up from the misty streets. Tessie lay among the cushions, her face a grey blot in the gloom, but her hands were clasped in mine, and I knew that she knew and read my thoughts as I read hers, for we had understood the mystery of the Hyades and the Phantom of Truth was laid. Then as we answered each other, swiftly, silently, thought on thought, the shadows stirred in the gloom about us, and far in the distant streets we heard a sound. Nearer and nearer it came, the dull crunching of wheels, nearer and yet nearer, and now, outside before the door it ceased, and I dragged myself to the window and saw a black-plumed hearse. The gate below opened and shut, and I crept shaking to my door and bolted it, but I knew no bolts, no locks, could keep that creature out who was coming for the Yellow Sign. And now I heard him moving very softly along the hall. Now he was at the door, and the bolts rotted at his touch. Now he had entered. With eyes starting from my head I peered into the darkness, but when he came into the room I did not see him. It was only when I felt him envelope me in his cold soft grasp that I cried out and struggled with deadly fury, but my hands were useless and he tore the onyx clasp from my coat and struck me full in the face. Then, as I fell, I heard Tessie's soft cry and her spirit fled: and even while falling I longed to follow her, for I knew that the King in Yellow had opened his tattered mantle and there was only God to cry to now."
Isn't this basically asking for people to share (potentially dangerous) infohazards? I'm not going to give ammunition to a random internet stranger.
But if we limit ourselves to fantasy books, then Assassin's Apprentice by Robin Hobb. The writing itself is great, but I read it during a rough time period and it felt like being repeatedly kicked in the balls.
You're not alone in that assessment. Way back when, when I asked the guy at the fantasy book store for recommendations, he said that Assasin's Apprentice was awesome, but he warned me not to read it if I wasn't in a stable mood. I read it and understood what he meant.
What are the best free sites that use AI to summarize long articles (such as the book review context stuff)? So far the free GPT's that I have tried do a bad job.
I tried https://tldrthis.com/ , signing in through google to get me an AI (human-like) summary that is detailed/section-wise and asked for summarizing this article:
and it gave a decent summary, but they only allow 10 articles for free.
Is it too silly to hope that something like a wikipedia could be created for slow-reading low attention span folks (like me) leveraging AI to summarize several books/articles? Sorry if I am being too stupid/naive.
Claude 2 (https://www.anthropic.com/index/claude-2) is great for this sort of thing- it's almost to the level of GPT-4 in quality, but has a far larger context window. If you have a PDF of an article or short book or can copy the text to a .txt file, you can attach it, ask Claude for a summary, and even get answers to follow-up questions.
Not really answering your question, but I found a striking contrast between his winning book review and his blog posts. The former I thought was brilliantly written, thought-provoking and insightful. The latter I find dull, clunky and irritating.
Yeah, he banned philosopher Richard Chappell for pointing out that he was misinterpreting a philosophy paper he was citing, then banned me for linking to Chappell.
He banned me for an annoyed but civil reply to another reader in the comments section, even though my reply contained a reasoned objection to to other reader's views. But person I replied to announced huffily that they was unsubscribing, and then Hoel banned me.
No, but for the love of god please just ignore anything he's ever written about intelligence/IQ. He acts like an authority but he is very unknowledgeable.
Scott, do you have any thoughts on Data Falsificada[1]? The summary is in the first paragraph: "[A] series of posts detailing evidence of fraud in four academic papers co-authored by Harvard Business School Professor Francesca Gino."
I'd like to point out to other potential readers that data falsificada is interesting in even just learning how to uncover manipulation and possible fraud within an excel file. It was an excellent lesson.
I'm not an expert in fraud but their case looks strong. I think it's very bad that Gino is suing them and hope she loses. Are there other things I should have opinions about?
I posted this in the subreddit, and haven't gotten any response, so hopefully someone here will know something:
Just came across a supposed image pulled from a rabbit's retina in the late 1800's by Dr. W. Kühne, supposedly creating the field of "Optography". While he himself claimed that it wasn't good enough to be of use in forensic science, I'm skeptical that he even managed to do it at all.
Supposedly it's based on the fact that Rhodopsin, a pigment in the retina, bleaches in the presense of bright lights, and can afterwards be fixed through chemical processes. The fixed Rhodopsin can then, according to Kühne, be turned into a recognizeable image (although not detailed enough to be of much use).
I buy the physical claims about Rhodopsin. I'm sure it bleaches as described, and I even buy that it can be fixed in that bleached/unbleached state. I do not believe that any images, useful or not, were actually produced with this method.
Unfortunately, some google scholar searching and a little bit of internet research have failed to turn up very much. It's mostly focusing on how widespread it got in victorian science fiction.
I found one citation from the 70's called "Optography of the retina. Resumption of Küne's studies", but it's just a citation, I can't actually find the article. Wikipedia has a link to an article that claims it was replicated (based on the title, I'm guessing it's not itself a replication, just a report of someone else doing it) but the link goes nowhere and the title doesn't even return anything on Google Scholar.
This has all the hallmarks of being a complete load of bullshit. But I can't find enough evidence to actually prove it.
If anyone has any actually reliable information on this, I would be greatly appreciative.
I recently realised that a spookily-consistent mathematical rule has described the previous political "re-alignments" in the US, and that this rule says the next re-alignment will be in 2028.
The rule is that each Party System lasts for four years longer than the previous one. I'm defining the precise dates of the party systems by my own reasoning, which differs very slightly by how historians may define them, but I think my definitions are justified (and I discovered the rule only after settling on these dates):
1776: The Revolution, and the framing of the constitution, and the largely uncompetitive, pre-party presidencies of Washington and Adams.
1800: The First Party System begins with the election of Jefferson, entirely dominated by what's now called the Democratic-Republican Party.
1828: The Second Party System begins with the election of Jackson, establishing the Democratic Party.
1860: The Third Party System begins with the election of Lincoln, establishing the Republican Party.
1896: The Fourth Party System begins with the campaign (and loss) of William Jennings Bryan, and the election of McKinley.
1936: The Fifth Party system begins with the re-election of FDR, firmly establishing the New Deal Coalition.
1980: The Sixth Party System begins with the election of Reagan, establishing the modern conservative movement.
In brief: the US established; 24 years later a party system established; 28 years later a *competitive* (two real options) party system established; 32 years later the *current* two-option party system established; 36 years later the current parties with their recognisable ideologies (D=left, R=right) established; 40 years later the modern "flavour" of Democratic ideology (big government, unions+minorities) established; 44 years later the modern "flavour" of Republican ideology (evangelicals+business+national security establishment) established. 48 years after 1980 will be 2028.
The only part of the above that seems to differ from how the party systems are normally defined is using 1936 for the start of the Fifth Party System, instead of 1932 when FDR was first elected. But I think this makes sense, because 1932 was not really an endorsement of a new ideology like 1828 and 1860 and 1980 were (or a repudiation of a new ideology like 1896 was) but a rejection of the incumbent over the depression. Also, I think FDR downplayed his big-government plans in his first campaign. Only his re-election really created a new ideological alignment. The rest of the dates seem uncontroversial to me.
So, why would this rule hold? It's too perfect to be a coincidence, I think. But what's causing it? I don't know exactly, but there are many phenomena that have very complicated causal explanations but can still be modeled by a fairly simple rule: that's the way the world often works, and the complex causes end up interacting with each other and canceling each other out to produce (when you zoom out) a simple, straightforward trend. Most likely, there's a general (mostly unconscious) awareness that each party system is coming to an end, and each time enough political will to squeeze one further election out of the old system before it collapses. (Incidentallly, you can even extend the rule back before the Revolution--20 years--to the beginning of the Seven Years- War in 1756, which was the catalyst for the causes of the revolution).
Finally, how will this most likely play out in 2028? I see three posibilities:
1. Desantis (or someone else who isn't Trump) wins the Republican primary and wins the general election. I know this isn't looking good at the moment, but I think it's more likely than people think (though I won't elaborate here) and it gives the clearest path to a political re-alignment. Say it's Desantis, and he returns to a more traditional GOP governance. The rural working class is sick of this and they permanently split from the GOP to form their own Trumpian populist party. The Democrats go into meltdown like they did in 2016, and the socialist faction again blame the woke elite faction. This time there's an actual split: the socialists leave the Democratic Party. Is it possible the Trump populists and the Sanders socialists find common ground and unite to become the Populist Party? I don't know, but it seems perfectly possible. The Trump supporters can now embrace class warfare and economic leftism along with right-wing nationalism to become a truly anti-elite force: Trump can outright adopt a restributionist agenda, truly drain the swamp, no longer have to play nice with the old guard of capitalism. Meanwhile, the socialists no longer have to gently criticise the woke faction: they can go all-out anti-woke, condemn identity politics as viciously as they condemn capitalism, educated elites as viciously as business elites. With the Populist Party established as a powerful force, the fight of 2028 will be between the two old parties, to decide which of them survives as the elite opposition to the Populists, and which one dies. That could go either way.
2. Trump wins the primary and the general. It's less clear how a split happens here, but maybe he decides to this time govern in a more economically leftist way, and the traditional Republicans leave their own party. It's impossible to see them joining the elite Democrats, and hard to see Dem socialists joining the Republican Party. But maybe these things happen in some weird way?
3. Biden is re-elected. In this case, he surely moves further to the left on economic matters, and that keeps the socialists and wokes in the same party for now. The GOP probably permanently splits, but the significance of this is less clear. Maybe a new populist Trump party challenges Biden/Harris from the left in 2028?
What do people think of this? Please don't dismiss the rule I described as a mere coincidence without explaining why it seems to so perfectly describe the past.
I think there may be truth to the idea that the political system "turns over" on a fairly regular basis.
And 30-40 years is probably roughly the length of a political career so this may literally be a measure of turnover.
But I wouldn't buy an exact year pattern - as you mention the dates are somewhat arbitrary. And they're going to be picked from 4 year intervals due to election cycles (hard to point to a 'regime change' without a presidential election), so it's not as unlikely as the raw math might seem.
*Maybe* the slight increase in "cycle length" can be associated with better health and longer political careers, but that's just guessing.
Some of these dates seem like arbitrary choices made to fit the pattern.
Why is it FDR's second victory that changes the party system rather than his first, third, or fourth?
Reagan was certainly influential but is his election really the start of a new party system? And if so then why not Trump? Reagan is a lot more like Nixon than Trump is like Bush.
In general, "party system" transitions tend to not happen all at once, giving a broad range of dates for when they occur. For the sixth party system, you can make a case for any election cycle between 1964 (when an awkward coalition of Buckleyites, Birchers, and Dixiecrats got Goldwater the Republican presidential nomination) and 1994 (when the geographical "party switch" process settled in with Republicans consistently dominant in pretty much the same states that had voted for William Jennings Bryan in 1896), although Reagan's election in 1980 is probably the modal date choses to associate with the transition.
The 4th-to-5th Party System transition is probably the sharpest, dating either to 1932 (FDR's first election) or 1936 (FDR's reelection after everyone knew what they were getting).
The 3rd-to-4th transition was also fairly sharp with 1896 as the defining position, although you could nudge it a bit earlier to 1892 (the emergence of the Progressive and Populist movements and significant national political forces and several Mountain West states voting against the Republican incumbent) or a bit later to 1904 (Theodore Roosevelt arguably being ideologically more archetypical of Fourth Party System Republicans than McKinley).
The 2nd-to-3rd transition was incredibly fuzzy. The modal start date is 1856 when the Republican Party won out as the new second major party, but you can also make a case for the 1854 midterm elections (the first election after the Kansas-Nebraska act, with the Whigs splintering and "Doughface" pro-Slavery northern Democrats taking a beating at the polls), 1860 (Lincoln's first election), 1868 (first post-Civil-War election) or even as late as 1876 (end of Reconstruction and the point where of the "Redeemer" takeover of the ex-Confederate states had mostly completed).
1st-to-2nd is modally dated to 1828 with the election of Jackson, but you can also make a case for 1824 (the alliance of JQA's and Clay's factions formed the core of the Whig party while Jackson's faction from that election formed the core of the Democratic party, and the 1824 election definitely wasn't part of the First Party System or the Era of Good Feelings) or for 1832 (the first election where the Whigs existed as a formal political party).
Then there's the question of whether the Era of Good Feelings counts as its own era or whether to count it as the tail end of the First Party System. And if you do, do you count the start date as 1812 (when the Federalists endorsed a Democratic-Republican dissident candidate instead of running their own nominee), 1815 (the de facto suicide of the national Federalist Party by way of the Hartford Convention), 1816 (Federalists stop being a significant factor in Congress and a lot of ex-Federalist politicians and local political machines have gone over to the D-Rs), or 1820 (Monroe's unopposed reelection).
And the emergence First Party system can be dated to 1787 (the Constitutinal ratification debate, which set the initial battle lines), 1790 (the identifiable emergence of "Pro-Administration" and "Anti-Administration" factions in Congress), 1792 (the formal creation of the Democratic-Republicans and the first contested Vice Presidential race), 1796 (contested Presidential race), 1800 (the Jeffersonian Revolution), or 1804 (D-Rs settle in to convincing national majorities in Presidential elections).
What happened to the convenient link in the email, that let a reader click to go direct to opening the page online? Today's message has a "subscribe here for more" link where it at various times had "view in browser" (one link) or "open in app or online" (2 links).
The intermediate state, with "view in browser" at the upper right, had a button with "read in app" a bit lower down. That button is still there, but "view in browser" is completely gone.
Obviously I got to the post in the browser, in spite of the user interface dis-improvement. You haven't made the blog completely inaccessible to those who never do anything on a cell phone they can do with a real computer, let alone to those who simply don't have a cell phone.
But the email interface to this blog is now making a pretty clear statement - we only offer convenience to app-lovers here. Most likely, that statement comes straight from substack, and is perhaps motivated by some idea they have that app users are more profitable. (Perhaps the app violates privacy more than the web site, giving them more to sell?)
You might want to restore the old appearance and links, if substack will let you do so.
I've always gone to the article by clicking the article's title in the email (in this case "Open Thread 294" in large type at the top). This still works.
Is accessing the post by clicking a link in the email an underappreciated phishing risk? It seems safer to navigate to Substack first, then log in to read posts.
Substack normally recognizes me without me typing in any information. When I do enter info, the only sensitive info I'm entering is my email address, which anyone who successfully emailed me presumably already has. Maybe this is different for people with a paid subscription?
Clicking any link in an email is a potential phishing risk. It shows that you exist and are willing to interact, which makes your email address more valuable as a target for further phishing scams.
I have a heuristic that the primary title/logo of a thing is often a hyperlink to that thing. Titles and logos are often images, and therefore can look like anything, so this heuristic doesn't particularly depend on appearances.
It's possible I might have also noticed my cursor changing when it moved across the title.
I frankly don't have a good set of heuristics for modern UI design.
I've abstracted some general principles:
- aesthetics is more important than functionality
- the new version is often slower and harder to use, never easier or faster
- the interface used on a desktop computer with a keyboard and 4K screen should conform to the design of the interface used on a cell phone with a 3*5 inch screen
- text should be avoided in favor of icons; these icons should be changed regularly
- all controls should be invisible until moused over; controls to make them always visible should be removed if they ever existed
Cynicism aside, I've made some attempts to figure out the design language, which never seems to be explained to users. (Users just get told how to use some specific version of some specific program, and then only if they are lucky.) I've had some small amount of luck by reading documents intended for developers, which may even go beyond such details as which icon they should use for some particular function.
Mostly though, I'm stuck in a world of trial and error used to learn each UI element of each interface individually. Sometimes I get lucky and can discover how to use the current version of whatever it is by using a search engine. Even more rarely, a UI element uses an idiom from an older time, involving plainly distinguished buttons, text labels, and perhaps even usable documentation.
I have developed a variant of your heuristic. I know that when a web site appears to have no clickable elements at all, just some kind of image, the image is supposed to be a gateway - you click it to get what I think of as the REAL web site. And on many sites you'll get a list of items, with pictures and a line or two of text. Some of those have a "more" button, to get full info for a single one of those items. Others require clicking on the image. Still others require clicking on whatever appears to be the name of the item. But that's as far as I'd taken this heuristic; in particular, I'd never applied it to email, perhaps because most emails I've encountered still have something like an explicit "read more"
At any rate, thanks for the extra tool for decoding modern interfaces. Without having it mentioned explicitly, it might have taken me several years to go from "astral codex ten dropped a useful function" to "the silly gits think clicking on their title is an obvious interface" to "and they are not alone; clicking the title is worth a try whenever I encounter a UI with no apparent way to get to the complete content I came for."
Hmm, I'm trying to remember whether html/rich text email was already common by 1993. I don't think it was. I don't think that even the html-based web was all that common. This was still a time of dial up modems, and I don't recall whether the more expensive ones had yet reached 9600 baud.
Not remembering for sure, I did some checking.
Google tells me that the first version of html was written in 1993. Myst - a popular game I disliked, involving finding the right pixel to click on to make progress, in a sea of images, was released in Sept 1993. (I still use "playing myst" as a disparaging metaphor for UIs that involve hunting for invisible UI elements.) I believed at the time that Myst was fairly unique, and couldn't understand its popularity.
I doubt you'd have had many opportunities to apply this heuristic 30 years ago, except perhaps for games like Myst.
We've been focused on the U.S. so far, so I haven't done much research on Europe yet, but the U.K. does have some producers certified as Animal Welfare Approved (which is the best certification in the U.S.): https://agreenerworld.org.uk/directory/
Were the Crusades bad? I mean, schooling has led me to believe they were bad, but the older I get the more I’m convinced my schooling was a bunch of lies and prejudicial assertions.
On the one hand, one can say that we can’t judge the past at all because their values were too different from ours. OTOH, does that mean we can’t judge Hitler? If we can judge Hitler, then why can’t we judge the Pope Urban II?
Don’t we arrive at our present values precisly by judging the past, and saying no, yes, no, no,yes, no?
If in the year 2023 we can confidently say Hitler was bad then we shold be able to, with some level of confidence, say whether Pope Urban II was good or bad. No?
I say Hitler was bad, and the Crusades were good. Christian culture thrived after the Crusades.
We could analyze forever which parts of the Crusades were good or bad or in between, but the one comment that crosses my mind when people are morally outraged by the Crusades (as, apparently, your teachers were), is: why is it always the Crusades?
Why does nobody ever debate the morality of any other medieval or ancient war?
Were the Roman conquests bad? Was Alexander the Great a monster? Should the royals of Britain apologize for the 100 years war? Should the royals of Scandinavia apologize for the Viking conquests? Should everyone in Europe apologize to everyone else for the 30 years war?
Nobody ever sees any of that as a moral problem. On the contrary, people today tend to glorify the conquerors of the past, which has always made me feel uncomfortable. See, for example, Greece and North Macedonia fighting each other over who gets to claim Alexander as their own. Why so eager to claim a warmonger? Also, why do people admire the Romans for all the wrong reasons? For violently subjugating other countries?
I see all the time the bloody conquerors of every era of history, from Alexander to Napoleon, being exalted as great heroes and role models. The crusaders are the only warmongers of the past that get criticized, all the others? we love them today!
I'm an atheist. As an atheist, I have always seen the medieval Church as just another political organization, and I have no reason to feel particularly outraged if and when it fails to uphold the morality of Jesus, any more than I'd feel outraged if any medieval king behaves in the same way.
If unlike me you're a Catholic, then you perhaps do have a reason to discuss the morality of what the Church did, but it would have to be a discussion explicitly based on Christian principles and therefore not suited to this forum. From a secular perspective, the discussion is an odd one; why are we singling out the crusaders? when there are so many people today who casually glorify the violence of Vikings, Romans...
Note that I don't mean any of this as a justification for warmongering in any era.
Yea but that was more of a wisecrack than a historical fact. It was largely true of the First Crusade, but not the Second (Louis VII and Conrad III were first sons) nor the Third (Richard I and Philip II and Frederick I were first sons). Then the Fourth through Sixth were smaller hosts that were led by some first sons as well as some not.
The fourth crusade was such an absurd comedy of errors. It deserves to be made into a long television series by Armando Iannucci that grows darker each season.
The crusaders asked Venice to build them a massive fleet to sail on Jerusalem. The Doge built one, but far fewer Crusaders actually showed up, so they couldn't pay for the whole fleet. So the Doge was like, "well, ok, I built a fleet you can't pay for, let's talk. I'll tell you what we can do. How about you pay me back by sacking a city on my list instead of Jerusalem? You'll get some practice sacking cities, I get to punish my rivals, everybody wins."
Backed into a corner, they agreed and sacked the Christian city of Zara.
The Pope excommunicated the crusaders, naturally, though the excommunication was hidden from them by their superiors to avoid, you know, hurting morale.
While they were wintering in Zara, the son of a deposed emperor appeared. He said, 'Hey I heard you like sacking cities for money, so here's the deal. My father ran a rich Empire. I'll give you unbelievable riches if you simply reinstate me as the rightful Emperor in Constantinople. I have inherited so much wealth, you can't even imagine, you just need to do this one small thing to help me unlock it."
Crusaders were desperate for funds, so they said sure, falling victim to one of the first deposed prince scams in history, the audacious success of which must have inspired countless Nigerian spammers.
The Doge was a big proponent of this plan, despite knowing no reinstated Byzantine emperor could possibly keep this promise. However... the Byzantines did massacre thousands of Venetians in 1182, so he was fully on board. (This "massacre of the latins" is itself a hard event to wrap one's head around and deserves separate treatment. In short, the roman catholics in Turkey were outsiders who dominated merchant financing and became incredibly rich, so they became a persecuted minority, yadda yadda attempted genocide, you know how it goes.)
So as it happened, the current Emperor was the uncle of the prince. But Constantinopolitans (yes that's the archaic demonym) didn't really have an entrenched concept of succession, so nobody in the city really cared about the transfer of power. Honestly one brother seemed as good as any other.
Halfway through the siege on Constantinople, the uncle brought out 8500 troops to surround the 3500 crusaders. Having the upper hand he... simply panicked and ordered his whole army to retreat, then quietly fled the city.
The imperial officials said, alright, fine, we'll just reinstate the deposed emperor, father of the deposed prince. He's not dead he was just uh, thrown in a dungeon. And blinded a bit. Having all their demands met was among the worst things that could have happened to the crusaders. Suddenly they had no demands, but also the Prince had no power or money to pay them what he had promised.
So the crusaders said "ok, new deal, his son has to be co-emperor." And the city was like, "but it's an emperor. the whole point is that there aren't two." The crusaders said "even so." So the city officials sighed and said, "ok fine he's co-emperor but we don't like where this is going."
Now that the prince was co-emperor, he realized that his uncle had nearly emptied the treasury before fleeing, really getting the best possible outcome here. (Well, it went downhill for him from there but anyway.)
The prince said, fine, have everybody melt down antiquities for gold and silver. This was not received well by the people, some of whom owned antiquities. There were, in fact, riots. The riots killed some Latins, which incensed the crusaders. In response the crusaders attacked a mosque, but it was well defended by residents so they had to retreat. The crusaders lit the "Great Fire" to cover their escape, which raged out of control for days, leaving some 100,000 homeless, and not exactly further endearing the crusaders to the local populace.
So, things deteriorated from here, and it wasn't long at all before the prince was strangled by a court official, naturally, who claimed the throne, naturally. The crusaders kind of lost their mind at the death of their patron, or who would have been their patron had he ever actually paid them. But that was a pretty fine distinction at this point. They went scorched earth, slaughtering and raping their way across the city.
Was this crusade good?
I'd say easy no? I don't think this is some kind of schoolmarm propaganda either, I think it was just one ridiculous disaster after another culminating with streets painted in blood. But I guess I'd admit it's also hard for me to view it as a singular moral act. It seems so abstract and absurd it's more like a force of nature that just snowballed. Like, sometimes tigers descend from the hills and wreak havoc on a village. Sometimes mobs erupt in human society crying for blood, and nobody can stop or control them. It is a terrifying thing we sometimes do and it seems inappropriate to use the same words for these horrific disasters that we use for say, someone stealing a wallet or cheating on a spouse. I don't know if anyone will agree with me, you can just tally up the harms and call it immoral, sure, but in some other sense it feels like moral language utterly fails here.
Over the centuries? Seen as a way of getting rich quick, but also addressing real political threats (the Muslim empires were not sitting around being all tolerant and discussing philosophy, they were expanding by force and conquest and presented a real threat that they were on the doorstep of Europe)
EDIT: Forgot Spain, with the occupation/settlement there (describe it how you prefer), they *were* in Europe.
The crusades were of their time, and in many ways justified. The hostility to them derives from the Protestant revolution in Britain in particular (England heavily backed the crusades so the popular memory of that needed to be crushed), from understandable Jewish antipathy to the effects of the crusades on the Jewish population, and to a lesser extent modern wokeness which sees the westerner as always the bad guy.
I would say (based on my limited knowledge) that the Crusades were fairly well justified, their execution was part brilliant, part atrocious (Constantinople WTF?), and the results were a mixed bag (slowing down the spread of Islam, importing ancient and medieval knowledge from the Islamic world into Europe vs. horrible atrocities and all-round suffering), but still much better than if they hadn't taken place.
The "importing ancient knowledge" part looks different when you realize that it's because of Islam that the ancient knowledge was not available in Europe in the first place.
Losing Egypt meant losing access to papyrus. Papyrus decays much faster than parchment, particularly if it's stored anywhere that isn't absolutely dry. So they couldn't copy stuff faster than it decayed.
Atrocities were on both sides, but the Muslims were much worse on surrendered cities.
What we can say about Hitler, Mao, Stalin et al is that they would have been nothing - you wouldn't even have heard of them - if it weren't for their millions of acolytes. https://grahamcunningham.substack.com/
If we're consequentialists, it looks like Spain, where the crusaders succeeded, is considerably better off than neighbouring Morocco, which remained under non-Christian rule. So it would seem like at least one of the crusades was good.
Not so clear what curve to grade on though. Spain is richer on an absolute scale, but adjusting for region Spain is one of the poorer European countries while Morocco is rich for Africa.
Spain is richer than most European countries in terms of GDP/capita. I don't think Morocco and other white African countries have much in common with black African countries.
I think the sensible attitude is to judge people and events by the moral standards of their day, but to judge the moral standards of their day by the standards of our day. So it's fair to judge Hitler for killing lots of people (which was exceptionally bad by the moral standards of his own day) but not fair to judge Winston Churchill for being against gay marriage or some shit.
I don't really understand your comment. Who is saying they were bad? What do they mean by bad? Can you give an example?
In the sense of being a bad idea for Europe, this seems largely true doesn't it? Lots of knights and commoners died, and in the end hardly anything was gained. The Fourth Crusade in particular was a moronic own-goal that opened up eastern Europe to Ottoman conquest.
In the sense of people listing the Crusades as an example of the evils committed in the name of religion, usually along with the Inquisition and witch-hunts, I think it's a bad example of an accurate point. There have been heaps of religious wars, often between sects of the same religion with slightly differing doctrines. In those cases the deaths are clearly the fault of religion, but most people don't know about those wars but have heard of the Crusades. So the Crusades get used as the standard example of "pointless religious war" even though they barely fit: the Muslims started the agression (most recently with Seljuk invasion of Byzantium), the Crusades were a response to aggression and an attempt to protect peaceful pilgrims from violence, and religious belief was the motivating factor but not the sole reason for the wars: stopping Turkish conquest of Europe, protecting Europeans in the Levant, and so on.
Now if leftist people are really using the Crusades as an example of oppression of Muslims, that's so moronic I can hardly believe it. Since the Muslim world was indescribably richer, more powerful and more pivilleged than the West at the time, how does this make the tiniest degree of sense? The only coherent form of this for a leftist would be something like "you blame Muslims for supporting terrorism, but they probably feel the same way Christians did in the 11th century: marginalised and desperate, and thus resorting to violence, understand where they're coming from etc". Do you have an example of someone making this point?
"What do they mean by bad? Can you give an example?"
Smelly ignorant religious zealot Westerners attacked, for no reason but greed and bigotry, peaceful advanced tolerant Muslim societies that came into being in the Middle East simply by strolling along handing out flowers to all they met, and then somehow becoming the rulers of those territories (probably because they were so nice everyone loved them and wanted to be ruled by them).
I think there's a large lack of nuance on both sides of this. That video is an example of my third paragraph above: "the crusades were just another senseless religious war", claimed partly because most people making the claim don't know the actual details of the crusades, and partly because they're trying to get at the fact that there *have* been plenty of senseless religious wars, but most people they're talking to haven't heard of them. So they use the Crusades as the famous go-to example even though it's a very bad example.
I'm sure there are plenty of insane leftist academic historians potraying it the way you describe, but I don't think that's the mainstream cultural attitude in movies and typical schools. "Pointless war because different groups can't get along" is.
Also, I feel it's important to note two things:
First, "and then somehow becoming the rulers of those territories (probably because they were so nice everyone loved them and wanted to be ruled by them)" is actually a fairly accurate description of what happened in the initial Islamic conquests of Egypt and parts of the Levant. Heretical churches like the Coptics were in fact treated a lot better under Isalm than under the iron-fisted Byzantine Church, and many of them welcomed the conqurerors (who of course did also have, you know, an army though).
Second, the Islamic world became *much* more brutal by the 11th century; a lot of this was the fault of the bloodthirsty Turks (oh no, racism! we can't acknowledge that some *cultures* are more violent than others!) compared to the philosophical Arabs. But also hardening of attitudes: destruction of the Church of Holy Sepulchre by a mad caliph, invasions of Byzantine Anatolia, increased persecution of Christian pilgrims in the Holy Land. Those things were all basically *the* causes of the First Crusade, and think all reasonable historians recognise this.
Tl; dr "muslims have always been violent barbarians" is no better than "muslims have always been helpless victims". Although I absolutely agree that the latter is far more inaccurate in the modern world.
Are aggressive wars bad? I.e. is it OK for one nation/tribe to attack another with intent to conquer, or even to raid?
Medieval thinking only tended to have a problem with this if the attacked group was of the same religion as the attackers. (Christian vs Christian; Muslim vs Muslim, etc.) And in any case, lots of people attacked co-religionists, without even the fig-leaf of claiming they were heretical or schismatic. On the other hand, attacking nations/tribes of other religions was often considered good. You might be able to save some souls by forcible conversion. Or at least transfer property (land, loot, peasants, slaves) from undeserving to deserving people.
More people today like to say that wars of aggression are never OK. But they still happen. There's often some kind of fig leaf - we don't simply want their stuff; we're retaliating for something they did, or spreading democracy, or regaining our traditional sphere of influence.
Probably not uniquely or unusually bad, for the time period. There were civilian massacres, but it's believed the deaths numbered in the low thousands. Compare with (say) Genghis Khan, who has three million-plus massacres to his name (Urgench, Merv, Nishapur) by some reports.
I'm all for the crusades being condemned, provided that the schooling system in question even so much as acknowledges the reality of violent islamic conquests of Christendom, and ideally their even greater badness. The fact that the crusades are usually criticized in isolation and treated as some uniquely evil part of the middle ages really demonstrates that this criticism is done for primarily propagandistic reasons rather than dispassionate historical enquiry/instruction. As does the fact that the crusades are commonly invoked when trying to portray muslims as an historically oppressed (at the hands of europeans) people.
There's a big difference between history pointing out the sins of your (religious) ingroup[1] and the sins of the outgroup. It *is* uniquely evil, because it's an example of people *following your[1] God*, rather than "heathens" or "heretics", acting in an evil way. It's a cautionary tale - "your religion is not immune to moral sin". That's not something you need to emphasize for the outgroup, because your average American will already hear that every day (especially in the post 9/11 world).
It's reductive to call it "propaganda" - in fact, I think calling it that is itself propaganda of the culture war. Calling the crusades to criticism significantly predates the modern culture wars where you *might* claim it's woke atheists writing the textbooks - my grandmother, who is Catholic, currently lives in a religious retirement community, and was educated back before the term "political correctness" was invented, when churchgoers wrote the textbooks, thinks the crusades were awful. You *might* be able to argue that it was anti-Catholic propaganda (because Rome), but again, Grandma was Catholic.
And really, there's another much simpler reason why more time is spent on the atrocities of the crusades than of the Muslim nations: US history curriculum just doesn't give a fuck about them. It's all Greece+Rome -> European royal conflicts -> American colonization. The only reason the Moors even show up is because they invaded Spain, an Actually Important country.
Side note: That last sentence there is kind of undermined by the fact that the biggest death toll I can find of a Muslim conflict is the Moorish wars, which was against the Byzantine Empire, AKA The Holy Roman Empire, But East.
[1] America, despite its protests to the contrary, has in-all-but-explicit-law been a *Christian* country up until very recently, and even now still mostly is. This has been reflected in the way we frame history.
Edit: Also, not to put too fine a point on it, but posting something that reduces to "I don't think we acknowledge the Muslims can be responsible for mass deaths enough" a week after 9/11 is kind of a wild take, my dude.
>There's a big difference between history pointing out the sins of your (religious) ingroup[1] and the sins of the outgroup.
If you think the crusaders are the "ingroup" of people who criticize the crusades, you're out of your mind. It's *literally* more correct to say that muslims are the ingroup of liberal atheist American historians and teachers who criticize the crusades.
>That's not something you need to emphasize for the outgroup, because your average American will already hear that every day (especially in the post 9/11 world).
The people who condemn the crusades think that muslims are an historically oppressed group, despite the fact that they are responsible for as much violent imperialism as anyone else, and have as much if not more of a tradition of slavery than Europeans which literally NEVER gets talked about by these people.
And in any case, muslim imperialism is precisely WHY the crusades first happened. Acting like this isn't the case IS PROPAGANDA. There's no scholarly justification for this - it's literally to make the crusades look worse and the muslims innocent.
Also, I've literally never seen a muslim criticize their own "in-group's" historical atrocities, so if they won't do it, we should, especially since they were directed in part at "our ingroup"!
>You *might* be able to argue that it was anti-Catholic propaganda (because Rome), but again, Grandma was Catholic.
That could not be less relevant. We're talking about the here and now, and the people talking the most about the crusades today are by and large not christians, not pro-christianity
>[1] America, despite its protests to the contrary, has in-all-but-explicit-law been a *Christian* country up until very recently, and even now still mostly is.
Institutionally, America is extremely not Christian, and there's few safer ideologies in academia than anti-Christian ones.
>Also, not to put too fine a point on it, but posting something that reduces to "I don't think we acknowledge the Muslims can be responsible for mass deaths enough" a week after 9/11 is kind of a wild take, my dude.
Almost no rhetoric by any major politician or insitution in the US emphasizes the role of muslims in 9/11. If white supremacists had been responsible for 9/11, that's all anyone would be talking about today. The liberal historians who condemn the crusades are exactly the ones who tie themselves in knots claiming that 9/11 attackers weren't "real" muslims and that these attacks have nothing to do with Islam, and that Islam (a religion founded by a warlord and which has as one of its most prominent symbols a sword) is a "religion of peace", whereas the crusades are taken as an indictment of Christianity itself. The liberal historian and US intuitional rhetoric around 9/11 proves my point precisely.
The point remains, American liberals like to portray muslims as historically oppressed, and this could not be further from the truth. The fact that muslims committed 9/11 does not change this fact and shouldn't spare them from condemnation if europeans are to be condemned for theirs.
This claim is just blatantly counterfactual. Just because conservatives like to rant about how academia is anti-Christian doesn't mean the people in charge of the curriculum actually are.
"and have as much if not more of a tradition of slavery than Europeans which literally NEVER gets talked about by these people."
Yeah, they started the African slave trade CENTURIES before Europeans got involved. Hardly anyone knows this, it seems, and if they do they don't talk about it. How have Blacks decided that what was done to them by Arabs is somehow not worthing talking about? Or are they just too scared of being cancelled by leftist Whites?
1. America-centrism. How many people know that vast, vast majority of slaves in the trans-Atlantic slave trade went to the Caribbean and Brazil?
2. Slavery in the Americas was vastly worse than slavery in the Arab world (and slavery in the Caribbean and Brazil was worse than slavery in the US). Slaves in the Arab world were more likely to be employed as domestic servants than as agricultural workers; were not necessarily chattel; and were not necessarily confined to the lower strata of society.
3. African slaves made up a far greater proportion of the US population than of the population of the Arab world.
Muslim countries maintained legal slavery well into the 20th century, so it's probably not recency. My cynical take would be that there are simply no incentives to be angry at Muslim slavers, whereas European ex-colonizers seem quite willing to keep paying recompense for as long as they're reminded of what their forefathers did.
Right, but "recent" is still a century and a half ago in the US. And the British discovered, and suppressed, an actual slave trade in 1850s Africa (run by Arabs), half a century after both Britain and the US ended their slave trades.
And just as a general feeling, I don't get the sense that recency has that much to do with it. I get a stronger sense of wanting to blame a particular race/culture for all the evils of the world for ideological reasons. Where that comes from, I'm not sure (I suspect academics, but I could be wrong).
Can you be clearer about whose ingroup is being condemned, and whether the ones doing the condemning are actually members of the group? Based on what you're saying, a Christian teacher condemning the Crusades is good, criticising her own ingroup, but an atheist or Muslim teacher doing so would be being bigoted against an outgroup. Is this what you mean? I think most people using your reasoning don't mean that at all, would have no problem with a non-Christian condemning Christianity, and most of this stuff about "privilege" and "ingroups" and "punching down" relies on fudging the details of who is actually doing what, to avoid getting caught in blatant self-contradiction.
Also, using "America is a Christian country" as a justification for allowing harsher criticism of Christianity, when "America is NOT a Christian country" is routinely used by the same people to oppose any public recognition of it or any Christian influence on public policy, looks like the worst kind of motte-and-bailey, and I hope that's not what you mean.
I don't think I can be clearer, no, because I think I was plenty clear about what I meant. The ingroup are members of an overwhelmingly Christian society.
I'm not interested in getting into a definitions fight on whether the US is a Christian country. It's a complicated question, yes, and constitutionally+legally we're not supposed to be, but one of the major parties disagrees, we swear our presidents in on the bible, pledge allegiance to a country "under god", declares only Christian holidays as government holidays, and a host of other things. For all intents and purposes, Christianity is THE ingroup, such that even our atheists are explicitly of the "I don't believe in God but the God I don't believe in is Jesus" Christian Atheist/Agnostic varieties.
(Also, "You say America is a Christian country yet others who I've identified as your tribe also say it's not, curious" is an actual motte-and-bailey here, since you're egregiously conflating two definitions of an is/ought mismatch, perhaps the biggest is/ought problem in US politics)
Also, the context of the conversation is not individual teachers, it's "the schooling system", meaning the important bit is what the state is putting in the textbooks and telling these teachers to teach. And I think that's still overwhelmingly presided by Christians and Christian agnostics. (There were still public schools that taught creationism not that long ago)
Look, I don't even *necessarily* disagree with your overall point. But there are a lot of sloppy claims made by the proponents of the "it's fine for me to attack your group but not fine for you to attack mine" double standard, and I'd really rather they be clarified. So I can see whether they really are justified or not.
First, using "under God" as an example of Christian dominance when the context is a war against Muslims makes literally zero sense: we're not talking about a war against pagans or atheists. Also, using "American atheists focus their atacks on Christianity specifically" is a weird piece of evidence for Christians being privileged. Fair points about the bible and holidays though.
Second, the motte-and-bailey applies across "tribes", that's the essence of it, and it's being used if at least some people are hopping between the motte and the bailey. All I'm saying is each person needs to be consistent. If you say America needs to be tougher on the evils of Christianity because it's a Christian country, you can't also say it needs to distmantle public Christian practices because it's not. Or if you say it needs to be secular and treat all religions the same, then that includes equal standards for criticism of all religions. Pick one or the other, as long as you do that you're fine. But there are definitely people who want all the benifits and none of the costs, to have their cake and eat it, and I'm calling that out as dishonest.
Third, my point is that a person who is not a Christian who attacls Christianity is, by definition, not attacking their ingroup. Scott's "I Can Tolerate Anything Except the Outgroup" applies particularly strongly here. If you're talking only about the system, I'd ask whether you still accept individuals should be called out for unfair outgroup bashing even if their outgroup is the society's ingroup? And whether a particular college with only 10% Christians (say 20% Muslim and 70% atheist) should have the opposite standard on the Crusades? And whether a Muslim majority country should be careful not to condemn the crusades but to always condemn their own culture's actions?
I just want people to apply a consistent standard. I'm not saying you're not, but just that I've seen many, many people who are not, and I'm applying zealous scrutiny.
I think the fact that you insist on referring to talking about factual history as an "attack" indicates to me that you're trying to have a dogmatic argument, rather than a discussion where we converge on truth. It's not an "attack", it's history, and it's being used as a parable. Learning about Japanese internment camps and why they were wrong doesn't make America your outgroup, and it doesn't mean you're "attacking" America.
Framing any admission of wrongdoing as an attack is culture war nonsense (like I said in my first post), and I'm not interested in engaging with you any further on that, sorry.
All my priors say something the author is hiding a lie in plain site and my gut says it has something to do with their over/loose use of "average" and "typical". But I just can't place it.
I mean, my god, of course soldiers in war are going to eat 6k calories. And of course pedestrians will need more calories than drivers. But I don't think those answers are really enough to call it the "solution" to the puzzle. Any suggestions on where I can stand to make this all line up?
How accurate are the calorie assessments? Maybe all those studies are overestimating calorie intake massively.
Calories are tricky: The same food provides more calories when it is cooked first, as the body needs to spend less energy to break it apart. Has the caloric density of food stayed the same over the decades? Potatoes today probably provide more calories per gram then half a century ago.
Sedentary lifestyle has been mentioned by other commenters. I want to add that even similar activities have probably become physically easier, like driving a modern car with a/c compared to 40ies hunk of metal without power steering. I think a thousand small things in daily life might just add up as well, like taking the stairs instead of escalators, etc.
I think he's ignoring how much physical effort was expended by normal day-to-day activities. Men working in factories probably did a lot more lifting, hauling, and general moving around, besides standing on their feet all day. Less automation, fewer labour saving tools and devices. Same with women working in the home - even with a washing machine, you were hauling wet clothes (which would have been heavy) out of the tub and wringing them out, etc.
Probably more walking, less transport by car. Less treats that we routinely consume - I was raised that eating in public (e.g. walking on the street) was bad manners and showed off your ignorance. Think of things like Starbucks drinks, which seem to be less coffee and more sugar delivery systems, which are consumed today but which would not have been available at all in the past.
There's hidden expenditure of calories in there that I don't think he's accounting for on the rough "they ate 3,000 calories a day and weren't fat".
In Poverty, a Study of Town Life (1901), Seebohm Rowntree estimates that moderately active adult men require 3500 calories a day to maintain health. In Viola Johnstone's Slimming Dishes (1957), her table says that moderately active 5'8" tall men weighing 11 stone need to eat no more than 2260 calories per day if they are not to gain weight. Both of these are accurate for vastly different meanings of "moderately active."
Exactly, for the first one from 1901 he is probably using working class men doing manual labour and who are living on inadequate meals (see the problems with the conscripts for the First World War from the towns and cities who tended to be short and often suffering from rickets and other disorders):
1957 is a world that is much more mechanised and Davies is writing for people who are watching their weight, so probably white-collar workers and much more sedentary/clerical labour, with access to better and more plentiful food.
Even office jobs 30 years ago involved more movement. I started working at a Fortune 500 corporate headquarters in 1991; and we walked around making copies, handing out memos, if you had to ask the accounting manager a question you just walked downstairs to talk to him, etc.. It was always noticeable when someone moved up to junior executives level because they’d start gaining weight - their workday got longer, they had to entertain clients with dining out and drinks, and they stopped walking around the office so much because now they could tell the secretary to go pass out memos and go talk to accounting for them.
The female executives usually reacted by starving themselves to stay slim; I remember one female VP in her 40s who had a tomato and cucumber salad and five cigarettes for lunch every day - but the men would start really packing on the pounds.
Even at home, we moved around more in those days. You had to get up to change the channel on the tv, to answer the landline phone, etc., and there just wasn’t as much passive entertainment available. I stayed slim in those days by going out dancing a lot and on the weekends we’d go to the city and walk around all day shopping.
I don’t necessarily think he’s “hiding a lie” in plain sight. Rather I think he’s just constructing a simple narrative that is partially, but significantly true. But from your question, I get the impression that you may want to do the same.
It’s a complex issue. Calories in vs calories out is obviously, but trivially true.
But there are so many interconnected factors – from economic and cultural to psycho-chemical and genetic – that affect metabolic health, caloric intake and activity, and affect individuals differently, that I have no idea how anyone can try to judge the relative historical effect of any one factor on a societal level.
People don’t move enough? Okay, but why? Is it only because of cars and TVs, or does nutrition affect our behavior too? If so, how? And when something like that’s true for a majority of people in a society, just saying that people used to walk more seems like an explanation intended to shut down further investigation, and turn a systemic problem into a personal responsibility. Besides, as you say, that doesn’t seem like the solution to the whole puzzle.
Then again, walking is just one way we are different today. There are so many ways human beings’ environments and behaviors differ from those of a few generations ago: We move less, we stress more, we eat different sugars and fats, we get our fructose in a form optimized for quick uptake and high blood sugar spikes in our blood stream, we stay up later, we are subjected to different advertising and marketing, we have more money and better access to all kinds of food, except we can no longer afford/take time to eat quality whole foods, etc. etc. It would be weird if those things had no effect.
Add to that, small differences in any of those factors will disperse, compound, manifest and interact over different time horizons, making it even harder to parse the consequences. (Also making me very suspicious of the round numbers used in the thread.)
