This week we have specific cases of situations that have broader implications on how we go into the future. We look at nuclear proliferation (which could be viewed as a special case of the more general problem of controlling dangerous technologies) and biological sex as a thought paradigm in anthropology (which can be seen as a specific case of socially controversial ideas struggling to find a place in scientific discourse).
Are nuclear weapons and the international agreements about them a good model for other technological existential threats (ASI, Bioengineered pathogens, nanotechnology, smart e-viruses, psychological warfare technologies)
How much should the scientific community change its research program to account for the sensitivities of the general population and potential harms? Is there a way to reconcile these conflicts? Will censorship and self-censorship cause more harm in the long run? Are there truths about people and society it’s better we just not know. Are there research agendas that, if we allow ourselves to pursue them, will lead to more wrong ideas than right ones?
Video, with YouTube transcript available:
Why Every Nuclear Power Built the Bomb (And Everyone Else Hasn't)
Arguments against: they are no longer in strong alignment with the ideas espoused by Karl Marx, who popularised the word "Communism" or various other historical groups who have called themselves Communist.
Arguments for: Communism is as Communism does. The Chinese Communist Party has 98 million members and vastly outweigh any other Communist group in the world, so if they say they're Communist then who are we to disagree? Karl Marx is just one guy, and he's dead, why don't the 98 million members of the CCP get a say in the definition of what Communism is? Saying that the CCP isn't Communist is like saying the Pope isn't Catholic; if one billion Catholics agree that the Pope is Catholic then he is, regardless of what St Peter might have thought.
Now you might argue that they interpretation of Sacred Texts is Wrong, and has nothing in common with True Marxism. Many people, said the same about Soviet communists.
Imho it is far from clear whether, had there be a ressurection and second coming of Marx now, he would prefer Soviet interpretation of his ideas to Chinese interpretation.
Argument against: the "Chinese Communist Party" is only the "Chinese Communist Party" in English. In its native Chinese it is the 中國 | 共產 | 黨 (Zhōng guó - China | gòngchǎn | dǎng - Party), with 共產 being the neologism invented to translate the word "Communist" into Chinese. But where "Communist" comes by way of French from the Latin "Communis" (common/universal/of the community), 共產 is a compound that includes both the morphene "共 /gòng" in the sense of common/shared but also the morphene "產 / chǎn" in the sense of to produce/beget/yield. "Chǎnpǐn" hyperliterally "produced-article" is the compound for "product" and "Chǎnjià" is "begetting-dates" and the compound for maternity leave, to give you a sense of other compounds formed with 產 / chǎn.
Which is all to say that the word for Communism in Chinese, 共產主義, could be hyperliterally back-translated as "Shared/Common-Producing/Begetting-Ideology." Feels a little different, no?
I don't want to overstate the importance of this. In Chinese, compounds are words and the morphene components of neologism aren't given any more weight in everyday use than we would give etymological origins in English; "電腦" means "computer" to a Chinese person and they don't think of it as a "electric-brain" even if that's the meaning of the morphene components 電 and 腦.
But I do wonder if, in a Sapir-Whorf way, the etymological divergence when "communist" got translated into "gòngchǎn", with the "chǎn" emphasizing outcomes and products, may have contributed to Chinese Communism's emphasis on instrumental ends rather than ideology. Certainly Chinese Communists have a tendency to write sentences that cohere queerly when translated into Western languages, such as Deng-era reformers observations that "[Western democracies with public health care] were doing Communism better than us" or that "Communism is about getting rich." Clearly some semantic drift has occurred in translation!
So: the Chinese Communist Party is definitely gòngchǎn but it is not Communist in the sense that the word is usually used in Latin languages.
China seems to have been a centralized empire for about 2000 years, with the occasional era of warring states and dynastic cycle. They may just be returning to form.
"Yes" and "no" are both... not "wrong" answers per se, but bad answers that indicate a misunderstanding of how language works.
The answer that gives a correct insight into the relationship between communism and the CCP is "communism is an ambijective word; some things are unambiguously communist and some are unambiguously not communist, but the CCP falls in the zone of ambiguity, so to make meaningful statements you need to expand the word out".
The definition of democracy is 'Government by the people, exercised either directly or through elected representatives.' According to wikipedia, 'A republic, based on the Latin phrase res publica ('public affair'), is a state in which political power rests with the public and their representatives—in contrast to a monarchy.' Every time I look at a country that has the words 'democratic republic' in the official name, it's had some form of elected body that on paper serves as the place where political power rests.
The thing we need to be careful of is people that choose tortured definitions of words that only serve to benefit them. You can go with an expansive definition that includes everything or a very narrow definition that only encompasses a small area; both are equally rational. You can't, however, switch back and forth depending on what benefits you.
In any case, It ultimately doesn't help. Saying China isn't truely communist doesn't protect communism from people that think communists are bad, it just switches their arguments from 'communists are bad' to 'people that call themselves communists are bad'.
Totalitarian regimes often coopt other terminology that they fail to espouse. No one outside of propogandists claims that the Democratic People's Republic of Korea is actually a democracy, and few people will take seriously the any claim that the National Socialists (aka Nazis) were actually socialists.
Of course, terms can also have separate meanings in the context of a country - c.f. American usage of "liberal" and how disjoint it is from the actual concept of liberalism.
"Socialism is the science of dealing with the common weal. Communism is not Socialism. Marxism is not Socialism. The Marxians have stolen the term and confused its meaning. I shall take Socialism away from the Socialists. Socialism is an ancient Aryan, Germanic institution. Our German ancestors held certain lands in common. They cultivated the idea of the common weal. Marxism has no right to disguise itself as socialism. Socialism, unlike Marxism, does not repudiate private property. Unlike Marxism, it involves no negation of personality, and unlike Marxism, it is patriotic. We might have called ourselves the Liberal Party. We chose to call ourselves the National Socialists. We are not internationalists. Our socialism is national. We demand the fulfilment of the just claims of the productive classes by the state on the basis of race solidarity. To us state and race are one." Hitler, 1923.
Hitler was pretty clearly talking about a socialism that's different than every other form of socialism that's ever existed, particularly those that trace their roots back to Marx.
He rejected Marxism, yet, as others pointed out, his actual policies had a lot in common with those of the USSR of that period. But I don't want to grind this on, suffice it to say that the original premise that "few people will take seriously the any claim that the National Socialists (aka Nazis) were actually socialists" is a bit flimsy. Plenty will.
Those policies aren't a function of socialism - they're a function of total war.
The United States, for example, took over factories and used them to make tanks. The U.S. employed rationing - with the government deciding how much each person could consume. The U.S. established the Office of Censorship.