I think one of our main problems is that we try to come up with simple narratives and one-size-fits-all solutions.
Or rather, that might be healthy for any single one of us, as individuals: Identifying the key variable(s) in our life that provides the most leverage. And as a society, I think we understand most of the variables at play pretty well, so individuals should be able to discover something that works for them.
(In other words: with reasonable effort and resources, there’s no individual whose overweight/obesity can’t be understood and addressed, however imperfectly, by our current knowledge.)
The problem appears when we become too eager to turn that one lever into a simple solution for the whole problem in all of society, and we become quick to dismiss anything that doesn’t fit our simple model. We focus exclusively on part of the puzzle, and no part of the puzzle solves the whole problem for everyone. So we get fad diets and exercises that work amazingly well for some, but do little for others.
Unfortunately, this way of thinking seems common among doctors and scientists (and journalists and politicians and...) as well as lay people.
Consequently, unless people get lucky, there’s no reliable way to get sufficiently qualified, personalized and holistic help that actually works when they’re struggling with obesity. Scale that up, and *that* is the simple issue that becomes the societal problem. 😉
One thing that doesn't get factored into people getting less exercise might be a combination of long hours at sedentary jobs and long commutes.
The stereotype of sedentary seems to be someone sitting and (used to be watching tv) streaming/doing social media, but work-related sitting takes up a lot of hours.
It occurred to me that the Amish might be a good test to see whether the rise in obesity had some kind of environmental factor. They live lifestyles pretty close to older generations- avoiding modern conveniences, spending much less time sitting, and being a lot more likely to eat home-grown food- so if they have obesity rates similar to the general population, that would pretty strongly suggest something other than lifestyle and overall food choice is causing the rise in obesity.
If I think of an AI as metaphorically a different species than ones that have come before, then it scares me to think that this new species would be more intelligent than humans. Because of course a much more intelligent species is going to makes mince meat out of a less intelligent one.
But if I think of AI as an extension of human intelligence in the transhumanist sense it doesn’t scare me so much.
I think AI is much more likely to be like the latter than the former. What are the arguments against that?
Personally I think this is one of those empirical questions where philosophers can get hung up on what is logically possible vs. what the local physics of the word actually produces, and we just need to run more rigorous experiments. To me it looks like the smartest LLMs are quite close to humans in mind space, but I think there are quite wide error bars on both what is “actually going on inside” and how different the minds will be when they are smart enough to be human-level.
Indeed the more RLHF, the more LLMs exhibit the same sort of cognitive biases and mental heuristics, which EY took to be depressing that these minds were being irrational, but I took to be a major update in favor of AI being human-like. See for example the “Humans in, Humans out” paper, which I’d love to see investigated further.
I think the difference depends a lot on to what degree humans are in the loop of AI applications.
If e.g. an LLM in a chatbot is a reliable advisor, and humans come to it with questions, receive and evaluate answers, and then choose which actions to take, then the AI will mostly be acting as an extension of human intelligence.
If an LLM in a software agent is directed to increase profits, and the LLM makes decisions and takes actions for days or weeks with the CEO just monitoring the stock price, then the LLM will be acting more like a member of a new species. ( Of course to _fully_ be a new species it would need enough robotic advances and enough "parts closure" for it to be able to copy itself and/or repair itself without human intervention. )
I started to wonder how common it is for people to embrace the idea of there being "systems" in the political context, where actions/policy choices have downstream consequences, which could be evaluated and selected for using a consequentialist framework (ie in order to decide if we should pursue x vs y policy, we should consider the anticipated systems-wide aggregate outcomes).
After speaking to a handful of generic liberals on this (ie civil servants, policy professionals, grad school educated pmcs types), I was shocked at how reprehensible everyone I spoke with found this idea. Discussing this concept felt as if I were broaching a highly taboo and inappropriate subject. The primary response I heard was that "you simply can't look at the consequences to understand what we should do" (this response, almost word for word, came from someone who self-advertises as being interested in "systems thinking"!)
I used to believe that many people disliked markets due to issues of exploitation and inequality, rather than objecting to the concept of a market itself. I also understood that some people had reservations about philosophical consequentialism, but I never thought this would extend to political contexts, where it could be considered merely one factor among many to consider.
I'm now very confused and was wondering if anyone here knows of any writing on this topic — specifically any psychology books/articles on why some people do or do not embrace the idea of systems and consequentialist reasoning.
> "you simply can't look at the consequences to understand what we should do"
I'm not sure what you mean by people saying that, since they obviously look at the consequences when designing a system. One difference I see often in people having similar conversations is the difference between treating the problem as about making a consequentialist judgement on a single decision, or putting in place systems that robustly make decisions that are good on average, and have a system of accountability when things go wrong. Does that fit what you are talking about?
Consequentialism tends to appeal to people with weak moral drives. The simplest explanation for what you observe is that those who have strong moral drives feel negative visceral reactions to the idea that you choose an action for its outcome, which is not far away from saying the ends justify the means.
Most people are somewhere between deontologists and consequentialists. Almost nobody is a universal consequentialist. If it were proven that society would be richer by killing less productive people, or allowing children with lifelong chronic illnesses to die (etc etc etc) then most people would still not support doing this.
Neither are most people deontologists, some socialists might prefer poverty and equality* to wealth and inequality, most people would be somewhere between - supporting wealth creation and accumulation only in so much as it benefits them or the general economy.
" If it could be proven that society would be richer by killing less productive people, or allowing children with lifelong chronic illnesses to die (etc etc etc) then most people would still not accept these actions."
I'm not sure that's true. Between the celebration of the Nordic countries using abortion to reduce Down's Syndrome patients and NHS's multiple cases of not just refusing treatment to patients, but forbidding them from finding treatment elsewhere, and the expansion of MAID programs to cover more and more non-terminal conditions, it seems like support for homicide in the service of the Greater Good(tm) is growing
Systems and consequentialist reasoning strike me as two very different things. You haven't given enough information here to understand your friends' views, and I wouldn't be surprised if you and them are misunderstood. My guess is either they 1. don't understand what you're asking, or 2. are fundamentally non-consequentialist.
An example of 1. would be like, I have a Democrat friend who thinks Biden should pack the supreme court to consequentially push democratic policies, and a Democrat friend who thinks he shouldn't because while it'll work today, Republicans will pack the court tomorrow when they have the power. If you asked the second friend if they'd support a policy like packing the court if it would consequentially improve democrat outcomes, they'd say no. They don't actually disagree though they just don't understand what you mean by consequentially.
Point 2 is literally most humans outside this subreddit, who care about things like fairness or justice or whatever outside of mere consequentialism. I'm sure if you ask your friends "would you do x if it raised the total fairness of society?" they'd probably say yes, so long as they're not interpreting your question as "if evil was good, would you choose it?" because that's a confusing question.
Does anyone have a good argument for an average person buying their house? All the good ones I've heard seems to go against it(undiversified, inefficient, expected returns no better than renting), and yet it remains so popular.
I'm not sure what you mean by "expected returns no better than renting"? What is the return from renting? You pay a month's rent, you live in the place for a month, and then you have nothing to show for it. Pay a month's mortgage, and you live in the place for a month and have a decent fraction of a month's mortgage in equity that you can borrow against, cash out when you move on, leave to your heirs, or at very worst claim from the bank as they're evicting you for not continuing to pay the mortgage(*). And which will almost certainly rise in value over time. That's an actual return, which renting offers nothing to compete with.
As an investment, homes are decidedly mediocre, probably with lower return and definitely with higher volatility than a good index fund. But it's an investment that you can make with what would otherwise be your rent money, and you can leverage it with money you borrow at the lowest interest rate plausibly available to an individual investor. It's like your options are A: pay rent and get to live in the place, or B: pay rent and get to live in the place plus a savings bond with a face value roughly equal to the rent payment. How can plan A possibly be superior?
OK, trick question. The transaction costs for buying and selling a house are substantial, and if you're only going to live there for a few years it's not worth it. Or maybe you expect to stay for decades but need the flexibility to leave at a moment's notice. In some markets, rent is substantially cheaper than the mortgage on an equivalent space - but don't assume this is the case, because it usually isn't. If your needs are met by a studio or 1BR, you probably can't buy a comparable house and probably shouldn't buy much more house than you need just because it would serve as a mediocre investment. Maybe you really don't want the responsibility of maintaining a house. Lots of sound reasons to rent instead of buy, in some circumstances.
But the bottom line is, buying a house means spending a lot of money over a long time and at the end of it you own a nice house. Renting means spending a lot of money over a long time and at the end of it you're living on the street unless you come up with still more money.
* Also, there's a lot more hoops the bank has to go through for a foreclosure eviction, if it comes to that.
A lot of the arguments against renting implicitly assume that the terms of your lease are fairly short term; if that doesn't hold then there are stronger cases to be made.
I moved recently, and needed a place near my kids' schools with at least three bedrooms. I won't have the location or size requirements after the younger one graduates, and was able to negotiate a multi-year lease at a slightly-higher-than-asking rent, locked in for the duration.
A mortgage payment alone, given the house's assessed value (which is typically well below sale price around here), would've been more than the rent even before the recent interest rate hikes, plus I'm not on the hook for any sudden massive expenses.
People keep telling me that I shouldn't buy houses, but in my area their prices simply keep growing, for decades. I remember when they cost 1/10 of what they do now, and back then already people told me "don't buy, the prices are now insanely high, they cannot grow anymore, you need to wait until they inevitably drop soon", except that never happened. My only regret is that I didn't buy more.
tl;dr -- maybe buying houses doesn't work in theory, but it definitely works well in practice
But this may depend on the specific place you live. I am in Eastern Europe, so I assume there was a "market imperfection" of local people simply not having enough money to buy more expensive, and foreigners not trusting the situation (e.g. worrying that some new government might nationalize their property overnight)... and as local people get more rich and the foreigners trust the situation more, the prices keep growing... and I suspect that this process has not finished yet.
"But, if the prices keep growing further, then no one will be able to afford buying a house anymore!" Indeed, this is the future, I believe. The houses will all be owned by some rich funds, most of them foreign, and local people will all rent. Except for me, of course.
Before reading the other responses, I'll share the advice given to me. If you plan to live in the same place for five or more years, you want to buy so that you're building equity instead of continually paying rent. Five years is typically the break-even point for closing costs and the higher interest payments on a mortgage for the first few years.
Based on this advice, if you would want to keep moving or leave your options open, most people would be better off renting. If you want to be in a stable place long term, you want to buy. All of this depends on a "normal" housing market that isn't seeing rapid gains or losses. Slow losses sounds bad either way, but if you just want a place to live then that's not really a big deal unless you need to take a loan out based on the equity of your house.
I'm about five years from paying off my mortgage, so I think we made the right choice on that.
Nice to not get kicked out of your house after you get old. Or to have to pay increasing rent as you enter your dotage. Nice also to have an asset to fall back on, one that can be monetised or liquified as needed. In fact from the point of view of the individual it’s hard to argue for paying any rent at all - somebody owns that property. Not a penny of rental payments add to your capital. Instead it does add to the owners capital.
It’s only when looking at the “general economy” that more people renting might help grow the economy by a few percentages of percentages, because economic reasons. Labor flexibility is one. There are others.
These kind of economic arguments don’t see the economy as made up of humans, but rather units of production, and if we had better ability to move these units across the economy as needed (with disregard to their personal preferences) then labor and capital would more easily match and GDP increase more rapidly, even if it didn’t benefit the average guy. This kind of economic thinking is anti human.
(In fact being homeless when old - much more likely if I’m the rental sector - and dying younger would probably benefit the economy too, although I doubt this is explicitly mentioned).
My unsatisfying answer is that there is no "average person" when it comes to home-buying. An individual's lifestyle, preferences, future prospects, and housing market all matter *tremendously* more than the generic observation that putting home-owning expenses into an index fund will have a greater return than owning (presuming past performance indicates future returns, which...well...um...).
In my secret heart-of-hearts, I purchased my condo mostly because *I never want to move again.* The aphorism that "three moves are as bad as a fire" certainly *feels* true, even if it obviously isn't. I was happy to pay a premium to stabilize my housing situation; not having to move every 1-3 years was well worth surrendering an extra whatever percent in my portfolio.
Being able to permanently install renter-unfriendly stuff in my condo (like a full wall of bookshelves, and a projector and screen) is a MAJOR bonus, too.
But that's just me! I love stability and I love my stuff. A minimalist who values the freedom to live internationally at whim is going to have wildly different feelings about what they might be willing to do to avoid moving.
It's still in the Irish cultural DNA to try and own your own home, because of evictions during the Famine.
I think for a lot of people, it's a marker of being adult and having arrived at where you should be in life - renting long-term is uncertain, because the landlord could decide to sell up any day and then where do you go? Owning your own home is owning property and a marker of stability and economic worth: you're settled down, you are now a solid citizen.
Once you own the house, you can do whatever you want with it. Wanna knock down wall and make a new room? You can do that. Rip out your tub and put in a giant shower? That too. Build a patio and gazebo in the backyard? Have at it.
Having rented and having owned, there really is something to be said for the sense of freedom and (for lack of better word) ownership that comes with homeowning. The property becomes yours in ways renting never could and you start thinking of it and of what you can do with it in ways you never really considered. It made me ever so slightly sympathetic to those arguments about restricting voting rights to property owners (not that much though), because it really does change your point of view.
That's the truth. When we bought our house, my dad told me that I'd "be surprised how quickly your house becomes your hobby." He was not joking around.
When you rent, you pay a premium to your landlord to compensate for the fact that 4% of the population are horrible to deal with and creates tons of extra work through stupidity, malice and stubbornness, and since your landlord can't know if you'll be one of them or not you'll have to pay the idiot premium. When you own, you don't need to pay the idiot premium unless you're an idiot. (This creates a lemon effect which further worsens the problem.)
Do you have a citation (or specific reason) for that 4% number? I implicitly agree with your framing, but could see other numbers in that order of magnitude, so I'm always curious where people are getting their intuitions/data from.
Not all all, it's an order-of-magnitude best estimate for a cut-off. It's a continuous distribution: people exist on a spectrum of idiocy but the cost for the landlord increases exponentially as idiocy gets lower.
If house prices go up 10x (or even 2x) in your area and you can no longer afford rent, are you willing/able to change jobs and move somewhere cheaper? If you want to guarantee you can stay where you are (friends, family, job, inertia), a good way to do so is to buy a house so your “rent” doesn’t float with the local market. Rent control is of course another hedge if that is available to you, but it has its own issues/distortions.
"Owning" a house generally means having a mortgage. So you are still quite vulnerable to changes in prices, just in the mortgage rate instead of rent. As a lot of people are now finding out.
You also get the increase in property tax, since that's usually based on the assessed value in some way. Admittedly, it's often delayed, or not based on all of the value, but that's because home owners tend to vote at a higher percentage than renters.
This is a very good point that I considered mentioning, but on careful thought it doesn't seem too true. Hedging is done for the purpose of decreasing risk. Something like an index fund of real estate would work this way, but buying an individual house will likely not, because there's just too much risk involved - it's entirely possible that your house's price will stagnate while the housing market is booming.
The price of your own house doesn't matter at all unless you intend to sell or want a loan against the equity. If your home price stays the same while the neighborhood goes up, you still avoid the problems of increased rent.
Alignment of incentives? If there's something the landlord should be doing there's not the danger that they won't want to, or will drag their feet.
As others have mentioned, there's more leeway to change things or to improve them.
With a rental property they'll raise your rent over time. Housing costs are more predictable, won't generally increase, and may decrease relative to inflation adjusted rent.
The degree to which buying a house is a good idea changes from time to time and from place to place. It's not always a good idea. But it can be.
Moving is massively disruptive and fairly expensive if you have a non-trivial amount of stuff and especially if you have school-age children. As a renter, you may need to move locally if your landlord wants to take the unit off the market for any number of reasons, and you might need to move out of the immediate area or else incur substantial financial hardship if market rent increases enough to strain your budget. But as a homeowner, you're hedged against your future needs for housing and have a vested option to continue living in the same place. You are exposed to the risk of local housing prices falling considerably, but apart from opportunity cost, that's only a problem if you want to move. So if you're relatively settled in and confident of the local job market for your line of work, buying removes a lot of risks of renting.
There's also a difference in size, quality, and mode of living between most rental units and most owner-occupied houses. Rentals are mostly on the smaller side and are mostly apartments. If you want a 2500 square foot detached single-family house with four bedrooms, you can probably find a few on the rental market, but you have a ton more options to buy.
I suspect this depends a lot on the area where you live. If there's a net influx of people, or any kind of gentrification (higher earning people replacing lesser earning people on net), both rents and home prices climb and keep on climbing.
I live in an area of this type. It had a few periods when house values dropped, but like the stock market, they came back up again fairly soon. And to put the icing on the cake, I managed to secure a 30 year fixed rate mortgage that had me paying a combined principle and interest that was just about the same as I'd have had to pay for rent, in the first years of my mortgage, and a lot less than hypothetical rent thereafter.
OTOH, my mother bought a house in an area with net out-migration and perhaps reverse gentrification. When she finally sold the house, the price in dollars was much the same - but inflation meant the dollars she received bought less than those she paid. OTOH, she did get to live rent free for some decades, which surely counts for something.
I had moved to get the best job I could, almost automatically putting me in a growing area with lots of people like me. My mom bought her house in the city where she was born. That may be part of the difference. But of course much of the rest might be luck, for all I know.
Every time I do the math home ownership comes out way ahead financially compared to renting, with a few reasonable assumptions in place. Could you point me to these good arguments that suggest otherwise?
That's surprising, I haven't done explicit calculations, but I would be very interested in yours, since that would seem to imply that houses are undervalued.
My math at this is amateurish so please point out if I'm making a dumb error. I mostly use publicly available calculators rather than rolling R cuz I'm lazy - if I'm super wrong I'll take it a little more seriously.
My partner and I are seriously looking at about $400,000 of house. We live near a up and coming sun belt city, but don't want to live _in_ the city. That money will buy us a 3 bedroom with between 1300 and 1500 sq ft and not much yard. Won't be the newest or prettiest but the area will be plenty safe. Eminently a reasonable option for being childless or for raising 1-2 kids.
We would put 80K down, and then 30 yr fixed rate mortgage assume 5% (we have excellent credit - you can't get a rate this good right now but a few years ago you could and were willing to wait) + property tax + property insurance will put us at about 2400 monthly.
Our current 2br apartment at 1050 sq ft is 1800 a month. To rent an apartment or home equivalent to the above would cost us about 2000 a month based on the listings in my area. Rents in my area have steadily risen by about 5% per year on average.
Even if we assume the real value of the house goes up not at all, just tracks inflation:
(Assuming a 4% discount rate)
Year 10:
House: Present (today) value of down payment and monthly payments so far - 140K
House tracking inflation only is worth about 530k in 2033 dollars.
Equity at year 10 is about 280k in 2033 dollars, depending on how you calculate it. That is, if you sold your home and then paid off the loan you'd be left over with about 280k, very nearly the present value of the money you've paid so far in today's dollars.
Rent:
2000 a month increasing by 5% yearly over 10 years present value is 54k.
If we rented and invested the difference compared with housing we'd have 86k PV to invest at let's assume 6% (including inflation) we'd have 156k. If you think you can invest well enough to get 5% after inflation you'd have 190k in 2033 dollars.
So you could either have spent a PV of 54k renting and invested the rest and at year 10 have 190k in the bank, or you could have spent a PV of 140K and at year 10 have 280k in equity in your house. Over invested in the house? For sure - but I'm willing to be exposed to too much housing risk for 90K in expectation and getting to own my own home which I haven't even discussed has many other things I value relative to renting. And if the value of the house goes up in real terms, then that's just candy.
Even if the house didn't track inflation and at year 10 was exactly 400k, you'd still have about 150k in equity - and I would pay 40k over ten years for the benefits of home ownership over renting, but that's a preference case.
I don't see how home ownership comes out financially behind unless you:
Think house values are going to drop in real terms
Are comparing a very non equivalent rental to the home - if you just rent a worse place you can come out way ahead, but true of buying a worse house too.
Assume rents won't go up
Would love to know if I'm wrong, since I'm looking at buying a house.
But, logically, it seems like housing should be ahead. When I pay my apartment 1800 a month I'm essentially just lighting it on fire in exchange for the right to exist in a place. When I give the bank 2400 a month on a mortgage some of it gets lit on fire but at the end of the period _I own a house_.
Unless your monthly payments end up very very different to each other the house basically has to come out ahead.
I think you have to assume perpetual strong growth in real-estate prices to make it come ahead (since what you put into your home you are not putting into the stock market). When I ran the numbers it really comes down to just those two parameters (real estate vs stock growth rate).
Personally I think it’s more likely that real estate will stop increasing over 30 yr (YIMBYs win, or we go all in on remote work and stop paying the city premium) than that the stock market stops growing, but is this the lens you are using when you say “reasonable assumptions”?
That said I am in favor of home ownership for other (hedging) reasons, I just don’t think it gets me ahead in the happy scenario.
The cost to rent a place is almost always higher than the cost of the underlying mortgage, interest, property taxes, and up keep. It's a business and that's how money is made in rental property. Imagine a world where you can rent a place for LESS than the landlord is paying in monthly mortgage, interest, property taxes, and up keep. That would be highly unusual. No one is going to lose money every month renting you a place as some sort of charity operation.
As long as we live in a world were a landlord can make a greater than $0 profit on a place is a world where owning is cheaper than renting. Of course there are TONS of reasons why one would be better off renting for personal or lifestyle reasons, but it being actually cheaper financially is not one of them.
I don't really understand the market kinematics of this; one possibility is that small landlords bought their properties decades ago when they were cheaper, and didn't raise the prices in lockstep with real estate appreciation. But that wouldn't explain why commercial landlords can afford to build new appartments and lease them.
Maybe it's a combination of i) renting is only cheaper for the initial period of the mortgage when your interest payment is high and is cheaper after some breakeven (and most homeowners actually move house within 5 years before they get to the "cheaper" part of the mortgage which would affect the sample of what people are actually paying on their mortgages), and/or ii) commercial landlords get access to cheaper capital and so their annualized debt servicing costs end up being substantially less than a residential mortgage.
As Sovereigness mentioned in another comment, it seems the problem with analysis like that one you linked is that they are not even attempting to compare equivalent or even similar places. As an example: Let's pretend in city X the median apartment is a 2 bedroom 1100 sqft place that rents for $1,000/month and the median home is a 3 bedroom 1,600 sqft place that costs $1,400/month in mortgage and taxes. Would you say that renting is cheaper than owning? Yes, its cheaper to rent a smaller and worse place in a building than a larger detached home, but that's not really what people are asking when they ask which is "cheaper". Shouldn't we at the very least be trying to compare similar places? Not sure how anyone can take an article like that seriously with such an massive and obvious oversight.
What people are actually asking is something like:
Is it cheaper to rent or own a 2 bedroom 1,000 sqft condo?
Is it cheaper to rent or own a 3 bedroom 1,600 sqft house?
Following this point and answering your first question - the most important parameter by far in the model is the difference in monthly rate between renting and mortgaging an equivalent product, emphasis equivalent
Most of the net economic benefit of buying a home (if any) comes from the fact that the government (rightly or wrongly) really wants you to. Exact situations vary but this tends to manifest as (1) artificially cheap credit (2) whose interest is tax deductible (3) to buy an asset that historically outperforms inflation.
There are also social and psychological benefits. However unlikely eviction would be in practice, apartment living always feels transient at a deep level, to yourself and to others. Buying a house gives you permission to improve, to express, to host, to plan. It's a credible signal of long-term stability.
This Arts & Culture feature from Google actually has a ton of interesting pages. The page for Care of Magical Creatures shows a paradoxical two-horned unicorn.
How's this one? Rust & Humus, an absolutely delightful illustrated history of a very variegated fantasy world (https://www.artstation.com/artwork/rAw5vm) (whose knowledge I owe to Neike here)
I've been a fan of Codex Seraphinianus for ages, it is so beautifully illustrated, and brings me back to the simpler times when I was a kid reading scientific encyclopedias and medical journals, with all the complex pictures that seemed to be out of this world.
Given that I'm just a lowly commentator, I don't exactly need to post an erratum, but I wanted to admit that I was at least partially wrong about Joe Biden a month or so ago when I said that there wouldn't be any evidence that he was aware of how much more-than-baseline corrupt the Hunter business was. I'd still insist that we don't really know what the baseline level of corruption in Washington is, but my actual claim seems wrong in retrospect.
It was all coming out in carefully titrated drips. Watching the narrative slowly evolve towards more and more evasive weasel words was instructive just by itself, of course, but the individual points were damning. Here's a link to the House Oversight Committee blog. Note that probably half the stuff on this list is from one whistleblower.
Other things about the whole situation really started to decrease my initial confidence, however. Consider the collapse of the narrative on that Ukrainian prosecutor Burisma wanted gone. When I first heard the official narrative about how plenty of people internationally wanted him gone due to his known corruption, this meshed well with my priors about Ukrainian corruption generally, and I just shrugged and said, yeah, that's probably fine. Later I've learned that actually he was being honored internationally for his efforts fighting corruption and exactly zero of the other various international figures that supposedly wanted him gone have been named. It starts to look like the '50 Intel sources' (i.e. 49 sources rubber-stamping the statement of one known to be corrupt) from whichever hoax it was they foisted on us that time.
I appreciate you making this post. It's hard to admit your mistakes, especially in a topic that's so inflammatory and full of bad actors on both sides.
> any evidence that he was aware of how much more-than-baseline corrupt the Hunter business was.
So far I ignored everything about hunter biden, because the first things I read about him were trump-propagandists trying to find dirt (which was ~5 years ago?). So it comes as a surprise for me to hear, that anything relevant came out of it.
--> what is the most relevant thing, that came out of the hunter-biden debate? (I am not up-to-date about news about him. A very general pointer would be enough, thanks.)
--> what is the information that made you change your mind?
Selling access is common to the point of being completely standard in politics. The idea that Joe thought that Hunter was only engaged in the normal amount of it seemed reasonable to me. It since has come to light, merely that Joe was more aware than I thought, the dollar amounts were higher than I thought, and the number of actual contacts for the sake of selling access were higher than I had thought. Given that I regard myself as a fairly sophisticated consumer of news as well as being rather cynical overall, for this to surprise me is itself a kind of second order surprising.
Thank you for this update. I think I was on that thread and agreeing with your thoughts. The evidence is much more substantial than I expected.
I must admit, until this happened, I had no idea any politician was selling access, and now I'm hearing it's so commonplace so he shouldn't be impeached. I wish I was in a society where I believed these things could be enforced equally, and we could just get remove everyone selling access out of politics, but that seems depressingly unlikely.
Given that you've admitted a mistake that you made, in a public manner about a political topic is, imo, already a rare thing, I applaud you for keeping track and not, for example, insisting you were right "in spirit" or saying that what you said isn't what you meant already puts you leagues above most people who post on the internet and quite a few pundits. I think for EXTRA epistemic points you'd be shifting your thinking about related topics (I don't particularly have any dog in the biden good or biden bad opinion race), in THEORY the """full bayesian update""" is trying to figure out how you made the mistake. I'm making it sound much more dramatic than it seems, as for me a lot of the time it turns out that I didn't think too hard about an issue and just went off of vibes instead of reasoning things out.
I'll admit something else, which is that I haven't really learned anything from being wrong. That is to say, I'm not really making any progress towards the full update because I'm not sure I trust the sources of information and there's too little transparency into the reference class to determine how much of an outlier this situation is. Maybe old Joe really just was more corrupt than usual, and perhaps became Vice President in the first place in exchange for favors. It's also quite possible that they're all this bad, but aren't being hung out to dry in response to an Alzheimer's related refusal to stop running for president.
Eh, changing minds is hard enough even for high benefit things, it's unreasonable to expect viewquakes for precisely reasons you outlined.
I think on the margin, the following trains of thought are "Bayesian leaning".
1. Have a model worked out where you assume all of the small ambiguous facts all turn out the way you don't expect. What world would cause those facts to be false? What does it mean for your worldview? What additional pieces of information would allow you to disambiguate? You don't have to follow up if you don't want to, but you do want to make it more inconvenient to rationalize afterwards by making "wrong" worlds more concrete.
2. Given that this looks like maybe a base rate recalibration, what IS the base rate of corruption? What does it look like? If it is much higher than you thought, why did you think it was lower? And even if it was higher, does this actually propagate out? (One example would be "why is X outgroup bad at Y" can be resolved by "well, by default everyone is bad by Y". You thought Y was easy, but you actually don't change your mind that much because your world model already embeds a bunch of downstream "Y is hard" facts.)
I have no idea if any of this helps, but this is how I try to think when trying to change my mind.
I think a lot of politics-adjacent material will make more sense from the following assumptions:
1.) Media is the fourth estate of government
2.) Government in general is corrupt
3.) Corruption is self-reinforcing (there's a heavily-looped graph of people who have dirt on one another, keeping one another from spilling the beans - and people not in the graph are suspect and need to be initiated into corruption, in order to add them to the graph, or removed as a threat)
Really you only need #1 and #3 if you think about it. ("Most of government is corrupt" is the only stable equilibrium, and you really need the media to be in the graph.)
Pay particular attention to divergences between "old" and "new" participants. It was mostly the newer congressional members demanding that Biden be seriously investigated - they aren't in the graph yet. The older congressional members were studiously avoiding taking any particular positions on the matter.
I expect that if the president were to issue a full pardon of everybody in the Federal Government we'd suddenly have a lot of mysterious murders in DC as those with ongoing interests sought to close weak links in the graph.
Which is to say - I don't necessarily think Biden was particularly bad. But I do think Hunter was particularly blatant / obvious about it, in a "trying to get caught" kind of way.
A good friend of mine was just diagnosed with stage 4 colon cancer (which when discovered had already spread to ovaries, liver, and abdominal wall). Still early and prognosis isn't known. I'm giving her and her husband (also a good friend) space. But reading your and your wife's writing has helped me feel a bit more connected to what my friends might be going through, emotionally.
If you feel more connected then we're succeeding. You're welcome and I hope your friend is okay.
Some of our friends have done things like sent periodic texts / emails just saying, "No need to respond to this, but I'm thinking about you." Makes us feel good w/o necessarily needing to engage, which is nice when things are overwhelming.
South Bay Meetup 9/23 cancelled.
We had plumbers in this week, they said they would be finished Wednesday, now say Friday. The meetup is scheduled for Saturday and we don't think we can get things sufficiently back in order to do it. I have sent the cancellation out on my mailing list, asked Scott to post it, and am putting this up as well.
When I visit https://astralcodexten.com, I'm taken to a sort of generic business-looking website. When I visit https://www.astralcodexten.com, I'm taken to the normal blog. Is this intentional (as some sort of ARG or defense against the public internet?) or accidental? Seems strange to me.
What traits does the aesthetic known as "classiness" entail? What exactly does it look like / feel like to have a classy home, a classy outfit, etc?
Most importantly: Is the defining feature of classiness simply that it signals status? Is classiness actually 100% a matter of social signalling, or does it have aesthetic qualities independent of signalling ability, at all?
This might sound odd in the context of these other takes, but I've thought that an important component of classiness is generosity. A classy home is welcoming to guests. It doesn't assault the senses; it doesn't overwhelm with grandiosity. But it never squeezes you in or leaves you without a place to sit, or a room to retreat to for privacy, or any comfort of home you might care for. A classy outfit elevates the wearer, yes, but it also elevates the people in the wearer's company. It doesn't suck all of the attention in the room. It is pleasing to look at and remains within the sartorial boundaries shared by the rest of one's associates, so that they can be perceived as peers of a sharply-dressed figure and not lessers.
Of course all of this can backfire miserably when attempting to bridge too wide a gulf in cultural context. Truly classy people know this and manage any complications with compassion and empathy. And all of this can be weaponized by those who adopt the letter but not the spirit of the code. But I don't think that means that status signalling is all that the aesthetic is about.
I like this definition! It makes sense of the first words that came to my mind, which were "understated elegance", and "polite and charming".
And I think the last part you mention is important - a lot of it is about attitude.
Thank you, this is a great answer! This feels intuitively right to me, and it's a useful addition to the discussion.
The reason I'm asking the question is that I'm trying to identify traits / attributes / aesthetics (in this case "classiness") that are both intrinsically motivating to people (for example because "classiness" plays to peoples' desire for status), but also possessing of pro-social potential. This sort of thing makes me think that "classiness" could be a good candidate.
The thought is, for example, if one could advocate that making your home into a welcoming and accomodating place is a Classy thing to do, the more people are motivated to do so, and then our world becomes a place with more enjoyable spaces and more enjoyable social gatherings, maybe even better communities; something like that.
I think the clue is in the name. Something is "classy" to the extent it signals membership in the elite class. Which typically means expensive, but understated. It should be nice, but in a subtle way that only other elites can appreciate. Impressive, but in a way that signals an aristocratic indifference to the need to impress. I'd say it's currently associated with a kind of minimalism, but doesn't necessarily need to be.
It certainly doesn't *have* to be minimalist-- look at how the wealthy dressed before the French revolution.
There was a Tom Wolfe essay about how being an upper class man (in the 70s, I think) meant being able to distinguish small differences in labels.
It's possible that some things just become signals of wealth for no particular aesthetic reason, and I especially mean Rolex watches.
I think part of the reason 18th-century fashions (and really all the way back to the Elizabethan era) were so elaborate is that cloth, and the labor needed to make elaborate clothes, were expensive. After the Industrial Revolution, clothes became so much cheaper that flashy clothing is no longer a status indicator. Think about the difference between lace clothing that had to be hand-made, inch by painstaking inch, and lace clothing that I can buy off Amazon for $40.
Now, class in clothing means understated quality and fit.
I think of lace as status-driven desire. When lace was hand-made and expensive, aristocrats might well be dripping with lace. Now that it's machine-made and cheap, it only has a vestigial use on women's underwear.
I wonder whether we could find analysis of basic human desires in what rich people do, especially if it's cross-cultural-- for example, hunting with companion animals.
My initial thought is it means "a combination of expensive and functional". A classy suit is one that creates a particularly powerful-yet-intelligent look, feels good to wear, and costs more than the average car. A classy car looks smooth at every point, drives fast and well, makes powerful engine noises, and costs more than the average house. If it's either inexpensive or non-functional, it isn't classy.
(Smartass answer: what makes a home classy is all the school desks.)
Interesting answer! Let me bounce a couple things off you and see how they sit with your intuition:
1. What about the Minimalist aesthetic? It can be sleek, clean, and modern, and it's trendy right now, especially among productivity and lifestyle people. But is it barred off from being "classy", because minimalism naturally tends to be inexpensive?
2. What about an object that you custom made yourself (assuming it doesn't *look* or *function* jankily; ie it's still sleek and nice looking, but you built it DIY)? It costs perhaps 0 money, but then again it was more costly in terms of time and effort, and yet then again it is a rare, one-of-a-kind item.
I'd have to see specific examples of minimalism. Google pictures of minimalism seem like they're designed to show off the large empty space around it, promoting the size of the building. Bright white walls, shiny hardwood floor. Several carefully placed hanging pictures in most of them, which seems like it would cut against minimalism. The house the room is in is what's expensive.
I don't think something people know you built yourself would be defined as Classy, unless it's specifically art. If they didn't know you built it, it gets defined by what price the viewer would pay for it.
Not quite happy with my own definition, so I'll also throw out "no-expense-spared longtermism": a classy suit is expected to outlast a cheap one, classy art is supposed to invoke deep thoughts not lowbrow thoughts, etc.
Thanks, I think these are good insights.
I'm back from the grave to toss another idea at you. I had a little lightbulb moment just now while making coffee:
What about the example of the French Press? It's an elegant and effective tool, definitely classIC, it strikes me as definitely being more classy than the run-of-the-mill coffee maker. I think if you tell an everyday person who's not into coffee that you use a French Press, they'll find it a bit fancy-sounding (maybe just because it's French though?).
Obviously there are extremely expensive coffee makers and espresso machines and such out there, owned pretty much exclusively by wealthy people, but personally I think I would describe them as "excessive" and "ostentacious"; not things I'd really envy or look up to. Maybe more to the point, their complication and moving parts makes them more clunky, and basically guaruntees that they will fail earlier than the trusty French Press, which plays into what you said about longtermism.
I'm sure there are plenty of examples of similar kinds of tools and objects, but this one just came to me.
Hm, true, foreign affiliation definitely adds class, to the point that people will fake it, like Haagen-Dazs. I guess it's possible to stretch the definition of expensive to include the implied foreign travel: "I'm using a French Press, I know it's a French Press because I've seen France." But especially in the Internet age I probably need a wider definition, in a way I can't define short of the vague "signalling the upper class".
1. This is a great question. Since many truly expensive products are designed in a minimalist style, cheaper minimalist products can sometimes look/feel expensive enough for people to describe them as classy. However, I think I would stop viewing one of these items as classy upon finding out its true price.
2. I’d say that if it *could* sell it for a lot, then it can count - so consider the price of the materials, and the skill require to make it.
Hi everyone! EA for Jews is running another round of the EA and Judaism Intro Fellowship this October (https://eaforjews.org/take-action/fellowship/). I thought it might be of interest to some folks here. Please help spread the word to any Jewish communities you are part of!
Jews seem to do two things
1. Furiously decry any form of 'othering' by non-jews as a prelude to anti-semitic pogroms
2. Make every single little thing in their lives explicitly jew-centric, as if jews are so categorically different to gentiles that they can't just do the same stuff through the same institutions as anyone else
I mean, good on you if you're trying to do ostensible good for the world, but still.
I've thought a lot about this, being half Jewish but not raised that way, and having read a lot of the alt-right stuff but not entirely bought it all or gone as far with it as they have.
It's an exaggeration: not every single Jew does that, and often the ADL types aren't the Orthodox types: alt-righters seem to think every Jew is a combination of the worst aspects of Karl Marx, Judith Butler, Gloria Allred, Ezra Klein, and Benjamin Netanyahu. (I'm sure I forgot a few.)
That said I think the 'diversity for thee but not for me' critique has some validity to it--you *do* see liberal and progressive Jewish media types doing that!--and my response has usually been 'you are correct, I do not support increased immigration or anti-white media bias'. My little contribution has been to stop watching Hollywood and Netflix and start watching anime to do my little bit to starve the woke beast, though as I think you saw earlier I am wondering what more I can do that might actually have some effect.
But I can't blame the Orthodox for wanting to do their own thing, the way the Mormons or Muslims do. We've always had freedom of religion in this country.
I probably won't join EA for Jews, not least because I'm not huge into EA. But it doesn't bother me that it exists.
Your post reminds me of this webcomic: https://webcomicname.com/post/185588404109
I do twitch a bit at #1.
As for #2, I don't. A lot of Jews don't. Not all Jews are observant-- a lot aren't, and not all Jews are fascinated by being Jewish.
Obviously this doesn't apply to all or even most jews - the point is that there is in my eyes a contradiction between desire for inclusion and ethnocentric identity
A community used to being threatened (and occasionally genocided) by its neighbors will quite naturally (a) complain and be hypervigilant about signs of being threatened and (b) form close-knit communities for mutual protection and reliance.
During Jim Crow, blacks both (a) complained about Jim Crow and (b) had tight-knit churches, black banks, formed the NAACP, etc. Both these things make perfect sense to do if you’re black under Jim Crow - it's no more contradictory than complaining to your local government about potholes on your street while simultaneously filling some yourself.
And the effects of that kind of thing linger for a long time. Speaking with a little personal perspective, the Armenian Genocide is 100 years in the rearview mirror, and Armenian communities in the US are at zero threat of recurrence, but we can *still* be close knit and insular. It's hardly shocking that other communities that went through similar things have similar responses.
In this venue, generalizations can be taken to mean all, or at least a very large majority.
In the culture generally, religions are capitalized.
Persecution may make people a bit weird. You're just going to have to live with it.
I was thinking that Jews were killed for being too smart, sometimes described as being cunning, or from another angle, being competent merchants, but not for keeping kosher, so talk about Jewish intelligence can make Jews nervous, though not here.
On the other hand, Jews weren't persecuted for keeping kosher and it's a more comfortable topic, at least in my experience. And then I remembered that when there was an effort to make Spain totally Catholic, then was a lot of pressure for everyone to eat pork. It might be a question of recency and lineage.
> I was thinking that Jews were killed for being too smart
That seems like an excuse. I am pretty sure that people who have a problem with someone being too smart also have a problem with someone else being too stupid -- whether in history, or at high school. So in the end, the problem is being *different*.
You need to notice someone to want to kill them, and it "helps" if you envy them as well. A bunch of Jews walled off in a ghetto on the wrong side of town, meh, probably not worth killing. But the bit where they became successful enough to be noticed, and envied, outside the ghetto - that had something to do with applied smartness.
I always figured it was garden-variety ethnic conflict. They want to kill you, they always find something.
The Germans were just more efficient at it.
How many personalities are there? I don't like the Bryer/Miggs stuff because they ignore so much. Seems to me personaltiies are at least:
1) Hedonists
2) Infovors
3) Status-mongers
4)Money-mongers
5) Scientists
6) Artists
7) Family-mongers
8) Moralists
9( Ethicists
10) Futurists
I am going somewhere with this. The idea is everyone is at east one of these, but often more than one.
Feel free to add categories.
EDIT: 11: Builders
I added that to include people like Elon Musk. I guess it says a lot that category was an oversight.
Big 5 / OCEAN is empirically validated; however it is not based on discrete "types" but rather discrete "dimensions", each of which manifests along a spectrum.
MBTI is a partial, dichotomized version of Big 5 (they drop neuroticism). So it's not totally nuts.
How on earth are these "personalities"?
Number of personailties = number of people + number of Multiple Personality Disorders. Any narrower grouping is doomed to information loss.
If there are builders, then there are certainly destroyers, too.
However the whole concept of personality as you are envision it seems to be somewhat one dimensional, and therefore even more limiting than existing methods of categorisation.
As with Myers-Briggs, or any of the more modern personality assessment processes, a personality is made up of many aspects or facets, some of which are more dominant than others in any given individual.
Me personally, I think I would fit into at least three of those categories, depending on the day - and some days I would fit in all three simultaneously.
Today I was thinking: coupons and loyalty programs basically use pointless makework as a form of costly signalling so that companies can get information to more effectively price-discriminate among their customers. But their existence is probably bad for economic efficiency overall because it distorts price signals and diverts labor into pointless makework. The cost of providing the product doesn't actually depend on who's buying it in the vast majority of these cases of price discrimination. Price discrimination transfers some of the surplus from consumers to producers but never increases the total surplus and it might create some deadweight loss if done imperfectly so banning price discrimination would probably not do any net harm.
Advertising wastes people's time conducting emotional manipulations that have no connection to the quality of the product. The information value of advertising is negligible except for obscure products, but most advertising is brand advertising for things we've seen before. Customers can gossip amongst themselves or use trusted third parties like consumer reports to gain much better information than advertising can provide. Most advertisers are incurring a lot of expense in an arms race that provides no value to anyone except zero-sum market share gains.
I think a high tax on advertising and coupon/loyalty programs would probably be a good thing even though I am generally way out on the right on economic issues.
"Price discrimination transfers some of the surplus from consumers to producers but never increases the total surplus"
Not true in general.
Suppose I could write a book at a cost in my time of $18,000. There are 2000 potential readers. 1000 value the book at $5, 1000 value it at $15. If I sold it to for $5 I would bet $10,000, which doesn't cover the cost of the book. If I sold it for $15 I would bet $15,000 ditto. But if I can price discriminate, sell it to the first 1000 at $5 and to the second at $15 I get $20,000, so it is worth my writing it and doing so produced $2000 of surplus.
This is outside of the usual supply and demand graph paradigm because here the seller is willing to sell any quantity above 18000/P. Is there any example where price discrimination can increase total surplus on a product with a normal upward sloping supply curve and downward sloping demand curve?
Price discrimination requires some degree of monopoly power, and a monopoly doesn't have a supply curve. You can certainly get the effect with ordinary supply and demand curves and only one producer.
There are two different reasons why monopoly is inefficient. One is pricing above MC. The other is the failure to produce at all if there is no price for which PQ>Cost(Q), even if there is a price at which PQ+Consumer Surplus is. Price discrimination can solve the second inefficiency by transferring some consumer surplus to the producer. Perfect price discrimination solves both problems — but introduces another and possibly worse one.
http://www.daviddfriedman.com/Academic/Price_Theory/PThy_Chapter_16/CHAP16.html
(Subhead: Discriminatory Monopoly: The Solution?)
"I think a high tax on advertising and coupon/loyalty programs would probably be a good thing even though I am generally way out on the right on economic issues."
Then the costs will be passed on to consumers in some form. The reason for loyalty programmes etc. is to try and get consumers in the door of your store, instead of the rival store. If there are six different supermarket chains, why will I go to store X instead of store Y?
Maybe I'll do it because, hey, coupons on products I regularly buy so that the price is slightly lower in X than Y. Maybe I really like their bread or other product. People do shop around for cheaper prices, so things like loyalty programmes make sense. If they weren't working, then businesses would not use things like that.
"The cost of providing the product doesn't actually depend on who's buying it in the vast majority of these cases of price discrimination."
Sure. That's not what coupons etc. are about. Biglands Dairy supplies milk to all six of those chain supermarkets. The cost is the same for the dairy and for the supermarkets. But if GreenShine is "50c off 2 litres of milk this week!" then it hopes to entice in shoppers instead of them just walking into whatever store is nearest to them to grab those staple supplies.
And once you have them in the door, then you work hard on getting them to spend more than they intended.
Basically, what you are asking in regard to coupons, loyalty programmes and advertising is "why don't companies just give up trying to make extra money off their consumers?" and I think that's a question that answers itself.
You’re sort of missing the whole point here which is that policy can nudge companies towards competing on price and quality (which has social utility) instead of burning the most money on advertising (which has no social utility). A leviathan can de-escalate a wasteful arms race between its subjects. Brand advertising is essentially brainfucking your customers as a substitute for delivering a better product or a lower price. On current margins nudging companies to divert resources from advertising to product quality/price would have a lot of utility (circa 1.5% of gdp for free would be my best guess)
Check out James Tiptree Jr.'s "The Girl Who Was Plugged In" for a proto-cyberpunk view of influencers in an "ad-free" world.
Yeah If you try to ban it entirely or set the tax too high people will find workarounds but a modest tax people will mostly comply with. How about just for instance making it so corporations can't deduct advertising/coupon/loyalty programs above $1M as an expense on their corporate income taxes. This would at least give them a directionally correct nudge to favor investment in actually improving their product over investment in merely brainwashing consumers.
Or take a page from human taxes. People need food more than corporations need advertising, but in my area, we still put sales tax on prepared food and restaurants. So as long as the advertising is plain text, black on white (or the reverse), they can deduct it. But anything more intrusive gets taxed like cigarettes.
another aspect of advertising is stimulating demand to get rid of excess inventory, in lieu of reducing the price. This effectively transfers some of the surplus from consumers to producers at the cost of the advertising which is sort of like a deadweight loss.
I like this idea, but it also immediately makes me think how companies would cheat to circumvent the rules.
There was a article years ago - 10 proposals for the US that make sense but will never pass or something like that. One being self valuing your house to determine property taxes but can be bought for that price by anyone at anytime. Have been searching in vain for a while - any leads?
A real world equivalent of the self-evaluated property tax is a claims race. If the claim is set at $10,000 anyone who enters a horse is agreeing to sell it at that price. You could win the race by entering a really good horse — but you won't go home with him. So everyone enters horses worth just below the claims amount, giving an even race hence one interesting to watch.
What if I have no intention of selling my property ever, at any price?
You probably need to develop your private nuclear weapons.
Further:
1. I don't even understand what problem is being solved here.
2. According to Investopedia, property tax rates are typically set by the municipality deciding how much they want to raise, then dividing that by the assessed values and scaling appropriately. So to a first approximation, what will happen is everyone will raise their own assessed value by some protective percentage, and everyone will end up with close to the same tax as before.
Regarding (1), basically the administration of property tax tends to be corrupted (or at best tends to be poorly executed) because of the fact that land values are hard to estimate. The self-valuation proposal gets out of this by forcing property to be more liquid.
Which we don't want, because a whole lot of what we do with (real) property is to build long-term improvements on it which are A: specialized and optimized to the owner's particular utility function and B: difficult or impossible to relocate.
I repeat my reaction to this (which has been mentioned before in some thread or other): this is a Clever Game Rule, not a good idea for how the world should work.
That's very silly. You're basically just forcing people to pay higher taxes to prevent themselves from being forced to sell their homes. If you want higher property taxes, just advocate for higher property taxes.
Kinda yes, but this is a way to make the market decide the property taxes for each place individually (like, each street could have a slightly different tax rate, depending on how good location it is), rather than the local government setting up the taxes probably in a way that provides an advantage for the important people.
Also, the tax rates are updated automatically, so you only need to make the unpopular law once.
Why not just base the tax rates on the market value of the properties (however imperfectly that is calculated) directly? What possible benefit is there in introducing a forced sale mechanism?
And how are they updated automatically if we're using self-valuation?
That would create great pressure to have the market value estimated even more imperfectly. If you own a lot of land, it essentially makes your bribes tax-deductible. I would not be surprised to see that land owned by huge corporations is somehow mysteriously considered almost worthless.
The forced sale mechanism is a check on this. "Are you saying that your private island is only worth $1? Nice, take my $2; it is mine now."
By "automatically" I meant that the local government does not need to initiate reevaluation. Owners do it regularly. Or they don't. Either option is okay.
As Viliam notes, the market price and the utility to the owner are not the same thing. It is very often the case that a thing, especially a piece of real property, provides real utility substantially in excess of its market value to the present owner. Transaction costs for hypothetical replacement are only part of the reason for this. Simplistically speaking, just the fact that most properties aren't presently listed for sale, suggests that their value to the present owner exceeds the market value.
If a piece of property has a market value of $225,000, a utility to Alice of $250,000, and a utility to current owner Bob of $300,000, then it would destroy $50,000 worth of utility if Alice were to force Bob to sell at nominal market price. We don't want that,
And I don't think we want to tax people on non-market value. So, no, let's not do this.
Could you elaborate on why not tax people on non-market value (at a lower rate than you would have taxed them on market value)?
What does that accomplish, exactly?
Because the difference between market value and the utility value of the current owner is a surplus available only because that particular person is there. That's a good thing - ideally we would be having that kind of surplus on everything, as it would indicate that people are properly sorted to where they gain the most value for society.
Taxing that difference lowers utility in precisely the place where we want it the most. That person gains more than most other people (hence the market value being lower) at no cost to society.
Should probably be "can be bought for that price +20%" or something like that. Otherwise, rich people could harass others by buying their correctly estimated property and selling it afterwards. For the buyer, there would be a small risk of losing money in the process, but for the seller, there would be a lot of inconvenience with moving to a different place. But if you give me extra 20% at every step, that probably makes the inconvenience worth it.
"can be bought for that price +20%" is functionally equivalent to just reducing the property tax rate by 16.66%. People whose subjective value exceeds the market value will still lowball their price a bit to save on taxes to an extent that they'd be slightly unhappy if it actually sold.
The name-your-own-price for property tax would be the price at which you are happy to sell to any buyer, even after factoring in the inconvenience. The rates would be lower accordingly.
er, maybe a bit lower than that because you might be gambling that nobody would take you up on it, in order to reduce your tax bill.
Forcing people to gamble on losing their homes is an especially vile policy. Just increase property taxes (especially for properties with market value >$X) and move on.
That's part of the problem. You entice people to play games with their own property taxes, which will sometimes mean that you get less taxes than the property is worth, and sometimes people lose their homes who are really upset about it.
You end up getting more tax money from richer people that likely offsets the losses from poorer people, but the poor may be routinely losing their homes. That doesn't seem ideal.
Yeah, that second one is going to be a killer. You're going to have a lot of old retired people on fixed incomes who have to chose between paying "full" property tax and e.g. paying for medicaaion, who will predictably and to some extent sensibly try to lowball the property taxes on the grounds that nobody is going out of their way to buy a crappy 50-year-old house in Solano.
Which is probably true, until it turns out a bunch of techbros billionaires are trying to buy up Solano for their own private utopia, and somebody's grandma and grandpa just lost their house for not even enough money to buy crappy 50-year-old replacement house somewhere else. And then you find out we live in a democracy.
"Anyone can take away your house at any time" is a bad policy even before you get to the protection racket of paying ever higher taxes just to lower the chances of it happening.
"We charge full sentimental value."
Well, I got my covid shot today. My flu shot was last week, so hopefully I'll be good for this season.
Here is a thing that I can't say to my friends, because it codes as anti-vax: I sometimes wonder if vaccines might be bad for you. Not in a "vaccines cause autism" way, but more like this: the covid vaccine will make me feel exhausted and feverish tomorrow, as my immune system kicks into overdrive and frantically converts all available resources into antibodies. I feel like that probably counts as a high-stress event? How many times can my immune system do that before it starts to get worn out?
I got the covid shot anyway, because covid is alarmingly common in my friend group, and because it's all sorts of bad for you, and I really don't want to get it. But I kind of resent that they made it this strong. I resent that nobody has researched whether a one-quarter-strength covid vaccine would work approximately as well, and be less of a strain on people's bodies.
From what I've seen, it's complicated. (Epistemic status: layperson, not an immunologist, and not in either the autism or anti-vaxxer camp. I believe beowulf888's account of vaccines is accurate.)
The vaccines most of us have grown up with - smallpox, rubella, measles, polio, hepatitis, and a few others - appear to be both safe and effective. "Safe" does not mean 100% safe, though, and likewise for "effective". Rather, they're both safer and more effective for most people than no vaccine at all. Traditional vaccines work by giving you a neutralized version of the microbe (typically dead ones) that causes the disease, and letting your immune system use it to create the defense it normally would against the live version, without you actually getting sick. AIUI, in a few cases, building that defense results in inflammation, soreness, tiredness, and other mild symptoms which one might identify as "sick", but are just normal functions of the body's immune system, and notably, far better to experience than stuff like permanent organ damage or the big D. Meanwhile, millions of these traditional vaccines get administered, there do not appear to be millions of babies dropping dead shortly after getting them, and there appear to be drastically fewer cases of measles, polio, hepatitis, etc. in the world, so it's reasonable to believe these are good things to get.
Since vaccines work by giving your immune system dead microbes to reverse engineer, they rely on you having an actually working immune system. If for some reason you don't, then we can expect you'll have a really bad time. At best, the vaccine has done you no good; at worst, something about your compromised immune system triggers even more inflammation, soreness, etc. that can set up other problems.
One way for your immune system to be compromised is for it to be lacking raw materials to build those defenses. In other words, you're not getting enough to eat, including not enough of the right things. You need water, protein, vitamins, etc. Another way is for your immune system to simply be busy with another defense. AIUI, this is why vaccines are customarily staggered - you get the most important one first, you wait for your system to process it, then you get the next one, and so on. I can imagine fast-tracking these by filling your body with more nutrients to bank your stores, but I don't know how feasible that actually is, and it seems unlikely to get a month-old baby to eat their carrots in the first place, so staggered it is.
One thing I've been hearing about mRNA vaccines is that their mechanism is different enough from traditional vaccines to cause some new problems. They don't give you dead microbes; instead, they give you blueprints for a specific protein and tell your immune system: "make that". The trouble comes because that dead microbe typically comes with all of that microbe's machinery that kept it out of certain cells of yours while it was alive. Note that successful parasitic microbes don't kill you right away; they want you walking around, sneezing on other people, etc. for a while first. So if they go straight for something critical, like your brain or heart, that's bad for them as well as you. Their corpses presumably still have all that "safety equipment" package along.
mRNA vaccines have none of that. They go in, tell some of your cells "make this bad protein", then your immune system sees that bad protein and makes a defense. This is fine if it's a pocket of cells in your deltoid muscle. Your immune system will attack those, you'll feel sore for a while, your muscle cells regrow the way they're designed to, and then you're back to normal plus a defense against that protein. But if something goes a little wrong and those blueprints make it to other cells, they'll get attacked as well. And if they're critical cells that don't grow back the way muscle cells do, that's bad. Maybe not fatal - even critical systems have contingencies for cell death - but it's never normal. It's like you're a D&D character and your hit points were permanently lowered.
The current concern, then... is heart cells. If that mRNA vaccine gets all the way to your heart, it doesn't know to stay away. The cells don't know to reject it. It's mRNA just like any other mRNA throughout the body. Orders are orders. They make the spike protein, the immune system attacks those cells, and now you're down a few. Usually it's not a big deal, but your heart structure is that much weaker, with that much more scar tissue, and if it's coupled with stress, say, from intense athletics, that could be a problem.
That's the story as I understand it. If you ever hear the term "trad-vaxxers", it's likely coming from that attempt to distinguish people who are fearful that vaccines are a hoax or cause autism, from people who are totally fine with the traditional vaccines but unsure of this new mRNA technique, especially given its novelty, and the unusually large amount of money being made from it, and a few other occurrences.
Two points...
1. The mRNA from a vaccine—if it somehow crossed into the interior of the cell—doesn't have the full viral genome to hijack the cell's protein-manufacturing machinery. This is
why live/attenuated virus vaccines can cause infections—and the reason the mRNA vaccines should be safer than attenuated virus vaccines. The mRNA is delivered in lipid nanoparticles, but I don't know of any mechanism (i.e. proteases and cell receptors) that would respond to the lipid envelop and absorb it. If someone knows of one, I'd be interested in knowing the details.
It's my understanding that the mRNA vaccines only have pieces of the spike and they don't have the complete viral receptor binding domain (please correct me if I'm wrong about this!). I think it would require a functioning RBD (that can change from the closed to open position in response to a protease (such as TMPRSS2 or Cathepsin) to enter the cell. But even if I'm wrong about this, as I said, the mRNA vaccine only contains pieces of the virus and not the whole virus. So it could not reproduce inside a cell.
2. According to the CDC, "the rate of myocarditis/pericarditis is around 12.6 cases per million doses of second-dose mRNA vaccine among individuals of 12-39 years of age. Patients usually presented two to three days after the second dose of mRNA vaccination with chest pain, some preceded with fever and myalgia one day after vaccination."
It's hard to compare the risk of myocarditis to the risk of severe complications from COVID for the 12-39 age group because the CDC breaks out the risk of dying from COVID into different age cohorts from the above study. In 2020, before vaccines were rolled out the risks of dying from COVID were the following...
age cohort mortality/100K
5–14 0.2/100,000
15–24 1.4/100,000
25–34 5.7/100,000
So it looks like the risk of myocarditis in the youngest age cohorts *might* be higher than the risk of dying from COVID. This is why some MDs preferred not to vaccinate children. But I don't have the myocarditis stats broken out into the same age cohorts, so an apples-to-apples comparison is difficult.
Overall, the mRNA technology has proven to be pretty safe compared to some other types of antigen delivery systems.
Your immune system is a multi-layered network of defenses. It continually adapts to new pathogenic threats and it doesn't "wear out". Of course, some pathogens have learned to bypass or subvert our immune defenses (HIV comes immediately to mind)—and sometimes our immune response cannot overreact to pathogens (cytokine storms)—but in healthy individuals, immune systems are quite resilient!
The good thing about vaccines is that they can expose your immune system to new viral proteins without the downside of having a virus attack your cells. From the vaccine, your immune system will learn the signatures of the viral epitopes (aka antigens, which are the exposed areas of folded proteins). Your body will develop neutralizing antibodies (NAbs) to combat these antigens by being able to bind to them (and thus neutralize their ability to infect cells), so when a SARS2 virion touches down on your mucosal membranes you'll have NAbs that can neutralize it. Also, after the initial post-vaccination rise in NAb titers, your T Cells start keying themselves to a different selection of epitopes. Everyone's T Cells key to a slightly different selection of epitopes from the virus, so that creates a diverse range of secondary immunity across human populations. When your NAb titers drop off after six-plus months post-vaccination or post-infection, the SARS2 virus may be able to get by your NAbs and start infecting your cells. But T cells with memory of the SARS2 epitopes continue to circulate in your blood and lymphatic system, and they go around knocking on the doors of your cells and demanding (without a warrant) that the cells show what sort of proteins they're producing. If the cells produce proteins with a recognized SARS2 epitope signature, the killer T Cells destroy the infected cells. Finally, B cells can replenish your NAb titers once an infection is detected. Plus B Cells are also diversifying the range of antigens they can bind to via a process called somatic hypermutation. So even though the SARS2 virus is rearranging its spike protein (through mutation and natural selection) to get past our NAbs, as time passes post-exposure, B Cell somatic hypermutation increases the range of epitopes NAbs can bind to. This is just part of how our immune systems work, but a vaccine booster won't cause your immune system to "wear out". Rather it tunes your immune system to deal with new threats.
There have been reports of T Cell "collapse" during COVID-19 infections—which would be one of the reasons COVID-19 mostly kills the old and the frail. In some patients, there can be long-term post-infection lowering of CD 8+ T Cells which may be implicated in PASC (aka Long COVID). FYI, CD 8+ T Cells are also known as "killer T Cells" and they detect and destroy cells that are infected with a virus, so the question remains whether Long COVID is the result of a low-level infection that our humoral immunity can't clear. Most peoples' T Cell counts recover several weeks post-infection though. People who've had a serious illness may take longer.
I've heard-- and I don't put it more strongly than that-- that mRNA is aimed at the spike proteins (which mutate rapidly, perhaps under pressure from vaccines), and not the surface membrane, so vaccines from more of the virus might be more effective.
Yes, mRNA vaccines deliver antigens derived from the spike proteins.
Yes, it was hypothesized that vaccines that used antigens from other parts of the virus would provide better protection against the evolution of SARS2 immune evasion. I didn't understand this argument because, if the virus is undergoing natural selection to evade the vaccines with S protein antigens, wouldn't it do the same for vaccines with a wider variety of antigens? But maybe there was more to this argument that I missed.
And, yes, mutations on the spike proteins that have higher immune escape values seem to be positively selected for. The fly in the ointment of this evolutionary argument is that variants that have high in vitro immune escape values don't necessarily correlate with case surges. While all the major SARS2 variants that caused waves had higher immune escape values than their predecessors—e.g. Alpha (worldwide wave), Delta (worldwide wave), Beta (African wave), Gamma (South American wave), and Omicron (worldwide wave)—but other variants with higher IE numbers didn't take off (e.g. Lambda, Mu, "Kraken", "Hyperion", and a host of other Scariants of Concern).
What's really interesting to me, is that some variants can come to dominate the viral landscape of a region without causing case surges. You'd think that if a variant were successful enough to push its competitors aside, it would also cause an increase in cases. For instance, in the US, we were in the middle of a B.1x surge in the winter of 2020, and Alpha came along at the tail-end of that surge. It didn't create a secondary spike in cases, but it quietly took over the US viral landscape — but it didn't create any new case waves (except in the state of Michigan for some bizarre reason). The same happened last winter with XBB.1.5. We were having a BQ.1x surge in Nov of 2022, and then the percentage of XBB.1.5 vs BQ.1x started to rise, but cases began to drop. So it seems to me there are other variables other than immune evasion at play here.
Hypothetically, surface molecules could be more crucial for the virus than spike proteins, and have fewer viable variants.
I've been looking at the question of why there are surges of variant COVIDS at all, rather than a variety of variants living with each other fairly stably.
Current hypothesis: the victory condition for COVID is beating out the competitors at its own level-- other COVID variants. It doesn't care about making people sick, that's just a side effect of the COVID wars. Sorry for personifying, but apparently not sorry enough to find another way of saying it.
Maybe the win for humans is to find a variant that doesn't make people sick but does beat out other variants.
Is it sometimes the case that creating a lot of defenses against X reduces the concentration of some defenses against Y?
Google Scholar shows that co-infections by two (or more) pathogens can increase the risk of serious medical complications and mortality. It's unclear from the literature I looked at if a successful immune response to one pathogen interfered with the immune response to the other. However, the fact that co-infections increase the risk of mortality suggests that your scenario might be plausible.
So could vaccines against X plausibly make your defenses against Y weaker?
And this just came across my Twitter feed...
Denmark SSI: No Increase In Serious Non-COVID Infectious Disease Hospitalization Rates Following COVID Infection
https://flutrackers.com/forum/forum/internet-communication/avian-flu-diary/979669-denmark-ssi-no-increase-in-serious-non-covid-infectious-disease-hospitalization-rates-following-covid-infection#post979669
Hmmm. I can't think of any reason they would, and AFAIK there's no evidence that they do. Remember antibodies are keyed to specific protein strings that are recognized as alien from our own proteins. If two viral "species" X and Y have a similar protein, and we have developed antibodies to that protein, our immune system should bind to both with equal vigor. ;-)
Having said that, vaccines in very rare cases can induce one's immune system to attack one's own tissues. But viruses can do that, too. In regards to the COVID virus, it can provoke an autoimmune response against one's tissues. Likewise, so can the vaccines — but a quick google indicates it's very rare among the vaccinated, and the vaccines provide significant protection from viral-induced autoimmune responses. The mechanism of autoimmune responses is getting outside my sphere of knowledge—so, your mileage may vary. But that's what I can find in Google Scholar.
I don't have time to dig it up right now, but I recall reading a study about half-dosing vaccines because supplies were limited and if you can use half the dose that's twice as many people immunized for the same manufacturing effort. So someone might have already looked into that?
That said, the COVID vaccine didn't hit me very hard at all. Everyone hyped up how nasty the side effects are and then when I got it I had a sore arm for the rest of the day.
(I also resent the flu shot, because it's only like 50% effective, and because nobody I know has ever gotten the flu, but I still have to get the shots anyway. But at least it doesn't make me noticeably feverish.)
I used to think the same way, but twenty years ago I almost died from the flu. Now I'm a good boy and get my shot every year.
As for the 50% percent effective — that is the reduced risk of getting infected compared to unvaccinated individuals. By reducing the relative risk of infection in individuals, it also lowers the reproductive rate of influenza virus across the overall population. So it's not just about you. But even if you're in the 50% who catch the flu despite being vaccinated, it can significantly reduce your risk of serious illness.
This paper argues that all the different cognitive biases identified by psychologists can be reduced to a small number of fundamental beliefs coupled with confirmation bias. Of course, as rationalists, we're all aware of our cognitive biases and thus we are able to set our biases aside when looking at the evidence. ;-)
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/17456916221148147
This certainly matches my experience of how my enemies behave.
Not my field, but as a Chess player where every single move combination gets its own opening name, I'm surprised to hear this wasn't the default assumption.
Interesting, thanks! I'm curious what someone with more experience in this area would have to say. My rough summary is that they propose that a lot of named "biases" result from the application of a few "beliefs", and that (unlike a pure Bayesian model), these beliefs get applied at multiple stages of the information-processing chain, leading to an inordinate effect on outcomes. A quick search of Less Wrong didn't turn up a mention of this, so it might be worthwhile for someone to dig into.
A quibble I have is that they talk a lot about beliefs and biases as if they were binary, although I think in places they acknowledge that they aren't. Which I think produces a bias in their framing. :-/
Also, the beliefs are:
My experience is a reasonable reference.
I make correct assessments of the world.
I am good.
My group is a reasonable reference.
My group (members) is (are) good.
People’s attributes (not context) shape outcomes.
In all but the last case, I'd ask, what's the alternative? If you don't think you or your group is good, that tends to lead to actions that change the world to make these true again. If you don't think you make correct assessments of the world, as a general matter, that tends to lead to an infinite loop of second-guessing. Using yourself and your group as a reference is where we all start (unless we have memories of past lives or something), although I think it's unquestionably true that we make better assessments as we gain more experience with other people and other groups. (E.g., the Japanese JET program, which has been described to me by participants as a way to show Japanese kids that foreigners are just people, if weird people.) And the last, I'd describe as part of a general tendency to treat systems as people, and treat events as being a result of intentional action, which I'd argue is extremely adaptive when dealing with deception and manipulation by entities of equivalent intelligence.
We've got Google now, so it doesn't take that much effort to do a perfunctory check.
Today's meme on another social media site was: the reason women don't have pockets in their clothing is so they could prove they weren't witches carrying spell-casting materials. That seemed questionable to me, but everyone who responded this post said things like "I didn't know that," or "That's good to know." I did a quick search of Google, and several sites suggested that pockets were phased out in women's garments when corsets and shaping garments became fashionable—and pockets ruined the the shapely feminine lines of the clothing. My predisposition is to believe that explanation rather than the witchery explanation because the witchery explanation doesn't seem to be documented anywhere. But I still provisionally doubt the shapely-line explanation without doing further research into the fashion history of women's pockets. Anyway, people spout bullshit all the time, and since false information seems to push out true information (Gresham's Law as applied to information), I've come to believe that most people are wrong by default. And because, like everyone else, I can fall for an attractive argument—I've come to suspect my own beliefs unless I can independently verify them. Heck, I doubt my own existence. We all might be AIs in a virtual reality. Well, at least I might be. You might be an illusion provided by the VR. ;-)
"Today's meme on another social media site was: the reason women don't have pockets in their clothing is so they could prove they weren't witches carrying spell-casting materials."
What? I was going to have a go at "why no pockets?" but I'm so stunned by the pristine stupidity of that 'explanation' that I can't even begin to delve into fashion trends.
"Look, good sirs, no pockets! Therefore I am not a witch! Ignore the large sack full of corpse parts, poisonous plants, and the book with the title OLD HAG'S GUIDE TO DEALS WITH THE DEVIL, CURSES, AND SPELLS in large letters on the front!"
What do you think the response would have been, had you posted something like this in response to that meme?
I didn't dare. I would have to don flame-retardant gear before I'd do that!
I'm writing a post on The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, just would like to hear what some of you, any of you, think about the novel. An informal survey but your quick thoughts would be appreciated.
By coincidence, I just picked it off my shelf last weekend and read the first two chapters. I had not read it since elementary school.
It's a much more charming and interesting read when you're older. Almost all of the humor was lost on me when I was younger.
The description of Huck’s father as a drunk hits very differently now. It’s also strange to read about kids plotting to murder each other’s families—not something I’d expect to see in modern children’s literature.
It seems to me that a lot of required reading is material that makes more sense to people who are past high school. This isn't just about verbal skills (though I've heard that verbal skills improve up to age 50), it's about life experience.
Maybe there should be lists of such material.
How did this happen? Some of it may be a hope that introducing teenagers to fiction for older people would cause them to read it again later. Unfortunately, the actual effect is to cause many people to never read "classic" literature again.
What would be good required reading (other than the thing which is most popular at the moment) to encourage reading good fiction for high school students?
I read both Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn as a kid, and though I was fascinated to read about the perspective of a slavery from someone who lived at the time, but wss also fairly confused, ao I enjoyed Tom Sawyer much more.
National Review has a weekly podcast called The Great Books. Last week was on The Adventures of Tom Sawyer. The expert interviewed said TS was a children’s book but HF was for adults. Interesting view considering most Americans read HF in school in their early teens?
https://podcasts.apple.com/ie/podcast/the-great-books/id1281089527?i=1000627586763
As a non-American, I remember reading it in a double volume with The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, and enjoying Tom Sawyer a lot more than Huckleberry Finn. Tom Sawyer is a series of entertaining vignettes, while Huckleberry Finn is a drawn-out story in which a bunch of random crap that I don't remember happens. I guess I also found the character of Tom to be more relatable than Huck.
Ahem.
“Persons attempting to find a motive in this narrative will be prosecuted; persons attempting to find a moral in it will be banished; persons attempting to find a plot in it will be shot.”
It bored me as a kid. The satire mostly went over my head. I reread it as an adult and I thought it was both entertaining and a brilliant commentary on human nature. Not sure why it's considered to be a book for children, though—and I can see why both Righties and Lefties are uncomfortable with it—and why school boards frequently try to ban it in schools.
I read it in middle school. I remember my impression of it being that it had a lot of good moments and the early part of the main plot (Huck defying his abusive father and helping Jim escape) was a solid story, but once our heroes are well along on the river journey the story descends into a rambling mess.
How do you all handle diversity statements? For context, I'm a STEM undergraduate applying to graduate programs, and this part of the process really has me stumped. I struggle somewhat with writing to begin with, so statements of interest are hard enough, but these truly challenge me, not least because I worry that these are designed as filters to keep out people with more milquetoast liberal views on diversity like myself. Not to mention, I have a pretty privileged background, all things considered. Have others been able to even find programs that don't require these? Have commenters here found success with any particular strategy in writing diversity statements?
All sympathy for struggling with writing application essays of any flavor, but I don't think there's anything particularly mysterious about writing an essay about how you hope to encourage diversity in your community relative to writing essays about how you hope to teach, do research, or advance the public good. A woefully incomplete list of example tips—I'm no writing coach:
* Explain your goals. Hopefully they align with the goals of the institution you are applying to; if not, what are you doing?
* Describe any relevant experience you've had. If you haven't had much relevant experience, describe why you have an interest in developing relevant experience, or what you would try given certain opportunities. For example, if writing a teaching statement despite never having taught a class, you might explain how a case of doing informal one-on-one mentoring inspired you to pursue teaching, or particular observations about effective teachers you've had. For DEIB, an equivalent would be a time when you made an effort to make a new person welcome in a club, or when you yourself were given support in a space where you felt like you were out of place—even if neither of these actions were across the identity axes that DEIB initiatives usually focus on.
* If your experiences support it, describe the impact of the relevant work you've done—demonstrate you're competent.
* Don't be negative. Imagine a research statement including something like, "I take care not to do too much research. We all know some of those researchers go way too far in terms of how much research they do." Even if that's something you actually think (maybe you think the average researcher has a work-life imbalance!), it sends the wrong message in a research statement, because neurotypical humans can't stop themselves from inferring beyond the written word when it comes to negativity. Likewise, don't funnel your "milquetoast" views into tacking caveats and conditions on your support for the concept of diversity. Don't lie—don't write anything you don't support—but keep your statements exclusively positive.
I would expect most STEM-oriented higher-learning institutions not to ask for such statements as part of some hyperchess stratagem to weed out political dissidents and wrongthink, despite what the Pepe chorus will perpetually claim. They're made of people like you who are trying to make the world a better place, and they want to know what the candidates they're considering think of this aspect of their mission and how those candidates are able to help out with it. ("That's exactly what weeding out wrongthink looks like!" croak a thousand resentful frogs. But it's also what any recruitment funnel looks like along any other axis.)
>I would expect most STEM-oriented higher-learning institutions not to ask for such statements as part of some hyperchess stratagem to weed out political dissidents and wrongthink, despite what the Pepe chorus will perpetually claim.
They mostly exist to justify non-meritocratic college admissions i.e. affirmative action by any other name, as well as to make themselves look good to any nosy administrators, activists and the government.
But the idea they exist "they want to know what the candidates they're considering think of this aspect of their mission and how those candidates are able to help out with it" is absolutely absurd. People write these things by saying whatever they think the admissions committees want to hear.
The idea that they provide any genuine insight into people's beliefs and values is ridiculous (unless people are foolish enough to openly disagree with 'diversity' policies).
>They're made of people like you who are trying to make the world a better place,
Whereas people who disagree with you about DEI are some combination of actively malicious and stupid, right?
>croak a thousand resentful frogs.
Do you call racial minorities 'resentful' when they cry that colleges can't as easily discriminate against more intellectually abled white and asian students to admit less capable brown students ?
>But it's also what any recruitment funnel looks like along any other axis.
Which recruitment processes involve a writing assignment in which you must state your ideological committments?
And please don't point to cover letters or something - saying how you'll directly benefit the company is in no way analogous, because directly helping the company *is literally what you're being employed to do*. People are not being admitted to a technical graduate program to "advance diversity" or something - they're there to learn and conduct technical research, and the majority of this DEI stuff is imposed on these departments - its certainly not the primary motivation for them being there.
[Previous comment retracted because all Substack showed me initially was a previous, much shorter iteration of your comment.]
> People write these things by saying whatever they think the admissions committees want to hear.
Pretty cynical, but even if true, OP is still best served by writing *as if* the admissions committee is there to do good for their community, because that's what the admissions committee likely believes about itself.
> Whereas people who disagree with you about DEI are some combination of actively malicious and stupid, right?
>>croak a thousand resentful frogs.
No, of course not. Most people, whether or not we see eye-to-eye, are trying to make the world a better place—or the part of it they care about, at the very least.
Opening by accusing me of thinking that the people who disagree with me are malicious and stupid is a pretty good demonstration of why I use the adjective "resentful" to describe the fraction of humanity that rally behind the same emblem you do. Feel free to act with kindness instead of resentment and you might change what people think of you.
> Do you call racial minorities 'resentful' when they cry that colleges can't as easily discriminate against more intellectually abled white and asian students to admit less capable brown students ?
Only if they act resentfully when doing so. It is possible to have conversations of policy that creates winners and losers (which is to say, policy) that don't devolve into spite-your-enemy contests, but one prerequisite is not being the first to spite your enemy.
> Which recruitment processes involve a writing assignment in which you must state your ideological committments?
Frame the situation in a hostile way, and you'll see hostile action. If you are applying for a teaching position, you might be asked to write about what teaching means to you. You are presumably expected to express that you think teaching is important and valuable. The only difference between that and a scary "ideological committment" is whether you are host to an opposing ideology.
No experience, but I'd start with googling an example (sorry if this is too obvious).
I don't have personal experience, but would recommend looking at public rubrics that are used to grade the statements, either from the place you're applying or (if not available) other similar institutions. For example, here's UC Berkeley's. If you're using ChatGPT to write the statement, consider feeding in some of this phrasing into the prompt.
https://ofew.berkeley.edu/recruitment/contributions-diversity/rubric-assessing-candidate-contributions-diversity-equity
Probably you shouldn't explicitly riff on Vaclav Havel: "I, the greengrocer XY, live here and I know what I must do. I behave in the manner expected of me. I can be depended upon and am beyond reproach. I am obedient and therefore I have the right to be left in peace."
But I think that's pretty much the message you're supposed to convey in whatever you write.
https://hac.bard.edu/amor-mundi/the-power-of-the-powerless-vaclav-havel-2011-12-23
An example of a less explicit riff:
"And that, Kanye, is how you buy yourself some time."
That was a good one. The audience reaction was fascinating. I wish there were some way to see what was causing the audience members to create those uncomfortable silences.
Diversity statements are not (yet) universal, not even for faculty applications let alone grad school, so you should definitely be able to find programs that don't require them. Distressingly many do of course.
Whoa! They make you write diversity statements/essays now? Even though I'm a Leftie who is almost Marxist in my views, I find this tremendously unsettling. I can see why they'd want you to acknowledge an organization's diversity policies—but to have to write an essay on what diversity means to you seems almost perversely Orwellian. Maybe I'm turning Republican in my old age. Gak! <"Must not watch Fox News!" I gasp as I reach for the remote...>
OTOH, I guess this isn't functionally any different from the loyalty oaths that my grandparents had to sign in the 1950s to get hired for jobs.
>OTOH, I guess this isn't functionally any different from the loyalty oaths that my grandparents had to sign in the 1950s to get hired for jobs.
Pledging loyalty to your country seems a hell of a lot different to pledging support for an ideology that is actively hostile towards you for your demographic characteristics.
I don't like loyalty pledges either, but an oath of loyalty to America isn't the same as writing an essay explaining how much you love America and how it can do no wrong. You can be loyal to a nation without agreeing with anything it does. The DEI equivalent of the oath of loyalty is agreeing to obey Title IX, the anti-harassment code, the speech police, and the like--far less Orwellian than having to write a whole essay on how DEI-loving you are.
https://www.econlib.org/loyalty-oaths-compared-an-orwellian-exercise/
There may be a difference between having to sign (or recite) an oath and having to write it yourself.
As I recall, this was one of the things done in North Vietnamese prison camps, as part of their attempt to break down American POWs.
Except that you didn't need to write them to be admitted to the prison camps! (At this point, I'll need to restrain myself from making snarky comparisons between prison camps and graduate programs...)
> Not to mention, I have a pretty privileged background
As probably do most of the people who apply to the same position. This is not a filter against privileged people; it is a filter against aspies.
I would try googling and/or ChatGPT. Better get it checked by someone neurotypical afterwards. If you happen to know people who already passed this test, they might help you.
Get ChatGPT to generate it for you!
That's what I would do now. And give it a quick read before submitting and maybe move a few words around, just because more and more people are probably going to be doing it this way now. You'd not want to have your submission randomly be _too_ much identical to those of other statements being reviewed by the same admissions officer.
https://www.radioiowa.com/2023/09/18/desantis-says-trumps-abortion-remarks-show-the-danger-in-reelecting-him/
I am no fan of Donald Trump. I am certainly no fan of Ron DeSantis. When I read this, I had the feeling I needed to choose between an opportunist or an ideologue. When Trump casually says that he can cut a deal about one of the most profound schisms between right and left. It’s very tempting to believe him. I think overall I prefer opportunism to ideology.
I mean, I know they are all playing games with each other but still…
Which of them do you think is an ideologue? I would have said they are both opportunists.
In the context of the article I linked to it was DeSanctimonious by a nose.
Trump's promises have the obvious problem of "Why did you do this when you were already president"?
Yeah. True, but he can always find someone else to blame. Most politicians do that, but he’s particularly good at it.
He can't blame the Democrats, because they'll still be there, and it would make him look weak. But he could blame other Republicans, for betraying him by undermining his agenda.
"I'll find a solution that makes everyone happy, and Mexico's gonna pay for it!"
If they aren't happy with "every state gets to pass whatever law their population thinks is appropriate", nothing has the remotest of chances.
I think he might be the direct descendant of PT Barnum.
I know, right? I **want** to believe that someone can come up with a compromise solution. And from what I understand, that's what would make me the mark in a con...
A compromise solution that would make the majority of people stop caring about abortion politically:
No "approval" necessary for the first two months. A doctor's approval required for the third month.
For the second trimester, a doctor's approval that it is either medically necessary or that the pregnancy isn't viable.
For the third trimester, the approval of a medical board that it is either medically necessary or that the pregnancy isn't viable.
Timelines can be fiddled with as necessary, but I think these timelines are broadly appropriate to people's expectations.
Additionally, provide a broad rape-or-incest exception, using a legal justification standard that requires only a preponderance of evidence available to the doctor and/or medical board. Noting that the legal process requires time, and abortion is a time-sensitive matter - you don't want a fetus that will be aborted to develop any farther than necessary! - the doctors making this decision need to be free to make the best decision they can with the evidence before them, as quickly as possible.
I've never been pregnant, but based on what I've heard, two months is too little. Some women with irregular cycle might not even notice that something is happening. So from their perspective it would be like: "if you find out, it's already too late".
The part about "a determined woman will find a doctor" would basically make it all about privilege. A rich woman with a liberal family, living in a big town, can find the doctor. A poor woman (doesn't have her own car) with a conservative family (will not allow her to go doctor shopping, or generally go anywhere alone after they notice that she is pregnant and considering abortion), living in a village (not many doctors nearby to choose from, and the nearest available doctor may refuse for religious reasons) cannot find the doctor.
So what changes, with regard to the second paragraph?
I am not really sure how this thing with "doctor's approval" would work, actually. You are basically saying that there would need to be some kind of diagnosis (even if fake one), did I get that right? So if one doctor says "no, you don't have X", and the second doctor says "no, you don't have X", can you still visit a third doctor, and keep getting new expert opinions until you get the one you want?
Or would there be some centralized system that would prevent you from doctor shopping? Something that would make a record "you already asked 4 doctors about X", so the fifth one would notice the pattern and... alert the authorities (insurance, or cops)?
Or suppose that the system keeps the record about how you visited ten different doctors, asking each of them to diagnose X, until the last one said yes. Could that record be used against you, legally, like if someone accuses you of cheating? Would there be something like prosecutors who try to figure out which women try getting a fake diagnosis?
...the exact answer would depend on details like this.
Those kind of constraints would apply for second and third trimester abortions, which specify medical need. But I wouldn't particularly be interested in punishing people for doctor-shopping, for a variety of reasons (which I go into in replies to other people - broadly, if somebody is sufficiently determined to get an abortion, at some point we just have to concede that it is going to happen, and, given that it is going to happen, we'd prefer it be done safely in a medical setting.)
The third month is just - a doctor said yes. In practice, if you have a doctor performing an abortion, you probably have a doctor who said yes, which is what I was going for. If you're using mifepristone, you have a prescription; somebody said yes. The intent there, which wasn't particularly clear the way I wrote it, is to provide a legal shield against doctors being forced to perform an abortion at that point in time, while also assuring pro-life people that the medical system would be involved in that point in time.
I think that would probably satisfy a lot of people, if you asked them individually. But I don't think it would satisfy the moral poles of the debate, the hardcore pro-lifers and pro-choicers. I think they'd keep arguing, and their genuine outrage would be too useful as a political weapon.
Most of Europe has a 12-14 week limit for abortion on request, and that seems to work for them. But I keep finding left-wing Americans who want later limits, and assume that Europe has them, and are shocked and sometimes express disbelief when they find out that European limits are most often more strict than some Republican proposals.
And of course, if you think abortion is murder, that's that, right?
I suppose I simply think that the American political process is too dysfunctional to adopt a good compromise, because both sides are beholden to their extremes, and moderation is disdained.
It likely wouldn't satisfy the most hardcore pro-lifers, but I think the pro-choicers would be happy enough to leave well enough alone.
As I wrote it, if a woman is determined to get an abortion, she can get one; just find somebody who will agree that, from a psychiatric perspective, the abortion is medically necessary. And given that on some point in the sliding scale of "determined to get an abortion", the abortion is going to happen with or without medical care, and I think the not-as-hardcore pro-lifers would rather the abortion that is going to happen regardless be safe.
The compromise lasts approximately until medical technology allows a fetus at any stage of development to be safely removed from the womb and implanted into an artificial womb.
It will be fascinating to observe the general cultural perspective on "financial abortion" at that point.
"As I wrote it, if a woman is determined to get an abortion, she can get one; just find somebody who will agree that, from a psychiatric perspective, the abortion is medically necessary. "
I would have agreed with your compromise had you not said that. If a doctor's approval amounts to a rubber stamp, your proposal is no different from allowing abortion on demand, which is in no way a compromise. If your proposal is going to be a compromise, psychiatric justifications for abortion cannot be considered legitimate.
As I wrote in my response to Deiseach:
Well, you either provide an "escape hatch" for women who are going to do it with or without proper medical care, and so keep some women alive who would otherwise die - or you have some women die from self-performed abortions, it becomes the thing everyone in the country focuses on, and we get to re-litigate everything all over again.
--
Also, and this is significant, when you're re-litigating abortion rights, the pro-choice side has a name and a face and a very very sad story to attach to the bill they're proposing.
Needless to say, you can get a better bargain out of the compromise if you just put an escape hatch in there the first time.
Not exactly-- not all woman have the needed resources (money, time off from work) for that strategy., and a lot of doctors aren't taking new patients or require a long wait.
Even absent that, even a low barrier is a barrier. The extra steps mean someone with ADHD, for example, is less likely to be able to navigate the hurdles.
It's not perfect, by any means, and leaves some gaps for charitable organizations to fill, but it is, I think, workable as a compromise.
"As I wrote it, if a woman is determined to get an abortion, she can get one; just find somebody who will agree that, from a psychiatric perspective, the abortion is medically necessary."
Which is pretty much what happened, and so your proposed limits are meaningless. "a doctor's approval that it is either medically necessary or that the pregnancy isn't viable" means nothing if it's just rubber-stamping "okay you want an abortion but you're healthy and can afford to have a kid, well no bother I'll just say it would adversely affect your mental health (nudge nudge wink wink)".
And then we're back right where we started, where people go "Everyone knows that the medical exemptions are bullshit, so just let women get abortions/ban abortion at those stages".
Well, you either provide an "escape hatch" for women who are going to do it with or without proper medical care, and so keep some women alive who would otherwise die - or you have some women die from self-performed abortions, it becomes the thing everyone in the country focuses on, and we get to re-litigate everything all over again.
I hope that you're right about the pro-choicers, but I fear that you're not. My impression is that the responsible adults buried inside the Democratic party are unwilling to shut down sufficiently vocal activists, and will bend to pressure as long as that pressure is applied.
I think the problem is the skew. As a very pro choice person (but for different reasons) if it was abortion on demand up through the end of the second trimester, you could make that sell to pro choicers, with only allowing medical necessity in not a bullshit way in the third.
I don't think you'll do better than that, and I personally would keeping fighting up until that minimum, because abortion is good for society and not just bodily autonomy.
My impression is that's something like what most people want, and have wanted for decades. Mysteriously, this has *no* public political representation.
Something like that was exactly what the 7-2 SCOTUS majority in "Roe v Wade" was expecting and what their ruling explicitly tried to enable. Well except for the 3rd-month doctor's approval requirement I guess, as "Roe" divided things up entirely by trimesters. But in broad strokes this scenario is what that ruling aimed for as a compromise between the competing interests at play in the legal/social issue.
"appellant and some amici argue that the woman's right is absolute and that she is entitled to terminate her. pregnancy at whatever time, in whatever way, and for whatever reason she alone chooses. With this we do not agree.... We, therefore, conclude that the right of personal privacy includes the abortion decision, but that this right is not unqualified and must be considered against important state interests in regulation.... we [also] do not agree that, by adopting one theory of life, Texas may override the rights of the pregnant woman that are at stake."
[The Court's bottom line in "Roe":] "(a) For the stage prior to approximately the end of the first trimester, the abortion decision and its effectuation must be left to the medical judgment of the pregnant woman's attending physician.
(b) For the stage subsequent to approximately the end of the first trimester, the State, in promoting its interest in the health of the mother, may, if it chooses, regulate the abortion procedure in ways that are reasonably related to maternal health.
(c) For the stage subsequent to viability, the State in promoting its interest in the potentiality of human life may, if it chooses, regulate, and even proscribe, abortion except where it is necessary, in appropriate medical judgment, for the preservation of the life or health of the mother."
https://tile.loc.gov/storage-services/service/ll/usrep/usrep410/usrep410113/usrep410113.pdf
People highly interested in the topic later came to view "Roe" as having established some sort of unconditional constitutional right to abortion, contrary to the plain text of the ruling. The anti-abortion side went first with that framing, the other side then joined in from the other direction, and here we are.
Well, if you have a doctor performing an abortion, hopefully you already have a doctor's approval. My purpose there has more to do with providing legal protections for doctors who are less-than-willing to perform that procedure at that point in time, as I think that compelling unwilling doctors to perform such abortions in the third month, as I expect will eventually occur, could re-open the whole issue for another round. However, providing explicit protections for the doctor in the third month provides a clear legal dictate about it, and while I expect religious freedoms arguments around the first two months, I expect the public to be more interested in the "religious freedom" of the doctors in question in that case.
(So I guess "a doctor" there should be "the performing doctor", strictly speaking.)