None of this really fits with our notion of a liberal, capitalist society - at least not during peacetime.
Are we going to say that the U.S. itself was a socialist country during World War 2, and that WWII was just a battle among socialists on the one side and socialists on the other?
Well, you could argue that yes, the U.S. did in fact become a quasi-socialist country during the war. And absolutely, two socialist regimes, German and Soviet, went at each others' throats - after a notable period of friendship and collaboration in the 30's right up to June 22 1941. And the propaganda in both countries was railing against the evil capitalists, with the added poison of antisemitism on the German side. The USSR took up the antisemitism thing after the war.
This only works at a level of generality that would make every government to ever face war a socialist government.
During war, the government usually raises taxes or borrows money to pay for soldiers and their families. That was true of George Washington's Continental Army. It was also true of Hitler's Wehrmacht.
If we go even one step deeper, the comparison stops working. From the Reason article you cited, "Aly argues that theft accounted for a full 70 percent of the Reich's wartime revenues, ensuring that the burdens of war fell squarely on the shoulders of the conquered."
Can you point me to something that, say, Bernie Sanders ever said that would suggest he wants to enact a similar policy?
I mean, I'm sure Bernie Sanders *says* he would just have to tax the *millionaires and billionaires* and we'd all have infinite free money, but his actual policy proposals would require approximately the highest tax rates in the world, imposed on the vast majority of the populace.
Regardless, Hitler's "socialism" wasn't just a gimmick to raise wartime revenue - a core part of his ideology since the early 1930s was having a large "social safety net" to ensure the security of the Aryan people.
Both Chinese "communism" and North Korean juche are explicitly nationalistic. Chinese "communism" certainly has private property. There's also the motte-and-bailey shell game where Western leftists will describe the Scandinavian social democratic governments as socialism.
Or you could just go to the defintions of socialism. The first search that comes up for me is:
socialism
sō′shə-lĭz″əm
noun
1. Any of various theories or systems of social organization in which the means of producing and distributing goods is owned collectively or by a centralized government that often plans and controls the economy.
2. The stage in Marxist-Leninist theory intermediate between capitalism and communism, in which the means of production are collectively owned but a completely classless society has not yet been achieved.
3. Specifically, in Germany, legislation, supported by Prince Bismarck, intended to improve the condition of the working-man. Among the measures included were the insurance of workmen against accident, sickness, and old age, and the establishment of cooperative associations under state protection.
>the means of production are collectively owned but a completely classless society has not yet been achieved.
I think this is important. A completely classless society is the goal that wreaks havoc. It’s impossible and too many people get killed trying to make it happen. Hitler may have had many socialist ideas. but a classless society was not one of them.
That certainly rules out definition 2 from applying to Hitler. Now we need to look at the other two.
For definition one, Hitler was certainly not opposed to state control of the economy, even before the war. For names you may recognize: Volkswagen.
Definition three may be the most applicable. It's certainly possible to argue that the political policies of the party were heavily influenced by the social democratic policies pushed decades before to head off the rise of communism. While this may not be applicable to modern socialism, it would have been very applicable to a Germany where these policies would be something a lot of people would remember.
Certain parts of Nazism will fit with the definition of socialism. Others won't. That's pretty typical of any economy. We could call them all mixed economies, but that erases a lot of the nuance.
Regardless, it's clear that Nazism is totally distinct from Marxism. Virtually all of the self-described socialist countries that have ever existed trace their lineage back to Marx. Nazi Germany did not.
Thus including Nazi Germany with the socialists is usually step one of making an argument according to the noncentral fallacy - the argument being that modern socialists have something meaningful in common with Nazi Germany. They don't. Hitler was very clear that his socialism was completely distinct from Marxism, as the quote discusses.
There's a lot in this reply that needs to be examined.
First, I never mentioned Marx. At the time Hitler came to power, there would have been only one self-described socialist country. That that particular form of socialism (Marxist) came to spread so much was entirely because that country was on the winning side of the war. Presumably, if the Nazis had won, there would have been more non-Marxist socialist governments.
Second, by using your logic, dis-including Nazi Germany from being socialist is usually step one of making an argument according to the noncentral fallacy - the argument being that the modern free market / capitalist political side has something meaningfully in common with Nazi Germany. Hitler was very clear that he was socialist (in terms of central economic control but not ownership in the service of the public good), even if not Marxist.
Finally, the point of the discussion originally was 'is China communist?'.. Aside from theoretical allegiance to the ideas of Marx (which leftists in this thread have pointed out has little bearing on Chinese policy) and retaining a rubber stamp elected legislature (which falls under the "democratic republic falsehood' argument), how, in practice, is the PRC different than Nazi Germany? Because even if modern socialists don't expect their government to end up like Nazi Germany, the fact that the most successful 'socialist' economy in practice looks an awful lot like Nazi Germany is a good argument that it is the natural evolution of socialist governance.
Trying to avoid the noncentral fallacy, both China and Germany:
Legally allow private property, including the means of production (China has 495 billionaires).
One party government.
Security state with brutal suppression of dissent.
Private companies exist at the whims of the party / government.
Militaristic and expansionist.
Uppity minorities sent to concentration camps in an effort to force conformance to dominant culture.
Government control of art / entertainment in the name of culture.
Strong central leader eliminates political rivals in own party.
What are the central differences?
I could make the argument that the Nazis cared more about the working class and the environment before the war, but that doesn't help your case.
I think that the "noncentral fallacy" is often over applied. Like, you can't say "a central example of rape would be forcible sexual intercourse by a man not wearing a pirate costume, and I totally wore a pirate costume, therefore this is a noncentral example of rape and shouldn't be punished".
To vastly simplify, a modern socialist would say "socialism is good, and Nazism was bad, therefore Nazism is a non-central example of socialism and doesn't count". A modern anti-socialist would say "socialism is bad, and Nazism is bad for exactly the same reasons, therefore it's a perfectly central example of socialism with a different coat of paint".
Ayn Rand once defined socialism as something like "an ideology that puts the good of society over the rights of the individual" -- under this definition all forms of socialism are evil for the same reason.
The standard counterargument is that the first people the nazis killed were the actual socialist party (while leaving the non-Jewish capitalists fine and dandy). Hillter took Marx's discussions of class and substituted "The Jews" for "capitalists", which is sort of a fundamental change.
This is a difficult discussion to have because there's no broadly agreed-upon definition of what socialism "is". I've previously argued that "leftist" should, at minimum, mean anticapitalist; socialist *should* ideally have the same distinction, but even I have used it in much fuzzier circumstances.
The standard counterargument falls apart very easily. It's certainly easy to find other Socialist governments that have purged rival socialist parties. Certainly the Bolsheviks purged the Mensheviks very early.