" doctors who are less-than-willing to perform that procedure at that point in time"
So I guess you missed out on all the "if you're not willing to perform routine legal healthcare, don't become a doctor" rhetoric? That came fast in my country as soon as abortion was even partly legalised; since we still have doctors who don't want to perform abortions, the American talking points got picked up: "if you don't want to provide the healthcare that is now a legal right, get out of the medical profession".
I remember reading about an author's fictional characters being expressions of 'personified mental constructs'[my words, probably]. Not sure how to do a search for this - it's like misspelling a word so badly spell check shrugs.
Does anyone have any solid starting point I can work off of? You would have my gratitude and a gift of 1000 points!
An anthropomorphic personification?
mmmm, not so much.
"Anthropomorphism is the attribution of human traits, emotions, or intentions to non-human entities." -Wikipedia
By my def you generate characters from ~memory fragments where anthropomorphism is taking standard human personality traits and applying to, say, a cat.
[My terms are descriptive and possibly very different from what professionals would use.]
I've seen the word Tulpa used in this context, it covers the creation of quasi-independent imaginary entities which sounds like what you're getting towards.
THAT is very interesting. It amazes me how useful early writings/thought can be if we substitute psychological explanations for the sensational. I personally do so without entirely discounting the original interpretation and find both perspectives beneficial.
1000 points to both you and 'B Civil' for your help! : )
The concept is so real to me. I did a quick Google search using my own terms, hoping to find something along the lines of what you are looking for, but I could not. However, many writers have talked about their relationship to their characters over the years; many. A voice and form that arises unbidden in oneself. Perhaps conjured by someone you met in a bar or at a wedding or at a funeral. But it all happens in your own head. To me, it is almost a truism that a character is a mental construct. What else could it possibly be?
"it is almost a truism that a character is a mental construct"
Absolutely, but what struck me reading the passage I had lost was how those characters were constructed(black box in the unconscious) and often from components of memories one never took much conscious notice of.
Reading your response I redoubled my efforts and located my untagged & misplaced Kindle highlight:
"Blake’s myth was very much a British one, combining the universal with the personal...
When his characters are understood as separate parts of his psyche, the clashes and drama that occurs between them can be seen as Blake trying to understand his own mental landscape. When the angels and demons who appear to be without are understood to come from within, all mythical and theological sagas are revealed to be the clashing energies of the mind...If this was the case, then it would be entirely appropriate. Blake’s myth was, ultimately, a myth of healing.”
--John Higgs, William Blake vs the World, 2021
> what struck me reading the passage I had lost was how those characters were constructed(black box in the unconscious) and often from components of memories one never took much conscious notice of.
I pursued a career as an actor for a while in my life, and I did a lot of improv. It is amazing how a bunch of things will just collect and slowly make itself apparent to you in some form. I have an alter ego named Jake for instance. The whole thing is fascinating.
If a person is a composite of sub-personalities then I supposes an "alter ego" is a sub-composite that becomes distinct. Creatives(e.g. actors/improvs) are said to have robust inner lives so this is as close I get to understanding, I suppose. It does sound fascinating.
The following is similar:
"The President of the United States when, with paddle, gun, and fishing-rod, he goes camping in the wilderness for a vacation, changes his system of ideas from top to bottom. The presidential anxieties have lapsed into the background entirely; the official habits are replaced by the habits of a son of nature, and those who knew the man only as the strenuous magistrate would not “know him for the same person” if they saw him as the camper. If now he should never go back, and never again suffer political interests to gain dominion over him, he would be for practical intents and purposes a permanently transformed being. Our ordinary alterations of character, as we pass from one of our aims to another, are not commonly called transformations, because each of them is so rapidly succeeded by another in the reverse direction; but whenever one aim grows so stable as to expel definitively its previous rivals from the individual’s life, we tend to speak of the phenomenon, and perhaps to wonder at it, as a “transformation.” These alternations are the completest of the ways in which a self may be divided.”
--William James, The Varieties Of Religious Experience: A Study In Human Nature, 1902
> When the angels and demons who appear to be without are understood to come from within, all mythical and theological sagas are revealed to be the clashing energies of the mind...
This is true wisdom. It should be kept in mind when discussing the perils and benefits of AI.
Excellent. It makes so much sense that it’s Blake.
"Why does every school teach history but hardly any have courses on the future?"
Futures thinking seems to be a burgeoning fad in K12 education. What do rationalists think?
The idea is to teach young people that their voice matters, and that they can change the future.
>"Why does every school teach history but hardly any have courses on the future?"
People, even experts, suck at making predictions, and such a class would likely just become another avenue for ideological propaganda.
>The idea is to teach young people that their voice matters, and that they can change the future.
This is a wildly incorrect idea. Like, actually. And justifying it even given this fact is likely done on a similar basis to having a 'growth mindset', which itself doesn't work.
How about putting a poster up on the classroom wall that says,
“The best laid plans of mice and men gang aft aglay.”?
That ought to get their attention..heh
Didn't we go through this with the comment about the private school and the kids having a big, flashy, summit or conference with invited speakers?
OP thought it was useless expenditure, but this is the sort of thing that goes on (same with Junior UN or local version thereof) to tell kids "you are the future and this is how you make your voice heard".
I personally incline towards the "it's all fluff" because unless you have a kid who is determined to go into politics, most won't involve themselves in this kind of activity once they're older.
Anyway, attempting to forecast the future has a poor track record, because we seem to go for "surely trend X of today will continue" and miss things that are truly novel (e.g. no Moon colonies, but nobody predicted the Internet).
I had tried to get my own elementary age kids interested in rationality and the idea of forecasting. I didn't get a lot of traction. Kids don't have the schema to make predictions about complex topics (not the patience to wait for real world outcomes), but they love estimating beans in a jar. Perhaps that could be harnessed to get kids interested in black sawn events and basic statistics. But I also tend to think this is "fluff" caused by academics looking for something to investigate in their Ed D thesis. Still, doing a lot of predicting as a child might tame down some Dunning Kreuger instincts.
>The idea is to teach young people that their voice matters<
Just what the world needs; louder children.
I cynically suspect that it's a way to indoctrinate children to support policy A, lest horrible future B happen.
Because the future hasn't happened yet?
A course on prediction could be excellent.
Heck, I'd settle for properly teaching probability theory.
Maybe also a short course on history of futurology. :)
That would be interesting! Century by century and decade by decade, picking through fiction and projection and media scares. What's going to kill us all? What country will dominate the world, and why? If these trends continue, what will happen? What utopias are envisioned, what problems do they solve, and how, and what problems do they fail to consider?
Is anyone doing analysis of the efficiency of the incentives being given for the CO2 emissions avoided or atmospheric CO2 removed. I've seen some high numbers but from sources that are opposed to any incentive, so I distrust them, but nothing from the loyal opposition. In principle I know that the form of the subsidy -- for investment in instead of output from the target technologies -- is wrong, but principles do not give magnitudes.
My back-of-the-envelope estimate is that all the "CO2 sequestration" technologies are fundamentally un-economic, when you use the kWh as the basic unit of currency. That means they will never be more efficient than "just not drilling oil in the first place".
But it is too much effort to convince people not to do this while still "fighting climate change". I consider it a local-minimum for graft in the space.
But what about the possibility of running the CCS on the zero marginal cost periods of solar/wind? As opposed to SOME hard to replace uses of fossil fuels? And the need to actually reduce CO2 concentrations after reaching net zero?
Is there any principled reason to think that will remain true in the relevant timeframe or is it an extrapolation from existing methods
The fundamental problem is that any energy source that relies on "burning hydrocarbons in oxygen" is going to run out very quickly. Certainly within the next 1000 years. Whether you bury the CO2 or leave it in the atmosphere does nothing about that problem.
No, no such reason exists. CO2 sequestration is *already* significantly cheaper than renewable energy, but climate change truthers would find it morally abhorrent to just easily solve our problem with a quick technological solution that allows us to continue to emit carbon, grow the economy, and have widespread human flourishing. To them, there needs to be a reckoning. We all have to *pay*.
Source?
https://i.kym-cdn.com/photos/images/original/002/360/522/db7.jpg
It's nice of you to admit it
What are these magic technologies you're describing that are cheaper than renewables, easy to scale up, and quick to produce?
There are many sane people in the world who are concerned about climate change and not tied to any particular solution. Roughly the whole pro-nuclear crowd, for example. There are definitely hard-green types who think the way you describe, but you're jumping five steps too far to impute those motives to everyone.
I find that very implausible. There's a big entropy gradient involved in sucking a rare gas out of the atmosphere, and related engineering constraints if you build any sort of physical device to do in in bulk. I'd need to see the plans.
Biofuel could be considered an example of sequestration. It's doable - and if fuel got expensive enough we'd do it a lot - but rarely truly economic under current conditions.
> CO2 sequestration is *already* significantly cheaper than renewable energy
Source?
I imagine that even with CO2 sequestration tech it would be hard for many people to drop the association between CO2 emission and “the earth will literally burn and we will all die” considering how prevalent that idea has been for the last few decades (just like how I feel a strong urge to recycle plastic even though it often does nothing or is possibly worse in some cases) but is there perhaps a more steel-manned argument one could make?
Some organizations in Europe signal their wokeness by having a token Black person at an important position. Other organizations signal their wokeness by having a token Gypsy person at an important position. I haven't seen an organization that would have *both*.
The general pattern seems to be that commercial companies prefer Black people, while non-profits prefer Gypsy people.
Is this true in general, or just in my bubble?
<mild snark>
Is this a natural application for next-token-prediction? :-)
</mild snark>
After thinking about this more, my best guess is that it depends on who is the intended audience of the signaling.
For corporations, the most important audience is their *foreign* business partners. So they use the international (i.e. American) standard of an oppressed minority. Non-profits signal to local population.
But this all is probably very country-specific. (Possibly also generation-specific, as people under 30 probably know more about what happens in USA than what happens in their neighborhood.)
In my bubble, it's more common to hire a female for this purpose. Some companies even have a goal of having half of upper management or half the board of directors be females.
The gypsy thing is definitely your bubble. And I’m not convinced about the black Person either, outside of Ads where they are definitely over represented.
I await the Gypsy equivalent of the Eastern Metis:
https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/nova-scotia/the-controversial-rise-of-the-eastern-metis-where-were-these-people-all-this-time-1.4680105
If someone finds a way of breeding black gypsies, they'll make bank.
I'm pretty sure I saw a documentary about that on pornhub.
LLMs are basically trying to do to human writing what the book review submitters were trying to do to Mr. Alexander's writing. For LLMs, the metric is how much their writing can seem like that of a generally skilled human. For book reviews, the metric is whether an audience selected for liking the Astral Codex Ten house style likes your kind of writing.
It's been established that Mr. Alexander is the best at writing like himself (1st place, plus a good-but-not-great finish for the second entry). Currently, humans are also the best at writing like humans more generally, although it seems like the difference is getting small for some more prosaic tests.
This suggests to me that it's going to be very, very hard to get LLMs to write better than humans. Obviously it's not open-and-shut, but I would presume some of the competitors spent much longer on their entries than Scott spent on the actual Njal's saga review (minus the gimmicky parts that I utterly ignored), or otherwise had more resources at their disposal.
In particular, I think this is a sign that we shouldn't be particularly worried about LLMs ripping off specific authors and being successful at doing so. For one, this demonstrates that it's a pretty tough job to outdo the literal benchmark on a task. But also, a lot of people are complaining about various aspects of Scott's style showing up too much in the book reviews; I'd expect complaints about there being too much Jane Austen in some hypothetical JaneAustenBot's works. At least for me, books by a specific author have clearly diminishing marginal returns.
I wouldn't take a random contest on a blog too seriously, but it's an interesting antidote to some of the more extreme forms of concern about LLMs rapidly becoming superhuman.
I realise it's probably inevitable to ape Scott's style on his blog, but I think the book reviews that stood out to me the most (On the Marble Cliffs and Zuozhuan) had a distinctive style of their own that kept them fresh and interesting, and I'd much rather read those than something that tries too hard to be something its not.
I imagine that a LLM could imitate an authors style fairly easily, but it would struggle to do so while remaining original, without falling into repetative cliches - whereas the actual author finds the style effortless, and so can just write about a new topic/plot/set of characters in a way that is both familiar and novel.
Personally, I don't really see the need for or appeal of LLM authors as a means of entertainment. There is already an effectively infinite amount of literature available (relative to the average human lifespan, at the very least) and I expect I'd quickly get bored of the output of an LLM, because if it was good enough to give me exactly what I wanted I'd quickly crave something new instead (and sure, it probably would be able to give me that, but so would a trip to the library or the Amazon algorithm).
Writing style seems to me the thing it would be easiest for LLMs to ape. But good writers have distinctive styles at many levels. Scott has a style of writing, but also a style of thought. Jane Austen has a style of thought, and also a distinctive approach to creating characters and a distinctive way of telling a story about them.
I don't know whether it's possible in principle for LLM's to learn some of these other, deeper levels of style. People are certainly able to learn them, though as you point out the imitators' products are generally not as good as the original. (On the other hand, there was once a Graham Greene imitation contest, and Graham Greene won 3rd place).
Help a friend out:
I'm looking for a forum to discuss philosophy/politics/culture. I already know of DSL ... and not them. Can anyone suggest a forum?
https://www.themotte.org/
I'm trying to understand partner dances. I was forced to learn some foxtrot back in middle school and I've picked up some country dance as a happy amateur now when I've matured. I'm trying to branch out into some Latin dances now as well. But I don't feel like I "get it".
1. Most (well-known) dances seem to have a "social" scene and a "show"/"competition" scene. To me as a casual observer, the "show" dance seems very far divorced from the "social" dance. I feel like if there's this sport called "golf" and when I try to learn it my teachers tell me to practice hitting this white ball with this club to make it go into a hole, but when I watch a golf competition on TV they're playing soccer. As a beginner, I try to learn the steps, and I try to learn the "feel" and posture of the dance. But are those things even important? Can I show up at a shag dance and dance the whole night without doing any shag basics steps?
2. Related: Often when I watch a video from a dance show, I don't see the dancers do any of the basic moves that I learn as a beginner. Often I wouldn't know what dance they were dancing unless the video title told me. How do you identify dances? Can you do it from the music alone ("this is a bachata song so they're dancing bachata")? Is there's some good flashcard-style way to learn to identify different dances? Like, I get a ten second clip of people dancing and I've to identify it. I guess I should hack it together myself using YouTube... Do dances have signature moves that makes them recognizable (but "advanced" dancers don't do the basic moves per 1., and also couldn't I do the signature move of one dance while dancing another dance just because I'm cool?)? How do I spot what dance someone is dancing?
3. Are there a music theory but for dance? Are there a natural limit to the types and styles of partner dances? Could I make up my own partner dance right now from scratch by just deciding on a couple of steps to a 4x4 beat? Or would what I make just turn out to be rumba with a backstep or something? Most (all?) partner dances seem to belong to a "tradition": do dances naturally split and involve like this? Do they fuse? Are new dances invented from scratch sometimes?
4. Related: Can dances be wildly combined? Could someone just smash together rumba and foxtrot and have a new fusion dance? Would it be recognizable as a rumba+foxtrot fusion? Could such a fusion be done in many different ways? Must the dance I'm dancing match my partner? What happens if I dance shag but my partners dance rumba? What happens if I dance lindy hop to bachata music?
(I know I could get an answer to many of these questions myself by just trying it myself, but I'm interested in the deeper answer that I don't really have the terminology to ask about.)
I have some significant experience here, albeit somewhat dated. (1) If you know `competition' dance you can social dance, but not vice versa. Essentially `competitive' dance has a `regular syllabus' of moves, which is all that you would use for social dancing (and this regular syllabus is segregated into tiers - bronze/silver/gold). The competition scene has you move through the `syllabus' tiers before graduating to the `open' (i.e. any moves allowed) level. But you have to have mastered `syllabus' before you can move to `open.' The `syllabus' moves constitute dancing with fairly rigid rules (and the rigidity of the ruleset makes it easy for your partner to follow, assuming your partner is also familiar with the rule set). At the `open' competition level, however, you throw the ruleset out of the window. This allows you to do much flashier stuff, which maybe has significant artistic merit, but the absence of a ruleset also makes it harder for your partner to follow, unless you and your partner are *very* skilled, or have practiced extensively together. Which is why you would never do `off syllabus' moves at a social dance. [You can do syllabus moves in competition, but if you do only syllabus moves at the `open' level it will be considered boring relative to the competition]. (2) Yes, the dance is defined by the music. There aren't signature moves as such. Advanced dancers won't dance exclusively `off syllabus,' but even any syllabus moves they use will probably be from the `gold' (i.e. advanced) syllabus, and not the `bronze' (i.e. basic) syllabus. (3) From a purely artistic point of view, I see no reason why dances could not be combined. For competition purposes, you are trying to maximize your score on a particular axis of artistic merit, so this is unlikely to be a winning strategy. (4) Yes dances can be wildly combined. Yes you need to match your partner. Otherwise, at a minimum, you are liable to collide/fall over.
I've been doing social dance for ~20 years, a combination of swing, blues, salsa, and tango. One analogy I like is that different dances are like different languages - some are very close together (swing / blues are so similar that many ideas cross over, much like Spanish and Portuguese). "Bilingual" dancers will often grab ideas from another dance, much like bilingual speakers will sometimes grab a word from another language. But if you don't understand Spanish, and I keep speaking it anyway, I'm kind of a dick.
Moving away from the language analogy, there are lots of motifs that are particular to each dance, just like there are motifs particular to the music. Swing and Salsa both have large bands with horn sections, but they're definitely different music! Mixing an element from one dance into another can be really interesting, like a dash of unexpected spice in a dish. But if not done carefully, it can turn everything into a mess (not everyone can pull off fusion cooking, and the chef normally needs to know both cuisines pretty well in order to make it work).
If you want fun and easy, consider contra dance. It's easy to pick up (the moves for each dance are taught at the beginning of the song), and tends to have a very friendly crowd (although skews heavily older and hippie, FWIW).
"skews heavily older and hippie" - maybe in some places but not all. I saw a "Techno Contra" at the Dance Flurry that skewed younger, lots of "guys" in skirts.
Where I live, a big city, there are lots
of dance schools and dance clubs. Have known several people who have had good experiences learning salsa, swing, tango etc. The teaching was good and so was the company. Maybe look for one of those places?
I don't know the official answer, but I agree that what people do at competitions seems to have *nothing* in common with what you learn at dance lessons.
Took can absolutely take a move from one and adapt it too the best of another. I took "social dance level 2" in college and that was the whole theme - hey! You can do this same sequence with a different beat in all these dances, slightly modified!
Don't watch elite competition videos on Latin dance for basics. As far as I can tell it's just a different ball game. Specify your search to basics and lessons and stick to that.
I think the best social dancing scene is swing. The competitive field seems to have lots of impromptu in it, so it overlaps with social. I tried West Coast but it was too hard for me but easy closer and lindy hop will take you a long way.
Try to take one out two paid workshops. I did one and it was very helpful.
I guess the problem is that it's easy to find videos of show dancing, and somewhat easy to find dance lessons, but it's hard to find videos of people social dancing (and most that you find is understandably at a party with camera movement and people in the background etc.).
I live in a small town: I'm exploring the local scenes to see which one is best. But I don't plan to compete so I'll pick the one with the nicest people and the dance I enjoy most.
Examples: not the best but they do show people in beginner classes actually dancing. There's a like video from Glen Echo Park in DC, which was quite lovely and multi skill level when I went there a few times many years ago.
https://youtu.be/vwVyjQrZ4YM?si=06uSJ4eRKG0Wwk5T
https://youtu.be/4UpaE0dDwiY?si=bPRoGfYJKDsUiSTp
https://youtu.be/PMyGH_NS7sU?si=mOIPRQzyKwXwjAw5
Thank you!
What dance are you interested in? Maybe I can post a few. If you search for beginner competitive or events held at random ballroom schools, they have lower level dancers and the events are filmed.
The square dance scene in my area was very good. Dances are 4/4, they sure you what to do before you have to do it, very welcoming. Contra dance is a scene to check out as well but I never clicked with that one.
But really the best thing to do is to actually go out and do it. That's easier for a follow then a lead but no way around it really.
Contra dance doesn't have a "show"/"competition" scene, it's all social. English country dance has some "show", but not really "competition", and the choreographies performed as "show" are the same choreographies as done for social. Scottish country dance is much more rigidly standardized and I think might have some "competition" as well as "show".
Right now I'm looking at Salsa, Kizomba, Bachata, Schottische and Polka. Any videos are appreciated. (Of course doing is best but scheduled dance time is limited and I learn painfully slow so I need to practice at home.)
TLDR: Ballroom dances were already established, and then formalized for competitions. If you want a new one, you would sort of need to make it popular enough in your area that you had people to dance with. Social dancing is about communication with your partner and uses easier moves, whereas competitive uses more advanced moves and choreography.
I've been doing dance for about 5 years now, with 3 years of social/performance ballroom dance, so let me take a stab at this. I'm not going to try to give some background information before answering your questions, and then give shorter answers to them using said info.
First thing to note is that "ballroom dances" are a collection of 10 dances with fairly disparate roots. It's not clear to me exactly what got them all in that category while getting, say, Salsa excluded, but that's what they are. Nevertheless, all of them were established BEFORE joining the competitive scene; I suspect that viennese waltz is the oldest, but most of them grew out of a highly popular social couples dance and were then fitted with stricter rules to make them useable for competitive.
Speaking of competitive! At a competitive level there are three "syllabi," which are basically just the list of moves that you can use. Most beginers will learn the bronze syllabus, progressing up to silver and then finally gold as they become more experienced. Gold syllabus has roots in bronze, but many of the moves are somewhat altered in ways that make them too challenging for a beginner to master. At the competitive level there are specific beats-per-minute ranges for each song. For example, Cha Cha is a 112-128 beats per minute dance. Paso Doble is a weird exception of a ballroom dance as there is only one valid song for competition.
Okay, time to give actual answers.
1. Show vs Social is a mixture between that social will use bronze syllabus usually, whereas show uses gold. Additionally, show performances are choreographed whereas social dance is improvised, so it can require a different skillset to excell in one or the other. Choreography will also naturally lead to some more fancy stuff being possible, as well as things that would otherwise be very difficult to communicate to a partner through the standard social dance holds.
2. It's a mixture of beats per minute and feel of the song. Cha Cha and Rumba have the same beats per minute, but Cha Chas will usually be more upbeat, while Rumbas will feel slower. I was told that "if you can snap to it, it's a foxtrot." Waltz's are always in 3/4 time and once it gets fast enough it becomes a Viennese Waltz. Generally you just have to dance a lot and you slowly learn. In social you will sometimes see different couples dancing different styles to the same song, so it depends on your choice still.
3. I think that you'd want a mixture of choreography and modern dance. Ballroom is largely a formalizing of already existing social dances, not an effort to create new ones.
4. See 2 and 3. You and your partner need to be doing the same dance though. Social ballroom dance is about communication, and dancing different dances would be like one of you speaking French and the other English. In choreographed dance for non-competitive performances you can do a medley and dance different styles over the course of a song, but there choreography is doing the heavy lifting instead of the communication necessary in social dances.
Thanks! I'm still confused though. Let's try another example: Can I start dancing Cha Cha, and then add some Rumba steps, and then add some more, and finally transition to be dancing Rumba instead? Or will the Rumba "clash" with the Cha Cha? (I understand that this would be against the syllabi(?) but is it possible?)
Let's say that someone is walking back and forth to a metronome, is it possible to tell if they're dancing Rumba or Cha Cha? Or is my question ill formed?
Edit: I don't know what I'm talking about.
And auspicious pair to ask about. You might find this helpful: In a certain sense, Cha cha and rumba are fundamentally the same dance.
To explain in the simplest way I can think of, basic "syllabus" of cha cha and rumba is composed of single measure moves consisting of half-measure transition and half-measure move proper. The moves proper are often exactly the same, the only difference is the transition - rumba uses a single half-measure step, cha cha - three steps, two eights followed by a fourth.
Of course the move set quickly diverges once you get to more complex figures spanning several measures. But up to a certain point, when you're learning cha cha, you're learning rumba and vice versa.
On the other hand, it would make absolutely no sense to mix up the two in one dance, the rhythm, flow, however-you-want-to-call-it, is completely different. And yes, it should always be pretty obvious which of the two is being danced at the moment.
Swing and Latin both are ballroom dances. I think that you are not quite using the right terminology.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ballroom_dance
See the competitive tab, East Coast and quite a few Latin dances are on there.
Your question is ill formed. For Rumba and cha cha their rhythms are different (Rumba has 3 steps per 4 counts while cha cha has more). Perhaps this will help: at a social dance, when I want to dance I just say "would you like to dance a Rumba" and then we both know what's going on.
Yes, sorry, I'm confusing myself.
I understand the practicality of dancing rumba: I'll ask someone to dance Rumba and I'll do the Rumba steps and we'll have a good time. Likely this is as far as I will ever go. But intellectually I would like to what "Rumba" is. Because it doesn't seem to be the steps I'm doing nor the music, but people still seem to be able to identify it. It doesn't seem to be "all the steps in the Rumba syllabi" since people can improvise outside of those. So what is Rumba and where does it "end" and become another dance?
It's the basic. Quick-quick-slow, at that tempo, with the rotation of the hips is fundamentally what defines it. It's sort of like choosing a key for a song. If your song is in C, you'll generally do C, F, and G chords. You can do fancier stuff, but at the end of the day, a lot of those will be hit. Similarly, you could do fancier stuff in Rumba but it is built around the basic step and the way that it defines the dance.
Rumba is about hips, east coast about push and pull, cha cha about short sharp movements, waltz about rising and falling in boxes to 3/4 time. If you really look at the basic step that is usually the defining feature and difference of the dances.
Does this answer what you're getting at? Sort of for why your questions are odd is because it's like saying "what if I wrote a song in the key of C but only ever played C#s?" You could do this, but it would be weird and your orchestra would dislike you for it, because it's so outside of what the key of C is meant to do. I don't know enough music theory to extend the analogy, but I'm sure that there's modd stuff for keys and time signatures and the like that have parallels to choice of dance as well.
I feel like my question is more like "what if I write a rock song but make it more like hip hop?" And the answer to that is that there are many artists that make this fusion in different ways and that the genre is called rap rock. And that though the borders are fussy, there comes a point where you have lost enough of some criteria that can be listed so that you are no longer playing rock in any meaningful sense.
But I assume it's the same with dances. Once I experience enough Rumba and Cha Cha, I will be able to tell what's what and what's a fusion just like how I can easily tell if a song is a rock song or a hip hop song or a fusion today.
Ok, so,
-Different dances have lesser or greater amounts of choreography/improvisation. Competition will have more "moves" planned ahead of time.
-Partner dancing is about communication. The leader shifts the balance of the system of both dancers, and the follower moves to re-establish that balance. However, the leader also has to lead in a way that there is space for the partner to move and in a dance without a set step pattern (like tango) *how* they are going to move into that space.
-Because of the above, if you have an established partner you can "get away" with leading all sorts of stuff but if you're dancing with someone for the first time, leading a space/path that isn't typical for the dance in question you're going to confuse/frustrate them.
Well, this is kind of my confusion. I'm learning the dance so when my partner isn't in step I get confused, and I try to stay in my steps, not get out of them. But more advanced dancers seem to do the opposite. Where's the line where two advanced dancers stop doing "dance X" and are simply improvising to music instead of doing a specific dance? Because that's what it often looks like to me. But I also feel like good dancers can watch some slowly turn in a circle or something and by some magic tell that they are dancing foxtrot based on the posture or the gait or something. So there's a conflict and I'm just confused.
> when my partner isn't in step I get confused, and I try to stay in my steps, not get out of them
When both you and your partner are beginners, that's probably a good strategy, because presumably the reason they are out of step is that they got lost or made a mistake. Then it's good of you to keep a very clear step so that they can catch up.
> more advanced dancers seem to do the opposite
Advanced dancers can keep the step / rhythm intuitively and won't make this kind of mistake. If they move out of the step, it's on purpose, and in a specific way. It's common in improvisation-heavy partner dances such as lindy hop to step away from your partner and just do some solo moves (both leader and follower do this), or freeze for a beat, or anything really. Usually a given song has parts where it makes more sense to do this and experienced dancers can tell.
> Where's the line where two advanced dancers stop doing "dance X" and are simply improvising to music
There's not necessarily a line? The dance moves that fit a given song are typically correlated with a given dance style, and dancers of a given style will be more likely to improvise within that style. In fact, pretty much all social dancing is "improvising to music", but I guess you mean wilder improvisation that can go completely outside the standard moves.
People with a good eye for it can tell when a swing dancer did ballet before, or hip hop, or salsa, because the way they move their body is reminiscent of other styles even if they are doing the same swing steps.
On the other hand, two dancers mildly experienced in several styles can dance together to a song without choosing any particular style as long as there is good (non-verbal) communication. You won't necessarily get something identifiable as style X, but really the song is a huge constraint in what kinds of things it feels good to do.
The key to dancing is communication. One person (usually the man) has to `lead' (i.e. communicate what step they would like to happen next), the other (usually the woman) has to `follow' (actually dance her part of that step). In show dancing you can cheat via choreography (viz. both partners know what is going to happen next because they discussed it and practiced it before). But ideally (and certainly for social dancing) this communication needs to happen `on the fly.' And the communication needs to be accomplished non-verbally (through stuff like weight distribution, hold, momentum...). The ability to do the advanced stuff that seems mystifying is downstream of a skill level where you can effectively communicate about such advanced stuff. How much you can improvise is limited by how effectively you can communicate. When `good dancers can ... by some magic tell' what they are doing is reading the (nonverbal) signals that you cannot yet read.
I know Scott has posted stuff about Buddhism in the past, so I assume there are some "secular Buddhists" here I could ask this question to. I know the Buddhist concept of rebirth is different from the traditional conception of reincarnation, that it's only the karma that gets reborn etc., however, suppose that I am a skeptical materialist that denies even that. If we believe that death doesn't bring rebirth into Samsara, but is a full extinguisment of everything one was, does that make it equivalent to Nirvana? Essentially, if we accept the first noble truth that life is Dukkha, and desire to extinguish that Dukkha, if we don't believe death results in rebirth into this world, then wouldn't suicide be a much quicker and more expedient means than the long and difficult road to achieving Nirvana in this lifetime? Or is there something to Nirvana that is more than just extinguishment, making it still preferable to death even in a world with no rebirth? Please note that I'm not actually contemplating suicide based on this line of reasoning, this is more of an academic exercise and something I'm genuinely curious about, whether Buddhism reduces to implying suicide if the belief in life as suffering is maintained but the belief in rebirth isn't. Essentially, death to an atheist materialist looks a lot like what Buddhists describe as the ultimate goal of paranirvana, i.e. permanently dying and not coming back, so if you think regular death brings that by default anyway, why not just die?
In general, it's impossible to be a Buddhist materialist, the most correct way is to be (somewhat) agnostic about it, idealism is acceptable.
It's not even karma that gets reborn, see the doctrine dependent origination/arising. I can recommend a classic text on this.
http://www.dhammatalks.net/Books6/Bhikkhu_Buddhadasa_Paticcasamuppada.htm
The whole point of the Buddha's teachings was to help us *live* life without suffering. Most Buddhist traditions warn against falling into the trap of nihilism—and suicide is generally considered to be an expression of nihilistic "wrong thinking." Living one's life with compassion for others and having the wisdom to understand how to effectively apply compassion to alleviate the suffering of others is a major goal of the Mahayana adherents (I'm not so sure about the Theravadin traditions, though). From a practical standpoint, suicide prevents one from doing anyone else any good.
As for nirvana, different schools/traditions of Buddhism may define it in different ways. But I think that most (correct me if I'm wrong!) make a point of distinguishing nirvana from anatta (non-self) states and sunyata (emptiness) states. The Buddha's teachings were all about extinguishing cravings as a way to end suffering. One could achieve nirvana while living by quenching the three fires/poisons of greed, aversion, and ignorance. Buddhism, having incubated in a culture where the dominant religion believed in reincarnation, so one could also extinguish the craving for rebirth (and presumably not be reborn). But it's important to remember that the Buddha refused to speculate about whether or not there is a life force independent of the body (what we would call a soul). He considered it to be a distraction to living life in the present.
I thought living life without suffering was impossible according to Buddhist theory.
I suspect that Buddhism as a way of improving one's capacity to *live* is an American addition.
This is all off the top of my head, and I don't claim any deep understanding...
There are varieties of Mahayana Buddhism that don't go in for the whole "reincarnation" thing. In some, a lot of the things that sound supernatural are interpreted as metaphors about life and consciousness. For instance, the cycle of death and rebirth and karma can be interpreted as something like what happens when you notice something, and it occupies your whole attention for a moment, but then you recollect what you were doing. Or where the general goal of nirvana is something like being able to analyze the suffering in your life in terms of attachment, which enables you to either reduce it or transform it through understanding and acceptance.
Overall, I'd say that Buddhism came from the broad background of Hinduism, and accepts much of that worldview as a base. This includes reincarnation. If you want an interpretation of Buddhism that doesn't involve reincarnation, you can't just take one that was based on reincarnation and remove the reincarnation, because the rest won't make sense. If it is to be a coherent whole worth thinking about, it needs to make sense as a whole, so you should look for a coherent interpretation of the whole thing that doesn't involve reincarnation at all. They're out there.
In terms of making big life decisions like suicide, I will point out that the 3rd Jewel is the Sangha, the community of Buddhists. It is co-equal in importance to Buddha and Dharma, and one might say that this is because, without conducting your practice in a group, it's possible to stray from the path by coming up with plausible interpretations which you don't know how to refute. Just look at how weird some Mahayana sects have gotten, after they abandoned the strict Theravada rules! ;-) So I would suggest that, before using this philosophy to justify suicide, that you should take into account the part that says, "don't try this at home".
I hesitate to offer specifics, but one thing to consider is that we exist in a web of karma. From birth, we acquire connections to people around us, love or hate or debts or what-have-you. And these run both ways. Suicide doesn't make other people's attachments to you go away, and an action to alleviate your own suffering may cause other people to suffer more. Buddhists should be concerned about all suffering everywhere, not just our own. I think classically, the Buddhist solution was to join a monastic order, which is in a sense removing oneself from the web of attachments that is life. And as I recall, there are a number of conditions laid out before one can join, such as not having minor children (i.e., either having no children, or having raised all your children to adulthood), which are basically there to prevent things like parents running off to join a cult and abandoning their kids.
You try suicide, reincarnate, and you're back in the same place as last time. Maybe you think it was a fluke, so you try suicide a few hundred more times, and each time you end up in the same place. Congratulations, you've just prolonged your suffering while accomplishing ~nothing.
I don't think the idea of being stuck in Samsara really sinks in until you've been stuck for a while.
If I thought I could achieve permadeath by committing suicide I would jump off the side of this building right now.
Eventually you realize that you have no choice, so you resign yourself to whatever torments life has in store for you.
I say this with genuine concern, not sarcasm or trying to make fun of you: Please see a therapist or at least call a suicide helpline. Your last two paragraphs indicate that you really need a therapist.
It may be surprising for some to understand, but it's possible to feel like you've had enough of life. I've been served a dish by life, have eaten my share, and I'm sated.
The problem inherent with these support systems is that they're unable to comprehend that someone is legitimately capable of being done with life. There is an inherent belief that life must be preserved at all costs.
Sorry, I don't mean to drag others down to hell with me. I appreciate the concern.
If the reincarnated person has no idea of his previous life, in what meaningful sense is it me? In what sense did "I" end up in the same place? Also, the world is very different today from when I was born, so if I committed suicide and reincarnated, the "new me" would necessarily lead a very different life.
Bruce Frantzis, founder of a qi gong etc. school (energyarts.com) said in some of his meditation classes that what reincarnates is your emotional habits, and those emotional habits are very hard to clean up.
I don't have a strong opinion about whether that's true, but if reincarnation of any sort is possible, then it's plausible, and it's an answer to the skeptics that ask why you don't know ancient Egyptian.
You probably have dreams every night that you don't remember. Just because you don't remember them doesn't mean that you don't internalize them. And even if you can't remember them the next morning you may realize that you slept restlessly because of some disturbing dreams (whose details you've forgotten)—so, they could affect your outlook over the day.
Buddhist doctrine says the shit you do comes back on you—in this life and the next. Likewise, for the merit you acquire. From a what goes around comes around standpoint, if you create a shitty world in this life through your actions, you're likely to be reborn in the shitty world you created. If you create a better world, you're likely to be reborn into that better world.
Is there any evidence that people internalize dreams they don't remember? Studies that correlate people's mood with EEG recordings of their brain in REM sleep, say? It doesn't sound implausible, but without evidence it's a just-so story. I could equally well deny that dreams I don't remember affect me, and that sounds just as plausible.
"From a what goes around comes around standpoint, if you create a shitty world in this life through your actions, you're likely to be reborn in the shitty world you created. If you create a better world, you're likely to be reborn into that better world."
That's very different from being "back in the same place as last time" after committing suicide. For one thing, you won't be back in the same place, even in a very metaphorical sense, unless you had absolutely no impact on the world and did exactly as much good as bad.
For what it's worth, sometimes my mood in the short term turns out to be related to a dream. Isn't there evidence that there isn't a lot of emotional difference between what is imagined and what is experienced?
Reincarnation doesn't work that way, as best as I can tell.
You remember your past lives, otherwise it's impossible to make any progress.
Unless you change drastically, your life basically always plays out roughly the same.
I'm not sure how to describe it exhaustively. Maybe the experience is different for every person.
"You remember your past lives, otherwise it's impossible to make any progress."
I don't remember my past lives, hence I am not reincarnated and have no reason to expect to be reincarnated after I die.
"Unless you change drastically, your life basically always plays out roughly the same."
So if my grandpa was a Soviet telephone switchboard operator who went off to fight the Nazis because they invaded his country, I should also expect to be a telephone switchboard operator who goes off to fight the Nazis? Even though neither the Soviet Union, nor switchboard operators, nor Nazi Germany exist anymore; even though I live halfway around the world; and even though nuclear weapons have put an end to wars between great powers?
I dunno, I can't claim to have a full and comprehensive understanding of how the reincarnation system works. Your replies don't make any sense to me, and I don't think this conversation is going to go anywhere productive so I will disengage now.
May your journey be fruitful.
My teachers (Gelug) told me that only advanced bodhisattvas remember their past lives. I happen to have memories (which may or may not be false memories) of past lives. I mentioned this to one of my teachers and he dismissed them as not being real.
>You remember your past lives
See, I have no such memory, I think most people don't either, and the claims from those that do can often be explained away without requiring the memories to be factual, which is the main reason I'm asking this as someone skeptical of reincarnation, even in the reduced form described by traditional Buddhism, but interested in the possibility of Buddhism being salvageable otherwise.
It seems like you've already made up your mind. Not all tools are meant for everyone. May your journey be fruitful. :)
> I have no such memory
> It seems like you've already made up your mind.
Eh, this reaction feels quite... uhm, how to put it politely...
If you reaction to a *factual* statement that contradicts your theory is "seems like you've already made up your mind", that definitely doesn't seem like a reaction of a person who has even the slightest interest to figure out the truth.
Ok, but that is assuming reincarnation is real and you really do come back after suicide. I'm asking what happens if we assume the materialist, atheistic view that that isn't the case.
If you've only lived one life then you probably want to enjoy it to the fullest. Any single life is probably going to be easily bearable anyway.
Understand the desire for permadeath as the ultimate escape from an endless cycle.
If you can escape how is it endless?
And if you can escape and presumably eventually will, where's the hurry? I find merely existing to be quite satisfactory and hope I get caught in samsara based on your description
I don't know that it's possible to escape, I've never done it. Maybe it's all a scam.
What is the general impression of AI generated art? It seems Aella takes flak for using it in her posts, but I generally like them, and I wouldn't even say her pictures are that effective. Are AI-generated images seen as not classy or something? Is it a generational thing?
So far it seems that AI art, at least in my creative circles, is mostly raising the floor rather than affecting the ceiling. Fan media and other non-professional creative works are seeing a bloom in use of illustrations where previously they would have nothing at all. They're not particularly good pieces, in fact they tends to be extremely generic, but a decent commission is $50 minimum so a free alternative definitely fills a niche for many.
The trouble with AI-generated art is that the underlying "creative" system lacks critical introspection. The human who inputs the parameters may be able to select one result out of many that are unique and interesting to other critical intelligences (humans). But uncurated training datasets yield uncurated output—so, it's garbage-in, garbage-out—unless a human with critical introspection can weed out the crap. Unfortunately, few people have those skills, so it's the tragedy of the commons as applied to artistic endeavors.
It's interesting? I don't follow Aella, but on other blogs, the stuff that gets picked out to illustrate posts tends to be slightly "off" in some way, but also striking in another way. It makes me wonder how many iterations the poster went through before finding an image that was satisfactory enough to post.
I suppose it's not as classy as having an artist-in-residence who can toss off oil paintings for every post, but I suspect it's a lot cheaper.
I don't much like AI images. Most seem to have very commercial arty DNA. If you just want an image of something pretty straightforward to liven up the page and don't have the skills to produce one yourself, something made by AI is just fine. But if you want an image that's unsettling, or sort of fractured in a way that lets you glimpse deeper truths through the cracks, you're not likely to get it with AI. Dall-e seems particularly primitive to me when it comes to artistic quality. It very often produces symmetrical images, and everybody knows that's bad because half the space is thrown away -- it contains nothing new, just a mirror image of the other half. Also, Dall-e's idea of a painterly style is to make the image out of random globs and gloobs that look like shit from closer up. On the other hand, if you can get Dall-e confused by giving certain weird prompts, you get some grotesque and fascinating misfires. I have a little collection of those that I'm quite fond of.
I've experimented quite a bit and that's not my impression at all. By experimenting with models, parameters, prompts, and workflows you can get some pretty varied stuff. It's like painting with a palette, only the colors are abstractions and styles
In one sense it's derivative, but I don't see how the same cant be said of all human art
That's one of my problems with AI, particularly AI art. There's a skillset involved in knowing how to prompt the thing to produce something that you might actually want. If you're not very good at prompts, you'll get a lot more garbage. That's likely to get better over time, but it's a huge problem for mass-market use now.
I've yet to see any AI-generated art that blows my socks off. Having said that, there's an abundance of crappy art created by human beings, too. But occasionally I run across human-generated art that makes me think, "Wow! That's what they mean by a masterpiece!
Derivative art is an imitation of sone other art. I'm sure there are many artists who are derivative but there are others with a different relationship to artists they admire: They are inspired by them. They have learned from them. The have adapted some of the admired artist's preoccupations and techniques to their own purpose. Think about your own relationship to teachers or thinkers you admire. You have learned from them. You are influenced by them. But you are not a parrot, trying to sound just like them, expressing their ideas and pretending you thought of them yourself. You have your own ideas and your own ways of saying things.
A couple videos that might help if you're looking to understand AI-Skeptic Art World's perspective
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K_Bqq09Kaxk
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tjSxFAGP9Ss
My partner is an artist who grew up in the SFO area and thus has a toe in the tech world as well. Things that I’ve absorbed over the course of a variety of conversations, which are by no means universal but may be useful as one of many responses if you are looking for “general impression” are:
(1) Abuse/Infringement of copyright in the training process. AI training appears to basically have been accomplished by scraping mass amounts of images online as training inputs. Consent was mostly not sought for this, and AI proponents tend to defend that with variations on the theme, “well you put it online, so it was fair game.” But that’s not how copyright works – the NFL logo is online; so are photos of the Olympics and images owned by Disney. Try using those things for anything without consent of their owners. So while there seems to be a lot of scoffing when someone raises copyright concerns about copies of their work being made and used to train AI models, that scoffing seems highly and suspiciously correlated with the institutional power of the complainant. Take, for example, music AI. Once the owner of the copyrights in question is a concentrated and highly-litigious music industry, rather than small-scale disorganized visual artists, suddenly we go from “this doesn’t violate copyright and you are stupid for suggesting it conceivably could” to:
“Dance Diffusion is also built on datasets composed entirely of copyright-free and voluntarily provided music and audio samples. Because diffusion models are prone to memorization and overfitting, releasing a model trained on copyrighted data could potentially result in legal issues. In honoring the intellectual property of artists while also complying to the best of their ability with the often strict copyright standards of the music industry, keeping any kind of copyrighted material out of training data was a must.”
https://wandb.ai/wandb_gen/audio/reports/Harmonai-s-Dance-Diffusion-Open-Source-AI-Audio-Generation-Tool-For-Music-Producers--VmlldzoyNjkwOTM1
So the distinction can seem, to artists, like less one of clear-cut legalism and more one of tech bros picking artists as a target for IP exploitation, not because they think they have a clear cut right to do the exploiting, but simply because they perceive artists to be unlikely/unable to fight back. And a stance of, “move fast and break things, as long as those things belong to a little guy who can’t do anything about it” unsurprisingly fails to sit well with the little guy.
(2) The very real implications for the lives and livelihoods of artists. Understandably, the luddite comparisons tend to come out here, and true enough changes in technology always lead to changes in how people can earn a living. But it tends to be a sour message when the guy telling you “just find your way in the new world” was only able to build his million dollar tool to replace you by cribbing from your own work without asking your permission. Also, there’s a class issue in play – AI may not for years, and may not even ever, displace the highest-performing artists at the pinnacle of their craft. However, the only way to *get* to that level is years of intense practice and study. Disney’s nine old men didn’t just burst forth fully formed from Walt’s brow. You find your way from storyboarding to character designer to animator and so on. If AI eats all the projects that would previously have gone to new artists – the $50 commission to draw my DnD character falls out of the market, it gets substantially harder to *become* skilled, and the art world becomes (more) concentrated with upper-class people who can rely on family support to launch a career. Silicon Valley types generally don't care about that kind of thing, but other people can and do.