1st - agreed it’s a difficult discussion. “Socialism” at this point has lost almost all meaning. In US, many Republicans use it for policies they don’t like, while young idealistic people use it to call policies they like.
I use it to describe the system in the USSR. While Nazis didn’t directly nationalize industries, they did exert significant control.
But seriously, no, they are not even claiming to have communism as the goal the way the Communist Party of the Soviet Union was.
To use your analogy, if the Pope proclaimed that God didn't exist and the Bible was just another adventure fiction book, and who needs to waste time on Mass anyway... that would be kind of where the CCP is now.
Abstract: In a few cases ChatGPT responds to a prompt (e.g. “To be or not to be”) by returning a specific text word-for-word. More often (e.g. “Johnstown flood, 1889”) it returns with information, but the specific wording will vary from one occasion to the next. In some cases (e.g. “Miriam Yevick”) it doesn’t return anything, though the topic was (most likely) in the training corpus. When the prompt is the beginning of a line or a sentence in a famous text, ChatGPT always identifies the text. When the prompt is a phrase that is syntactically coherent, ChatGPT generally identifies the text, but may not properly locate the phrase within the text. When the prompt cuts across syntactic boundaries, ChatGPT almost never identifies the text. But when told it is from a “well-known speech” it is able to do so. ChatGPT’s response to these prompts is similar to associative memory in humans, possibly on a holographic model.
I have zapped myself a few times doing amateur home electrical repair without turning off the circuit breakers first. It's generally been helpful for my depression and PTSD, with noticeable effects lasting around 12 hours. I haven't been crazy/gutsy enough to intentionally repeat it, but have merely been a bit ... as a Catholic might say about unprotected sex, open to providence.
ECT and TMS have also been helpful but not a cure, as with the guy in the article. Dunno why this would be any different?
I suppose I should be more considerate of the non U.S. readers. I’m in the habit of using this sort of shorthand. The Times, The Post even occasionally The Journal if I’m absently thinking everyone must know I’m referring to a big time US newspaper.
I only know about it because I once read about a Congressman (apparently even less hip than me) who asked a tech executive if he was going to "ban finsta."
I'm dated too, because I had no idea what that was and had to look it up. And of course, by the time it made it to the NYT, the concept is already lame and no longer cool 😁 From 2021, so the crossword is already 2 years behind the trends, as to be expected when your parents finally hear about the Hot New Thing:
"From 2015 to 2018 finstas ruled the teenage digital landscape. Slang for fake Instagram accounts, finstas were the first place teens would post photos they didn't want to share on main. Creating a finsta was a rite of passage, and following someone's shadow feed felt like you were really part of their close inner circle.
...But if you ask any teen, they’ll probably tell you that finsta is already a dated concept.
In a 2021 survey from financial services firm Piper Sandler, only 22 percent of teenagers said Instagram was their favorite social media platform, coming in third after Snapchat and TikTok, respectively. Compare that with the results of Piper Sandler’s 2015 data that show Instagram at the top of the list among teenagers, with 33 percent of participants claiming the photo-sharing app as their favorite."
I'm looking for a scene in a movie -- or it could be from something on TV, or some YouTube video -- that contains an example of what I would call a good fight: Both parties are quite hurt and angry and say and that, via raised voices, tears, etc. But they refrain from treating each other badly. So they are not sarcastic, belittling, mocking, and they don't accuse each other of huge character flaws -- stupidity, not caring about anyone except oneself, profound sneakiness or dishonesty. They stick with the topic, each talking about why their point of view makes sense, and how hurtful and infuriating they find the other's point of view.
"I hate it when you do X. I've told you that many times and you keep doing it anyway."
"You know why I keep doing X? It comes naturally to me. I've done it all my life. And nobody else complains about it. You didn't either, til last year."
"That's true, but a lot of things changed last year, and that affected how I feel about X, and I think that's a valid reason to object to it now. And I've told you that too, but you still keep doing X."
Well, I guess it depends how well-reasoned everyone has to be in the scene. Maybe the Fisher King? It's pretty one-sided and there's a couple of snipes but that's the topic under discussion.
For another suggestion, there's probably something from the TV series "Babylon 5" that counts. I can't recall anything off the top of my head, but maybe someone else can?
You are right, that's an excellent example of what I'm looking for. Here is some normative information for you: It is extremely rare to put in a request with as many fine-grained details as mine and get a response that meets all the little criteria. I've probably put up on ACX a dozen requests this detailed and picky, and I usually do not get a single answer that meets all the criteria. On this thread somebody posted a question and only had one criterion: They wanted research data, and did not want anecdotal data, which they'd already gotten a lot of from acquaintances. Out of about 5 responses they got, one was anecdotal data accompanied by pressure to act in line with the poster's view, based on anecdotal data.
So, MM, I'd say that even in the ACX population you are 90-something percentile in accurate responsiveness to detailed requests. You've done it before, too. It's a really good quality to have -- some combo of regular smarts and emotional intelligence.
Yeah I stepped into it, didn’t I? FWIW I apologized to the original poster.
Lesson in reading comprehension for me: I re-read the post, and yes, clear request not to use personal anecdotes, and somehow I assigned too low a weight to it, overridden by “I know this situation and can help” impulse.
I'm sorry I spoke kind of harshly to you -- though I don't think I was *awful.*. But I had a particularly strong reaction to your post because if I were in OP's situation I think I too would be sick to death of people pushing me to be in a support group because on helped them or their son-in-law or whoever.
Hmm. Well, I do wish there was more back and forth on our private correspondence. But it seems to me that about the most important topics we are both so distressed that we need a near-perfect response, without which we will feel even worse than we already do about the stuff we’re disclosing. And while I feel sure I will respond with intelligent empathy, I’m not sure that I can produce a perfect response. Plus of course each of us is the same gender as the person who did the awful stuff. So mostly I feel like, ah well, either this will work or it won’t, & I can’t influence the outcome except by fakery, which I’m not about to engage in.
:-) I shall work on the first, tomorrow. I'm generally tolerant of imperfection, so don't worry too much about that, or the gender thing. I think a big part is that my standards for myself are too high relative to my new lower level of capability. And my memory issues mean that one day in which I resolve to do it tomorrow, is much like any other day in which I resolve to do it tomorrow. :-/
My therapist recommended that I stop trying to "create intimacy" on dates and instead "cultivate intimacy." This means no hugging, telling jokes, etc. How do I affirmatively do this?
For context, I am a white American man in the US, and Chinese women are WAY more interested in me than anyone else is. (This only applies to women born in China. Chinese-American women ignore me completely.) What does a successful date look like in China?
I have no actionable advice. It sounds to me that "cultivating" would mean letting the woman lead and leaning into topics she brings up, as opposed to "creating" where you're telling a dirty joke* or going in for a hug and forcing an accept/reject response from her.
*(I assume by "jokes" you meant dirty jokes. Unless your therapist thinks you're so incredibly unfunny that it scares people.)
Oh. Yeah that'll do it too. I remember a training video or somesuch for interpreters, where the host makes a pun and the interpreter says "their joke is untranslatable, please laugh."
I'm hardly a huge success story (though I did have two girlfriends for a while), but I've heard lifting weights helps some people. You no longer fit one of the key parts of the nerd stereotype, and unlike a lot of the other redpill advice (exposing your balls to UV light, say) it's healthy taken in isolation.
I also wonder if you might try to find another therapist (though I guess it can be hard these days). If they can't explain the difference between 'creating' and 'cultivating' intimacy (which are two different words with the overlapping meaning of 'make something appear' with different connotations that could definitely be used in a non-intuitive way by mental health people), well, they're not doing their job.
You might try checking out the "Chinese Doom Scroll" substack, and looking through the archives for some accounts of dating. They appear to do things very differently over there. The substack is basically a daily translation of some of the top stories, plus occasional commentary. The glimpses of the dating and marriage scene over there appear grim to me.
To toss off a completely unfounded speculation, maybe you somehow both match the things they expect and want, and simultaneously fail to match the things they expect but don't want. (Like the book "The Princess Bride": maybe you're the "Good Parts Version".)
I know one Chinese man who came to the US a few years ago and is dating. His ideas about dating and marriage are quite different from US ones, at least US ones among educated professionals, which is what he and the women he dates are. He believes that his being in a profession that will probably make him quite rich gives him a huge advantage. (I told him it probably was a modest advantage. Female doctors and lawyers make pretty good money on their own, and people who got graduate degrees in things like philosophy and medieval history probably just don't care much about money.). He believes that women older than 28 or so have much lower standards in men because their shelf life is expiring. (I told him that it's very common among professionals to be unmarried at 28, because most don't finish their training til then, and 28 does not have an "old maid" tint to it in people's minds.) And he is kind of bewildered by the stuff I say about chemistry and falling in love and looking for a partner who is also a best friend. All this stuff about the quality of the connection seems weird to him. His picture of mate-finding is much more transactional than that. I have no idea whether his ideas are typical of the attitudes of other Chinese people, though.
I don't really understand the difference between "creating intimacy" and "cultivating it," and how hugs and jokes come into it. Do you have a clear picture of what your therapist had in mind?
Also don't know what to make of Chinese women, but no other women, finding you attractive. Never heard that from anyone before. Are you unusual in some way -- looks, circumstances, interests?
Is your Chinese acquaintance having success dating?
I believe he wants me to postpone all flirting-type behaviors until I have internalized her body language, etc. So I have "don'ts" but no "dos."
I am a short ugly weirdo! My therapist believes that I fit in so poorly with mainstream American culture that I'm only attractive to women who don't care about that culture. (Indian women are a distant second.)
Oh, and I have been getting into salsa dancing. Last night, I saw this older fat balding guy that looked like a creepy pedo, but that danced quite well, dancing with women wildly out of his league, young women too.
I was so impressed I walked up to him and asked him if this works, and he told me that yeah, it works for meeting women, but progressing further depends on you, so he apparently does pull, against all odds.
I insist, do not underestimate what confidence can do for you, and maybe get into salsa dancing or something similar.
I just wanted to share that I knew a guy who was short, fat, and effeminate, a gamer too, and he ultimately ended up marrying a girl quite out of his league in terms of looks. He had the gift of the gab though, and he hit on lots of girls, to the point people at the office snickered at him behind his back about it.
Don't underestimate what confidence can do for you. You shouldn't believe mainland Chinese women are your only prospects.
I think I probably would have fallen in love with Wally Shawn if he and I were somehow thrown together a lot because we were on the same boat or working on the same project or something. https://i.imgur.com/XQZdOXm.png
Yes, I mostly remember him from Dinner with Andre too, and don't know much about what he's really like. But I imagine him as being smart, funny, and I-yam-what-I-yam.
And if he was in fact like that, his looks would not have been an obstacle. In fact, I would have started liking his looks, because he looked like Wally and I really liked Wally. And in fact different parts of him would have started looking like various things I liked -- like his turned up nose would look like the locus of his puckishness. That is how it has always worked for me for people that I like. I have an acquaintance, M, whom I like a lot -- not romantically -- who had average looks, and a big nose. He recently got surgery to reduce the size of his nose, and while I can see that from the point of view of conventional good looks he has improved his appearance, I felt disturbed by the change, til I got used to it, because it made him look less like M.
Shortness is definitely a disadvantage, though if you are taller than 5'7 or so you will be taller than most women, and for many women the important thing is that the man be taller than them. So being short-ish, like 5'7, knocks out at most 1/3 or 1/2 of the women. (And for a woman to hold out for someone who is tall seems really vacuous to me. Good grief, that's just not important! You're probably better off without women who demand 6 feet of height at least.). Are you genuinely *ugly,* (as opposed to not being handsome?) Has someone else confirmed that your appearance truly is a lot worse than average? If your face truly is ugly according to current tastes, it really might be worth considering cosmetic procedures, especially for things that are pretty easily correctable, like acne scars or a misshapen nose. If your body is way worse than average, then you should probably lose weight or gain weight and/or go to the gym and get in better shape.
So the suggestions above about improving your appearance apply most strongly if you are searching for dates on dating apps. I think dating apps are just inhumane and awful. Seems much better to find something you like doing that puts you in a setting where there are lots of other people who share a common interest, and hunting there for someone to ask out. And if you are weird, join up with some group where lots of people are weird the way you are. (ACX meetups?)
Even if Chinese women aren't disturbed by the way you are "weird," that doesn't guarantee they are going to be able to appreciate and savor your weirdness. You need to find someone who gets you.
In response to your question about how my Chinese acquaintance is doing with dating: He is having a bad time of it. Mostly does not much like the women he meets, and after a while gets tired of emitting the behaviors he thinks they wants. Fell really hard for somebody who, I could tell, was desplaying quite moderate interest. When she ended it, he was terribly distressed.
I have obvious facial asymmetry that is not correctable without very invasive surgery. I am only moderately overweight, which is probably the only part of the situation that I can do anything about.
I generally have much better things to do than hang out in groups that are >80% male, with the few women disproportionately uninterested in men. (This describes literally everything I enjoy.)
>I generally have much better things to do than hang out in groups that are >80% male, with the few women disproportionately uninterested in men.