(3) And then there’s a bunch of stuff that I don’t know how to categorize other than as “distasteful behavior on the part of AI World.” Stuff like:
- Naive pronouncements that AI will lead to utopia or a post-scarcity society. This kind of behavior seems dumb enough on its face that people might think I’m exaggerating, but take, for example, 5:42 – 7:30 of the Proko interview.
“this is probably the largest thing that will like occur in a long time and the reason that we know that is because it is a technology that like probably can create Utopia…it is like at some point the AI can do everything that the human can do at like but cheaper and like more effective… and if that were to happen it would mean the labor costs of everything would go to zero…like almost all of the price is paying somebody [for labor] and you might say “that's important that we like pay people to do that” but like the AGI case is like no no actually it's bad because the alternative is everything is free, the alternative is like your rent is pennies, the alternative is that like you never have poverty"
- Shutting down pushback on AI with self-serving arguments about its inevitability. “Eugenics can’t possibly be stopped” - guy who loves eugenics and refuses to stop, 1925. “Oh please. Even if you regulated our industry, nobody’s gonna stop China from using CFCs” – American CFC manufacturer, 1975.
The weird thing is, all of this has happened already, with the invention of photography. A catastrophic event for the livelihoods of painters. Also made violating the copyright of existing art vastly easier. Yet painting and visual art still survived, and indeed added a whole new subfield.
I think an even more striking example is the effect of phonographic recording on, say, orchrstras. Even now, it's kind of amazing to think that records didn't put a complete end to live concerts. What kind of sane person would spend heaps more money to hear live the same thing they could hear at home, *just* for the experience of knowing it's authentic, and really being performed in front of them? But of course, lots of people do exactly that. Orchestral musicians aren't even creating anything (you might say), they're merely reproducing something (artistically of course). If there's one artistic job technology would logically take it's that one. Yet a whole century later, their profession is very far from dead.
I think these two precedents are pretty convincing. AI will reduce the number of jobs for artists, no doubt (though it may also create as many or more equally artistic jobs, as well as whole new artistic forms the way the above technologies did). But there's no way it will come close to destroying or replacing visual (or any other kind of) art.
I don’t get that the concern of the artists. They are the most protected of groups, because digital art isn’t most of art.
AI doesn’t threaten painting, or sculpture, street performance, knitting, or whatever is going on in most modern art. It couldn’t even unmake a bed.
All it can do is create digital images of any of this. Which leaves us with logo designers and the very few people working in digital animation, where AI is likely to be used as a tool and not something likely to replace humans. It’s, so far, not consistent enough.
This contrasts with music, which can be produced with entirely electronic means, with or without AI. And writing. And nearly everything else. Yet, it’s the artists that are most hysterical.
I think digital art probably is most of art actually. Think video games, board games, comics, children's books, book covers, album covers, advertising, branding (which is much more than logos), greeting cards, wrapping paper, concept art etc etc. There is comparatively much less money in physical art for the average artist.
Basically there's a large contingent of artists and the kinds of people who feel very strongly about protecting artists who vocally hate it. I assume they will be mad about it until the day they die, so you might as well start ignoring them now.
There's some discourse about them being plagiarism, which is generally very stupid. However it stems from a fairly sympathetic state of malaise at the thought of people using AI art instead of commissioning human artists. (My personal view is that it's fine to use AI art for purpose where you'd otherwise Google a stock image, e.g. illustrating a blog post; PhilosophyBear does it too and it's cute — but unclassy to use it for something where you'd otherwise commission a human artist e.g. a book cover.)
I recently spent a decent amount of time trying to get some AI art that worked for a pet project. It does some decent to great stuff with certain prompts, but struggles with a lot of others. Out of many dozens of prompts and hundreds of images generated, I got about 10 that were usable and among those only a few that were close to what I really wanted. Nothing that was exactly what I wanted.
Lots of weird things a human artist would never get wrong, like non-Euclidean geometry showing up a lot even when that wouldn't make sense.
As far as your other question, as long as the art is as messed up as it commonly is, it's going to not be classy just based on that. Once it's not so messed up, it's going to be seen as taking jobs from an area where human expression has been seen as key for a long time. There's going to be pushback from the places that really care about art, which may bleed into other areas. Cheap companies (including small ones that can't afford an artist) may choose to use it, as well as people in their own time. It's going to be a tough transition to general use, especially for professional art and places that can already afford better. Artists for big companies may end up being more involved in Marketing generally, or some other multi-functional skill to separate themselves and build their capabilities as a selling point.
There is a common opinion that AI-generated art is plagiarism, since the AI was trained on (and the results somehow incorporate) human-generated art not licensed for that purpose. (My own personal experience with how strongly felt this opinion can be comes from various online Stardew Valley discussions, in the context of fan art for the video game as well as the images used in mods.)
It's hard to say where to draw the line, but it's definitely true that some off-label uses of art are plagiarism. It's bad if I download an image someone drew, apply a Photoshop filter, and pass it off as my own. It's bad if I download 100 images someone drew, make a collage out of them, and pass it off as my own. (Here, I want to separate the things that are actually illegal from things that are ethically wrong. The latter will vary from person to person. In my own view, heavily influenced by academia, the two examples above would be ethically okay if I cited my sources and explained what I had done, but not otherwise.)
Is using AI-generated art kind of like the two examples above? Or if we grant the AI some small measure of personification, is it more like the AI browsing the internet and being inspired by things it sees, which we'd be fine with a human doing? Part of the problem is that the AI does not cite its sources; I bet that some very specific prompts are more like a Photoshop filter, and some very broad prompts are more like browsing the internet, and it's impossible to tell which is which.
>There is a common opinion that AI-generated art is plagiarism, since the AI was trained on (and the results somehow incorporate) human-generated art not licensed for that purpose.
This is one of the big marketing points for Adobe's "Firefly" generative AI: it's billed as being copyright-safe because it was trained exclusively on public domain and openly-licensed content and Adobe's own stock image database. The main downside of this is that Firefly doesn't know how to draw iconic pop culture characters who are mostly shown only in copyrighted material.
Conflict of interest disclaimer: I am an Adobe employee. I do not work on the Firefly team and am speaking only for myself and not for my employer.
Some of it is cool and is good as "art". Most of it (like that used for blog posts and stuff) is at worst banal but that is true of most of the stock images used for that purpose already. At least with AI stuff we get variety. I have not moral/ethical concerns with it at all.
Definitely not classy. Kind of insipid and repetitious, to my mind.
How's everyone's experience with meditation? Do people here meditate regularly? Do you get a lot out of it? I did some every day during Covid, and eventually had a kinda-transcendental experience after drinking a beer on a beach where I was extremely dialed in to my surroundings- not, off in my own head thinking about something else. I was just very 'there' and not elsewhere for a little while. Despite that, I got away from regular meditation until recently, when I started up again. I'm now averaging probably 4 days a week, every morning after I get out of the shower and before I have coffee. It's a slow but steady learning curve to get better, though I haven't experienced any benefits outside of the actual meditation yet.
Are other people meditating regularly? Seeing benefits?
You don't meditate for instrumental benefits. You meditate to be more aware of your own mind, and to be more connected with the present moment. That might have some kind of personal benefit, it might not. It's just a personal preference. I feel much more secure in my behavior and ponderings when I feel more connected to how my mind is working in a given time in my life, but I never expect to feel "better" or more confident or calmer or whatever.
I think a lot of people develop a greater degree of equanimity from regular practice.
Piano players: I want to learn a few pieces nearly perfectly. By this I mean that I'd like to be able to play them in front of a crowd with no stumbles/startovers and *maybe* miss a note here and there. It seems that as I practice, my accuracy asymptotically approaches 90% or 95% and takes a long time to even get close to that.
I am convinced that really good pianists still have to practice a lot but they don't have to deal with asymptotic progress and they can progress fairly linearly up to 100%. At piano recitals, I marvel at the way performers will play multiple pieces without a single mistake.
How do I get there? Is there a way to shoot for 110% so that I hit 100% with less effort? For instance, if I want to lift 100 lbs 6 times, I'd work on being able to lift 120 lbs 8 times. At that point, lifting 100x6 would be almost effortless. What's the analogous approach for piano? Learning to play it in the dark?
Thanks!
I'm not a piano player at all, but here is a great post about practicing: https://celandine13.livejournal.com/33599.html
Yes. Yes. Yes.
Errors happen for reasons, not because of personal defects. Find out what conditions are leading to the errors.
This is tentative, but I wonder whether putting so much emphasis on accuracy is distracting you from the music.
Maybe add some playing for fun as well as playing for technical improvement.
I am guessing that you can play easy pieces flawlessly and consistently. The professional approach is to expand the realm of what constitutes an easy piece. Highly skilled musicians have reached a level of proficiency so that even if they are playing their worst, their playing is still excellent. I sort of balk at the practice of working really hard to ingrain a few pieces into muscle memory so that one can demonstrate perfection. A more musical approach is to constantly learn harder and harder pieces. So I think your weight lifting analogy is a good approach.
Not the OP, and a different instrument (guitar), but I’ve actually found this not to be the case for myself at all. I’ll have to practice harder pieces much more than easy ones obviously but I’ve found that there is essentially a consistency threshold that I always end up hitting and I can never manage to get anything to a consistent or flawless level. I’ve maybe played a song “flawlessly” 2-3 times ever. Much to my own frustration! Everyone says the answer is always just more practice but I suspect there is some trait like “ability to learn to perform a dexterous task repeatably with a high level of precision” which simply varies across the population.
I’ve spent a good amount of time trying to improve my approach to practice but recently I’ve also started to wonder if I need to somehow fundamentally change that way I _think_ when playing.
something something practice doesn't make perfect, perfect practice makes perfect
practice makes permanent.
People have mentioned slowing down, this works, but is in my experience not quite optimal all the time. It's good to start this way but to learn at maximum efficiency you should practise one bar (or two bars or whatever) at a time at full speed.
Pick a short enough section that you can play it correctly at full speed, up to the first note of the next session. Make sure you play the first note of the next bar with the "correct" finger placement to continue. Repeat lots. Then do the same for the next bar. When you can, start stitching the bars together into bigger chunks. If you make mistakes, go back and do it in smaller chunks. If you still make mistakes at the smallest reasonable chunk, then go slower.
Sounds like good advice. I'll start doing that.
You'll probably get better advice if you can be more specific about the pieces you are aiming for.
One thing that hasn't been suggested already: take apart difficult passages analytically and use them to invent your own exercises that will let you practice the necessary skills in different ways. (e.g. play the passage in a different key; same notes, different rhythm; swap LH and RH positions and/or parts, etc.) This can help avoid boredom and maintain mental focus, which is important because mentally focused practice is always better than mindless practice.
Nahre Sol has some great examples of this sort of thing on YouTube:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MNM0JOAJ0aI&t=123s
Let's say I have a difficult passage the LH is supposed to play. I've often wondered if it's worth learning to play it with both hands or if this would just confused me (esp bc the fingering would be different!)
In most cases, the "confusion" effect that you are worrying about isn't going to be a problem. This is because for an amateur pianist, the learning bottleneck is often mental rather than physical — or more precisely, it is the coordination of the mental with the physical. (Analogy: When learning a foreign language, the main barrier to fluency isn't how fast we can move our tongues, but how well we can combine unfamiliar syntax, vocabulary, and pronunciation rules in real time.)
Practicing with the "wrong" hand, like the other techniques I mentioned above, can help with this mental aspect of the learning process, since relearning the music in a new way imprints it on new circuits in your brain, and these new circuits are still useful when you go back to playing with the correct hand.
Excellent analogy! The advice here from you and others is really inspiring me to go practice some more!
Another thing, since a lot of people here are mentioning "slow down": when doing slow practice, you need to actually make it *sound good* at the slower tempo. It's not just about getting the notes right — think about phrasing, dynamics, and all the other stuff just as if you were really planning to perform it at the slower tempo. (Some interpretive choices that work at a slower tempo might turn out not to work so well when you speed it up later on, but that's fine — the point is that paying attention to these details will help you practice mindfully rather than mindlessly.)
Great replies so far! I really appreciate the input.
I do some slow practice but I'm starting to think that this should be a majority of what I do. How slow do you play pieces? 50% of what you can sort of manage? 75%?
And I'll do more hands separate work.
Interesting what Perry said regarding how long "real pianists" actually practice. If it takes 6 hours / day to perfect a piece, I'll pass! Let me first see how far I can get with 30-60 minutes/day.
You should slow down to where you don’t make any mistakes, and maintain good phrasing and dynamics, like Quiop said. Once comfortably there, start picking up speed. If you can’t play three times in a row without a mistake, slow back down.
I like that idea. I've been practicing at a fast tempo where I can hit (say) 75% accuracy, and then I try to improve the accuracy over time. I think what you're suggesting is that I find a tempo slow enough that I can play with 95%-100% accuracy and then increase the tempo over time.
Yes, and really think about ≈100% accuracy, no matter how slow you need to play. It's been a game changer for me, I've been able to play really difficult pieces now with ease and confidence by taking time to burn the correct movements into the muscle memory. Different instrument, but the principles are the same.
Edit: to add, the technical ability is limited by precision, not speed. Everyone can drum fingers on a tabletop with machine-gun speed, but it's meaningless. Placing each finger at the exact location with the proper timing is what makes the technique work, and it is all about precision.
I’ve heard this advice quite a bit (play slow enough to make no mistakes) and yet I’ve found that I still make mistakes no matter how slowly I play, even if it’s 1 note every 2 seconds. What instrument are you on out of interest? Mine is guitar, and there are so many things to keep track of across both hands that I can’t think about them all simultaneously and something inevitably goes wrong no matter the speed.
Same instrument in all its variations. But this is really instrument-agnostic, every instrument has its quirks and difficulties.
So: in this case you should break the whole piece into smaller chunks. Really small chunks. Say, play just 2 notes together. Then 3. Then maybe one measure. Once you can play one measure without mistakes, try the next one. If that is too much, break it down to smaller chunks.
Also play scales. I still regularly play scales, at an easy tempo where I make 0 mistakes. If I stumble, I slow down and play the same scale slower until I can play it three times in a row with no mistakes.
There's no shortcuts, or, rather, this is the shortcut - learn to play perfectly, no matter how small/simple a chunk and how slow you have to go.
Now, I don't know if you have struggles related to how you hold the instrument, hand position, physical things like that. These can only be addressed IRL by an instructor or at least an experienced musician.
Thanks for this reply. I'll really set higher accuracy standards for myself.
Please don't put words in my mouth! I said that's how much time it takes over a period of years to become a degreed performer, not to learn a piece. I have no idea of the level of proficiency of the people you're talking about. Are they professionals at concerts? Are they random folks you know who take piano lessons? I wanted to use a concrete example of someone I know. And I wanted to underline that you are probably underestimating the "normal" amount of time to learn how to play an instrument well.
The number of hours it takes to learn a piece depends a lot on the specific piece in question, your baseline level of skill, and the level you want to play it at. Hitting all the right notes at the right time with the tempo and dynamics written into the sheet music is one thing, and frankly it sounds like that's what you care about. Musicality, tone, expression, etc. are a different ball game entirely; I know because that's what I struggled with as a young musician!. And it takes additional practice and skill to perform a piece well on top of mechanically being able to play it.
Aha, thanks for the correction & explanation.
We might be talking at cross purposes so ignore me if that's the case. But when I play I'm playing to enjoy myself. Why does it matter if you make a mistake? If you're on your own, no one noticed. If you're in front of a crowd, they'll judge you far more on your demeanour and whether you seem to be having fun than on your technical accuracy.
EDIT: I wish to make it clear that my cavalier attitude towards making mistakes does not mean I condone jazz of any kind.
I'm not sure what level of expertise you want, but I played piano through school and my amateur advice is to play much, much slower. One of my teachers always told me speed was the very last thing (to master, for each piece), and not really essential: better to play at a snail's pace and play it right, than to speed up and make mistakes. Unlike everything else (the notes, rhythms, dynamics) changing the tempo isn't really changing the piece; you're still playing the same piece (I think; I could be wrong about this). So slow way down, keep slowing down until you can consistently play it well. Then either stop there and just perform it at the slow tempo, or very gradually work your way up to higher speeds.
Two other things. First (and unless you're a real beginner this is probably blindingly obvious, so forgive me), practice each hand separately. Try to get each hand perfect on its own, and only then put them together. Second, a lot of classic pieces have a short menorable section that everyone knows and a longer (and often harder) extension in the fuller versions. For example, the well-known part of Fur Elise is only about 23 bars, and pretty easy. If you just want to impress people informally, you can learn the shorter memorable parts of famous pieces (that may be the only bit most people know anyway) and leave out the rest.
Yes, the "slow the f down" advice cannot be overemphasized. It is vital to build the correct movement pattern into your muscle memory from the start. It's much harder to fix learned mistakes from playing fast too soon than to have never made them in the first place.
I'd go as far as to say there's really no such thing as "difficult to play" music, only "not yet familiar enough".
How do you practice? I used to have a similar problem but I was just playing the song start to finish repeatedly. More targeted, repeated practice of the specific parts I had the most trouble with went a long way towards bridging the gap from 90% to ~99%.
As for shooting for 110%, not sure how good of an idea this is, but things you could try are:
- Playing the song faster than you would expect to play it in front of the crowd
- If your main goal is just not having stumbles/startovers, then I'll make the assumption you're not paying a lot of attention to dynamics or the release timings of your notes. If that is the case, you can try to incorporate those in your practice as a "110%" task.
Interesting, I was always taught *not* to practice it faster than you would perform it, because then it's too easy to accidentally perform it too fast. It's already easy to rush when you're performing; no need to make it easier.
Definitely don't practise it fast!
I was told a story about muscle memory - that your fingers learn the movements separately to how fast they carry them out. So if you play something a thousand times at slow motion speed, it will sink in and you can expect to reel it off unconsciously, perfectly, at a high speed, without even thinking about it.
Whereas if you go fast during practice, for one thing you'll stress yourself out and find yourself less keen to practise again, and for another you'll encode the mistakes you're making into your muscle memory instead of the correct notes.
Yes, this makes sense.
What is your general level of piano playing experience? It sounds like you aren't particularly experienced if I am correctly reading between the lines.
I have a friend who was a music performance major, and when we were in college he was practicing something like 6 hours a day on top of lessons, rehearsal, and classes. You may be underestimating how much time it takes to reach the level of performance you've seen in other people. At the kind of level that I used to play (I.e. good for a teenager but nowhere near a prodigy, and I chose not to pursue further training) it still took many hours of practice to get a piece to performance/audition level.
I'm sure a professional musician would be able to give you a better answer than me--I've only ever been a hobbyist and my preferred instrument was never the piano. I can only give basic advice: scales and arpeggios to develop muscle memory, focusing on difficult passages or runs, hiring a teacher to point out technique errors or biomechanical issues, practicing for an hour or more every day.
I asked my friend what he thought about your goals here. He expressed a strong opinion that asymptotic improvement is just the way that musical learning works. Someone with greater skill might be able to proceed faster along that asymptotic curve, but the last parts (nailing complex runs, expressing musicality, etc.) are always going to come more slowly than the easier parts.
His suggestion for something analogous to training with heavier weights is playing a more challenging arrangement of the piece you want to learn. (The classic example is Mozart's variations on Twinkle Twinkle Little Star.) Learning more challenging music can help you build skills that also benefit you on easier pieces. But generally, his opinion is that in learning music, you train the basics to build up to more challenging pieces. To use the lifting metaphor, you have to progress through benching 50, 75, etc lbs before you can lift 120x8 to improve at 100x6.
I'm afraid I don't have any useful advice but I just wanted to say I think this is a really interesting question I'd never really thought of. I used to do a bit of music, and I was pretty good in a young-person-at-an-open-mic-night sort of way, but I don't think I ever gave a performance with no mistakes. Could the simplest explanation be correct, that the performers who play perfectly are just much, much better at their instrument than us mere mortals? Or maybe they feel that they make mistakes too, but the better they get the less noticeable the mistakes are?
Tentative advice: Practice the last section most so you're moving toward what you're most sure of.
Take a look at whether you're making errors in the same places. Maybe those places could use a little extra work.
Ukrainian forces are slowly breaking through Russia's three concentric lines of defenses in southwestern Ukraine. They've now reached the second line.
Why doesn't Russia respond by building a fourth line farther back? Ukraine's men are moving so slowly that Russia probably has enough time to build it before the Ukrainians reach it.
And if the slow pace continues, what's to stop Russia from building fifth, sixth and seventh defensive lines in time?
It took the Russians somewhere between six months and a year to build the nominal three defensive lines they have. If the Russians were to have started construction of a fourth line of defenses at the outset of the Ukrainian offensive two months ago, we'd expect the fourth line to be ready somewhere between now and mid-November, and the fifth line not until next year. In practice, it will probably take longer still because the first three lines may have e.g. used up most of the spare land mines they'd accumulated in about seventy years of production.
Russia was able to build three defensive lines because A: the Ukrainian army was not able to conduct an offensive last winter, and B: they had a large stockpile of land mines, concrete, etc. The Ukrainian army is capable of conducting offensives now, so Russia isn't going to be able to build three more defensive lines of the sort they are seeing. Just a bunch of speed bumps.
That said, the three defensive lines they have now *may* be enough for them to hold on to their limited gains.
Winter is the time to build them. And you know where.
The source I read most often for Ukraine updates suggests the Russians are doing something along those lines:
https://xxtomcooperxx.substack.com/p/ukraine-war-5-september-2023-q-and
Relevant pull quote:
"….all which is also the answer to the question: and what is behind that 2nd anti-tank ditch?
The answer is simple: it’s the 1st Russian Defence Line.
Sure, this is not sexy to conclude, and doesn’t sound logical. But, that’s the wy the Russians are fighting nowadays. It means that, ‘behind that 2nd anti-tank ditch, there are yet more of well-concealed Russian positions in every hedgerow they could find.
…and a growing number of these positions are ever more sophisticated. Some have top cover, so that they’re not easy to destroy by mortar bombs lighter than 120mm, or by cluster bomblets deployed by artillery shells. They really need a direct hit by 155mm; some even so-called ‘bunker-busters’.
That’s the 1st Russian Defence Line, and that’s going to remain the 1st Russian Defence Line, even once the ZSU overcomes it and gets to Tokmak and beyond, sometimes in the future. The reason is that, due to the failure of the West to re-arm Ukraine, the ZSU has not enough heavy equipment for a mechanised advance. Which means that Ukrainian infantry can only advance at the infantry pace, which is the same pace at which the Russians are withdrawing, which in turn means that every time Ukrainians break through the 1st Line of Defence, the Russians have enough time to bring in another reserve unit from somewhere, and construct/patch up the 1st Line of Defence, somewhere further to the rear."
Building a fourth wall would take resources. Those resources are currently being employed at the second line to make the Ukrainians move slowly. If those resources were reallocated to build a fourth line, the Ukrainians would quickly overtake the under-defended second line, and either overrun this fourth line or stall at it after grabbing significant territory.
Basically your proposal is that the Russians should trade territory for other resources. That is a valid thing to do in some circumstances, but not for Russia right now since lost territory hurts them a lot politically and since they don't have much more territory to give until Ukrainian artillery can reach the Sea of Azov which would make logistics a nightmare.
"Building a fourth wall would take resources."
This. It would radically alter the entire theater.
Plus, the war would get way too meta if & when Ukraine broke it.
As a military you have "100 logistics points" to spend. You can spend it all on one fat defensive line and when it's broken you're f*cked. You can spend it on 20 defensive lines, but each one will be a mere speedbump. There is an optimum, or at least an optimal range of number of defensive lines, depending on your systematic assessment of all relevant factors.
Also, you might simply run out of physical space, given the effective ranges of weapons systems and geography.
Ah addendum: Many laymen don't know that logistics is probably the most underrated factor in war, because it is not "flashy". But without good logistics, apparently you can't even conquer a vastly smaller outgunned and outmanned neighbouring country whose geography you know like your own, whose military base structure you built yourself for them some time ago, who speak the same language, even when you yourself are one of the biggest land armies and largest countries in existence.
Look up the size of the logistical arm of the US or UK armed forces. It's vast.
"An army marches on its stomach."
or,
"Can't kick ass without tanker gas."
"Many laymen don't know that logistics is probably the most underrated factor in war, because it is not "flashy"."
Logistics, did you say? Have I got the guy for you!
Easy (relatively speaking), fun introduction to the subject, using the LOTR movies:
https://acoup.blog/2019/05/10/collections-the-siege-of-gondor/
"What we are watching at this stage is what is called operations – the coordinated movement of large bodies of troops to their objective. Operations is the level of analysis between tactics (how do I fight when I get there?) and strategy (why am I fighting at all?).
...Now, as we’ve noted, operations are all about the problem of moving large armies. Late season Game of Thrones notwithstanding, armies do not generally teleport around the world, they have to march. That imposes all sorts of restrictions and costs on movement: where are the roads? Mountain passes? River Crossings? The terrain Sauron’s army must attack over is defined (as we’ll see) by a series of transport bottlenecks that have to be negotiated in order to deliver the siege. Then there is the issue of supplies – even orcs need to eat.
Looking at the logistics of moving the Army of Mordor to Minas Tirith is actually a great way to introduce some of these problems in more depth. They say ‘amateurs talk tactics, but professionals study logistics.’ Well, pull up a chair at the Grown-Ups Table, and let’s study some logistics."
Just type "logistics" into the search box on his page and he has a lot on the topic from real-world historical examples:
https://acoup.blog/2022/07/15/collections-logistics-how-did-they-do-it-part-i-the-problem/
Why Tolkien is better than Martin when it comes to fantasy world logistics (okay, that's my own title):
https://acoup.blog/2019/10/04/collections-the-preposterous-logistics-of-the-loot-train-battle-game-of-thrones-s7e4/
And I've got another guy for you: https://www.youtube.com/@PerunAU
One hour a week, usually focused on military logistics-- not just the maneuvering, but also the complex economic, political,, human, and engineering issues that go into military success and failure.
One hour/week of researched material with Australian humor included.
"Why doesn't Russia respond by building a fourth line farther back? Ukraine's men are moving so slowly that Russia probably has enough time to build it before the Ukrainians reach it. "
I will take off my virology expertise internet hat and replace it with my military expertise hat ...
I think a big part of this is that you kinda have to build those lines in the open because there is lots of heavy equipment to install the caltrop thingies and more heavy equipment to dig some of the tank-repelling trenches. Mines are laid out on the surface which means that someone needs to be there doing the laying out.
With drones the Ukrainians will notice this and blast you with artillery while doing so. This tends to be fatal to the folks driving the equipment or laying the mines. In addition to dead people, your fortification plans get disrupted because of all the bodies and wrecked equipment.
A reasonable question then is: Why didn't Ukraine also do this last fall/winter when the Russians were building the lines in the first place. I don't know, but I can imagine that Ukraine had a lot less equipment back then?
Last fall/winter, Ukraine was short on artillery ammunition, had a lot of forces committed in and around Bakhmut, and were training several brigades to take place in the counter offensive. There also seems to have been an intelligence failure -- Ukraine seemed to have been genuinely caught off guard by the extent of the Russian mine fields (or, at least, the planners were caught off guard).
Also, we are talking about a vast amount of territory here. Ukraine doesn't have enough aircraft to cover the entirety of the front line, and doesn't have sufficient air defenses to risk deploying the aircraft they do have that close to the line, anyway. That means that hitting Russian engineering would require keeping on an eye on a huge territory using UAVs, then deploying limited artillery in a timely fashion, then hitting the Russian engineering, then moving that artillery quickly so it doesn't fall victim to Russian counter battery fire. All while they majority of your best forces and equipment are committed elsewhere to stop the Russian offensive.
Mines can be laid remotely via artillery or aircraft
Anybody here play Eclipse Phase? I've been looking to join a game and I've been having a devilishly hard time finding anyone interested.
I just finished running my group through a one-shot scenario in between starting our next campaign (different system) and I am down to play more of it.
It occurs to me only now that substack doesn't have a messaging service. What's the best way to get in contact with you?
I looked for that as well, failed and then went on vacation for a couple of weeks. We can do discord with thelancercorsair.
I'm not too familiar with discord. What is thelancercorsair?
That's my user name that you can use with "Add Friend"
Okay. I'll get on Discord and send you a message.
Awesome. Shoot me a message and lets talk more.
For the fans of forecasting: Main takeways from FORPOL - Czech project exploring the use of forecasting in policy: https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/ZL5MqHLDNP5qTxwvw/forecasting-for-policy-forpol-main-takeaways-practical
Being Human
Contents:
Instinct to Social Morality............... 2
Advancing Humanness.................... 3
Steps to Betterment........................... 4 [TBD]
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1q7l72cRgfZ41545e-xJP0OxzWETySuHK/view?usp=sharing
What would the effect on the economy be if factories were 100% automated and they could shut down without ill consequence during recessions? No furloughed human workers, no increase in unemployment and welfare claims, no families damaged by mom or dad sitting in the living room drunk or high all day suddenly.
I think there's a missing assumption here. Why would factories shut down? A seasonal need could be compensated by also building some other seasonal good in the first good's downtime. If they overproduce and saturate the market, you could compensate by producing less but consistently (100 units a month to make 1,200 a year, instead of 300 a month and running out of work in four months).
This could all happen with or without automated factories. So you're really asking why are there business cycles, and what would happen differently if one part of the business cycle stopped the cascade that leads to a full recession. That is, if factory workers don't lose money, they keep spending and the rest of the economy is fine. But you've already posited recessions as still real, which means the factory doesn't have anything to do with it. Wherever the former factory workers get their money will likely be affected by whatever is causing the recession, and therefore still lower their consumption and spread the recession.
So it seems like the question you are asking goes beyond factories, and was saying "what would happen in a recession if the entire [essential] economy were fully automated?" It seems that the answer is to question how there would even be a recession in that case.
I don’t get this at all. Factories (or any company) produce to perceived demand. They don’t overproduce in recessions to smooth out “seasonal demand” - whatever that means. Even in a fully automated factory production costs money in raw materials, marketing, sales and transportation. Automation doesn’t end business cycles.
Seasonal demand is about seasonal items. Maybe a factory produces more leading up to Christmas or similar.
I agree that even a fully automated factory doesn't end business cycles, which was my point in saying there was a missing assumption in the original question.
What are humans doing with their time when there's not a recession? If humans are employed for wages doing service work instead of manufacturing, then they will still feel the employment effects of a recession, since there is in general just as much less demand for services as there is less demand for goods during a recession. If humans aren't employed for wages, then you're imagining a very different world from one we've lived in for the last 200 years, and it sounds interesting, but it's not clear why recessions would exist.
If factories are shutting down during recessions, that means there is not sufficient demand for the goods/services they are providing. That means that there isn't enough money for discretionary spending. That means that whatever jobs the former workers are now doing are not paying enough, or they were unable to get another job, so they are already suffering from the 'increase in unemployment, claiming welfare, sitting drunk or high all day at home' effects.
Economists have modeled the consequences of eliminating the business cycle:
https://twitter.com/anup_malani/status/1701354960867545215
I'm looking to set up (play money, for now) prediction markets within my company on private company topics...which means I can't use third party applications, but can (and deeply desire to) use third-party source code to get off the ground. Anyone know of a recommended codebase for something like this? The closer to vanilla use of common languages like html/js and python, the better.
Manifold is open source.
I run my own prediction market for my team at work.
I literally just run it through google sheets and SQL.
Any user can input a new prediction a new prediction (or update on an existing one) by adding a new line to the excel sheet with name | date | question | percentage.
Usually when a new question gets added it is posted in team chat for other participants to weigh in.
The sheet periodially updates a SQL table and SQL script handles the math using the Good Judgement project's methods (https://www.gjopen.com/faq).
I could dashboard it up pretty easily but honestly just running the script works for my tech savvy marketplace.
Thus far it has been obvious and noncontentious when a market has resolved.
Obviously this could be broken by bad actors and might not work at a larger scale. But if all participants are non-anonymous coworkers you should be fine.
SQL script - https://pastebin.com/PCcbRVjd
pastebin will expire on 20231018
Dialect is presto
predictions_raw schema: predictor | prediction_date | title | pct | resolution_date | is_resolved | outcome (where 1 means it happened and 0 means it didn't)
Forgive my ignorance, but does a prediction market require any specific problems to be solved, over and above the same stuff you'd need for any other web service? (Ie, user account creation, letting them upload data, aggregating said data and displaying it back, etc.)
Why not just use Django for the backend, and maybe d3.js for pretty graphs on the client?
(Unless those technologies are considered ancient now - I've not kept up to date. In which case, same suggestion, just for whatever came in and replaced them.)
Not particularly? But frankly I'd love to not be rolling my own UI here, and having someone who battletested the aggregation math would also be helpful for the same reason (though less extreme) you don't roll your own crypto. Lmk if you think I'm missing something obvious though!
Interesting idea! Seems like it could help, but my concern is that the extra step could sap motivation for folks - I expect this to initially be a cute novelty to most folks and only build confidence with them over time.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KOJkZbgGIvE&ab_channel=JessicaKellgren-Fozard
A claim that LGBTQ+ people have a higher than average rate of disability. Might be a worthwhile survey question.
Some studies found that those identifying as bisexual or transgender reported a greatly increased level of 'Long Covid' compared to other cohorts: https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/pressroom/nchs_press_releases/2022/20220622.htm
Haven't watched the video (and unfortunately, it's unlikely that'll have time soon (I checked enough to notice it's about 18 minutes)), so / but I will register a suspected confounder: LGBTQ+ people happen to be more willing to go to doctors or have disabilities formally recognized than non-LGBTQ+ people, who are more willing by contrast to "just walk it off".
FAIK, the video addresses that confounder specifically.
I don't think you need to watch the video-- it's mostly about LGBTQ* people being abused and therefore having more disabilities, though that certainly wouldn't explain the presenter's EDS. At least, I don't think it could, though I believe the ACE (adverse childhood experience) model that bad experiences in childhood connect to non-obvious ill heath later.
There’s a doctor in Michigan who is hypothesizing a link between various medical issues, including EDS, and certain forms of queerness and neurodiversity due to the combined presence of certain alleles. He’s been treating trans patients in particular and noticed a higher prevalence of certain conditions. He wants what he calls Meyer-Powers syndrome to be classified as a Disorder of Sex Development. https://reddit.com/r/DrWillPowers/s/YrgrgJfdk7
My prediction, based entirely on anecdotal evidence (that is, based on the LGBTQ+ people I have personally known, including myself):
Clear yes for LQ (compared to the base rate for heterosexual women in the former, and the most relevant category for the latter), clear no for G (I'll go slightly further and predict the rate to be weakly less than the base rate for heterosexual men), weak yes for female bisexuals but no for male bisexuals, statistically insignificant yes for T.
For +, I have no anecdotal data.
With an estimated 35-45 years to live as per every life expectancy calculator I can find and a net worth of approximately $2.5M, how would you devote the remainder of your life to fighting wokeness and/or feminism with maximum effectiveness? If I keep working at my (quite woke) job for the next 5 years, I will probably accumulate another $1-1.5M. Assume no family.
Don't bother lol. If this level of wealth could make a difference, the difference would already have been made! The rot extends to the roots, and wokeness cannot be fought without tearing out the roots - something that you are almost certainly incapable of even contributing to in any meaningful way.
If you don't do so already, I suggest following Curtis Yarvin. He's the ultimate non-grifter amongst prominent anti-wokists, because he's one of the few ones to admit you can't fight it (directly) and that people telling you you can are after your money. If you must spend your money on something, try looking at this post: https://graymirror.substack.com/p/acorns-for-the-culture-war. I suspect these specific causes have passed, but if you reach out to Yarvin he may have some other ideas or more general advice.
Another good one: https://graymirror.substack.com/p/you-can-only-lose-the-culture-war
And if you want to "fight" in a simple (but still ultimately hopeless) way, you would almost certainly be better off with false flag propaganda than with anti-woke stuff. Telling white people they need to fight back against hateful anti-white leftists is not going to make people anti-woke to anywhere near the degree of telling them that they're privileged racist oppressors who need to pay reparations to black people.
I know that level of wealth can't do much. I was curious if anyone had any ideas where a small bit could go further than usual. I'll take everyone's answers into account. Thank you.
My impression is that $2.5 million doesn't go very far if you want to change the culture.
Right. I was thinking....*maybe* support some dissident artists? But I don't know how to find those and it might just be money down the drain since I have no clue who's going to go viral.
It would really help if you specified if you're trying to "fight" the current set of cultural mores OR the very idea of a stifling petit-bourgeoisie (also known as PCM in its modern incarnation) social conformity. The former will wane on its own. The latter requires fundamental changes to society at large - so fundamental, in fact, that they probably cannot be achieved without first changing the material and civilizational foundations of said society. Technological progress that will eliminate the need for the credentialed managerial class is what you should be targeting, and I'm not sure it's something you can reliably affect on your own.
I'm not sure there's much I can do. I was wondering if one of the clever people on here had any clever ideas. But some problems don't have solutions!
A version of me from a year and a half ago would have said "scale up by 20,000 times and destroy Twitter", but it looks like someone already did that. :-)
Why do you want to fight wokeness? I mean I'm not a fan of liberal circlejerkery either but do you really feel it's like, the biggest evil, and that this is the best way to direct all your energies?
It's a bigger evil than the things most people spend their effort fighting, and it has/is continuing to capture virtually all insitutions that matter. Even if you think they're not really doing bad stuff now (they are), the nature of 'progress' is that it never ends. We're not even 10% of where woke ideologues wish things to be, and there's no conceivable near or even mid-term future in which these people's ideologies have less power within institutions than they do now. The things we are seeing now would have been thought of as impossible 20 years ago, so there's little limit to how much worse things can get in even the next 20 years.
"and there's no conceivable near or even mid-term future in which these people's ideologies have less power within institutions than they do now."
I'm pretty conservative, and I really don't get this kind of thinking. First, this is the sort of thing I'd expect from the militant left: "Our ideology is irresistable, the way of the future, you might as well give up now" etc etc. In what way does it make sense for those on the right to agree with this? "Yes, your victory is inevitable, our resistance is futile". Why?
Second, how is this even true? You're implying that wokeness has some sort of inevitability separate from political power. Wokeness as we understand it was basically invented during the Obama administration and barely existed before that. How woke were things in 2007?
The left has won three of the last four elections, so of course things are very leftist right now. The way to fight that would be to win some more elections for the right. Not declare that the left is invincible, which implies winning elections is pointless.
Even after just one term of Trump, wokeness has been all but eradicated from the Supreme Court. Just imagine what a couple more terms (of hopefully someone other than Trump) will do.
>"Yes, your victory is inevitable, our resistance is futile". Why?
They've been getting stronger for decades, it's never truly gone backwards, even if a certain trend is recognized as 'excessive', it doesn't get repealed, it simply becomes the new baseline. All of this is based on a fundamental narrative-driven worldview that took decades to become established and cannot be dislodged without a decades long cultural shift that nobody has any way of deliberately effecting.
>Wokeness as we understand it was basically invented during the Obama administration and barely existed before that. How woke were things in 2007?
This is *hopelessly* naive. The roots of wokeness reach back to the 60s and 70s. All of this stuff has filtered down through academia and far left political advoacy. All the BLM black nationalism we're seeing recently rests on a racial egalitarian foundation that has been developed for decades. All of the LGBT stuff started out as radical political activism decades ago. All of the foundational woke narratives were WELL established before Obama even ran for office.
If people are thoroughly convinced slavery made America rich and black people poor and that all racial differences are caused by "racism" and that black people commit crime because of 'poverty' and police discrimination, they aren't going to just suddenly stop supporting DEI initiatives. And there's no way of discovincing people of this stuff at scale, when it's all instilled from an extremely young age and all opposition to it is completely verboten.
>The left has won three of the last four elections, so of course things are very leftist right now.
Presidential elections are not relevant here. It's NOT where woke insitutional power comes from, and if anything Trump being in power strengthened and radicalized the insitutional left. The 2020 BLM riots and racial reckoning happened on Trump's watch.
>Even after just one term of Trump, wokeness has been all but eradicated from the Supreme Court.
This depended entirely on extremely fortunate chance circumstances (i.e. Trump being in a position to appoint justices) - not any kind of legitimate cultural change or deft political strategy, nothing that can be applied any more broadly than literally just the supreme court at that time. And even in and of itself, having a less woke supreme court is nice, but it's not fundamentally an engine of cultural change. It might marginally slow things down but little else. Elite colleges will continue with their DEI policies through other means, and roe v wade being repealed gave more cultural power to feminism, not to conservatism.
Aside from the supreme court, Trump basically has no major accomplishments to speak of, and the instituional culture became woke at a greater rate under his presidency than perhaps any other point in history. Trump was so mindlessly incompetent that he didn't even bother appointing all of the positions that he had the power to appoint. But even if he had, the real power of the state comes from the vast, unelected bureaucaracies that make up most government departments, and not only can you not get rid of these people, you can't get them to stop being dyed in the wool liberals.
Ok, firstly, I don't mind if you think my attitude is naive, but I hope you know you're calling conservatism itself naive. Your attitude certainly sounds like "the world is hopelessly corrupt, elections are a sham, violent revolution is the only answer" or something similar. Whether you're literally calling for violent revolution I'm not sure, but regardless does it bother you that if you swap a few words what you're saying is indistinguishable from the most militant BLM ideology, or from communism?
Second, I find your attitude (which admittedly is the attitude of almost everyone, or so it often seems) that whatever policies and ideological shifts have happened were always inevitably going to happen and the actual contingent decisions of powerful people and voters are irrelevant, to be very lazy thinking. It's very easy to look at the things that ended up happening and say they were inevitable. You don't notice the things that almost happened but didn't, you forget the "inevitable" social trends that fizzled out and died, and you can't know how things would have gone if a given election had gone differently. I prefer to work on the assumption that if a leftist government is elected and then society gets a lot more culturally left-wing, that that was the primary reason and there was nothing inevitable about it. At least without a very convincing argument that it would have happened anyway.
"They've been getting stronger for decades, it's never truly gone backwards, even if a certain trend is recognized as 'excessive', it doesn't get repealed, it simply becomes the new baseline. "
I think you're doing the exact thing leftists do when they say the world always moves left, by simply defining as "left" only the things that won. Communism was defeated. Like, in its proper form, *completely* defeated, after ruling half the world at one point. Massive deregulation and lowering of taxes in the 80s. Many of the 60s counter-cultural ideas (abolishing marriage, communal living, free love, mass drug-taking) either disappeared or were relegated to a small part of society. Religion is rising in many parts of the world. Within the US, university speech codes were crushed by the courts in the early 90s and many states have moved further and further away from gun control. You devalue the efforts of those on the right who fought those fights by either ignoring them or declaring that only the largely successful identity stuff really counts as left.
"All of the foundational woke narratives were WELL established before Obama even ran for office."
Who cares what happens in academia if they have no political power? I said wokeness "as we understand it" by which I mean things like cancel culture, trigger warnings, declaring your pronouns, and so on. How many people were being cancelled in the 2000s, for anything less extreme than literally saying segregation was good?
"The 2020 BLM riots and racial reckoning happened on Trump's watch."
Most of this is the cultural trends and policies started under Obama taking a while to fully manifest. Also, the Tea Party happened under Obama but because he got re-elected it went nowhere. Your policy agenda is meaningless if you don't have the power to implement it.
"And even in and of itself, having a less woke supreme court is nice, but it's not fundamentally an engine of cultural change. It might marginally slow things down but little else. Elite colleges will continue with their DEI policies through other means, and roe v wade being repealed gave more cultural power to feminism, not to conservatism."
If Hillary had won and appointed one more justice, the Court may well have ruled the First Amendment doesn't protect "hate speech" and California would have laws like Sweden that have pastors arrested for their sermons. I think you're vastly understating the significance of things like that. Also, how specifically is feminism more powerful in the last year than it was in the half-decade before?
"Trump was so mindlessly incompetent that he didn't even bother appointing all of the positions that he had the power to appoint."
I'm glad you agree that Trump was mindlessly incompetent, but don't you see that the reason he was nominated in the first place was because of attitudes like yours? "Nixon, Reagan, Bush did nothing to stop the left, we need to overhaul the whole system etc". I mean, Reagan only defeated communism, right? And Bush nearly passed a Federal Marriage Amendment, which would have stopped the lgbt movement in its tracks. It's no surprise that passing up a chance to nominate an actual conservative instead of a barely coherent salesman would be a less effective way to fight wokeness.
Figure out a good, compelling articulation of whatever ideology you have that you believe is anti-woke or anti-feminist. Then pay to get that turned into novels or videos or some other fun to absorb format.
Purely reactionary anti-ideology is pointless, ideology needs to offer a positive narrative that people are happy to engage with and strive for.
"Fighting wokeness" declares a reaction. Unless your strategy is to outspend wokeness in propaganda -- which would be monumental -- you're giving the self-anointed 'progressives' just what they want.
Better to build something real and substantial than race to the bottom. You flatter fools when you respond to their nonsense. Direct your energy and resources toward building something with character. Money in itself is pretty useless, but it can be used to build something better.
Teach people kindness and thoughtfulness. Admittedly, this is easier to say than to do.
If you did that, you'd be opposing a lot of conservativism, too, but maybe it's worth it.
That's even less realistic than fighting wokeness directly!