Yeah, I get that, it's true of a lot of guys that the things they are most interested in do not interest women. But consider this: Are you sure you want to be in a relationship with a woman, then? Because what exactly are you going to do together and talk about? Even excellent and frequent sex is only going to fill up at hr/day on average, and not many modern women are going to be on board with cooking meals and darning your socks while you're gaming or attending sports events with other males during your hours of free time.
You know, for a long time I figured exactly that. Women don't like nerd stuff, a few do but they are going to be snapped up by the few most skillful nerd men, so romance is pointless (for me anyway, normal guys obviously do it and like it).
That and I had late-90s feminism making me guilty about wanting to have sex and convinced any flubbed approach would lead to a harassment lawsuit. Which is probably true now, but not back then.
That was half of what ended my last relationship: we talked about nothing but work because the only thing we had in common was being employed. (The other half was her asexuality.)
I suppose I have a fantasy of meeting a woman who shares my level of curiosity and indulging in whatever directions it takes us. However, this is firmly in the category of "dream" rather than "goal."
Huh, well Trump has one less trial to prepare for: a New York state judge just issued a summary judgement that Trump, his three adult children, his business and a couple other officers of that business are all liable for obvious business fraud committed repeatedly for a decade. The ruling says basically that the repeated fraud is so obvious from the documented facts that holding a trial would be a waste of a jury's time.
In the US adversarial legal system, motions for summary judgement are routinely filed by both sides despite being very rarely granted. I just asked two veteran trial attorneys of my acquaintance who each said they have never, during their successful legal careers, had a motion for summary judgement be granted. One guy said his law partner did once.
I assume Trump et al will appeal this ruling. In the meantime though the case moves on to a penalty phase.
Selection bias really plays a role here. Summary judgment motions aren't often granted because if you knew to a certainty that you'd lose on summary judgment, you'd either settle or dismiss it yourself.
The threat of summary judgment weeds out a lot of cases that otherwise would be proper for summary judgment.
Sure, so you need one side to be making non-rational tactical choices. By for instance having a client who refuses to accept his lawyers' analysis that his defense is untenable.
In fairness to Trump, his options are most likely constrained in ways not typical of other litigants. Because he's a really high-profile figure, any settlement agreement would be scrutinized endlessly. Because he's a high-profile political figure, a generous settlement deal would be career suicide for any AG that offered it.
For what it's worth, Trump's side did offer to settle with the AG in the civil fraud trial. The AG rejected the settlement offer.
Isn't it great how one person can just decide that? It's even better that judges are made out of better stuff than commoners and can be relied on to look at only the facts and not their own prejudices.
It's also great when judges know more about valuation than banks do! 'Cause obviously those poor simpleton banks were terribly hoodwinked by that sly Trump and totally relied on him for the terms of those loans! And that awful Trump, trying to cover up his fraud by paying back everything that was lent to him, with interest! That'll teach him (and future generations!) to abuse the comply-with-the-terms-of-the-agreement loophole!
I like the idea of 'fraud is impossible because the person being defrauded would have known more about the situation than a judge/jury, so they must have been correct in their initial assessment and the judge/jury must be wrong'.
It does seem to make summary judgment a bit of a stretch. More than that, I understand the judge said that Mar-a-lago was worth between $18-27 million, despite the fact that much smaller properties (less than an acre, single house, compared to 20 acres and multiple buildings) next door were worth more than that. The judge may be right, but that really seems like the kind of thing you should, you know, have to show in court.
Summary judgment is about things that, even if all the facts were exactly as stipulated by the person making the claim, would still not permit any answer but one.
The defrauded party is the people of the State of New York, per state Executive Law 63|12. Every state has a similar law on the books. The basic idea is that someone who engages in "repeated fraudulent or illegal acts" or "persistent fraud or illegality in the carrying on, conducting or transaction of business" is degrading the fundamental trust in business practices upon which a vibrant state economy depends. The keywords are "repeated" and "persistent", the law is aimed at fraudulent action being used as a business strategy. The attorney general is specified in the law as the official who is supposed to bring such persistent patterns of fraudulent practice to the attention of the state courts.
The specifics laid out in the court's ruling are pretty wild. For instance Trump repeatedly listed his personal condo at three times its actual square footage (and hence market value) despite multiple on-the-record notifications of its actual size -- one of those having been published in the pages of Forbes magazine.
Despite having received valuations of $30M or less from five different professional fair-market appraisers (!), he listed a parcel as being worth at least $261M in four different annual sets of Trump Org sworn financial statements. Then yet another outside appraisal came in at $56M but Trump stuck with, and even tried to defend in court, a valuation of $291M. [The ruling reads as if this is the one that really pushed this judge over into summary-judgement territory.]
Regarding the 40 Wall Street building, Trump Org seems to have for years taken outside appraisers' numbers and simply doubled them in the company financial statements, loan applications, etc.
Regarding Mar A Lago, it isn't the judge who valued it at between $18-27M but rather the local county assessor in Florida, who placed its value in that range 12 years in a row. The reason for that valuation is that the property is not legally subdividable or developable: Trump in 2002 signed an irrevocable deed in which he surrendered all rights to develop or use any part of the parcel for any purposes other than the existing social club. He did that in order to get a large tax deduction for the resulting historic-preservation easement. That easement is permanent, it "goes with the land", that's why he had to sign and record a fresh deed in order to receive the tax benefit.
Hence most of the Mar A Lago property's market value was legally extinguished, and comparisons to neighboring properties on which new houses or other structures have been built are specious. The county assessor correctly based its valuations, and Trump's annual property tax bills, on comparable properties having the same sort of deed restrictions on them. But Trump kept basing his sworn financial statements on the idea that the Mar A Lago parcel could be sold at any time for something like half a billion.
There's more, but those are the headline properties. The stuff about his golf courses seems closer to just eye-rolling hyperbole than actual fraud and probably wouldn't have led to this case or this ruling on their own. They are more icing on the cake in the context of the above. (Well maybe excepting the valuation of refundable club membership deposits, which Trump has been in the habit deciding are not actually a liability because reasons. That just flat-out violates Generally Accepted Accounting Principles.)
"The defrauded party is the people of the State of New York, per state Executive Law 63|12. Every state has a similar law on the books. The basic idea is that someone who engages in "repeated fraudulent or illegal acts" or "persistent fraud or illegality in the carrying on, conducting or transaction of business" is degrading the fundamental trust in business practices upon which a vibrant state economy depends. "
So... "The People of the State of New York" (which includes literally zero actual humans, being an abstract entity) is being defrauded. The harm is not obtaining the maximum possible profit in any given transaction I guess? Oh no, because a "vibrant economy" (yet another abstract entity for which 'vibrant' cannot possible apply) requires *trust* (and only some kinds of people can degrade this trust, absolutely NOT government employees, they can't degrade trust nosireebob.) But this purported harm to "The Trust" of "The People" can totally be quantified and a concrete punishment righteously laid out against the human malefactor.
I don't think Trump was perfectly fine in what he was doing, but I do have a problem with this being decided in summary judgment. As I mentioned before, that's when there's no question of facts and cannot be decided otherwise as a matter of law. The valuation of properties is not so clear cut. Trump may have lost this one in court no matter what, but summary judgment is not the right approach and he'll likely win that on appeal.
If he does though I don't think it will be on the basis of valuations of properties being inherently subjective. They obviously are, but both the law and GAAP are clear that a reasonableness standard has to be applied. In some spots state or federal laws place explicit ranges on that (just as an example, a 501(c)(3) tax-exempt organization cannot rely on a valuation that is more than 20 percent different from that of an independent outside appraiser).
That type of specifics varies from state to state and I am not knowledgeable about New York State law. But across the board a sworn financial statement that is prepared for lenders and investors to rely upon has to be within some reasonable bound on things like the values of assets. The judge is certain that in this case that reasonable bound was being exceeded and not by a little bit, and there is no question that it was a habit (year after year for decades). Judges hate being reversed on appeal and it seems doubtful that this judge would have risked it on such a fundamental point to the case.
Also an attorney has pointed out to me that the defense lawyers' behavior before this judge created additional support for summary judgement. The Trump attorneys in hearings before the judge kept bringing back up arguments which the judge had already ruled out as legally irrelevant. Besides being irritating to that judge, doing that raised the prospect that those lawyers would do the same in open courtroom with a jury present. Which adds fuel to the idea that (a) the defense had no real defense to offer and (b) the defense would by its actions poison a jury pool just trying to get a mistrial. basically stall stall stall and try to run out the state's patience and clock. The appeals court is going to look _very_ negatively upon that.
Mostly, it would have been the right thing to do. If there are laws, prosecute those who break them, or repeal them. Fiat justitia ruat caelum. It is shameful that he got away with his shit when he was friends with the powerful. That they turn on him when he's out of favor is no credit to them.
While I agree about law should apply to everyone and not "too well-connected to prosecute", is Ms. James now going to go after the other 7 million New Yorkers who fibbed on their tax returns, maximised their answers on "how much you earnin'?" for mortgage applications and loans, and vastly inflated their value when looking for love on dating apps?
Ex-mayor Bloomberg, for instance: he is totally squeaky-clean and never claimed a penny more in worth than he actually possessed, and certainly never ever had accountants doing the fandango around tax laws and minimising liability? I'm positive this is all so and Ms. James wasn't engaged in partisanship!
Not at those levels, sure. But I fill in wage details for mortgage applications for staff at my place of work, and they ask "put down that I'm working so many hours a week" or that I put in the higher level they got paid (they work standard hours but sometimes work more in a week).
That's technically fraud.
I'm sure Donald Trump isn't the only business mogul in NY doing it, and I'm sure a lot of people at all income levels fudge their tax and their loan applications. So if Ms. James is going after this crime because it's A CRIME and not because of partisan politics, she'll be hauling a heck of a lot of people into court, and they won't all be millionaires.
I think it would have taken some of the glamour off him. Maybe it would have kept him doing reality TV, instead of running for President. Or maybe the media wouldn't have built him up as much during the primaries. Or maybe the left would have had more success attacking him for his lying and bullshit, instead of making up the Russia stuff.
In the big picture, I don't know. It's possible that Hillary Clinton or Jeb Bush or whoever would have produced worse outcomes, by my measures, in the areas I care about. My thinking in this area is distorted.
" Or maybe the left would have had more success attacking him for his lying and bullshit, instead of making up the Russia stuff."
Er, they *did* try the "not a real billionaire" stuff - see Hillary (oh God) and her ideas of what is funny with her quip about liking real billionaires. Are you really forgetting all the tax returns demands to prove he wasn't as rich as he claimed? None of it worked, because for Trump supporters, he's rich even if not as hugely rich as the others. When you've got 5 billion moneybags sneering at Trump for only having 1 billion, or maybe not even a billion at all, that is less effective than the "party of the little guy, the poor, the disempowered, the minorities and the working class" might hope. Because you know that the moneybags are sneering even harder about you, the little poor guys, and at least Trump isn't.
And the more the moneybags and their ilk sneer and seethe, the better. So you're going to stick with Trump, because he drives them crazy. So what if he only has tens of millions? That's a hell of a lot more money than you will ever see in your entire life. That's rich enough, as far as you're concerned.
"On Monday, Clinton sat on an Omaha, Neb., stage behind Buffett, grinning widely as he attacked Trump for not releasing his tax returns. "How many of you would be afraid to have your tax return made public?" Buffett asked the cheering crowd. "You're only afraid if you've got something to be afraid about."
Buffett even offered a kind of deal, saying he'd release his tax returns if Trump did.
For the Clinton campaign, appearances by figures such as Buffett and Cuban can subtly help erode Trump's reputation for wealth and success, Democratic consultant Hank Sheinkopf said.
"The kind of endorsements from Cuban and Warren Buffett and Mike Bloomberg and other like that are ways of saying, 'Donald Trump is not the businessman he says, 'cause if he was, real businessmen would be endorsing him,' " Sheinkopf said.
It's also a way of scaring off potential donors, at a time when Trump appeared to be starting to finally gain some ground in fundraising, though major contributors have been holding back."
That's the same Buffett who talked about paying less tax than his secretary, yes? Yeah, I'm pink-collar/blue-collar/lower middle class white collar worker, I'm sure impressed by rich guy going to tell all about exactly how rich he is and how much, much richer than my guy he is, so I should vote for the candidate of the rich, rich people. We can see how well that worked out in the election.
“Billionaires for Hillary” isn’t a group the Clinton campaign will be trotting out anytime soon to win over die-hard Bernie Sanders supporters, but in recent days, quite a few megarich business moguls have been publicly appearing with the Democratic nominee to sing her praises.
Just in the past week, Dallas Mavericks owner Mark Cuban made a surprise appearance with Clinton in Pittsburgh, Michael Bloomberg slammed Donald Trump at the Democratic convention in Philadelphia last week and on Monday night, investing guru Warren Buffett, the “Oracle of Omaha,” touted Clinton at a campaign stop in his Nebraska hometown."
So if they had gone after him in 2015, what would have been the difference? City Attorney General who is in the bag for the Democrats goes after potential Republican candidate? Oh my, that will certainly make all the Republican voters reconsider who they might support!