Nancy, you seem to imply that feminism is antithetical to kindness and thoughtfulness. (I do hope I’m misunderstanding you!)
To me, feminism simply means that women should have equal rights and opportunities to men. Certainly not something a kind and thoughtful person would fight. I have no sympathy for woke excesses, and I consider myself a feminist.
That vast majority of feminists I've ever encountered have been anywhere from somewhat to extremely unkind, and a great many have been outright hateful people.
A movement is defined by the actions of those who make up the movement, not some definition you can point to. If the Republican party said that their mission was to unyieldingly strive for truth and justice in all things (but had the same platform as it does now), would you say that being against the Republican party means you're against truth and justice? But being a Republican "means" to be in favor of truth and justice!
>To me, feminism simply means that women should have equal rights and opportunities to men.
Most people would consider that condition to have already been reached in the US, and if someone doesn't then it suggests that have an especially expansive conception of what "rights" and "opportunity" (and "equal") mean.
And additionally, "should" is doing a hell of a lot of work here, because in practice it means everything from 'it would be the most moral outcome if things were this way' through to 'it would be wrong if the government did not use the threat of force to ensure this state of being comes to exist'.
What exactly is meant by "equal rights and opportunities" and how these are to be acheived are precisely where the vast majority of issues around feminism in the US come from and leave the door wide open for "kind and thoughtful" people to rationally oppose the feminist movement.
A bit of slippage at my end-- what "feminism" means here and what it means in most of the places I hang out are quite different.
I'm working on something about about the divergence between thinking a word means what the theory behind it says vs. thinking a word means what you run into in the real world.
Feminism means a bunch of things, and some of them are decent treatment for women, and some of them are hostility to men.
Here's why I don't identify as a feminist-- back in college, I read some Mary Daly. A feminist, a Nietzschean live with gusto sort of writer. Fun in a lot of ways, but with a pattern of portraying men as robots who were simultaneously evil and boring. I made her readable by thinking that when she said "women", she actually meant "people", though she actually didn't.
The years pass, and she dies. I read a random sample of her obituaries. Some were enthusiastic about her feminism, some were angry about her transphobia. No one seems to notice the anti-male stuff, and no one seems to notice that being anti-male is a short route to hating transwomen.
You know, I think I read some of that in high school, as well as some other authors I can't remember (I really should not have read Sherri S Tepper), and it probably helped to make me an MRA!
Reverse radicalization is a thing.
I'm still more of a feminist than a lot of people-- I'll say something relatively sympathetic to men and be told I don't go far enough in ways I don't understand.
But yes, I wasn't even thinking about how Daly's misandry would sound to a man, I was against it on relatively abstract principles.
I've been told not to use the term "misandry"-- it puts me in bad company, but I don't know of any other word for the concept.
Dont get stuck in basket problems - many things are attributed as "feminism" whether rightly or wrongly and ultimately thats not even really a distinction since theres no objective truth of the matter.
OP is describing things I think wed probably all think are bad, and wed disagree about whether its feminist, or a central example of feminism.
Same as woke probably.
But if people are kind and thoughtful they will just end up thinking kind and thoughtful things and we dont have to worry about whether those things count as "woke" or "feminist" or not
>But if people are kind and thoughtful they will just end up thinking kind and thoughtful things and we dont have to worry about whether those things count as "woke" or "feminist" or not
Sure, and if people are peaceful then they won't be violent criminals. Redirecting funding from policing to 'peacefulness' campaigning would still be an absolutely insane thing to do nonetheless. You can't teach this stuff - its mostly heritable, and even if it isn't, it won't be changed by any kind of social campaign or propaganda.
Any evidence at all for mostly heritable? Seems highly suspect.
To the extent it should be possible to enact any social change through deliberate individual action and money (the original question) I don't see why it shouldn't be possible to promote kindness and thoughtfulness
I don't think it looks like the ad campaigns that say "be kind and thoughtful" but society has been getting _overall_ kinder and thoughtful-er outside our little polarized culture war cycles. Seems like we should be able to keep doing more of that.
>Any evidence at all for mostly heritable? Seems highly suspect.
All aspects of behavior and personality are highly heritable in the US
>To the extent it should be possible to enact any social change through deliberate individual action and money (the original question) I don't see why it shouldn't be possible to promote kindness and thoughtfulness
These are fundamental behavioral traits, not political culture or ideology.
>But society has been getting _overall_ kinder and thoughtful-er outside our little polarized culture war cycles. Seems like we should be able to keep doing more of that.
Okay, but you can't even BEGIN to coherently explain how or why this has happened, let alone formulate a realistic strategy for making it happen to a greater extent. Additionally, I don't actually think its necessarily true that people have gotten kinder. Maybe in certain respects, but today people have a lower sense of community and are more individualistic (read: selfish) than perhaps ever before in American history.
And what on earth do you mean "little polarized culture wars"? This isn't some BS twitter argument we're talking about here, this is the ideological foundation of all major US instituions today that affects all aspects of American society.
Thank you, especially for the last paragraph.
Buy advertising which portrays their extreme forms as unusual or not normal. The message should be that ordinary people care about (e.g.) the poor rather than the demographic olympics, that everyone knows a very rare individual needs to transition to another sex, that the typical person is aware women can't be as effective firefighters as men, and that this is OK.
I'm sorry to learn that you ended up in a place like this where you are so passionate about fighting Wokeness. For what it's worth, I definitely don't like wokeness at all ( https://thingstoread.substack.com/i/95684591/what-does-the-data-say ) but for your sake, I hope life gets in the way, and that eventually we can't assume no family for you anymore.
This answer might work but I'd push for a significant tweak: OP should be focussing on building the nonwoke world up, rather than attacking and trying to bring the woke world down.
It's better for the discussion in general, it presents a classier image of his (our?) side of it in particular, and it's a damn sight healthier and more positive for him as a person.
In any case, woke dogma has got so ridiculous in many places that you don't need to attack it - just show a better way and people will jump ship by themselves. I think at this point it's mainly a lack of counter examples (and the quite sensible fear people in the system have of providing any) that allows wokeness to perpetuate itself.
Wait five years for culture to move on to whatever it is going to fight about next; that you're concerned about fighting wokeness/feminism now means you've waited until the fight has entered the broad cultural sphere, at which point the outcome is already mostly predetermined.
Repeat.
>Wait five years for culture to move on to whatever it is going to fight about next;
It's all going to be part of the same underlying thing.
No, it merely looks like the same underlying thing, because the people involved want to give the perception that it is the same underlying thing; by tying the current fight to a fight that was already won, they hope to achieve some level of legitimacy. Not automatically believing women about rape charges (and enacting punishments against the accused) is the same underlying thing as not allowing women to vote!
Do you believe that? I don't. Why concede that ground?
"not allowing women to vote" isn't part of this. It isn't what anyone is talking about, nobody is proposing this. That's not what I'm talking about.
DEI, BLM, LGBT, Feminism - these are all made of the same stuff. They all come from the same fundamental narratives and worldview and do not exist completely independently.
This isn't conceding groud, its understanding that 'fighting' very specific manifestations of the underlying ideology is like removing weeds from your garden by plucking off the leaves. If you can't tear it out at the root, it will keep sprouting up with a slightly different appearance each time.
And you're also implying that these policies have a very limited lifespan and then everyone moves on. No, what happens is change happens, then people move onto something else *without that change being meaningfully reversed*.
I mean, if you look back at history at the changes that have actually been made, it would seem that that is the way things work. But that's kind of like thinking that people used to be better at writing because all the old books are good; it's survivorship bias.
It's the same kind of thing where I sometimes encounter progressives who think that "progressivism" has been a constant and unvaryingly positive force in society - because all the ideas and changes that were progressive at one point, but rolled back after they were discovered to be terrible, get relabeled as "conservative". For a particularly nasty example, eugenics.
So, no, that's not the way things work, and you're conceding quite considerable moral high ground to your opponents in thinking that's the way things work.
(Also, can't you think of any older examples to support your thesis that changes are made and people move on without meaningfully reversing them? You could at least go back a few decades to "political correctness", it's low-hanging fruit that's sitting right there.)
"The outcome is already mostly predetermined" precisely because of the determined efforts of the two sides fighting the battle. The fact that WWII was over in 6 years doesn't mean that it wasn't worth fighting, or that people's efforts in fighting it didn't matter, or that it wasn't the most important fight to have at the moment.
Two tribes are at constant warfare over various things. They fight over who gets to hunt in the great forest, they fight over who gets to fish in the silver-blue waters of the southern lake, they fight over everything.
One day a young warrior notices that, almost without fail, the fight is always won by the side with more warriors, and proposes a new solution: Instead, the two tribes shall meet, bringing all their warriors with them, and whoever brings the most shall, if both chiefs agree the other side has more capable warriors, win. But if the chiefs do not agree, they shall have a wrestling match between the weakest warrior on both sides, with each chief choosing who among the opposing warriors shall represent the other tribe, and the winning wrestler shall determine the outcome, with no blood needing to be shed. And if yet the chiefs still disagree, only then need it come to a fight.
The older warriors scoff. Of course the side with more warriors usually win - they win because they fight. That the fight is predetermined doesn't mean the fight is unimportant - every fight is critically important to the livelihoods of the tribe.
And so they go on killing each other.
The next valley over, twelve tribes had long since arrived at the same conclusion as the young man, and followed such prescriptions exactly. But one tribe, blessed by the richest hunting grounds, had grown larger than all other tribes together, and so dominated these meetings year after year.
The chief of one of the smaller tribes, a veteran warrior long practiced in their fights with the mountain tribes, was disturbed that soon his tribe might lose everything, as with every meeting they were forced to concede more, put together a plan. And so he gathered to him the fifty best warriors of the tribe, and they went together to the great gathering.
And the vote was called, to cede their clay to the great tribe, he and his fifty men stepped forward, and the great tribe stepped forward with its five hundred, and the matter might have been resolved, but that the old warrior contested the vote, and challenged the great tribe to a wrestling match, weakest warrior to weakest warrior. And the chief of the great tribe looked at the fifty great warriors, and then to his numerous many of which were weak, and grew wary. But he relented, and it was to his surprise when the chief of the small tribe chose his strongest warrior - and thus the wrestling was conducted, and the small tribe lost, if barely.
And yet the chief of the small tribe insisted, and demanded battle. The chief of the great tribe laughed, and so they met in battle, and of his five hundred eighty perished, and the fifty warriors of the small tribe were killed to the man.
And so the great tribe took the clay, but it was a somber occasion, for men had died for no reason at all, which the great chief was deeply troubled by, for he did not understand the purpose in such senseless death. And a year passed, which was harder than it had been for great and small tribe alike, many of their great hunters having perished, and when the small tribe sent forth fifty warriors once more, and when he considered that he wanted their quarry - he hesitated. For he saw among the other small tribes more than one who had sent their finest warriors and none other, and he remembered well so very many of his friends and cousins who did not stand with him that day. And then, as he saw, he understood the price that the chief of the small tribe had paid, and why he had paid it, and he wept, and relented.
And so the rules were changed again, that the great tribe would not simply take what it wished from the small, and the great tribe even conceded many old claims, and all began to prosper.
Right, so count on the great tribe being nice instead of steamrolling smaller tribes, right after it became a great tribe by steamrolling smaller tribes. That might work if the great tribe were compassionate humanitarians. Looking at the woke and their bullying, their suppression of free speech, their obsession with identity instead of universal humanity, and their blind eye toward left-wing violence, I don't see compassionate humanitarianism. I see authoritarianism and a will to power.
You miss the point.
The great tribe didn't hesitate for humanitarian reasons. They hesitated because winning would be incredibly expensive. Only upon realizing that any victory would be pyhrric did the great chief embrace humanitarianism.
The last resort of the minority is spite. But spite, properly executed, is both rightfully and necessarily expensive. The smallest minority being the individual, long live the killdozer.
That being said, there is far more ready a weapon, in the United States: Waiting. No popular movement can grow large enough, fast enough, to outrun its own scandals, and its own revolutions-within-the-revolutions. The United States is as a whale - so large that our cancers develop their own cancers.
You're worried about feminism as a threat? Why? Look at feminism. Feminism is currently occupied in fighting feminism, fighting in battle lines that were drawn before the public even became aware that there was a fight to be had.
I remember arguing with TERFs back in the early oughts, telling them they'd be the new right wing soon. The fight with feminism was over before it ever hit the public sphere, set in stone by arguments and schisms that were formed by people who have long since moved on to other debates. The fight in the public sphere is fundamentally perfunctory - feminism has already lost. Not just for the obvious reason of infighting, but the far more subtle reason that there is no "next fight" for feminism in the near future; there are no deep cultural reservoirs to draw on, to inspire a next fight; they've shot all their ammunition and their armories lay bare. All that is left for feminism, as a movement, is reaction. It has become, in a fundamental sense, a conservative movement.
The same is true of "wokism", at least as presently defined. They're still firing their ammunition, but are rapidly running out. And their last resort, as that of any small tribe - is spite.
They fought against The Man so long they didn't notice when they became The Man - don't repeat that mistake. Keep fighting, and take their quarry, at your own peril.
So, all in all, given the choice, and given you are not at the forefront of the fight, I'd suggest waiting. By the time you notice there is a fight going on, you've already won or lost - and if you've won, then, in continuing the fight, you're just becoming the thing you think you are fighting against.
+1
Which specific parts of wokeness and/or feminism do you want to fight? The three most horrible things that come to mind to me are cancel culture, abortion, and extremist transgender ideology. But we had a long discussion a few weeks ago and you seemed quite in favour of two of those.
So if it's cancel culture and free speech, I'd say try to get as much media reach as possible (whether traditional or social media or other online reach like Scott) and produce as much interesting and insightful stuff as you can that (1) totally refuses to genuflect to wokeness and challenges it head on whenever relevant, thus breaking down the taboos that keep it going, while (2) NOT becoming obsessively anti-woke even when it's not relevant, and especially not getting into conspiracy theories or other stuff that lets people dismiss you as a nut.
Or is it something else more specifically? (The above still probably applies in that case).
i suggest you first take a deep breath then deactivate your social media accounts and/or other forms of media where you encounter frequent culture war discussions.
And then you can re-evaluate if the culture war is really what you want to focus on for the rest of your life.
Woke ideologies has captured a majority of America's most powerful institutions to varying extrents. The idea that this is some social media BS is, quite frankly, kind of delusional. College admissions, employment policies, workplace policies, policing, scientific research, school curricula, all forms of goverment policy, the military, healthcare....all of these things are influenced by the prevailing politico-cultural trend. It's not just some idiots arguing on twitter.
It's amusing to see both sides claim they're fighting a desperate battle against a dominant foe. It's like watching parallel universes.
There is no conceivable way in which America's local, state and especially federal political departments, universities, schools, corporations, NGOs and the media aren't overwhelmingly culturally left wing on any issue related to race, gender, sexuality etc.
If you could go back 60 years and show people what American insitutions would look like in 2023, people on the right would be dismayed and left wing activists would think a revolution had taken place. The left are radicalizing faster than insitutions, so they convince themselves that instituions haven't became extremely left wing culturally. And they also naively think Trump being in power was a boon for right wing political cultural influence - exactly the *opposite* was true, the president has little real power (especially conservative ones) and under Trump, institutions became woker faster than any other point in history.
The funny thing is, I think they're both right. Different political ideologies and cultures control different areas. Rural areas are overwhelmingly Republican and have conservative views, while urban areas are the opposite. Beyond that, whole states get identified with one side or the other, despite the actual mix in the population being more even. About 30% of New Yorkers are Republican (with almost another 20% being independent). But conservatives think of New York as being a totally alien outsider population. First-Past-The-Post voting has a lot to do with it, but also our tendency to extrapolate from limited examples.
So each side can point to an area truly controlled by their opponents (Texas, California, Florida, New York) and feel like a persecuted minority. I blame the expansion of federal power, especially in the executive, and the concurrent assertion of state power against that federal power. Both sides are doing that a lot lately.
Areas aren't relevant. INSTITUTIONS are what is relevant. Rural areas don't drive US politics, science, academia, policing, curricula. America's urban based insitutions do. And even if you want to claim that rural areas helped elect Trump, Trump had very little positive impact (from a right wing perspective) on society - indeed, under Donald Trump's watch, America's institutions became more woke than any other period in history.
I thought the deal with Trump was he riled up the left without doing anything effective for the right. He couldn't even make e-Verify work, or build that wall he kept talking about. So the net effect was to make the left more powerful.
I'd agree, provided you undertake to give this advice to ten feminists first.
Why? They're not the the ones here asking this question. If they were, then they might get the same answer.
Why? To make sure the answer isn't "right on, you fight the good fight and don't give up!" in one direction and "you're sad and pathetic for thinking about this, you should get a life and coincidentally back out and be quiet," in the other.
As it happens, I personally dislike social media and would advocate abandoning it whenever possible. But I note the OP didn't mention social media at all, it was stryler who went straight for what looks a lot like the standard shame-and-silence manoeuvre.
Which, if he did, I opposed.
I understand the concern but the possibilities are worth iterating here. It's either true, or not, that logging off can be good for OP. And whether true or false, it remains so regardless of the motivations of the person giving it.
Let's assume, arguendo, that both things are true:
1. OP would be healthier logging off and obsessing less about wokeness (which itself is largely driven by the Too Online on the left).
2. If enough such people logged off, the other side would have more of a monopoly on social media, to the detriment of society.
So let's say someone (i.e. stryler) argues for people on the right to log off, ostensibly for their good health but secretly because they want the other side to dominate. In this case, the pushback you're doing arguably amounts to saying "for the sake of the online wars, you should stay online, regardless of your own mental health." Which might be a reasonable stance to take, if you feel strongly enough about the cause and the need for self sacrifice.
But if that's your stance, I suggest being explicit about it so that OP can make their own decision. It's not really clear thinking to directly tie someone's (potential) hypocrisy to the quality of their advice, even if those larger questions are worth asking for their own sake.
You are assuming a strange sort of helplessness on OP's part, and you're diving into weeds you don't need to dive into. The working principle here is simply: "Be suspicious of people's motives if they pattern match closely to bad behaviour you've seen before."
Don't assume no family! Start a family! Having kids, raising them right, forming villages with other people who share your values is the best thing you can do.
Edit: Failing that (or in addition to it): create propaganda. We need good quality films, books, tv shows etc. that demonstrate and celebrate proper values. You win the culture wars by creating culture.
You don't need the same numbers of non-woke to woke films to make a difference - especially if non-woke films are standouts in terms of quality. Cf: Asch's conformity experiment: a small number of dissenting voices amidst a sea of woke messaging will have an outsize effect on what ideas people have at their disposal.
Second edit: unless you think you'll be shit at writing films. In that case, take a leaf out of ComtemplativeMood's book and make the clumsiest, most sermon-y woke propaganda films you can imagine.
I don't think I'm artistic enough to make nonwoke films, and starting a family...ugh.
I've got some money, but I'm not too sharp with people. That would just make me divorce-and-alimony-bait.
I don't think I would raise healthy children. I would have no idea how to raise them without either getting them in trouble with wokies or making them insanely neurotic.
Some people just shouldn't breed. I am willing to practice eugenics by removing myself from the gene pool--I don't think that's unethical.
Correct me if I'm wrong, because I'm only going off your answers up and down this thread.
But it seems to me like you are far, far too mired in all this stuff, to the point where it's chiselled away at your self esteem and displaced even the memory of other things.
You live in an overly feminist-influenced environment (either through living and working with extremely woke people, or through spending too much time hearing from/about them online) and you find yourself writing stuff like "I wouldn't raise healthy children", "I shouldn't breed", "physical contact with the opposite sex feels gross and creepy", etc.
This rings alarm bells to me. If you were in a carbon monoxide rich environment, and found yourself complaining that you're very sleepy and you just want to lie down because everything's too hard... the right answer is to *get out of that environment*.
You should wait to make any other, larger, decisions until you have a clear head!
You might well be a complete no-hoper who's too stupid, uncreative, socially awkward, etc to be any use to anyone (I don't know you, after all.)
But you aren't in a fit state to judge that until you get yourself clear of the carbon monoxide.
Can I ask, what's your lifestyle like? How does your time get spent? Do you live/work alone or with people, and if so what kind of people?
Once again I could easily be haring off on the wrong track here, but that's what I'm thinking from what you've said so far.
Become the most outspoken and strident male feminist you could possibly be while secretly sexually harassing, stalking, and groping every woman in your workplace and social sphere. Then wait to inevitably be exposed as a predator thereby besmirching every cause you previously publicly identified with.
I've thought about that, but I'm not smart enough to be an effective male feminist for the first part of that to work.
Besides, I'm not really interested in harassing, stalking, and groping women. I don't trust them, particularly post-#metoo, but I don't particularly want to act against an individual woman who's done nothing bad to me just because of her sex; to me that's just as evil as feminism!
Also, one of the long-term effects of spending so much time in feminist environments is the idea of sex or any kind of physical contact with the opposite sex, even with a consenting partner, starts to feel gross and creepy (yeah, this messed up my relationships), so doing it to someone who doesn't like it feels even worse.
Many such cases
Love it!
L*bgen being sued: https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2023/09/most-notorious-illegal-shadow-library-sued-by-textbook-publishers/
School in canada removes all books published before 2008 because they're not woke enough (paging FdB) - https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/toronto/peel-school-board-library-book-weeding-1.6964332
More confirmation that Scott was correct about the Ferguson effect - https://www.unz.com/isteve/approaching-35000-incremental-homicides-and-traffic-fatalities-in-2020-2022-compared-to-2018-19-average/
The rise in car deaths has been fairly widely reported in liberal circles, but the racial skew of it not so much. It seems important.
Has Scott talked about the Ferguson effect?
https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/what-caused-the-2020-homicide-spike
Some metrics seem much easier to Goodhart than others. For example
-easy to manipulate: "In response to Labour targets in the 1990s, one force recorded a 27 per cent reduction in the number that had a target (‘theft from a motor vehicle’) alongside a 407 per cent increase in the number that had no target (‘vehicle interference’)." (https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v45/n18/john-lanchester/get-a-rabbit)
-presumably much harder to manipulate: homicide versus suicide or accidental death.
Assuming I'm not mistaken, what are some not-too-technical sources discussing this further? For general interest, not AI alignment.
> presumably much harder to manipulate: homicide versus suicide or accidental death
Nope. As always, the more people say that they're looking at the murder statistics because at least those are reliable (and everyone says this, in so many words, all the time), the less reliable the murder statistics become.
https://www.vox.com/2014/6/29/5850100/chicago-brought-its-murder-rate-down-by-not-counting-murders
"Specifically, they find evidence that while Chicago reported 414 murders in 2013 they really had at least 432 through what, if you read the article (and you should) looks like pretty deliberate malfeasance."
So murder stats aren't perfect, but I'll take that error / misprision compared to those that can be made almost effortlessly with regard other crimes.
Thanks for posting the numbers.
I'm looking for help. Mostly in the form of advice, I guess, though I wouldn't say no to other forms (not money, I still have some to keep me afloat for a while).
There are three aspects to my problems: work, a place to live, and psychology.
1. I'm a scientist from Russia. Not a particularly good one, with a candidate's degree (the lower level in two-level PhD system) and over 25 published papers but my h-index is not even 5. I'm not really keeping up to date with current research in my area, and it's been quite a while since I tried to tackle some serious problem. I can do middle-level work if given a problem to work on, get some results and write those papers. This might have been enough if I was 30 but I'm ~40 now.
My work also involves programming (and I do it for my own entertainment/personal projects), but I'm not up to date on a lot of tools and concepts. It's a bit better in my own area (machine learning) but there aren't many job offers. I think with enough effort I could get myself in shape to be employable in a wider area, but it's hard to put in the effort with uncertain prospects.
Still, I am hoping to find a job I'm somewhat qualified to do.
2. I wasn't a fan of Russia since at least 00s, but never found enough motivation to do something about it. Eventually, I fled to Armenia in late 2022 when they started mobilization (not that my risk of being drafted was high, but I decided to take a safer route). It's nice here but I'm not sure it works as a long-term solution. For one thing, Armenia still has strong ties with Russia and I'm not sure what happens to people like me if Russia passes laws making us criminals. So while finding a decently paying job here would be a nice start, eventually I hope to find a job that would allow me to move elsewhere.
Which is a huge problem because I have zero experience with looking jobs abroad (and negligible experience doing it in my own country, for that matter).
Armenia is also problematic in that it's hard to find a decently paying job here if I decide to switch to something I'm less skilled with just to break the pattern.
3. I don't know what it is with me, but things do not look good. I lack motivation and willpower. With my old low-requirement job it was mostly enough, though I had a tendency to almost miss deadlines whenever things I didn't really like doing (e.g. preparing papers) came up. The actual work of finding things out was more interesting so less problematic. It seems to be exacerbated by me working from home (though I wouldn't give a scout's promise to become a highly performing worker if I had to work from the office, but it should help if I'm at least somewhat interested and can't switch off immediately whenever I encounter something I don't feel like doing). Lately it got worse with the necessity to look for a new job, which I'm scared of. Maybe also because of the overall shitty situation, too (shame and guilt over what my country does with overt support by a lot of people I knew and respected, having to leave my home unprepared and leave behind friends and relatives in what seems to be turning into a totalitarian state). But the end result is that I do basically nothing to advance further towards this goal of a new job - mostly just wasting time, sometimes doing something that is still meaningful and can qualify as "work" but is an obvious way to avoid doing something I want even less. I'm not even sure where writing this post falls, but I'll try to commit to following at least some of the advice I get if there is any.
Is it depression? I'm not sure, it doesn't feel like I imagine depression should. Though lately there have been days when I just wanted to stay in bed, but that was because none of the things I had planned were enjoyable, and I was trying to stop allowing myself doing anything besides them. (Also there's growing sense of urgency so even the distracting things I normally like are less enjoyable. But that's more like a stress.)
So, I'll appreciate any thoughts and suggestions. In particular:
Re 1. Is there any kind of job you think I should focus on looking for? I still have time and money to maybe get additional training (or prepare myself) in some math or programming related topic if it would let me land a job with high probability.
(I probably won't say no to a direct offer too, if everything I wrote hasn't discouraged you.)
Re 2. Particularly if I can get this job in any livable country that wouldn't kick me out to Russia on short notice, for example if Russia decides that missing an appointment with a military registration office is now a crime. Although I feel like I'm just not good enough to look for a job abroad (anyone willing to expand their search this much can probably find better candidates), is there anything I can do about it?
Re 3. I am close to recognizing that I need professional psychological/psychiatric help, but if that is so, will the help help? Do my problems look like something where talking it out or taking some pills is likely to result in a large improvement? Again, I'm constrained with the resources I could spend on this but I can afford giving it a try if the expected payoff is good. Or are there things I could just try by myself?
Regarding anti-depressant pills, I'm not a doctor, but I'm going to offer the advice I wish I'd gotten.
It sounds like you're depressed. Anti-depressants can help with depression. Depression is a symptom, which can be caused by many things, including a chemical imbalance in the brain, and/or simply being in a depressing situation. No matter what the causes, your depression is probably making it harder for you to identify and fix the causes. So if you take the anti-depressants, and you start feeling better, use that opportunity to make changes in your life that might reduce the causes of depression (changes like, perhaps, getting a new job, moving to a new country, eating food with better nutrition, and getting more exercise), and then once those are pretty much solid, talk to your doctor about stopping the anti-depressants*. Don't view the anti-depressants as a long-term solution to make a bad situation bearable. Ideally your doctor will support all of this, but sometimes they have an attitude of "if the pills fixed the problem, just keep taking the pills", which I think is a big mistake.
* This can be important. Some older anti-depressants can have bad effects if you stop taking them suddenly. SSRIs are usually pretty safe, though. Read up on whatever you're taking and know what to watch for. In the US, last I checked, most anti-depressants are SSRIs, but I don't know what's common in Armenia.
Antidepressants are worth a shot. SSRIs are easy and safe. They may help you a lot. If not, taper off them.
If you were in the US it would be trivial to get an ADHD diagnosis and be prescribed stimulants. I think less so in saner countries (I think ease of getting amphetamines in US will backfire and is about to cause big problems). Those will directly fix low energy, disorganization, and lack of focus. Although in my observation of self and others, they don’t ultimately help when the problem is procrastination due to some mental/emotional self-sabotage.
Trying therapy or even reading CBT books may help a lot. Definitely worth a shot. All the good books I know of (eg those by David Burns) are shot through with absolutely deranged American California positivity, but I urge you to overlook this and just try doing what they say.
Also do not forget, academia is about the worst environment in the world for your type of procrastination issue. Normal companies have good management practices and also more constant collaboration so it’s much easier to stay on track.
Thank you for the advice!
Yeah, I can see how stimulants may fail to help even if I get more energy.
So I guess it's CBT (probably reading a book as a first step as it seems easier) and looking into getting an SSRI prescription since it's been suggested a lot.
I knew a Russian PhD student who considered anti-depression medication to be a dietary supplement. In this at least you are very not alone.
Does it mean they thought it doesn't work, or that they ate it like candy?
He thought that everyone should be on them by default, and passed them out to people to try.
Interesting. But given the serious side effects I don't think I agree. With no priors I would assume it was an attempt to generalize from a sample of one's own friends and acquaintances, for a PhD student known by someone commenting in Scott's blog it's somewhat likely he did his research, but it would still seem dubious.
Oh it's incredibly dubious! But I guess among his acquaintances depression was so extremely common, he was made to feel this way.
I'm not sure if this helps in general, but I hope it brings you a small amount of comfort to know that a lot of people in a similar situation to you also find themselves depressed.
I can’t speak to the other parts, but re the psychiatric question: it’s helpful to remember that depression is a spectrum and not a discrete category, and that from what you’re describing I think you’d meet the diagnostic criteria for it or something like it in the US (although that might differ elsewhere, and it’s debatable whether that means you “have” “depression”). Also, the things that psychologists/psychiatrists do (“treatments”) are basically the same for most constellations of symptoms — SSRIs for pills, and empathic listening or CBT for therapy. And many people find those very helpful, independent of what “disorder” they “have”. It’s hard to say whether they’re worth it for you, but if you’ve never tried either before, there’s a decent base rate chance they’re extremely helpful. And there’s ways to make them cheaper to access (e.g. in the US, a generalist doctor can prescribe SSRIs instead of paying for a specialist psychiatrist). So might be worth checking out.
Also props for asking for help ❤️. Wishing you luck.
(Sources: I’m a PhD in psychology)
Thank you for the advice! It sounds about right regarding CBT and maybe SSRIs from what little I've read, but it's still a little surprising: it was my understanding that SSRIs help by blunting emotions (it's probably more complicated but that's the obvious surface effect and in many cases it helps by itself). With low motivation doesn't it sound like I could end up worse? Admittedly, fear and other negative emotions are a part of my problem so I could see it working anyway (or just working because of the more complicated reasons than my simplified and incomplete understanding).
Nobody actually knows how SSRIs work. There's obviously many theories, but nothing close to consensus. (Blunting emotion is definitely one thing people commonly report, but I think that tends to mean more direct emotions like "sadness" or "fear" rather than complex internal states like "motivation".) I think low motivation is a standard symptom under the heading "depression" and SSRIs are the standard pharmacological approach to improving depression, so I don't think on average they make motivation worse. But of course there's huge variation across people (and like I said nobody really knows what they do) so it's hard to know in advance. An advantage of SSRIs is that if you invest 6 months in trying them (e.g., finding a prescriber, trying a few of them), you'll know forever whether they help you or not :)
I see. Yes, this is convincing, thank you.
Yeah, you're in quite a hole...
Searching for work is quite an unpleasant and nerve-wracking chore, *especially* when you are not used to it, and so risks resulting in a self-reinforcing spiral of procrastination if you don't have the fortitude to keep at it.
I would suggest trying to find as much as possible ways around that, which typically means using your network, which you kind of did here ! (At least, COVID is over !)
Oh, and just in case you don't realize it - because it's super important (especially at your age) : regular physical exercise ! (More regular than once a week.)
Thank you! Yes, I did look for ways around it. So far it didn't help me much but I was procrastinating even doing that, so the results aren't surprising.
You're right about the exercise of course, and thanks for the reminder. (My usual pattern is more like "several times at a reasonable pace and then nothing for months." Never got to the point where it would be tolerable enough to keep at it, with or without excuses like a knee that starts hurting.)
It doesn't even have to be something where you significantly force yourself (though that *would* be better, for many reasons, but that can be "phase 2", once "phase 1" is a habit), IIRC merely walking for 30 minutes (but *every* day !) near your maximum can do wonders ?
Do 5x5 by reading into StrongLifts.com. 3 times a Week, 2 hours each. It has helped me enormously, is by far the least heartful and injury prone sports I’ve ever done, and I’ve never been nearly as strong as I’m today (despite back injury, and others).
The positive mental effect cannot be overstated.
Even though our general situation and how we got into it seems very different, I feel a strong connection in how you feel right now (it sounds like I could have written it just a relatively short time ago).
It seems that I have managed to at least *start* climbing out of my hole. If you want to connect and discuss, shout out to me: https://www.linkedin.com/in/dominik-zivcic-419430227
I do not think you're in depression. Of course I cannot tell from afar. But, again, what you have written sounds like something I could have written and I am sure that I never had proper depression (I saw real depression in people close to me twice in my life, and that looked much, much worse).
In short: I think you are asking yourself the right questions and looking for solutions. I think you're on a good path. The struggle is part of it.
Thank you! I guess this means I'll have to create an account there after all.
It's nice that things seem to be improving for you, I wish you luck.
You should. Create a LinkedIn account. It’s still one of the more useful tools in job search.
If you have other suggestions of how to get in contact without sharing private numbers or emails via a public comment, I am happy to oblige :)
As I understand it, there are two aspects of depression, misery and lethargy.
I am wondering: What book should you never have read?
House of Leaves, it's quite disturbing
Technical Analysis of the Futures Market, by John Murphy.
Old Yeller, when I was a kid (gave me dead dog sadness that lasted and lasted.)
Possibly _The Southern Book Club Guide to Slaying Vampires_. I like horror, but it was possibly too harrowing.
The vampire didn't just drink blood, he also got people into bad financial deals. This only sounds funny if you aren't watching it step by steap.
I mean, it *does* sound funny: not only the vampire drinks your blood (and presumably you die or become a vampire?), he also makes you pay a late fee on your credit card!
I know it sounds funny (and, as per the title, the first part of the book has some social comedy), but the vampire is making people financially dependent on it so that it's hard for them to escape-- bad investments that pay back something but not enough.
I can’t come up with titles off the top of my head but there are a handful of books I should have given up on earlier when I felt like I should finish every book I start.
Sometimes the books were just poorly written, other times I just wasn’t ready for them.
I’m glad I came to realize that was a mistake. Now if a book isn’t working for me I’ll pick up something else to read.
I should never have read the Advanced Dungeons & Dragons Second Edition Players Handbook. But really, any D&D was a mistaken read, like loading Mac OS onto a PC.
Atlas Shrugged. I read it when i was a teenager and it influenced me for a while to idolize capitalists. I look back now and realize just how poorly written, extremist, and polemical the book is.
Some people read it and take it to heart forever, like the cult book it is.
robertsdavidn.substack.com/about
Circa 1958, I only skimmed for the sex parts, pretty unsuccessfully. :)
I think if the lesson you got from that book was "Capitalists = good" you missed some, uh, critical points.
Out of the protagonists who are capitalists, by which I mean owning the means of production, we have - Hank, Ellis, Midas, Ken, Ted, Dwight, and Francisco, of whom Hank is the only central protagonist (there are a couple of other very minor characters who may or may not count; I don't think we get enough information about them to say).
Dagny (!), John (!!), Owen, Tony and Eddy are employees. Ragnar and Akston are/were academics. Cherryl is a capitalist-worshiper who marries a capitalist and discovers he's a villain (!!!).
On the antagonist side, listing "capitalists", we have James, who runs the company Dagny works for. Other "bad capitalists" include Emma Chalmers, Lee Hunsacker, Eugene Lawson, Horace Bussby Mowen, Ben Nealy, the Starnes siblings.
Fred Kinnan, who represents unions, is one of a handful of characters who kind of fulfills both roles, antagonist and protagonist - the book strongly implies that in a different/better world, he would be one of the protagonists, but in the world he was in, he joined with the antagonists.
There's a pretty large cast involves, and most (all?) of the roles have both a protagonist or antagonist version - so you'll have one good banker, and one bad banker; one good bureaucrat, one bad bureaucrat. The progression of the book is the "bad" versions of each of the roles gradually supplanting the "good" version as perverse incentives (in a general sense, favoring feel-good "woo" over substantive good) gradually warp society in a negative direction.
Nit: I'm pretty sure Dagny is owner and CEO of a small railroad for at least part of the story. And as a Taggart, I suspect she has substantial holdings of Taggart Transcontinental stock. But yes, her primary role is as an employee of a company run by her brother.
And the general point is absolutely correct. Ayn Rand was a passionate admirer and proponent of entrepreneurial capitalism, while simultaneously hating and despising what is now called "crony capitalism". So if someone read "Atlas" to come away with the impression "capitalism GOOD", and has since been disillusioned by the observation that capitalism is not all that great, I have to suspect they read it at a too-young age and didn't catch that nuance. Which, being Rand, really wasn't all that nuanced.
I believe you're right - IIRC, I think she undertook to be the CEO of a small railroad because James refused to be responsible for it? But yeah, her role is more employee than employer throughout the book.
I'm personally of the opinion that Atlas Shrugged is a fundamentally Marxist critique of, simultaneously, socialism/communism, and also the particular variant of "capitalism" practiced at the time of her writing.
In what sense is it Marxist?
When you get down to it, the narrative thrust, the end-goal, is a material dialectic in which the contradictions in the "dark capitalism" practiced by the villains come to a head - in the same sense that Marx's work on capitalism is about letting the contradictions in capitalism come to a head.
Like Marx, the central thematic element is alienation - in Rand's case, alienation from moral value, and in Marx's case, alienation from physical value. (Although I'd argue Marx's argument was also fundamentally about alienation from moral value.)
It's fundamentally a book about the class conflict between the producers of society, and the parasitic classes that take from them, framing the conflict in terms of the exploitation of the productive classes.
There's a subtler framing, which I worry will be misleading if made directly, about how in a significant sense the world of Atlas Shrugged is one in which the villains own the "moral/ethical/virtue factories", and the protagonists, who produce all of the morality/ethics/virtue, are deprived of them.
I don't remember the owner and CEO of a small railroad part.
I only vaguely remember it, and I'm not going to reopen that book, but a bit of googling suggests that it was the "Rio Norte Line", which was logistically important in some way I don't recall but falling apart and James Taggart couldn't be bothered to fix it. So IIRC Dagny took a leave of absence from Taggart Transcontinental, took over the Rio Norte (presumably borrowing against her Taggart stock), renamed it the "John Galt Line" and rebuilt it with extensive use of Rearden Metal.
Then, mission accomplished, went back to her COO job at Taggart, for a while at least.
Thanks. That sounds familiar.
The first time I read Atlas Shrugged, I paged back and forth to find a section where Fred Kinnan talks with John Galt. It isn't there, and I wonder whether it existed in a earlier draft.
If Galt was trying to recruit Kinnan (presumably he was), that's definitely interesting.
That would have been a fascinating scene, yeah.
I seem to recall him being in the general area when Galt is, ah, in the same room as a bunch of the antagonists, and him being disgusted with the whole affair and leaving early, but I don't actually recall a conversation between the two.
Granted it's been a while since I read the book, and my memory isn't fantastic.
As I recall, Kinnan talked about how tough Galt was, I thought it implied they had a conversation.
I have never read it (because of hearing things of that vein about it), but I did read a... long form "review" of it :
https://web.archive.org/web/20220820001838/https://www.patheos.com/blogs/daylightatheism/series/atlas-shrugged/
Which is a hoot, but I always wondered whether there were *some* aspects of the book that that review had misrepresented ??
I got through to part 2 before getting bored. As of that point, all of them.
I'm not up for reading even all the chapter summaries of the review, but one of the most common ways the book is misrepresented is the portray the good guys as bad for leaving society, and ignoring that they're escaping a dangerous dictatorship.
It's kind of a general theme of criticisms of the book: You're a bad person if you don't infinitely tolerate being abused.
Which is kind of centrally necessary to criticize the book, I guess, because the central theme of it is "You don't have to tolerate being abused." (Rearden's central arc being him realizing that he doesn't have to tolerate the emotional abuse from his family.)
I think that family issue is probably one of the themes that tends to drive laypeople away: divorce is supposed to be something to avoid. Your point about tolerating abuse is one many naturally share, but I think the considered response to that is "be more careful about who you accept into your family in the first place, because that commitment will need to be practically for life".
On a slightly different note, I recall Rearden's discussion with... Moucher? I forget, it's been years. MaybeMoucher comes in and declares he's seizing Rearden's assets, and Rearden, to MM's surprise, affirms that he will succeed. MM expected a fight, asks why. Rearden points out that this isn't really what MM wants, which is something MM won't get. MM asks what that is. Rearden: "you want me to say it's okay". (I might have paraphrased it a little.)
That line stuck with me. Tied well with some of the other events (the other Galt refugees destroying their physical assets behind them). Rand had a point, and it sucks how many critics appear to have missed it.
"The consent of the victim".
I really enjoyed the first season of True Detective, and was especially curious about the inspiration behind Rust's (Mcconaughey's) character. This brought me to "The Conspiracy Against the Human Race" by Thomas Ligotti.
Maybe it was because I was not that mentally stable at the time, but it was very hard to read this book and not come away feeling like you should kill yourself.
On the one hand, I feel like facing up to the extreme forms of pessimism, nihilism, and anti-natalism forwarded in this book rather paradoxically gives you an enhanced appreciation for life in the long-term.
On the other hand, reading it will probably make you severely depressed for at least a week.
Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro. I saw the 'twist' from the get-go and found the whole thing pedestrian.
The lesson I took was to be more careful about who to take recommendations from.
I liked never let me go and didn't really consider the "twist" a twist (I just assumed it's something everyone knows and talks around and not really meant to surprise the reader).
His "when we were orphans" though is definitely this for me (and I'm borderline on remains of the day), so would join in on antirecommending him in general.
I love Ishiguro, but even I wouldn't want to read Orphans a second time. Remains of the Day is probably my favourite post-war novel. Never let me go is desperately, achingly sad and beautiful, and I agree it's not really accurate to speak of a "plot twist"
Anything by Friedrich Dürrenmatt, he is bleaker than Moscow in winter. Nausea by Jean-Paul Sartre made me sick. Emil Cioran might not be healthy for some depressed people.
A Song of Ice and Fire. Wasted my time on that huge book series that got gradually worse and is not going to ever be finished but the ending still got spoiled in a shitty way by the Game of Thrones show.
Nausea is an info hazard if you as vulnerable to depersonalization and derealization.
The ending might not be the same for ASoIaF, but you still don't have a reason to read the next book if it comes out. People will tell you how it ends.
We're not even talking about the ending yet. GRRM is still working (?) on book 6.
The culture series Surface Detail and it’s description of hell, unnerved me.
The first book of the Wheel of Time. It was mediocre, but got me in a cycle where I'd finish one, and, despite barely enjoying it, pick up the next because it was so easy to read, like candies, popcorn or chicken tenders in book form. It took me the better part of a year to go through the serie and I thoroughly regret it
Snap. I got, I think, to book six before finally twigging that the first third of the novel had been recap and I had very little hope that the second and third thirds would contain much more than filler. One of the first books I consciously put down half way rather than just drifting away from.
In high school sometimes at the lunch table I would entertain people by deriding (at length) Robert Jordan for being a hack. This was after months of refusing to read any of his books on the recommendation of people clearly less literary than myself. Eventually, I read a few just to be able to know what I was talking about when explaining how utterly vapid it is.
The King in Yellow and The Necronomicon top my list. Do not recommend.
When I was much younger, for a while I thought that "The King in Yellow" was about the mythical Chinese "Yellow Emperor", and sort of combined them in my head.
I don't know, the second one has a pretty good explanation for AI paperclipping everyone:
Nor is it to be thought that man is either the oldest or the last of earth's masters, or that the common bulk of life and substance walks alone. The Old Ones were, the Old Ones are, and the Old Ones shall be. Not in the spaces we know, but between them, they walk serene and primal, undimensioned and to us unseen. Yog-Sothoth knows the gate. Yog-Sothoth is the gate. Yog-Sothoth is the key and guardian of the gate. Past, present, future, all are one in Yog-Sothoth. He knows where the Old Ones broke through of old, and where They shall break through again. He knows where They had trod earth's fields, and where They still tread them, and why no one can behold Them as They tread. By Their smell can men sometimes know Them near, but of Their semblance can no man know, saving only in the features of those They have begotten on mankind; and of those are there many sorts, differing in likeness from man's truest eidolon to that shape without sight or substance which is Them. They walk unseen and foul in lonely places where the Words have been spoken and the Rites howled through at their Seasons. The wind gibbers with Their voices, and the earth mutters with Their consciousness. They bend the forest and crush the city, yet may not forest or city behold the hand that smites. Kadath in the cold waste hath known Them, and what man knows Kadath? The ice desert of the South and the sunken isles of Ocean hold stones whereon Their seal is engraver, but who bath seen the deep frozen city or the sealed tower long garlanded with seaweed and barnacles? Great Cthulhu is Their cousin, yet can he spy Them only dimly. Iä! Shub-Niggurath! As a foulness shall ye know Them. Their hand is at your throats, yet ye see Them not; and Their habitation is even one with your guarded threshold. Yog-Sothoth is the key to the gate, whereby the spheres meet. Man rules now where They ruled once; They shall soon rule where man rules now. After summer is winter, after winter summer. They wait patient and potent, for here shall They reign again.