That's the problem with making a blatantly political attack. Whereas if somebody had been going after him before he ran, it wouldn't have been brushed off so easily. But no one seemed to want to do the work, or have principles. If any of the attacks had done as much research as this silly piece about his hair treatment, things might have turned out differently.
Nobody went after him before he ran because (a) they never considered he would go for political office (b) he was hanging out on good terms with Democrats (see the photos endlessly posted online of him at black tie events with Bill'n'Hill all smiling and laughing and having a high old time) (c) when he did announce it, he was treated as a joke candidate - the Clinton campaign allegedly helped boost him because they were so confident that were he the Republican choice, Hillary would win by about 100% instead of having to deal with a genuine contender.
Well, we've seen how well that worked out, haven't we? Trump, precisely because he was an outsider and precisely because all the glitterati were laughing at him, appealed to voters who were "a plague on both your houses". Silly little snobby magazine hit-pieces about how he liked his steak done and ketchup with it, how *low class*? Even if you like your steak rare, if you're "low class" by the PMC standards, you're going to go "Well to hell with you, I'm working class who doesn't qualify for the fancy restaurants you like either, he's my guy and you're not".
Have you looked at how many people went after Trump for being an obvious fraudster before 2015? Everybody who was paying attention knew the man was a crook. albeit sometimes a profitable one to do business with if you were careful about it. Trump's dishonesty was a standing joke in the mainstream media.
Everyone who was eventually going to go out and *vote* for Donald Trump, either affirmatively disbelieved the mainstream media that was saying Donald Trump was a crook, or simply didn't care. Adding one more New York Times story to the long list of pre-2015 New York Times stories saying "yet another court has determined that Trump done defrauded someone", was not going to change that.
I think there are very few of us whose thinking in this area is not distorted. I find it impossible to think about without getting furious and despairing, and once I'm feeling that way my priorities become either to shout all my thoughts, or to find someone who disagrees with me and go after them.
I mean, it's hard to think about this counterfactual without my PTSD acting up. I'm not proud to say this, but I truly enjoyed how the mere presence of Trump made my outgroup suffer. When people, whom I once thought were my friends but later learned were not, moved to Canada in advance of his election, I laughed from schadenfreude, and from their self-inflicted misjudgement of his character.
Would Hillary or Jeb have provided me this joy? I doubt it.
I do not think this is healthy, but I try to be honest about the way I was and am. Maybe one day I will not be like this, as I once was not.
I didn't vote for him (I thought he was dangerously incompetent and narcsissistic), but I didn't find him as aggravating as most of the progressives around me do, and I did enjoy watching them seethe.
Jeb would have been relentlessly hammered as Chimpy McHitler 2 and another one of the warmongering Bush dynasty who only made it on nepotism rather than merit. So I don't think it made much difference which Republican won the White House, the fury over depriving Hillary of Her Turn Now would have been the same.
He might not have coasted to the nomination and if he did still do that he might not have taken the electoral college by small margins in a few states.
And then I might not have spent four years shouting Dunning Kruger at my TV.
I’m turning it into a sort of joke with the last remark but it took a good deal of gallows humor to ride out the storm.
I know the guy won fair and square but imo he doesn’t belong in a position as important as the presidency.
From my perspective, honestly, yeah? Not 2022, but 2023 is pretty back-to-normal in terms of both economic and social factors (outside of what the news media would like to talk about, anyway- that has been notably degrading since 2018). Far fewer people are losing their jobs from cancellation, ZIRP isn't leading to private equity rugpulling the hell out of small businesses to the same extent, and there have been a spate of Supreme Court decisions that have been mostly good (with a few notable exceptions). Maybe not "so much" better, but it certainly feels like 2020-2021 was the last gasp for a lot of extremely unfortunate social phenomena. (Not particularly catalyzed by the President or anything, honestly- I think the most recent two presidents are both products of the emergent social consensus at the time, not reagents for it.)
"there have been a spate of Supreme Court decisions that have been mostly good (with a few notable exceptions)."
Gasp! You mean the same Supreme Court that Trump packed with conservative Catholic theocrats, a theme upon which many grave periodicals and sober media outlets issued warning articles?
"Have you ever wondered how six conservative Catholic Supreme Court Justices were able to be on the Supreme Court at the same time? There is an additional liberal Catholic, Justice Sotomayor, but all conservatives on the Court now were raised Catholic. Doesn’t it strike you as odd that all of the conservatives are Catholic, and that no evangelical is among them, given the abortion litmus test among Republicans? Compare the current Court’s conservative makeup with the face of today’s anti-abortion movement, which is mostly evangelical in the headlines, though the Catholic Church hierarchy has always lobbied to make abortion illegal. Period. No exceptions for rape, incest, or any other reason. Six Catholics overturned Roe v. Wade in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization. Of course, Supreme Court appointments are mired in politics, but in a country with extraordinary religious diversity, this configuration demands explanation."
"Going back to that television viewer, an unstated and accurate aspect of the message was the lack of religious diversity on the Roberts Court. With five, maybe six, Catholic conservative justices and one Catholic liberal justice (Sonia Sotomayor), seven out of nine justices are of the same religion. Justice Elena Kagan is Jewish and new Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson has said she is a nondenominational Protestant.
Just as the court is beginning to look more like America with four female justices and two Black justices, religious diversity reflecting the nation’s multi-religions is another factor in inspiring public confidence in the court’s rulings and the institution’s legitimacy."
"Conservative Supreme Court Justices are making unaccountable and undemocratic decisions, much like the Vatican Congregation of the Doctrine of the Faith."
"But the justices in the Dobbs majority aren’t simply cradle Catholics. Several have ties to intellectual and social currents within Catholicism that, for all their differences, share a doctrinal conservatism and strong opposition to abortion."
Too many Papists means the nation is now being ruled from the Vatican! Alas that the warnings of long ago went unheeded! /s
Mea culpa, 2018 didn't have complete zero interest rates, just very low ones (lower than any year from 1970 to 2009). Not enough to really make bond investments a good choice.
Does anybody have good examples of either, or both, of the following? Of the two, I'm more interested in the second:
1. An idea or tool that should rightfully be popular and widespread, but it has been rejected by a segment of the population due to tribal association? (ie the thing is obviously good from an objective perspective, but it has failed to catch on in the wider population because it became associated with the lower/upper class, the political left/right, femeninity/masculinity, etc)
2. An idea or tool that has escaped the aforementioned trap (ie something that *has* caught on in the wider population, without its popularity being bogged down by tribal affiliation).
Boring, mundane examples are perfectly good!
Also on that note, is there a single word or short phrase to describe the phenomenon of "being robbed of support because one tribe rejects it due to association with competing tribes"?