How so? I can imagine cosmic horror causing a crisis if makes you question your metaphysical view of the world - is that what happened to you?
Guess that joke doesn't really work in text.
Both of them are fictional books which, in the stories they appear in, drive their readers insane. Hence my "do not recommend."
I got the joke.
Okay, that joke went straight over my head. Sorry for ruining it...
Don't worry, that means you are either a lot younger than the rest of us, or don't read the same 'classic' horror fiction that the rest of us do.
"The King in Yellow" comes from references in stories by Robert Chambers which were published in book form in 1895. The stories are a mix of the title story and references in other ones set in an alternate future America of the 1920s (though since the account is given by a very unreliable narrator, it may not be a true description), and 'bohemian life in Paris with ex-pat American art students' which have fantastical/ghost story elements.
"The King in Yellow" itself is the title of a play about the eponymous character, a play which even when read has such terrible effects that the play and the texts of it have been banned.
From the story "The Repairer of Reputations":
"During my convalescence I had bought and read for the first time, The King in Yellow. I remember after finishing the first act that it occurred to me that I had better stop. I started up and flung the book into the fireplace; the volume struck the barred grate and fell open on the hearth in the firelight. If I had not caught a glimpse of the opening words in the second act I should never have finished it, but as I stooped to pick it up, my eyes became riveted to the open page, and with a cry of terror, or perhaps it was of joy so poignant that I suffered in every nerve, I snatched the thing out of the coals and crept shaking to my bedroom, where I read it and reread it, and wept and laughed and trembled with a horror which at times assails me yet. This is the thing that troubles me, for I cannot forget Carcosa where black stars hang in the heavens; where the shadows of men's thoughts lengthen in the afternoon, when the twin suns sink into the lake of Hali; and my mind will bear for ever the memory of the Pallid Mask. I pray God will curse the writer, as the writer has cursed the world with this beautiful, stupendous creation, terrible in its simplicity, irresistible in its truth—a world which now trembles before the King in Yellow. When the French Government seized the translated copies which had just arrived in Paris, London, of course, became eager to read it. It is well known how the book spread like an infectious disease, from city to city, from continent to continent, barred out here, confiscated there, denounced by Press and pulpit, censured even by the most advanced of literary anarchists. No definite principles had been violated in those wicked pages, no doctrine promulgated, no convictions outraged. It could not be judged by any known standard, yet, although it was acknowledged that the supreme note of art had been struck in The King in Yellow, all felt that human nature could not bear the strain, nor thrive on words in which the essence of purest poison lurked. The very banality and innocence of the first act only allowed the blow to fall afterward with more awful effect."
From the story "The Yellow Sign":
" I had read all the papers and all the books in the library, but for the sake of something to do I went to the bookcases and shoved them open with my elbow. I knew every volume by its colour and examined them all, passing slowly around the library and whistling to keep up my spirits. I was turning to go into the dining-room when my eye fell upon a book bound in serpent skin, standing in a corner of the top shelf of the last bookcase. I did not remember it, and from the floor could not decipher the pale lettering on the back, so I went to the smoking-room and called Tessie. She came in from the studio and climbed up to reach the book.
"What is it?" I asked.
"The King in Yellow."
I was dumfounded. Who had placed it there? How came it in my rooms? I had long ago decided that I should never open that book, and nothing on earth could have persuaded me to buy it. Fearful lest curiosity might tempt me to open it, I had never even looked at it in book-stores. If I ever had had any curiosity to read it, the awful tragedy of young Castaigne, whom I knew, prevented me from exploring its wicked pages. I had always refused to listen to any description of it, and indeed, nobody ever ventured to discuss the second part aloud, so I had absolutely no knowledge of what those leaves might reveal. I stared at the poisonous mottled binding as I would at a snake.
"Don't touch it, Tessie," I said; "come down."
Of course my admonition was enough to arouse her curiosity, and before I could prevent it she took the book and, laughing, danced off into the studio with it. I called to her, but she slipped away with a tormenting smile at my helpless hands, and I followed her with some impatience.
"Tessie!" I cried, entering the library, "listen, I am serious. Put that book away. I do not wish you to open it!" The library was empty. I went into both drawing-rooms, then into the bedrooms, laundry, kitchen, and finally returned to the library and began a systematic search. She had hidden herself so well that it was half-an-hour later when I discovered her crouching white and silent by the latticed window in the store-room above. At the first glance I saw she had been punished for her foolishness. The King in Yellow lay at her feet, but the book was open at the second part. I looked at Tessie and saw it was too late. She had opened The King in Yellow. Then I took her by the hand and led her into the studio. She seemed dazed, and when I told her to lie down on the sofa she obeyed me without a word. After a while she closed her eyes and her breathing became regular and deep, but I could not determine whether or not she slept. For a long while I sat silently beside her, but she neither stirred nor spoke, and at last I rose, and, entering the unused store-room, took the book in my least injured hand. It seemed heavy as lead, but I carried it into the studio again, and sitting down on the rug beside the sofa, opened it and read it through from beginning to end.
When, faint with excess of my emotions, I dropped the volume and leaned wearily back against the sofa, Tessie opened her eyes and looked at me....
We had been speaking for some time in a dull monotonous strain before I realized that we were discussing The King in Yellow. Oh the sin of writing such words,—words which are clear as crystal, limpid and musical as bubbling springs, words which sparkle and glow like the poisoned diamonds of the Medicis! Oh the wickedness, the hopeless damnation of a soul who could fascinate and paralyze human creatures with such words,—words understood by the ignorant and wise alike, words which are more precious than jewels, more soothing than music, more awful than death!
We talked on, unmindful of the gathering shadows, and she was begging me to throw away the clasp of black onyx quaintly inlaid with what we now knew to be the Yellow Sign. I never shall know why I refused, though even at this hour, here in my bedroom as I write this confession, I should be glad to know what it was that prevented me from tearing the Yellow Sign from my breast and casting it into the fire. I am sure I wished to do so, and yet Tessie pleaded with me in vain. Night fell and the hours dragged on, but still we murmured to each other of the King and the Pallid Mask, and midnight sounded from the misty spires in the fog-wrapped city. We spoke of Hastur and of Cassilda, while outside the fog rolled against the blank window-panes as the cloud waves roll and break on the shores of Hali.
The house was very silent now, and not a sound came up from the misty streets. Tessie lay among the cushions, her face a grey blot in the gloom, but her hands were clasped in mine, and I knew that she knew and read my thoughts as I read hers, for we had understood the mystery of the Hyades and the Phantom of Truth was laid. Then as we answered each other, swiftly, silently, thought on thought, the shadows stirred in the gloom about us, and far in the distant streets we heard a sound. Nearer and nearer it came, the dull crunching of wheels, nearer and yet nearer, and now, outside before the door it ceased, and I dragged myself to the window and saw a black-plumed hearse. The gate below opened and shut, and I crept shaking to my door and bolted it, but I knew no bolts, no locks, could keep that creature out who was coming for the Yellow Sign. And now I heard him moving very softly along the hall. Now he was at the door, and the bolts rotted at his touch. Now he had entered. With eyes starting from my head I peered into the darkness, but when he came into the room I did not see him. It was only when I felt him envelope me in his cold soft grasp that I cried out and struggled with deadly fury, but my hands were useless and he tore the onyx clasp from my coat and struck me full in the face. Then, as I fell, I heard Tessie's soft cry and her spirit fled: and even while falling I longed to follow her, for I knew that the King in Yellow had opened his tattered mantle and there was only God to cry to now."
Isn't this basically asking for people to share (potentially dangerous) infohazards? I'm not going to give ammunition to a random internet stranger.
But if we limit ourselves to fantasy books, then Assassin's Apprentice by Robin Hobb. The writing itself is great, but I read it during a rough time period and it felt like being repeatedly kicked in the balls.
I can't quite say I regret reading _Cloven Hooves_ by Megan Lindholm (Hobb's real name), but it's remarkably depressing. Intelligent, though.
As a fitz, too, yeah. It's a mixed bag.
You're not alone in that assessment. Way back when, when I asked the guy at the fantasy book store for recommendations, he said that Assasin's Apprentice was awesome, but he warned me not to read it if I wasn't in a stable mood. I read it and understood what he meant.
What are the best free sites that use AI to summarize long articles (such as the book review context stuff)? So far the free GPT's that I have tried do a bad job.
I tried https://tldrthis.com/ , signing in through google to get me an AI (human-like) summary that is detailed/section-wise and asked for summarizing this article:
https://worksinprogress.co/issue/why-we-didnt-get-a-malaria-vaccine-sooner
and it gave a decent summary, but they only allow 10 articles for free.
Is it too silly to hope that something like a wikipedia could be created for slow-reading low attention span folks (like me) leveraging AI to summarize several books/articles? Sorry if I am being too stupid/naive.
Not exactly what you are asking for, I'm afraid, but this app https://artifact.news/ generates a bullet point summary for each article in your feed.
Claude 2 (https://www.anthropic.com/index/claude-2) is great for this sort of thing- it's almost to the level of GPT-4 in quality, but has a far larger context window. If you have a PDF of an article or short book or can copy the text to a .txt file, you can attach it, ask Claude for a summary, and even get answers to follow-up questions.
Thank you so much. Alas, though, it seems to only be available in the US and the UK.
Does anyone know a good TLDR or summary of some of Erik Hoel's ideas on neuroscience and consciousness? Any thoughts on it?
Not really answering your question, but I found a striking contrast between his winning book review and his blog posts. The former I thought was brilliantly written, thought-provoking and insightful. The latter I find dull, clunky and irritating.
It is a source of constant bafflement to me!
Rather oddly I remember reading a post by him on that exact topic: https://www.theintrinsicperspective.com/p/why-are-famous-writers-suddenly-terrible
I would say I find the titles of his posts thought-provoking, but I rarely find his answers that insightful.
Yeah, he banned philosopher Richard Chappell for pointing out that he was misinterpreting a philosophy paper he was citing, then banned me for linking to Chappell.
https://entitledtoanopinion.wordpress.com/2023/02/17/a-comment-i-would-have-made-at-erik-hoels-were-i-not-banned/
He banned me for an annoyed but civil reply to another reader in the comments section, even though my reply contained a reasoned objection to to other reader's views. But person I replied to announced huffily that they was unsubscribing, and then Hoel banned me.
No, but for the love of god please just ignore anything he's ever written about intelligence/IQ. He acts like an authority but he is very unknowledgeable.
Isn’t he a neuroscientist? After reading his novel, he strikes me as a literary genius at minimum.
Scott, do you have any thoughts on Data Falsificada[1]? The summary is in the first paragraph: "[A] series of posts detailing evidence of fraud in four academic papers co-authored by Harvard Business School Professor Francesca Gino."
[1] https://datacolada.org/109
I have nothing to say save to quote this:
"Two different people independently faked data for two different studies in a paper about dishonesty."
I'd like to point out to other potential readers that data falsificada is interesting in even just learning how to uncover manipulation and possible fraud within an excel file. It was an excellent lesson.
I'm not an expert in fraud but their case looks strong. I think it's very bad that Gino is suing them and hope she loses. Are there other things I should have opinions about?
I posted this in the subreddit, and haven't gotten any response, so hopefully someone here will know something:
Just came across a supposed image pulled from a rabbit's retina in the late 1800's by Dr. W. Kühne, supposedly creating the field of "Optography". While he himself claimed that it wasn't good enough to be of use in forensic science, I'm skeptical that he even managed to do it at all.
Supposedly it's based on the fact that Rhodopsin, a pigment in the retina, bleaches in the presense of bright lights, and can afterwards be fixed through chemical processes. The fixed Rhodopsin can then, according to Kühne, be turned into a recognizeable image (although not detailed enough to be of much use).
I buy the physical claims about Rhodopsin. I'm sure it bleaches as described, and I even buy that it can be fixed in that bleached/unbleached state. I do not believe that any images, useful or not, were actually produced with this method.
Unfortunately, some google scholar searching and a little bit of internet research have failed to turn up very much. It's mostly focusing on how widespread it got in victorian science fiction.
I found one citation from the 70's called "Optography of the retina. Resumption of Küne's studies", but it's just a citation, I can't actually find the article. Wikipedia has a link to an article that claims it was replicated (based on the title, I'm guessing it's not itself a replication, just a report of someone else doing it) but the link goes nowhere and the title doesn't even return anything on Google Scholar.
This has all the hallmarks of being a complete load of bullshit. But I can't find enough evidence to actually prove it.
If anyone has any actually reliable information on this, I would be greatly appreciative.
This was a popular 19th century urban legend.
Look up "oeil révélateur".
Also, in English: Simon Young, "Nail in the Skull and Other Victorian Urban Legends", p. 164-169.
If you're able to find more information about this elsewhere and have time, please post it- this is definitely an interesting subject!
I recently realised that a spookily-consistent mathematical rule has described the previous political "re-alignments" in the US, and that this rule says the next re-alignment will be in 2028.
The rule is that each Party System lasts for four years longer than the previous one. I'm defining the precise dates of the party systems by my own reasoning, which differs very slightly by how historians may define them, but I think my definitions are justified (and I discovered the rule only after settling on these dates):
1776: The Revolution, and the framing of the constitution, and the largely uncompetitive, pre-party presidencies of Washington and Adams.
1800: The First Party System begins with the election of Jefferson, entirely dominated by what's now called the Democratic-Republican Party.
1828: The Second Party System begins with the election of Jackson, establishing the Democratic Party.
1860: The Third Party System begins with the election of Lincoln, establishing the Republican Party.
1896: The Fourth Party System begins with the campaign (and loss) of William Jennings Bryan, and the election of McKinley.
1936: The Fifth Party system begins with the re-election of FDR, firmly establishing the New Deal Coalition.
1980: The Sixth Party System begins with the election of Reagan, establishing the modern conservative movement.
In brief: the US established; 24 years later a party system established; 28 years later a *competitive* (two real options) party system established; 32 years later the *current* two-option party system established; 36 years later the current parties with their recognisable ideologies (D=left, R=right) established; 40 years later the modern "flavour" of Democratic ideology (big government, unions+minorities) established; 44 years later the modern "flavour" of Republican ideology (evangelicals+business+national security establishment) established. 48 years after 1980 will be 2028.
The only part of the above that seems to differ from how the party systems are normally defined is using 1936 for the start of the Fifth Party System, instead of 1932 when FDR was first elected. But I think this makes sense, because 1932 was not really an endorsement of a new ideology like 1828 and 1860 and 1980 were (or a repudiation of a new ideology like 1896 was) but a rejection of the incumbent over the depression. Also, I think FDR downplayed his big-government plans in his first campaign. Only his re-election really created a new ideological alignment. The rest of the dates seem uncontroversial to me.
So, why would this rule hold? It's too perfect to be a coincidence, I think. But what's causing it? I don't know exactly, but there are many phenomena that have very complicated causal explanations but can still be modeled by a fairly simple rule: that's the way the world often works, and the complex causes end up interacting with each other and canceling each other out to produce (when you zoom out) a simple, straightforward trend. Most likely, there's a general (mostly unconscious) awareness that each party system is coming to an end, and each time enough political will to squeeze one further election out of the old system before it collapses. (Incidentallly, you can even extend the rule back before the Revolution--20 years--to the beginning of the Seven Years- War in 1756, which was the catalyst for the causes of the revolution).
Finally, how will this most likely play out in 2028? I see three posibilities:
1. Desantis (or someone else who isn't Trump) wins the Republican primary and wins the general election. I know this isn't looking good at the moment, but I think it's more likely than people think (though I won't elaborate here) and it gives the clearest path to a political re-alignment. Say it's Desantis, and he returns to a more traditional GOP governance. The rural working class is sick of this and they permanently split from the GOP to form their own Trumpian populist party. The Democrats go into meltdown like they did in 2016, and the socialist faction again blame the woke elite faction. This time there's an actual split: the socialists leave the Democratic Party. Is it possible the Trump populists and the Sanders socialists find common ground and unite to become the Populist Party? I don't know, but it seems perfectly possible. The Trump supporters can now embrace class warfare and economic leftism along with right-wing nationalism to become a truly anti-elite force: Trump can outright adopt a restributionist agenda, truly drain the swamp, no longer have to play nice with the old guard of capitalism. Meanwhile, the socialists no longer have to gently criticise the woke faction: they can go all-out anti-woke, condemn identity politics as viciously as they condemn capitalism, educated elites as viciously as business elites. With the Populist Party established as a powerful force, the fight of 2028 will be between the two old parties, to decide which of them survives as the elite opposition to the Populists, and which one dies. That could go either way.
2. Trump wins the primary and the general. It's less clear how a split happens here, but maybe he decides to this time govern in a more economically leftist way, and the traditional Republicans leave their own party. It's impossible to see them joining the elite Democrats, and hard to see Dem socialists joining the Republican Party. But maybe these things happen in some weird way?
3. Biden is re-elected. In this case, he surely moves further to the left on economic matters, and that keeps the socialists and wokes in the same party for now. The GOP probably permanently splits, but the significance of this is less clear. Maybe a new populist Trump party challenges Biden/Harris from the left in 2028?
What do people think of this? Please don't dismiss the rule I described as a mere coincidence without explaining why it seems to so perfectly describe the past.
I think there may be truth to the idea that the political system "turns over" on a fairly regular basis.
And 30-40 years is probably roughly the length of a political career so this may literally be a measure of turnover.
But I wouldn't buy an exact year pattern - as you mention the dates are somewhat arbitrary. And they're going to be picked from 4 year intervals due to election cycles (hard to point to a 'regime change' without a presidential election), so it's not as unlikely as the raw math might seem.
*Maybe* the slight increase in "cycle length" can be associated with better health and longer political careers, but that's just guessing.
Some of these dates seem like arbitrary choices made to fit the pattern.
Why is it FDR's second victory that changes the party system rather than his first, third, or fourth?
Reagan was certainly influential but is his election really the start of a new party system? And if so then why not Trump? Reagan is a lot more like Nixon than Trump is like Bush.
In general, "party system" transitions tend to not happen all at once, giving a broad range of dates for when they occur. For the sixth party system, you can make a case for any election cycle between 1964 (when an awkward coalition of Buckleyites, Birchers, and Dixiecrats got Goldwater the Republican presidential nomination) and 1994 (when the geographical "party switch" process settled in with Republicans consistently dominant in pretty much the same states that had voted for William Jennings Bryan in 1896), although Reagan's election in 1980 is probably the modal date choses to associate with the transition.
The 4th-to-5th Party System transition is probably the sharpest, dating either to 1932 (FDR's first election) or 1936 (FDR's reelection after everyone knew what they were getting).
The 3rd-to-4th transition was also fairly sharp with 1896 as the defining position, although you could nudge it a bit earlier to 1892 (the emergence of the Progressive and Populist movements and significant national political forces and several Mountain West states voting against the Republican incumbent) or a bit later to 1904 (Theodore Roosevelt arguably being ideologically more archetypical of Fourth Party System Republicans than McKinley).
The 2nd-to-3rd transition was incredibly fuzzy. The modal start date is 1856 when the Republican Party won out as the new second major party, but you can also make a case for the 1854 midterm elections (the first election after the Kansas-Nebraska act, with the Whigs splintering and "Doughface" pro-Slavery northern Democrats taking a beating at the polls), 1860 (Lincoln's first election), 1868 (first post-Civil-War election) or even as late as 1876 (end of Reconstruction and the point where of the "Redeemer" takeover of the ex-Confederate states had mostly completed).
1st-to-2nd is modally dated to 1828 with the election of Jackson, but you can also make a case for 1824 (the alliance of JQA's and Clay's factions formed the core of the Whig party while Jackson's faction from that election formed the core of the Democratic party, and the 1824 election definitely wasn't part of the First Party System or the Era of Good Feelings) or for 1832 (the first election where the Whigs existed as a formal political party).
Then there's the question of whether the Era of Good Feelings counts as its own era or whether to count it as the tail end of the First Party System. And if you do, do you count the start date as 1812 (when the Federalists endorsed a Democratic-Republican dissident candidate instead of running their own nominee), 1815 (the de facto suicide of the national Federalist Party by way of the Hartford Convention), 1816 (Federalists stop being a significant factor in Congress and a lot of ex-Federalist politicians and local political machines have gone over to the D-Rs), or 1820 (Monroe's unopposed reelection).
And the emergence First Party system can be dated to 1787 (the Constitutinal ratification debate, which set the initial battle lines), 1790 (the identifiable emergence of "Pro-Administration" and "Anti-Administration" factions in Congress), 1792 (the formal creation of the Democratic-Republicans and the first contested Vice Presidential race), 1796 (contested Presidential race), 1800 (the Jeffersonian Revolution), or 1804 (D-Rs settle in to convincing national majorities in Presidential elections).
What happened to the convenient link in the email, that let a reader click to go direct to opening the page online? Today's message has a "subscribe here for more" link where it at various times had "view in browser" (one link) or "open in app or online" (2 links).
The intermediate state, with "view in browser" at the upper right, had a button with "read in app" a bit lower down. That button is still there, but "view in browser" is completely gone.
Obviously I got to the post in the browser, in spite of the user interface dis-improvement. You haven't made the blog completely inaccessible to those who never do anything on a cell phone they can do with a real computer, let alone to those who simply don't have a cell phone.
But the email interface to this blog is now making a pretty clear statement - we only offer convenience to app-lovers here. Most likely, that statement comes straight from substack, and is perhaps motivated by some idea they have that app users are more profitable. (Perhaps the app violates privacy more than the web site, giving them more to sell?)
You might want to restore the old appearance and links, if substack will let you do so.
The title of the blog post in the email links to the the page online. You just have to click the bold "Open Thread 294" at the top.
Just realized someone already said this, oops
For me all substack links in e-mails are now a jumbled mess of tracking data that uMatrix automatically blocks anyway.
I've always gone to the article by clicking the article's title in the email (in this case "Open Thread 294" in large type at the top). This still works.
Is accessing the post by clicking a link in the email an underappreciated phishing risk? It seems safer to navigate to Substack first, then log in to read posts.
Substack normally recognizes me without me typing in any information. When I do enter info, the only sensitive info I'm entering is my email address, which anyone who successfully emailed me presumably already has. Maybe this is different for people with a paid subscription?
Clicking any link in an email is a potential phishing risk. It shows that you exist and are willing to interact, which makes your email address more valuable as a target for further phishing scams.
That Scott A[I]exander's a tricky one!
I see. It never occurred to me to click there. It doesn't look like clicking there should have any effect.
In html terms the display idiom I see leads me to imagine <H1>Open Thread 294</H1> not <a href=https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/open-thread-294?utm_source=post-email-title&publication_id=89120&post_id=137136289&utm_campaign=email-post-title&isFreemail=true&r=7ym86&utm_medium=email>Open Thread 294 </a>
Of course it's actually the equivalent of <H1><a href=https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/open-thread-294?utm_source=post-email-title&publication_id=89120&post_id=137136289&utm_campaign=email-post-title&isFreemail=true&r=7ym86&utm_medium=email>Open Thread 294 </a></H1>. But why would anyone expect that?
I have a heuristic that the primary title/logo of a thing is often a hyperlink to that thing. Titles and logos are often images, and therefore can look like anything, so this heuristic doesn't particularly depend on appearances.
It's possible I might have also noticed my cursor changing when it moved across the title.
I frankly don't have a good set of heuristics for modern UI design.
I've abstracted some general principles:
- aesthetics is more important than functionality
- the new version is often slower and harder to use, never easier or faster
- the interface used on a desktop computer with a keyboard and 4K screen should conform to the design of the interface used on a cell phone with a 3*5 inch screen
- text should be avoided in favor of icons; these icons should be changed regularly
- all controls should be invisible until moused over; controls to make them always visible should be removed if they ever existed
Cynicism aside, I've made some attempts to figure out the design language, which never seems to be explained to users. (Users just get told how to use some specific version of some specific program, and then only if they are lucky.) I've had some small amount of luck by reading documents intended for developers, which may even go beyond such details as which icon they should use for some particular function.
Mostly though, I'm stuck in a world of trial and error used to learn each UI element of each interface individually. Sometimes I get lucky and can discover how to use the current version of whatever it is by using a search engine. Even more rarely, a UI element uses an idiom from an older time, involving plainly distinguished buttons, text labels, and perhaps even usable documentation.
I have developed a variant of your heuristic. I know that when a web site appears to have no clickable elements at all, just some kind of image, the image is supposed to be a gateway - you click it to get what I think of as the REAL web site. And on many sites you'll get a list of items, with pictures and a line or two of text. Some of those have a "more" button, to get full info for a single one of those items. Others require clicking on the image. Still others require clicking on whatever appears to be the name of the item. But that's as far as I'd taken this heuristic; in particular, I'd never applied it to email, perhaps because most emails I've encountered still have something like an explicit "read more"
At any rate, thanks for the extra tool for decoding modern interfaces. Without having it mentioned explicitly, it might have taken me several years to go from "astral codex ten dropped a useful function" to "the silly gits think clicking on their title is an obvious interface" to "and they are not alone; clicking the title is worth a try whenever I encounter a UI with no apparent way to get to the complete content I came for."
Don't forget the light gray text!
I have had this particular heuristic for maybe 30 years. I don't consider it to have anything to do with "modern" UI in particular.
Hmm, I'm trying to remember whether html/rich text email was already common by 1993. I don't think it was. I don't think that even the html-based web was all that common. This was still a time of dial up modems, and I don't recall whether the more expensive ones had yet reached 9600 baud.
Not remembering for sure, I did some checking.
Google tells me that the first version of html was written in 1993. Myst - a popular game I disliked, involving finding the right pixel to click on to make progress, in a sea of images, was released in Sept 1993. (I still use "playing myst" as a disparaging metaphor for UIs that involve hunting for invisible UI elements.) I believed at the time that Myst was fairly unique, and couldn't understand its popularity.
I doubt you'd have had many opportunities to apply this heuristic 30 years ago, except perhaps for games like Myst.
If anyone's interested in AI stuff, we might have our first report of Gemini (Google's upcoming model that's supposed to compete with OpenAI's GPT-4).
https://twitter.com/BrianRoemmele/status/1702671064239833415?s=20
"It is equivalent to ChatGPT-4 but with newly up to the second knowledge base. This saves it from some hallucinations."
Plug for meat-eaters who want to find more humanely raised meat: https://findhumane.com/
Interesting idea! Do you know if anything like this exists for Europe?
We've been focused on the U.S. so far, so I haven't done much research on Europe yet, but the U.K. does have some producers certified as Animal Welfare Approved (which is the best certification in the U.S.): https://agreenerworld.org.uk/directory/
Were the Crusades bad? I mean, schooling has led me to believe they were bad, but the older I get the more I’m convinced my schooling was a bunch of lies and prejudicial assertions.
On the one hand, one can say that we can’t judge the past at all because their values were too different from ours. OTOH, does that mean we can’t judge Hitler? If we can judge Hitler, then why can’t we judge the Pope Urban II?
Don’t we arrive at our present values precisly by judging the past, and saying no, yes, no, no,yes, no?
If in the year 2023 we can confidently say Hitler was bad then we shold be able to, with some level of confidence, say whether Pope Urban II was good or bad. No?
I say Hitler was bad, and the Crusades were good. Christian culture thrived after the Crusades.
We could analyze forever which parts of the Crusades were good or bad or in between, but the one comment that crosses my mind when people are morally outraged by the Crusades (as, apparently, your teachers were), is: why is it always the Crusades?
Why does nobody ever debate the morality of any other medieval or ancient war?
Were the Roman conquests bad? Was Alexander the Great a monster? Should the royals of Britain apologize for the 100 years war? Should the royals of Scandinavia apologize for the Viking conquests? Should everyone in Europe apologize to everyone else for the 30 years war?
Nobody ever sees any of that as a moral problem. On the contrary, people today tend to glorify the conquerors of the past, which has always made me feel uncomfortable. See, for example, Greece and North Macedonia fighting each other over who gets to claim Alexander as their own. Why so eager to claim a warmonger? Also, why do people admire the Romans for all the wrong reasons? For violently subjugating other countries?
I see all the time the bloody conquerors of every era of history, from Alexander to Napoleon, being exalted as great heroes and role models. The crusaders are the only warmongers of the past that get criticized, all the others? we love them today!
I'm an atheist. As an atheist, I have always seen the medieval Church as just another political organization, and I have no reason to feel particularly outraged if and when it fails to uphold the morality of Jesus, any more than I'd feel outraged if any medieval king behaves in the same way.
If unlike me you're a Catholic, then you perhaps do have a reason to discuss the morality of what the Church did, but it would have to be a discussion explicitly based on Christian principles and therefore not suited to this forum. From a secular perspective, the discussion is an odd one; why are we singling out the crusaders? when there are so many people today who casually glorify the violence of Vikings, Romans...
Note that I don't mean any of this as a justification for warmongering in any era.
Wasn't there something in Shakespeare about the Crusades being a way to get troublesome younger sons *out* of Europe?
Yea but that was more of a wisecrack than a historical fact. It was largely true of the First Crusade, but not the Second (Louis VII and Conrad III were first sons) nor the Third (Richard I and Philip II and Frederick I were first sons). Then the Fourth through Sixth were smaller hosts that were led by some first sons as well as some not.
I mean, which bits in particular?
The fourth crusade was such an absurd comedy of errors. It deserves to be made into a long television series by Armando Iannucci that grows darker each season.
The crusaders asked Venice to build them a massive fleet to sail on Jerusalem. The Doge built one, but far fewer Crusaders actually showed up, so they couldn't pay for the whole fleet. So the Doge was like, "well, ok, I built a fleet you can't pay for, let's talk. I'll tell you what we can do. How about you pay me back by sacking a city on my list instead of Jerusalem? You'll get some practice sacking cities, I get to punish my rivals, everybody wins."
Backed into a corner, they agreed and sacked the Christian city of Zara.
The Pope excommunicated the crusaders, naturally, though the excommunication was hidden from them by their superiors to avoid, you know, hurting morale.
While they were wintering in Zara, the son of a deposed emperor appeared. He said, 'Hey I heard you like sacking cities for money, so here's the deal. My father ran a rich Empire. I'll give you unbelievable riches if you simply reinstate me as the rightful Emperor in Constantinople. I have inherited so much wealth, you can't even imagine, you just need to do this one small thing to help me unlock it."
Crusaders were desperate for funds, so they said sure, falling victim to one of the first deposed prince scams in history, the audacious success of which must have inspired countless Nigerian spammers.
The Doge was a big proponent of this plan, despite knowing no reinstated Byzantine emperor could possibly keep this promise. However... the Byzantines did massacre thousands of Venetians in 1182, so he was fully on board. (This "massacre of the latins" is itself a hard event to wrap one's head around and deserves separate treatment. In short, the roman catholics in Turkey were outsiders who dominated merchant financing and became incredibly rich, so they became a persecuted minority, yadda yadda attempted genocide, you know how it goes.)
So as it happened, the current Emperor was the uncle of the prince. But Constantinopolitans (yes that's the archaic demonym) didn't really have an entrenched concept of succession, so nobody in the city really cared about the transfer of power. Honestly one brother seemed as good as any other.
Halfway through the siege on Constantinople, the uncle brought out 8500 troops to surround the 3500 crusaders. Having the upper hand he... simply panicked and ordered his whole army to retreat, then quietly fled the city.
The imperial officials said, alright, fine, we'll just reinstate the deposed emperor, father of the deposed prince. He's not dead he was just uh, thrown in a dungeon. And blinded a bit. Having all their demands met was among the worst things that could have happened to the crusaders. Suddenly they had no demands, but also the Prince had no power or money to pay them what he had promised.
So the crusaders said "ok, new deal, his son has to be co-emperor." And the city was like, "but it's an emperor. the whole point is that there aren't two." The crusaders said "even so." So the city officials sighed and said, "ok fine he's co-emperor but we don't like where this is going."
Now that the prince was co-emperor, he realized that his uncle had nearly emptied the treasury before fleeing, really getting the best possible outcome here. (Well, it went downhill for him from there but anyway.)
The prince said, fine, have everybody melt down antiquities for gold and silver. This was not received well by the people, some of whom owned antiquities. There were, in fact, riots. The riots killed some Latins, which incensed the crusaders. In response the crusaders attacked a mosque, but it was well defended by residents so they had to retreat. The crusaders lit the "Great Fire" to cover their escape, which raged out of control for days, leaving some 100,000 homeless, and not exactly further endearing the crusaders to the local populace.
So, things deteriorated from here, and it wasn't long at all before the prince was strangled by a court official, naturally, who claimed the throne, naturally. The crusaders kind of lost their mind at the death of their patron, or who would have been their patron had he ever actually paid them. But that was a pretty fine distinction at this point. They went scorched earth, slaughtering and raping their way across the city.
Was this crusade good?
I'd say easy no? I don't think this is some kind of schoolmarm propaganda either, I think it was just one ridiculous disaster after another culminating with streets painted in blood. But I guess I'd admit it's also hard for me to view it as a singular moral act. It seems so abstract and absurd it's more like a force of nature that just snowballed. Like, sometimes tigers descend from the hills and wreak havoc on a village. Sometimes mobs erupt in human society crying for blood, and nobody can stop or control them. It is a terrifying thing we sometimes do and it seems inappropriate to use the same words for these horrific disasters that we use for say, someone stealing a wallet or cheating on a spouse. I don't know if anyone will agree with me, you can just tally up the harms and call it immoral, sure, but in some other sense it feels like moral language utterly fails here.
Entertainingly put.
That really is a "yes, but" question 😁
Original impetus? Genuine religious conviction
Over the centuries? Seen as a way of getting rich quick, but also addressing real political threats (the Muslim empires were not sitting around being all tolerant and discussing philosophy, they were expanding by force and conquest and presented a real threat that they were on the doorstep of Europe)
EDIT: Forgot Spain, with the occupation/settlement there (describe it how you prefer), they *were* in Europe.
The crusades were of their time, and in many ways justified. The hostility to them derives from the Protestant revolution in Britain in particular (England heavily backed the crusades so the popular memory of that needed to be crushed), from understandable Jewish antipathy to the effects of the crusades on the Jewish population, and to a lesser extent modern wokeness which sees the westerner as always the bad guy.
I would say (based on my limited knowledge) that the Crusades were fairly well justified, their execution was part brilliant, part atrocious (Constantinople WTF?), and the results were a mixed bag (slowing down the spread of Islam, importing ancient and medieval knowledge from the Islamic world into Europe vs. horrible atrocities and all-round suffering), but still much better than if they hadn't taken place.
So I wouldn't round them down to "all bad".
The "importing ancient knowledge" part looks different when you realize that it's because of Islam that the ancient knowledge was not available in Europe in the first place.
Losing Egypt meant losing access to papyrus. Papyrus decays much faster than parchment, particularly if it's stored anywhere that isn't absolutely dry. So they couldn't copy stuff faster than it decayed.
Atrocities were on both sides, but the Muslims were much worse on surrendered cities.
What we can say about Hitler, Mao, Stalin et al is that they would have been nothing - you wouldn't even have heard of them - if it weren't for their millions of acolytes. https://grahamcunningham.substack.com/
If we're consequentialists, it looks like Spain, where the crusaders succeeded, is considerably better off than neighbouring Morocco, which remained under non-Christian rule. So it would seem like at least one of the crusades was good.
I would distinguish between the reconquista and the Crusades. The latter was directed toward the Holy Lands of the middle east.
Not so clear what curve to grade on though. Spain is richer on an absolute scale, but adjusting for region Spain is one of the poorer European countries while Morocco is rich for Africa.
Spain is richer than most European countries in terms of GDP/capita. I don't think Morocco and other white African countries have much in common with black African countries.
I think the sensible attitude is to judge people and events by the moral standards of their day, but to judge the moral standards of their day by the standards of our day. So it's fair to judge Hitler for killing lots of people (which was exceptionally bad by the moral standards of his own day) but not fair to judge Winston Churchill for being against gay marriage or some shit.
I don't really understand your comment. Who is saying they were bad? What do they mean by bad? Can you give an example?
In the sense of being a bad idea for Europe, this seems largely true doesn't it? Lots of knights and commoners died, and in the end hardly anything was gained. The Fourth Crusade in particular was a moronic own-goal that opened up eastern Europe to Ottoman conquest.
In the sense of people listing the Crusades as an example of the evils committed in the name of religion, usually along with the Inquisition and witch-hunts, I think it's a bad example of an accurate point. There have been heaps of religious wars, often between sects of the same religion with slightly differing doctrines. In those cases the deaths are clearly the fault of religion, but most people don't know about those wars but have heard of the Crusades. So the Crusades get used as the standard example of "pointless religious war" even though they barely fit: the Muslims started the agression (most recently with Seljuk invasion of Byzantium), the Crusades were a response to aggression and an attempt to protect peaceful pilgrims from violence, and religious belief was the motivating factor but not the sole reason for the wars: stopping Turkish conquest of Europe, protecting Europeans in the Levant, and so on.
Now if leftist people are really using the Crusades as an example of oppression of Muslims, that's so moronic I can hardly believe it. Since the Muslim world was indescribably richer, more powerful and more pivilleged than the West at the time, how does this make the tiniest degree of sense? The only coherent form of this for a leftist would be something like "you blame Muslims for supporting terrorism, but they probably feel the same way Christians did in the 11th century: marginalised and desperate, and thus resorting to violence, understand where they're coming from etc". Do you have an example of someone making this point?
"What do they mean by bad? Can you give an example?"
Smelly ignorant religious zealot Westerners attacked, for no reason but greed and bigotry, peaceful advanced tolerant Muslim societies that came into being in the Middle East simply by strolling along handing out flowers to all they met, and then somehow becoming the rulers of those territories (probably because they were so nice everyone loved them and wanted to be ruled by them).
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fdbNeaj62IE
I think there's a large lack of nuance on both sides of this. That video is an example of my third paragraph above: "the crusades were just another senseless religious war", claimed partly because most people making the claim don't know the actual details of the crusades, and partly because they're trying to get at the fact that there *have* been plenty of senseless religious wars, but most people they're talking to haven't heard of them. So they use the Crusades as the famous go-to example even though it's a very bad example.
I'm sure there are plenty of insane leftist academic historians potraying it the way you describe, but I don't think that's the mainstream cultural attitude in movies and typical schools. "Pointless war because different groups can't get along" is.
Also, I feel it's important to note two things:
First, "and then somehow becoming the rulers of those territories (probably because they were so nice everyone loved them and wanted to be ruled by them)" is actually a fairly accurate description of what happened in the initial Islamic conquests of Egypt and parts of the Levant. Heretical churches like the Coptics were in fact treated a lot better under Isalm than under the iron-fisted Byzantine Church, and many of them welcomed the conqurerors (who of course did also have, you know, an army though).
Second, the Islamic world became *much* more brutal by the 11th century; a lot of this was the fault of the bloodthirsty Turks (oh no, racism! we can't acknowledge that some *cultures* are more violent than others!) compared to the philosophical Arabs. But also hardening of attitudes: destruction of the Church of Holy Sepulchre by a mad caliph, invasions of Byzantine Anatolia, increased persecution of Christian pilgrims in the Holy Land. Those things were all basically *the* causes of the First Crusade, and think all reasonable historians recognise this.
Tl; dr "muslims have always been violent barbarians" is no better than "muslims have always been helpless victims". Although I absolutely agree that the latter is far more inaccurate in the modern world.
Are aggressive wars bad? I.e. is it OK for one nation/tribe to attack another with intent to conquer, or even to raid?
Medieval thinking only tended to have a problem with this if the attacked group was of the same religion as the attackers. (Christian vs Christian; Muslim vs Muslim, etc.) And in any case, lots of people attacked co-religionists, without even the fig-leaf of claiming they were heretical or schismatic. On the other hand, attacking nations/tribes of other religions was often considered good. You might be able to save some souls by forcible conversion. Or at least transfer property (land, loot, peasants, slaves) from undeserving to deserving people.
More people today like to say that wars of aggression are never OK. But they still happen. There's often some kind of fig leaf - we don't simply want their stuff; we're retaliating for something they did, or spreading democracy, or regaining our traditional sphere of influence.
>Were the Crusades bad?
Probably not uniquely or unusually bad, for the time period. There were civilian massacres, but it's believed the deaths numbered in the low thousands. Compare with (say) Genghis Khan, who has three million-plus massacres to his name (Urgench, Merv, Nishapur) by some reports.
I'm all for the crusades being condemned, provided that the schooling system in question even so much as acknowledges the reality of violent islamic conquests of Christendom, and ideally their even greater badness. The fact that the crusades are usually criticized in isolation and treated as some uniquely evil part of the middle ages really demonstrates that this criticism is done for primarily propagandistic reasons rather than dispassionate historical enquiry/instruction. As does the fact that the crusades are commonly invoked when trying to portray muslims as an historically oppressed (at the hands of europeans) people.
There's a big difference between history pointing out the sins of your (religious) ingroup[1] and the sins of the outgroup. It *is* uniquely evil, because it's an example of people *following your[1] God*, rather than "heathens" or "heretics", acting in an evil way. It's a cautionary tale - "your religion is not immune to moral sin". That's not something you need to emphasize for the outgroup, because your average American will already hear that every day (especially in the post 9/11 world).
It's reductive to call it "propaganda" - in fact, I think calling it that is itself propaganda of the culture war. Calling the crusades to criticism significantly predates the modern culture wars where you *might* claim it's woke atheists writing the textbooks - my grandmother, who is Catholic, currently lives in a religious retirement community, and was educated back before the term "political correctness" was invented, when churchgoers wrote the textbooks, thinks the crusades were awful. You *might* be able to argue that it was anti-Catholic propaganda (because Rome), but again, Grandma was Catholic.
And really, there's another much simpler reason why more time is spent on the atrocities of the crusades than of the Muslim nations: US history curriculum just doesn't give a fuck about them. It's all Greece+Rome -> European royal conflicts -> American colonization. The only reason the Moors even show up is because they invaded Spain, an Actually Important country.
Side note: That last sentence there is kind of undermined by the fact that the biggest death toll I can find of a Muslim conflict is the Moorish wars, which was against the Byzantine Empire, AKA The Holy Roman Empire, But East.
[1] America, despite its protests to the contrary, has in-all-but-explicit-law been a *Christian* country up until very recently, and even now still mostly is. This has been reflected in the way we frame history.
Edit: Also, not to put too fine a point on it, but posting something that reduces to "I don't think we acknowledge the Muslims can be responsible for mass deaths enough" a week after 9/11 is kind of a wild take, my dude.
Christian, yes. Catholic, no. The hostility to the crusades in the English speaking world is not an in group hostility.
>There's a big difference between history pointing out the sins of your (religious) ingroup[1] and the sins of the outgroup.
If you think the crusaders are the "ingroup" of people who criticize the crusades, you're out of your mind. It's *literally* more correct to say that muslims are the ingroup of liberal atheist American historians and teachers who criticize the crusades.
>That's not something you need to emphasize for the outgroup, because your average American will already hear that every day (especially in the post 9/11 world).
The people who condemn the crusades think that muslims are an historically oppressed group, despite the fact that they are responsible for as much violent imperialism as anyone else, and have as much if not more of a tradition of slavery than Europeans which literally NEVER gets talked about by these people.
And in any case, muslim imperialism is precisely WHY the crusades first happened. Acting like this isn't the case IS PROPAGANDA. There's no scholarly justification for this - it's literally to make the crusades look worse and the muslims innocent.
Also, I've literally never seen a muslim criticize their own "in-group's" historical atrocities, so if they won't do it, we should, especially since they were directed in part at "our ingroup"!
>You *might* be able to argue that it was anti-Catholic propaganda (because Rome), but again, Grandma was Catholic.
That could not be less relevant. We're talking about the here and now, and the people talking the most about the crusades today are by and large not christians, not pro-christianity
>[1] America, despite its protests to the contrary, has in-all-but-explicit-law been a *Christian* country up until very recently, and even now still mostly is.
Institutionally, America is extremely not Christian, and there's few safer ideologies in academia than anti-Christian ones.
>Also, not to put too fine a point on it, but posting something that reduces to "I don't think we acknowledge the Muslims can be responsible for mass deaths enough" a week after 9/11 is kind of a wild take, my dude.
Almost no rhetoric by any major politician or insitution in the US emphasizes the role of muslims in 9/11. If white supremacists had been responsible for 9/11, that's all anyone would be talking about today. The liberal historians who condemn the crusades are exactly the ones who tie themselves in knots claiming that 9/11 attackers weren't "real" muslims and that these attacks have nothing to do with Islam, and that Islam (a religion founded by a warlord and which has as one of its most prominent symbols a sword) is a "religion of peace", whereas the crusades are taken as an indictment of Christianity itself. The liberal historian and US intuitional rhetoric around 9/11 proves my point precisely.
The point remains, American liberals like to portray muslims as historically oppressed, and this could not be further from the truth. The fact that muslims committed 9/11 does not change this fact and shouldn't spare them from condemnation if europeans are to be condemned for theirs.
>Institutionally, America is extremely not Christian, and there's few safer ideologies in academia than anti-Christian ones.
US Senate, 85% Christian: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Religious_affiliation_in_the_United_States_Senate
House of Representatives, 89% Christian: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Religious_affiliation_in_the_United_States_House_of_Representatives
President of the US, avowed Catholic.
SECRETARY OF EDUCATION, vocal Catholic: https://religionnews.com/2022/12/21/education-secretary-cardona-if-it-werent-for-my-faith-i-wouldnt-be-here/#:~:text=Indeed%2C%20references%20to%20faith%20are,of%20the%20Department%20of%20Education.
This claim is just blatantly counterfactual. Just because conservatives like to rant about how academia is anti-Christian doesn't mean the people in charge of the curriculum actually are.
"and have as much if not more of a tradition of slavery than Europeans which literally NEVER gets talked about by these people."
Yeah, they started the African slave trade CENTURIES before Europeans got involved. Hardly anyone knows this, it seems, and if they do they don't talk about it. How have Blacks decided that what was done to them by Arabs is somehow not worthing talking about? Or are they just too scared of being cancelled by leftist Whites?
1. America-centrism. How many people know that vast, vast majority of slaves in the trans-Atlantic slave trade went to the Caribbean and Brazil?
2. Slavery in the Americas was vastly worse than slavery in the Arab world (and slavery in the Caribbean and Brazil was worse than slavery in the US). Slaves in the Arab world were more likely to be employed as domestic servants than as agricultural workers; were not necessarily chattel; and were not necessarily confined to the lower strata of society.
3. African slaves made up a far greater proportion of the US population than of the population of the Arab world.
I suspect they're angrier about what's more recent, but I'm guessing.
Muslim countries maintained legal slavery well into the 20th century, so it's probably not recency. My cynical take would be that there are simply no incentives to be angry at Muslim slavers, whereas European ex-colonizers seem quite willing to keep paying recompense for as long as they're reminded of what their forefathers did.
Right, but "recent" is still a century and a half ago in the US. And the British discovered, and suppressed, an actual slave trade in 1850s Africa (run by Arabs), half a century after both Britain and the US ended their slave trades.
And just as a general feeling, I don't get the sense that recency has that much to do with it. I get a stronger sense of wanting to blame a particular race/culture for all the evils of the world for ideological reasons. Where that comes from, I'm not sure (I suspect academics, but I could be wrong).
Can you be clearer about whose ingroup is being condemned, and whether the ones doing the condemning are actually members of the group? Based on what you're saying, a Christian teacher condemning the Crusades is good, criticising her own ingroup, but an atheist or Muslim teacher doing so would be being bigoted against an outgroup. Is this what you mean? I think most people using your reasoning don't mean that at all, would have no problem with a non-Christian condemning Christianity, and most of this stuff about "privilege" and "ingroups" and "punching down" relies on fudging the details of who is actually doing what, to avoid getting caught in blatant self-contradiction.
Also, using "America is a Christian country" as a justification for allowing harsher criticism of Christianity, when "America is NOT a Christian country" is routinely used by the same people to oppose any public recognition of it or any Christian influence on public policy, looks like the worst kind of motte-and-bailey, and I hope that's not what you mean.
I don't think I can be clearer, no, because I think I was plenty clear about what I meant. The ingroup are members of an overwhelmingly Christian society.
I'm not interested in getting into a definitions fight on whether the US is a Christian country. It's a complicated question, yes, and constitutionally+legally we're not supposed to be, but one of the major parties disagrees, we swear our presidents in on the bible, pledge allegiance to a country "under god", declares only Christian holidays as government holidays, and a host of other things. For all intents and purposes, Christianity is THE ingroup, such that even our atheists are explicitly of the "I don't believe in God but the God I don't believe in is Jesus" Christian Atheist/Agnostic varieties.
(Also, "You say America is a Christian country yet others who I've identified as your tribe also say it's not, curious" is an actual motte-and-bailey here, since you're egregiously conflating two definitions of an is/ought mismatch, perhaps the biggest is/ought problem in US politics)
Also, the context of the conversation is not individual teachers, it's "the schooling system", meaning the important bit is what the state is putting in the textbooks and telling these teachers to teach. And I think that's still overwhelmingly presided by Christians and Christian agnostics. (There were still public schools that taught creationism not that long ago)
Look, I don't even *necessarily* disagree with your overall point. But there are a lot of sloppy claims made by the proponents of the "it's fine for me to attack your group but not fine for you to attack mine" double standard, and I'd really rather they be clarified. So I can see whether they really are justified or not.
First, using "under God" as an example of Christian dominance when the context is a war against Muslims makes literally zero sense: we're not talking about a war against pagans or atheists. Also, using "American atheists focus their atacks on Christianity specifically" is a weird piece of evidence for Christians being privileged. Fair points about the bible and holidays though.
Second, the motte-and-bailey applies across "tribes", that's the essence of it, and it's being used if at least some people are hopping between the motte and the bailey. All I'm saying is each person needs to be consistent. If you say America needs to be tougher on the evils of Christianity because it's a Christian country, you can't also say it needs to distmantle public Christian practices because it's not. Or if you say it needs to be secular and treat all religions the same, then that includes equal standards for criticism of all religions. Pick one or the other, as long as you do that you're fine. But there are definitely people who want all the benifits and none of the costs, to have their cake and eat it, and I'm calling that out as dishonest.
Third, my point is that a person who is not a Christian who attacls Christianity is, by definition, not attacking their ingroup. Scott's "I Can Tolerate Anything Except the Outgroup" applies particularly strongly here. If you're talking only about the system, I'd ask whether you still accept individuals should be called out for unfair outgroup bashing even if their outgroup is the society's ingroup? And whether a particular college with only 10% Christians (say 20% Muslim and 70% atheist) should have the opposite standard on the Crusades? And whether a Muslim majority country should be careful not to condemn the crusades but to always condemn their own culture's actions?
I just want people to apply a consistent standard. I'm not saying you're not, but just that I've seen many, many people who are not, and I'm applying zealous scrutiny.
I think the fact that you insist on referring to talking about factual history as an "attack" indicates to me that you're trying to have a dogmatic argument, rather than a discussion where we converge on truth. It's not an "attack", it's history, and it's being used as a parable. Learning about Japanese internment camps and why they were wrong doesn't make America your outgroup, and it doesn't mean you're "attacking" America.
Framing any admission of wrongdoing as an attack is culture war nonsense (like I said in my first post), and I'm not interested in engaging with you any further on that, sorry.
What do you mean by bad? At the time, it caused lots of suffering, hard to expect future outcomes to changes that fact?
What's the counterfactual?
Invading Nazi Germany caused a lot of suffering too.
On net, though?
Over what time frame that doesn't count as "future outcomes"? While the invasion is ongoing it's surely increasing net suffering.
Okay, I'm not usually one to ask for spoilers, but I could use some help with this puzzle.
Jonathan Blow doublecrossed this thread:
https://nitter.net/Outdoctrination/status/1694842310625010144#m
All my priors say something the author is hiding a lie in plain site and my gut says it has something to do with their over/loose use of "average" and "typical". But I just can't place it.
I mean, my god, of course soldiers in war are going to eat 6k calories. And of course pedestrians will need more calories than drivers. But I don't think those answers are really enough to call it the "solution" to the puzzle. Any suggestions on where I can stand to make this all line up?
How accurate are the calorie assessments? Maybe all those studies are overestimating calorie intake massively.
Calories are tricky: The same food provides more calories when it is cooked first, as the body needs to spend less energy to break it apart. Has the caloric density of food stayed the same over the decades? Potatoes today probably provide more calories per gram then half a century ago.
Sedentary lifestyle has been mentioned by other commenters. I want to add that even similar activities have probably become physically easier, like driving a modern car with a/c compared to 40ies hunk of metal without power steering. I think a thousand small things in daily life might just add up as well, like taking the stairs instead of escalators, etc.
I think he's ignoring how much physical effort was expended by normal day-to-day activities. Men working in factories probably did a lot more lifting, hauling, and general moving around, besides standing on their feet all day. Less automation, fewer labour saving tools and devices. Same with women working in the home - even with a washing machine, you were hauling wet clothes (which would have been heavy) out of the tub and wringing them out, etc.
Probably more walking, less transport by car. Less treats that we routinely consume - I was raised that eating in public (e.g. walking on the street) was bad manners and showed off your ignorance. Think of things like Starbucks drinks, which seem to be less coffee and more sugar delivery systems, which are consumed today but which would not have been available at all in the past.
There's hidden expenditure of calories in there that I don't think he's accounting for on the rough "they ate 3,000 calories a day and weren't fat".
In Poverty, a Study of Town Life (1901), Seebohm Rowntree estimates that moderately active adult men require 3500 calories a day to maintain health. In Viola Johnstone's Slimming Dishes (1957), her table says that moderately active 5'8" tall men weighing 11 stone need to eat no more than 2260 calories per day if they are not to gain weight. Both of these are accurate for vastly different meanings of "moderately active."
Exactly, for the first one from 1901 he is probably using working class men doing manual labour and who are living on inadequate meals (see the problems with the conscripts for the First World War from the towns and cities who tended to be short and often suffering from rickets and other disorders):
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/002200948001500201
1957 is a world that is much more mechanised and Davies is writing for people who are watching their weight, so probably white-collar workers and much more sedentary/clerical labour, with access to better and more plentiful food.
Even office jobs 30 years ago involved more movement. I started working at a Fortune 500 corporate headquarters in 1991; and we walked around making copies, handing out memos, if you had to ask the accounting manager a question you just walked downstairs to talk to him, etc.. It was always noticeable when someone moved up to junior executives level because they’d start gaining weight - their workday got longer, they had to entertain clients with dining out and drinks, and they stopped walking around the office so much because now they could tell the secretary to go pass out memos and go talk to accounting for them.
The female executives usually reacted by starving themselves to stay slim; I remember one female VP in her 40s who had a tomato and cucumber salad and five cigarettes for lunch every day - but the men would start really packing on the pounds.
Even at home, we moved around more in those days. You had to get up to change the channel on the tv, to answer the landline phone, etc., and there just wasn’t as much passive entertainment available. I stayed slim in those days by going out dancing a lot and on the weekends we’d go to the city and walk around all day shopping.
> Think of things like Starbucks drinks, which seem to be less coffee and more sugar delivery systems
It's no surprise to me that the way to make coffee popular is to ensure that nobody can taste it.
I’m far from being an expert, but ...
I don’t necessarily think he’s “hiding a lie” in plain sight. Rather I think he’s just constructing a simple narrative that is partially, but significantly true. But from your question, I get the impression that you may want to do the same.
It’s a complex issue. Calories in vs calories out is obviously, but trivially true.
But there are so many interconnected factors – from economic and cultural to psycho-chemical and genetic – that affect metabolic health, caloric intake and activity, and affect individuals differently, that I have no idea how anyone can try to judge the relative historical effect of any one factor on a societal level.
People don’t move enough? Okay, but why? Is it only because of cars and TVs, or does nutrition affect our behavior too? If so, how? And when something like that’s true for a majority of people in a society, just saying that people used to walk more seems like an explanation intended to shut down further investigation, and turn a systemic problem into a personal responsibility. Besides, as you say, that doesn’t seem like the solution to the whole puzzle.
Then again, walking is just one way we are different today. There are so many ways human beings’ environments and behaviors differ from those of a few generations ago: We move less, we stress more, we eat different sugars and fats, we get our fructose in a form optimized for quick uptake and high blood sugar spikes in our blood stream, we stay up later, we are subjected to different advertising and marketing, we have more money and better access to all kinds of food, except we can no longer afford/take time to eat quality whole foods, etc. etc. It would be weird if those things had no effect.
Add to that, small differences in any of those factors will disperse, compound, manifest and interact over different time horizons, making it even harder to parse the consequences. (Also making me very suspicious of the round numbers used in the thread.)
I think one of our main problems is that we try to come up with simple narratives and one-size-fits-all solutions.
Or rather, that might be healthy for any single one of us, as individuals: Identifying the key variable(s) in our life that provides the most leverage. And as a society, I think we understand most of the variables at play pretty well, so individuals should be able to discover something that works for them.
(In other words: with reasonable effort and resources, there’s no individual whose overweight/obesity can’t be understood and addressed, however imperfectly, by our current knowledge.)
The problem appears when we become too eager to turn that one lever into a simple solution for the whole problem in all of society, and we become quick to dismiss anything that doesn’t fit our simple model. We focus exclusively on part of the puzzle, and no part of the puzzle solves the whole problem for everyone. So we get fad diets and exercises that work amazingly well for some, but do little for others.
Unfortunately, this way of thinking seems common among doctors and scientists (and journalists and politicians and...) as well as lay people.
Consequently, unless people get lucky, there’s no reliable way to get sufficiently qualified, personalized and holistic help that actually works when they’re struggling with obesity. Scale that up, and *that* is the simple issue that becomes the societal problem. 😉
One thing that doesn't get factored into people getting less exercise might be a combination of long hours at sedentary jobs and long commutes.
The stereotype of sedentary seems to be someone sitting and (used to be watching tv) streaming/doing social media, but work-related sitting takes up a lot of hours.
It occurred to me that the Amish might be a good test to see whether the rise in obesity had some kind of environmental factor. They live lifestyles pretty close to older generations- avoiding modern conveniences, spending much less time sitting, and being a lot more likely to eat home-grown food- so if they have obesity rates similar to the general population, that would pretty strongly suggest something other than lifestyle and overall food choice is causing the rise in obesity.
Unfortunately, the studies here seem to conflict oddly. There's a 2013 study at https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3625537/ which finds that Amish people in Ohio do indeed have the same average BMI as non-Amish people in the same area, and a 1990 study at https://www.jstor.org/stable/45049306 found something similar. However, there are other studies like the ones at https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/14707772/ and https://journals.lww.com/acsm-msse/fulltext/2007/03000/physical_activity_and_body_mass_index_of_children.3.aspx which seem to show the opposite- the Amish they studied apparently had very low BMI relative to the general population.
Someone should really do a deep dive into these studies to find out where the discrepancy is, and what we can learn from it.
I recommend "Burn" by Herman Pontzer and the substack "experimental fat loss".
If I think of an AI as metaphorically a different species than ones that have come before, then it scares me to think that this new species would be more intelligent than humans. Because of course a much more intelligent species is going to makes mince meat out of a less intelligent one.
But if I think of AI as an extension of human intelligence in the transhumanist sense it doesn’t scare me so much.
I think AI is much more likely to be like the latter than the former. What are the arguments against that?
Typically it’s arguments like “mind-space is vast, and the optimizer producing the AI mind is very different from the one that produced human minds”.
Starting points: https://www.lesswrong.com/tag/optimization , https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/FkgsxrGf3QxhfLWHG/risks-from-learned-optimization-introduction
Personally I think this is one of those empirical questions where philosophers can get hung up on what is logically possible vs. what the local physics of the word actually produces, and we just need to run more rigorous experiments. To me it looks like the smartest LLMs are quite close to humans in mind space, but I think there are quite wide error bars on both what is “actually going on inside” and how different the minds will be when they are smart enough to be human-level.
Indeed the more RLHF, the more LLMs exhibit the same sort of cognitive biases and mental heuristics, which EY took to be depressing that these minds were being irrational, but I took to be a major update in favor of AI being human-like. See for example the “Humans in, Humans out” paper, which I’d love to see investigated further.
This sounds a lot like Agent AI vs Tool AI. It's a very interesting concept, so you might want to read about it if you haven't.
I think the difference depends a lot on to what degree humans are in the loop of AI applications.
If e.g. an LLM in a chatbot is a reliable advisor, and humans come to it with questions, receive and evaluate answers, and then choose which actions to take, then the AI will mostly be acting as an extension of human intelligence.
If an LLM in a software agent is directed to increase profits, and the LLM makes decisions and takes actions for days or weeks with the CEO just monitoring the stock price, then the LLM will be acting more like a member of a new species. ( Of course to _fully_ be a new species it would need enough robotic advances and enough "parts closure" for it to be able to copy itself and/or repair itself without human intervention. )
After writing this post in the subreddit last week https://old.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/comments/16chk0g/understanding_the_general_apathy_towards_systemic/
I started to wonder how common it is for people to embrace the idea of there being "systems" in the political context, where actions/policy choices have downstream consequences, which could be evaluated and selected for using a consequentialist framework (ie in order to decide if we should pursue x vs y policy, we should consider the anticipated systems-wide aggregate outcomes).
After speaking to a handful of generic liberals on this (ie civil servants, policy professionals, grad school educated pmcs types), I was shocked at how reprehensible everyone I spoke with found this idea. Discussing this concept felt as if I were broaching a highly taboo and inappropriate subject. The primary response I heard was that "you simply can't look at the consequences to understand what we should do" (this response, almost word for word, came from someone who self-advertises as being interested in "systems thinking"!)
I used to believe that many people disliked markets due to issues of exploitation and inequality, rather than objecting to the concept of a market itself. I also understood that some people had reservations about philosophical consequentialism, but I never thought this would extend to political contexts, where it could be considered merely one factor among many to consider.
I'm now very confused and was wondering if anyone here knows of any writing on this topic — specifically any psychology books/articles on why some people do or do not embrace the idea of systems and consequentialist reasoning.
> "you simply can't look at the consequences to understand what we should do"
I'm not sure what you mean by people saying that, since they obviously look at the consequences when designing a system. One difference I see often in people having similar conversations is the difference between treating the problem as about making a consequentialist judgement on a single decision, or putting in place systems that robustly make decisions that are good on average, and have a system of accountability when things go wrong. Does that fit what you are talking about?
Consequentialism tends to appeal to people with weak moral drives. The simplest explanation for what you observe is that those who have strong moral drives feel negative visceral reactions to the idea that you choose an action for its outcome, which is not far away from saying the ends justify the means.
I have a review of the scientific literature, along with some data a poster at the Motte gave me access to, here: https://thingstoread.substack.com/p/is-utilitarianism-an-amoral-system
Philosopher Richard Chappell has written about how people are averse to actually thinking through philosophical problems https://rychappell.substack.com/p/puzzles-for-everyone
Most people are somewhere between deontologists and consequentialists. Almost nobody is a universal consequentialist. If it were proven that society would be richer by killing less productive people, or allowing children with lifelong chronic illnesses to die (etc etc etc) then most people would still not support doing this.
Neither are most people deontologists, some socialists might prefer poverty and equality* to wealth and inequality, most people would be somewhere between - supporting wealth creation and accumulation only in so much as it benefits them or the general economy.
(Some libertarians are also deontologists).
" If it could be proven that society would be richer by killing less productive people, or allowing children with lifelong chronic illnesses to die (etc etc etc) then most people would still not accept these actions."
I'm not sure that's true. Between the celebration of the Nordic countries using abortion to reduce Down's Syndrome patients and NHS's multiple cases of not just refusing treatment to patients, but forbidding them from finding treatment elsewhere, and the expansion of MAID programs to cover more and more non-terminal conditions, it seems like support for homicide in the service of the Greater Good(tm) is growing
Systems and consequentialist reasoning strike me as two very different things. You haven't given enough information here to understand your friends' views, and I wouldn't be surprised if you and them are misunderstood. My guess is either they 1. don't understand what you're asking, or 2. are fundamentally non-consequentialist.
An example of 1. would be like, I have a Democrat friend who thinks Biden should pack the supreme court to consequentially push democratic policies, and a Democrat friend who thinks he shouldn't because while it'll work today, Republicans will pack the court tomorrow when they have the power. If you asked the second friend if they'd support a policy like packing the court if it would consequentially improve democrat outcomes, they'd say no. They don't actually disagree though they just don't understand what you mean by consequentially.
Point 2 is literally most humans outside this subreddit, who care about things like fairness or justice or whatever outside of mere consequentialism. I'm sure if you ask your friends "would you do x if it raised the total fairness of society?" they'd probably say yes, so long as they're not interpreting your question as "if evil was good, would you choose it?" because that's a confusing question.
Does anyone have a good argument for an average person buying their house? All the good ones I've heard seems to go against it(undiversified, inefficient, expected returns no better than renting), and yet it remains so popular.
I'm not sure what you mean by "expected returns no better than renting"? What is the return from renting? You pay a month's rent, you live in the place for a month, and then you have nothing to show for it. Pay a month's mortgage, and you live in the place for a month and have a decent fraction of a month's mortgage in equity that you can borrow against, cash out when you move on, leave to your heirs, or at very worst claim from the bank as they're evicting you for not continuing to pay the mortgage(*). And which will almost certainly rise in value over time. That's an actual return, which renting offers nothing to compete with.
As an investment, homes are decidedly mediocre, probably with lower return and definitely with higher volatility than a good index fund. But it's an investment that you can make with what would otherwise be your rent money, and you can leverage it with money you borrow at the lowest interest rate plausibly available to an individual investor. It's like your options are A: pay rent and get to live in the place, or B: pay rent and get to live in the place plus a savings bond with a face value roughly equal to the rent payment. How can plan A possibly be superior?
OK, trick question. The transaction costs for buying and selling a house are substantial, and if you're only going to live there for a few years it's not worth it. Or maybe you expect to stay for decades but need the flexibility to leave at a moment's notice. In some markets, rent is substantially cheaper than the mortgage on an equivalent space - but don't assume this is the case, because it usually isn't. If your needs are met by a studio or 1BR, you probably can't buy a comparable house and probably shouldn't buy much more house than you need just because it would serve as a mediocre investment. Maybe you really don't want the responsibility of maintaining a house. Lots of sound reasons to rent instead of buy, in some circumstances.
But the bottom line is, buying a house means spending a lot of money over a long time and at the end of it you own a nice house. Renting means spending a lot of money over a long time and at the end of it you're living on the street unless you come up with still more money.
* Also, there's a lot more hoops the bank has to go through for a foreclosure eviction, if it comes to that.
A lot of the arguments against renting implicitly assume that the terms of your lease are fairly short term; if that doesn't hold then there are stronger cases to be made.
I moved recently, and needed a place near my kids' schools with at least three bedrooms. I won't have the location or size requirements after the younger one graduates, and was able to negotiate a multi-year lease at a slightly-higher-than-asking rent, locked in for the duration.
A mortgage payment alone, given the house's assessed value (which is typically well below sale price around here), would've been more than the rent even before the recent interest rate hikes, plus I'm not on the hook for any sudden massive expenses.
People keep telling me that I shouldn't buy houses, but in my area their prices simply keep growing, for decades. I remember when they cost 1/10 of what they do now, and back then already people told me "don't buy, the prices are now insanely high, they cannot grow anymore, you need to wait until they inevitably drop soon", except that never happened. My only regret is that I didn't buy more.
tl;dr -- maybe buying houses doesn't work in theory, but it definitely works well in practice
But this may depend on the specific place you live. I am in Eastern Europe, so I assume there was a "market imperfection" of local people simply not having enough money to buy more expensive, and foreigners not trusting the situation (e.g. worrying that some new government might nationalize their property overnight)... and as local people get more rich and the foreigners trust the situation more, the prices keep growing... and I suspect that this process has not finished yet.
"But, if the prices keep growing further, then no one will be able to afford buying a house anymore!" Indeed, this is the future, I believe. The houses will all be owned by some rich funds, most of them foreign, and local people will all rent. Except for me, of course.
1. Can't you invest in housing without personally owning the one you live in?
2. "prices simply keep growing, for decades. I remember when they cost 1/10 of what they do now"
sure, but that is true for most think growing at moderate rates over a span of 'decades'
A continuous return of 10%/year will grow 10x in about 23 years
Before reading the other responses, I'll share the advice given to me. If you plan to live in the same place for five or more years, you want to buy so that you're building equity instead of continually paying rent. Five years is typically the break-even point for closing costs and the higher interest payments on a mortgage for the first few years.
Based on this advice, if you would want to keep moving or leave your options open, most people would be better off renting. If you want to be in a stable place long term, you want to buy. All of this depends on a "normal" housing market that isn't seeing rapid gains or losses. Slow losses sounds bad either way, but if you just want a place to live then that's not really a big deal unless you need to take a loan out based on the equity of your house.
I'm about five years from paying off my mortgage, so I think we made the right choice on that.
Nice to not get kicked out of your house after you get old. Or to have to pay increasing rent as you enter your dotage. Nice also to have an asset to fall back on, one that can be monetised or liquified as needed. In fact from the point of view of the individual it’s hard to argue for paying any rent at all - somebody owns that property. Not a penny of rental payments add to your capital. Instead it does add to the owners capital.
It’s only when looking at the “general economy” that more people renting might help grow the economy by a few percentages of percentages, because economic reasons. Labor flexibility is one. There are others.
These kind of economic arguments don’t see the economy as made up of humans, but rather units of production, and if we had better ability to move these units across the economy as needed (with disregard to their personal preferences) then labor and capital would more easily match and GDP increase more rapidly, even if it didn’t benefit the average guy. This kind of economic thinking is anti human.
(In fact being homeless when old - much more likely if I’m the rental sector - and dying younger would probably benefit the economy too, although I doubt this is explicitly mentioned).
My unsatisfying answer is that there is no "average person" when it comes to home-buying. An individual's lifestyle, preferences, future prospects, and housing market all matter *tremendously* more than the generic observation that putting home-owning expenses into an index fund will have a greater return than owning (presuming past performance indicates future returns, which...well...um...).
In my secret heart-of-hearts, I purchased my condo mostly because *I never want to move again.* The aphorism that "three moves are as bad as a fire" certainly *feels* true, even if it obviously isn't. I was happy to pay a premium to stabilize my housing situation; not having to move every 1-3 years was well worth surrendering an extra whatever percent in my portfolio.
Being able to permanently install renter-unfriendly stuff in my condo (like a full wall of bookshelves, and a projector and screen) is a MAJOR bonus, too.
But that's just me! I love stability and I love my stuff. A minimalist who values the freedom to live internationally at whim is going to have wildly different feelings about what they might be willing to do to avoid moving.
It's still in the Irish cultural DNA to try and own your own home, because of evictions during the Famine.
I think for a lot of people, it's a marker of being adult and having arrived at where you should be in life - renting long-term is uncertain, because the landlord could decide to sell up any day and then where do you go? Owning your own home is owning property and a marker of stability and economic worth: you're settled down, you are now a solid citizen.
Once you own the house, you can do whatever you want with it. Wanna knock down wall and make a new room? You can do that. Rip out your tub and put in a giant shower? That too. Build a patio and gazebo in the backyard? Have at it.
Having rented and having owned, there really is something to be said for the sense of freedom and (for lack of better word) ownership that comes with homeowning. The property becomes yours in ways renting never could and you start thinking of it and of what you can do with it in ways you never really considered. It made me ever so slightly sympathetic to those arguments about restricting voting rights to property owners (not that much though), because it really does change your point of view.
On the other hand, from the people I know who own homes, dealing with remodeling and maintenance is practically a second job for them sometimes.
That's the truth. When we bought our house, my dad told me that I'd "be surprised how quickly your house becomes your hobby." He was not joking around.
Assuming you can get the permits, the HOA approves of the style and color of your gazebo, etc.
When you rent, you pay a premium to your landlord to compensate for the fact that 4% of the population are horrible to deal with and creates tons of extra work through stupidity, malice and stubbornness, and since your landlord can't know if you'll be one of them or not you'll have to pay the idiot premium. When you own, you don't need to pay the idiot premium unless you're an idiot. (This creates a lemon effect which further worsens the problem.)
Do you have a citation (or specific reason) for that 4% number? I implicitly agree with your framing, but could see other numbers in that order of magnitude, so I'm always curious where people are getting their intuitions/data from.
Not all all, it's an order-of-magnitude best estimate for a cut-off. It's a continuous distribution: people exist on a spectrum of idiocy but the cost for the landlord increases exponentially as idiocy gets lower.
That really makes sense. Just curious, are you speaking from experience here?
Not as a landlord, but this should be a well-known problem for everyone who has done business with the general public.
The pithy answer is “you are naturally short housing”: https://thezikomoletter.wordpress.com/2012/12/10/you-are-naturally-short-housing/
If house prices go up 10x (or even 2x) in your area and you can no longer afford rent, are you willing/able to change jobs and move somewhere cheaper? If you want to guarantee you can stay where you are (friends, family, job, inertia), a good way to do so is to buy a house so your “rent” doesn’t float with the local market. Rent control is of course another hedge if that is available to you, but it has its own issues/distortions.
"Owning" a house generally means having a mortgage. So you are still quite vulnerable to changes in prices, just in the mortgage rate instead of rent. As a lot of people are now finding out.
You also get the increase in property tax, since that's usually based on the assessed value in some way. Admittedly, it's often delayed, or not based on all of the value, but that's because home owners tend to vote at a higher percentage than renters.
Good point, this is a "US vs. rest of the world" thing, in the US most mortgages are 30 year fixed-rate, thanks to the government backing by the GSEs.
This is a very good point that I considered mentioning, but on careful thought it doesn't seem too true. Hedging is done for the purpose of decreasing risk. Something like an index fund of real estate would work this way, but buying an individual house will likely not, because there's just too much risk involved - it's entirely possible that your house's price will stagnate while the housing market is booming.
The price of your own house doesn't matter at all unless you intend to sell or want a loan against the equity. If your home price stays the same while the neighborhood goes up, you still avoid the problems of increased rent.
Alignment of incentives? If there's something the landlord should be doing there's not the danger that they won't want to, or will drag their feet.
As others have mentioned, there's more leeway to change things or to improve them.
With a rental property they'll raise your rent over time. Housing costs are more predictable, won't generally increase, and may decrease relative to inflation adjusted rent.
The degree to which buying a house is a good idea changes from time to time and from place to place. It's not always a good idea. But it can be.
Moving is massively disruptive and fairly expensive if you have a non-trivial amount of stuff and especially if you have school-age children. As a renter, you may need to move locally if your landlord wants to take the unit off the market for any number of reasons, and you might need to move out of the immediate area or else incur substantial financial hardship if market rent increases enough to strain your budget. But as a homeowner, you're hedged against your future needs for housing and have a vested option to continue living in the same place. You are exposed to the risk of local housing prices falling considerably, but apart from opportunity cost, that's only a problem if you want to move. So if you're relatively settled in and confident of the local job market for your line of work, buying removes a lot of risks of renting.
There's also a difference in size, quality, and mode of living between most rental units and most owner-occupied houses. Rentals are mostly on the smaller side and are mostly apartments. If you want a 2500 square foot detached single-family house with four bedrooms, you can probably find a few on the rental market, but you have a ton more options to buy.
I suspect this depends a lot on the area where you live. If there's a net influx of people, or any kind of gentrification (higher earning people replacing lesser earning people on net), both rents and home prices climb and keep on climbing.
I live in an area of this type. It had a few periods when house values dropped, but like the stock market, they came back up again fairly soon. And to put the icing on the cake, I managed to secure a 30 year fixed rate mortgage that had me paying a combined principle and interest that was just about the same as I'd have had to pay for rent, in the first years of my mortgage, and a lot less than hypothetical rent thereafter.
OTOH, my mother bought a house in an area with net out-migration and perhaps reverse gentrification. When she finally sold the house, the price in dollars was much the same - but inflation meant the dollars she received bought less than those she paid. OTOH, she did get to live rent free for some decades, which surely counts for something.
I had moved to get the best job I could, almost automatically putting me in a growing area with lots of people like me. My mom bought her house in the city where she was born. That may be part of the difference. But of course much of the rest might be luck, for all I know.
Every time I do the math home ownership comes out way ahead financially compared to renting, with a few reasonable assumptions in place. Could you point me to these good arguments that suggest otherwise?
That's surprising, I haven't done explicit calculations, but I would be very interested in yours, since that would seem to imply that houses are undervalued.
My math at this is amateurish so please point out if I'm making a dumb error. I mostly use publicly available calculators rather than rolling R cuz I'm lazy - if I'm super wrong I'll take it a little more seriously.
My partner and I are seriously looking at about $400,000 of house. We live near a up and coming sun belt city, but don't want to live _in_ the city. That money will buy us a 3 bedroom with between 1300 and 1500 sq ft and not much yard. Won't be the newest or prettiest but the area will be plenty safe. Eminently a reasonable option for being childless or for raising 1-2 kids.
We would put 80K down, and then 30 yr fixed rate mortgage assume 5% (we have excellent credit - you can't get a rate this good right now but a few years ago you could and were willing to wait) + property tax + property insurance will put us at about 2400 monthly.
Our current 2br apartment at 1050 sq ft is 1800 a month. To rent an apartment or home equivalent to the above would cost us about 2000 a month based on the listings in my area. Rents in my area have steadily risen by about 5% per year on average.
Even if we assume the real value of the house goes up not at all, just tracks inflation:
(Assuming a 4% discount rate)
Year 10:
House: Present (today) value of down payment and monthly payments so far - 140K
House tracking inflation only is worth about 530k in 2033 dollars.
Equity at year 10 is about 280k in 2033 dollars, depending on how you calculate it. That is, if you sold your home and then paid off the loan you'd be left over with about 280k, very nearly the present value of the money you've paid so far in today's dollars.
Rent:
2000 a month increasing by 5% yearly over 10 years present value is 54k.
If we rented and invested the difference compared with housing we'd have 86k PV to invest at let's assume 6% (including inflation) we'd have 156k. If you think you can invest well enough to get 5% after inflation you'd have 190k in 2033 dollars.
So you could either have spent a PV of 54k renting and invested the rest and at year 10 have 190k in the bank, or you could have spent a PV of 140K and at year 10 have 280k in equity in your house. Over invested in the house? For sure - but I'm willing to be exposed to too much housing risk for 90K in expectation and getting to own my own home which I haven't even discussed has many other things I value relative to renting. And if the value of the house goes up in real terms, then that's just candy.
Even if the house didn't track inflation and at year 10 was exactly 400k, you'd still have about 150k in equity - and I would pay 40k over ten years for the benefits of home ownership over renting, but that's a preference case.
I don't see how home ownership comes out financially behind unless you:
Think house values are going to drop in real terms
Are comparing a very non equivalent rental to the home - if you just rent a worse place you can come out way ahead, but true of buying a worse house too.
Assume rents won't go up
Would love to know if I'm wrong, since I'm looking at buying a house.
But, logically, it seems like housing should be ahead. When I pay my apartment 1800 a month I'm essentially just lighting it on fire in exchange for the right to exist in a place. When I give the bank 2400 a month on a mortgage some of it gets lit on fire but at the end of the period _I own a house_.
Unless your monthly payments end up very very different to each other the house basically has to come out ahead.
I think you have to assume perpetual strong growth in real-estate prices to make it come ahead (since what you put into your home you are not putting into the stock market). When I ran the numbers it really comes down to just those two parameters (real estate vs stock growth rate).
Personally I think it’s more likely that real estate will stop increasing over 30 yr (YIMBYs win, or we go all in on remote work and stop paying the city premium) than that the stock market stops growing, but is this the lens you are using when you say “reasonable assumptions”?
That said I am in favor of home ownership for other (hedging) reasons, I just don’t think it gets me ahead in the happy scenario.
I don't think you need to assume that at all.
The cost to rent a place is almost always higher than the cost of the underlying mortgage, interest, property taxes, and up keep. It's a business and that's how money is made in rental property. Imagine a world where you can rent a place for LESS than the landlord is paying in monthly mortgage, interest, property taxes, and up keep. That would be highly unusual. No one is going to lose money every month renting you a place as some sort of charity operation.
As long as we live in a world were a landlord can make a greater than $0 profit on a place is a world where owning is cheaper than renting. Of course there are TONS of reasons why one would be better off renting for personal or lifestyle reasons, but it being actually cheaper financially is not one of them.
While from first principles it might seem like rent must be higher than mortgage, it actually isn't universally so. In many metro areas it's cheaper to rent: https://www.lendingtree.com/home/mortgage/comparing-rent-vs-owning-a-home-in-nations-largest-metros/
I don't really understand the market kinematics of this; one possibility is that small landlords bought their properties decades ago when they were cheaper, and didn't raise the prices in lockstep with real estate appreciation. But that wouldn't explain why commercial landlords can afford to build new appartments and lease them.
Maybe it's a combination of i) renting is only cheaper for the initial period of the mortgage when your interest payment is high and is cheaper after some breakeven (and most homeowners actually move house within 5 years before they get to the "cheaper" part of the mortgage which would affect the sample of what people are actually paying on their mortgages), and/or ii) commercial landlords get access to cheaper capital and so their annualized debt servicing costs end up being substantially less than a residential mortgage.
As Sovereigness mentioned in another comment, it seems the problem with analysis like that one you linked is that they are not even attempting to compare equivalent or even similar places. As an example: Let's pretend in city X the median apartment is a 2 bedroom 1100 sqft place that rents for $1,000/month and the median home is a 3 bedroom 1,600 sqft place that costs $1,400/month in mortgage and taxes. Would you say that renting is cheaper than owning? Yes, its cheaper to rent a smaller and worse place in a building than a larger detached home, but that's not really what people are asking when they ask which is "cheaper". Shouldn't we at the very least be trying to compare similar places? Not sure how anyone can take an article like that seriously with such an massive and obvious oversight.
What people are actually asking is something like:
Is it cheaper to rent or own a 2 bedroom 1,000 sqft condo?
Is it cheaper to rent or own a 3 bedroom 1,600 sqft house?
Following this point and answering your first question - the most important parameter by far in the model is the difference in monthly rate between renting and mortgaging an equivalent product, emphasis equivalent
Spot on.
More autonomy over how you can use the house, e.g. pets
https://xkcd.com/905/
Most of the net economic benefit of buying a home (if any) comes from the fact that the government (rightly or wrongly) really wants you to. Exact situations vary but this tends to manifest as (1) artificially cheap credit (2) whose interest is tax deductible (3) to buy an asset that historically outperforms inflation.
There are also social and psychological benefits. However unlikely eviction would be in practice, apartment living always feels transient at a deep level, to yourself and to others. Buying a house gives you permission to improve, to express, to host, to plan. It's a credible signal of long-term stability.
This week I made two magical discoveries and I offer them up in exchange for other whimsical or magical items which you might consider worth sharing:
1. Codex Seraphinianus - an encyclopedia of an imaginary world. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Codex_Seraphinianus)
2. The Ripley Scroll - a Medieval step-by-step guide for making the Philosopher's Stone. (https://artsandculture.google.com/story/exploring-the-ripley-scroll/sgLCNEuJqIJzLg)
This Arts & Culture feature from Google actually has a ton of interesting pages. The page for Care of Magical Creatures shows a paradoxical two-horned unicorn.
I recommend this fun video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ObXJSdfLfv4. You could think of it as a circus performance out the Codex Seraphinianus world.
Obvious suggestions along the same lines: Jung's Red Book, Voynich manuscript.
How's this one? Rust & Humus, an absolutely delightful illustrated history of a very variegated fantasy world (https://www.artstation.com/artwork/rAw5vm) (whose knowledge I owe to Neike here)
That's delightful, thank you for sharing.
I've been a fan of Codex Seraphinianus for ages, it is so beautifully illustrated, and brings me back to the simpler times when I was a kid reading scientific encyclopedias and medical journals, with all the complex pictures that seemed to be out of this world.
Given that I'm just a lowly commentator, I don't exactly need to post an erratum, but I wanted to admit that I was at least partially wrong about Joe Biden a month or so ago when I said that there wouldn't be any evidence that he was aware of how much more-than-baseline corrupt the Hunter business was. I'd still insist that we don't really know what the baseline level of corruption in Washington is, but my actual claim seems wrong in retrospect.
What have you seen in terms of that evidence? I'd love to give it a read if you have a link.
It was all coming out in carefully titrated drips. Watching the narrative slowly evolve towards more and more evasive weasel words was instructive just by itself, of course, but the individual points were damning. Here's a link to the House Oversight Committee blog. Note that probably half the stuff on this list is from one whistleblower.
https://oversight.house.gov/blog/evidence-of-joe-bidens-involvement-in-his-familys-influence-peddling-schemes/
Other things about the whole situation really started to decrease my initial confidence, however. Consider the collapse of the narrative on that Ukrainian prosecutor Burisma wanted gone. When I first heard the official narrative about how plenty of people internationally wanted him gone due to his known corruption, this meshed well with my priors about Ukrainian corruption generally, and I just shrugged and said, yeah, that's probably fine. Later I've learned that actually he was being honored internationally for his efforts fighting corruption and exactly zero of the other various international figures that supposedly wanted him gone have been named. It starts to look like the '50 Intel sources' (i.e. 49 sources rubber-stamping the statement of one known to be corrupt) from whichever hoax it was they foisted on us that time.
I appreciate you making this post. It's hard to admit your mistakes, especially in a topic that's so inflammatory and full of bad actors on both sides.
> any evidence that he was aware of how much more-than-baseline corrupt the Hunter business was.
So far I ignored everything about hunter biden, because the first things I read about him were trump-propagandists trying to find dirt (which was ~5 years ago?). So it comes as a surprise for me to hear, that anything relevant came out of it.
--> what is the most relevant thing, that came out of the hunter-biden debate? (I am not up-to-date about news about him. A very general pointer would be enough, thanks.)
--> what is the information that made you change your mind?
Selling access is common to the point of being completely standard in politics. The idea that Joe thought that Hunter was only engaged in the normal amount of it seemed reasonable to me. It since has come to light, merely that Joe was more aware than I thought, the dollar amounts were higher than I thought, and the number of actual contacts for the sake of selling access were higher than I had thought. Given that I regard myself as a fairly sophisticated consumer of news as well as being rather cynical overall, for this to surprise me is itself a kind of second order surprising.
Thank you for this update. I think I was on that thread and agreeing with your thoughts. The evidence is much more substantial than I expected.
I must admit, until this happened, I had no idea any politician was selling access, and now I'm hearing it's so commonplace so he shouldn't be impeached. I wish I was in a society where I believed these things could be enforced equally, and we could just get remove everyone selling access out of politics, but that seems depressingly unlikely.
^ Your brain on TDS
Given that you've admitted a mistake that you made, in a public manner about a political topic is, imo, already a rare thing, I applaud you for keeping track and not, for example, insisting you were right "in spirit" or saying that what you said isn't what you meant already puts you leagues above most people who post on the internet and quite a few pundits. I think for EXTRA epistemic points you'd be shifting your thinking about related topics (I don't particularly have any dog in the biden good or biden bad opinion race), in THEORY the """full bayesian update""" is trying to figure out how you made the mistake. I'm making it sound much more dramatic than it seems, as for me a lot of the time it turns out that I didn't think too hard about an issue and just went off of vibes instead of reasoning things out.
Regardless, congrats for admitting a mistake.
I'll admit something else, which is that I haven't really learned anything from being wrong. That is to say, I'm not really making any progress towards the full update because I'm not sure I trust the sources of information and there's too little transparency into the reference class to determine how much of an outlier this situation is. Maybe old Joe really just was more corrupt than usual, and perhaps became Vice President in the first place in exchange for favors. It's also quite possible that they're all this bad, but aren't being hung out to dry in response to an Alzheimer's related refusal to stop running for president.
Eh, changing minds is hard enough even for high benefit things, it's unreasonable to expect viewquakes for precisely reasons you outlined.
I think on the margin, the following trains of thought are "Bayesian leaning".
1. Have a model worked out where you assume all of the small ambiguous facts all turn out the way you don't expect. What world would cause those facts to be false? What does it mean for your worldview? What additional pieces of information would allow you to disambiguate? You don't have to follow up if you don't want to, but you do want to make it more inconvenient to rationalize afterwards by making "wrong" worlds more concrete.
2. Given that this looks like maybe a base rate recalibration, what IS the base rate of corruption? What does it look like? If it is much higher than you thought, why did you think it was lower? And even if it was higher, does this actually propagate out? (One example would be "why is X outgroup bad at Y" can be resolved by "well, by default everyone is bad by Y". You thought Y was easy, but you actually don't change your mind that much because your world model already embeds a bunch of downstream "Y is hard" facts.)
I have no idea if any of this helps, but this is how I try to think when trying to change my mind.
I think a lot of politics-adjacent material will make more sense from the following assumptions:
1.) Media is the fourth estate of government
2.) Government in general is corrupt
3.) Corruption is self-reinforcing (there's a heavily-looped graph of people who have dirt on one another, keeping one another from spilling the beans - and people not in the graph are suspect and need to be initiated into corruption, in order to add them to the graph, or removed as a threat)
Really you only need #1 and #3 if you think about it. ("Most of government is corrupt" is the only stable equilibrium, and you really need the media to be in the graph.)
Pay particular attention to divergences between "old" and "new" participants. It was mostly the newer congressional members demanding that Biden be seriously investigated - they aren't in the graph yet. The older congressional members were studiously avoiding taking any particular positions on the matter.
I expect that if the president were to issue a full pardon of everybody in the Federal Government we'd suddenly have a lot of mysterious murders in DC as those with ongoing interests sought to close weak links in the graph.
Which is to say - I don't necessarily think Biden was particularly bad. But I do think Hunter was particularly blatant / obvious about it, in a "trying to get caught" kind of way.
My wife wrote "It Only Takes 200 Joules To Restart A Heart:" https://bessstillman.substack.com/p/it-only-takes-200-joules-to-restart, which I think is great. I would, though.
That was devastating and yet very beautiful to read. Thank you for sharing it. All the very best to you both.
A good friend of mine was just diagnosed with stage 4 colon cancer (which when discovered had already spread to ovaries, liver, and abdominal wall). Still early and prognosis isn't known. I'm giving her and her husband (also a good friend) space. But reading your and your wife's writing has helped me feel a bit more connected to what my friends might be going through, emotionally.
Thank you for sharing. I wish both of you peace.
If you feel more connected then we're succeeding. You're welcome and I hope your friend is okay.
Some of our friends have done things like sent periodic texts / emails just saying, "No need to respond to this, but I'm thinking about you." Makes us feel good w/o necessarily needing to engage, which is nice when things are overwhelming.
That essay is an absolutely stunner, thanks for sharing.
Thank you for the kind words, Paul!
She's an incredible writer. Best of luck to the two of you.
Thank you!
I agree with your wife, and good luck, Jake!
Thank you!