I would say phonics in education. It is objectively the best way to teach children to read, but a proportion of educators are opposed to it because it is too...prescriptive? conservative? boring to teach? I'm honestly not sure what the root of the disagreement is.
>1. An idea or tool that should rightfully be popular and widespread, but it has been rejected by a segment of the population due to tribal association?
To some degree, in western societies, masking when you're sick. At the beginning of the *2020 thing* i was somewhat enthousiast at the thought that we'd start wearing mask when we're sick, which seems like a sensible behaviour, but the insane mania around mandatory masking really poisoned that well by placing a sort of social stigma around the dude who still mask in 2023.
I mostly just stay home when I'm sick, which is much easier in the post-COVID era of remote work. But I agree it would have been nice if we could have found a sane, happy medium on masking, rather than making masks somewhere between a tribal marker and a religious icon.
Seated urination. Men overwhelmingly reject this, despite its obvious advantages (less urine on clothes, on floor, etc) due to its association with femininity. There are cases where it's debatable (public restrooms, esp. with urinals), but at the very least, sitting in one's own home is strictly superior.
Have you ever peed in the men’s room at a sports stadium? It’s all long stainless steel toughs. In that case rapid through put is important. I’m in and out and my wife has advanced to the halfway point of the women’s queue.
But yeah, I take your point in spite of my joke about the water in the bowl being too cold below.
They make the seats too small, so you get the choice of scooting back and pooping on the seat rim or scooting forward and rubbing your dick against the inside of the toilet. And that's without arousal, which also causes the problem of "now I'm sitting down and aiming completely out of the toilet at the air in front of me." You can mitigate that when you're standing.
For 1, I vote dresses and skirts, especially in hot environments. Very associated with femininity post horseback riding, and it still hasn't gone back to being gender neutral, despite how few men are riding horses.
Because the clothing is "decorative", rather than "practical"? That is, instead of enhancing thing-based physical capabilities, it enhances aesthetic-based interpersonal capabilities.
1) Automatic cars in the UK. I'm an immigrant here, I'm mostly fond of the country, but the reluctance to adopt an almost strictly superior technology for 99% of users is completely baffling. It's associated with 'being a bad driver', so much so that if you get your license with an automatic car it's a lesser license (you can't drive non-automatics, which is a material restriction re: rentals etc). So I suffered through learning to drive with a manual car in London, despite having no intention to ever drive a manual again.
2) ...the entirety of modernity? Say, dishwashers and washing machines (which I continue to hold to be two of the high points of civilisation).
I agree that automatic transmissions are in general superior to manual, but the "you must pass a driving test using stick in order to be licensed to drive stick" restriction seems perfectly reasonable to me. Driving stick is difficult if you only know how to drive automatic, and incompetent stick drivers are dangerous (stalling at intersections/in stop-and-go traffic, rolling backwards on hills). The reverse is not true; anyone who can drive stick can also drive automatic.
The state thus has a perfectly reasonable interest in making sure that only people who can actually drive stick are allowed to do so. I think this fully explains the licensing asymmetry, without any appeal to the UK's irrational "manual is better" attitude.
Have a manual transmission in the US is becoming something like anti theft technology. Fewer and fewer US drivers have ever used a stick.
Sorry you find it annoying but I grew up with stick shift vehicles and prefer them to automatics. I like the feeling of connection to the machinery.
I taught my wife how to drive a standard and she really took to it. The only glitch was her first time at a stoplight facing uphill on a steep San Francisco hill. The driver behind her was right on our rear bumper so she was afraid of rolling back a bit at the light change.
She set the parking brake and we switched seats so I would drive away from the light. It was just that one time though and now she can handle that situation without a problem.
1) nuclear power -- rejected because it was associated with war-hawks, capitalism and atheism (many of the early hippies believed in God: e.g.: The Farm commune, which influenced The Green movement profoundly)
I'm talking about our failure to invest in nuclear over the past 50 years because of the so-called Green Movement. Imagine how many coal plants we could have gotten rid of back then but for goddamn dirty hippies.
When Canadians rejected Target and booted the company out mostly due to Anti-American sentiment and pro-Canadian rhetoric. When it would have actually been great to have Target and when so called Canadian classics like Tim Hortons are actually owned by Americans... all about perception.
Canadians, I believe, (as I speak for all of them) would have loved to welcome Target into our retail world-scape. But Target was determined to punch themselves in the nuts at every opportunity.
Nice! Thanks for the links. I don’t know about the rest of Canada either but I was living in Toronto at the time and there was a lot of anti-American sentiment. Trump was campaigning and all over the news and I sensed people really rejected Target because of this. That was the impression I got. Which I was bummed about cause one opened near where I was living and then closed and there was no comparable store.
On your point (2), several entire scientific fields had to pass through that crucible during the 19th century because each of them was in the process of debunking the Christian Bible as literal account of the world's beginnings. Devotion to that story, that the Earth and all its living things dated from a specific day 6,000 years ago, was thoroughly mainstream across Europe and North America. Paleontologists, geologists, and evolutionary biologists all had to deal with extensive fallout based on that reaction to what they were learning and documenting. For those objecting it felt very much [though they of course used contemporary wordings to express this] as if a core piece of their shared identity was being torn away.
#1. It's hard to come up with examples where the thing is "obviously good", since nearly everything is debatable.
One example of #1 could be spelling reform. For educated people (people who have successfully learnt to write), mastering irregular spellings becomes a status symbol and not mastering them is associated with ignorant people. (Of course, the idea of spelling reform is not associated with uneducated people.)
(Other similar examples could be found throughout the world.)
Arguably the non adoption of the metric system in America/Britain.
Vaccination? -- Probably there are people who reject vaccination because they want to belong to the "anti vax" "tribe". But that maybe wouldn't be their conscious reason for rejecting vaccination. (There are probably also historical examples of this.)
Sobriety has been rejected by certain groups of men because it is associated with women and religion.
Also, some young people engage in silly or risky behavior because they want to reject older people, or the "squares".
Esperanto would be an obviously brilliant idea if more people had adopted it. Did people not adopt it because it was associated with weirdos?
2. As far as #2 is concerned, there must be so many examples of this, that it is hard to come up with "good" examples. I mean, so many ideas and tools have been transmitted from one culture to another.
The use of the metric system in so many places could be an example.
I'll adopt meters and kilograms if the metric people agree to switch to the obviously superior Fahrenheit system. It's not like anyone multiplies temperatures by 1000, and having the 0-100 range encompass more of the normal variation in weather is really useful. But the fact that the metric people insist on using Celsius too suggests that it's just empty cultural posturing based on what they're personally familiar with.
That seems backwards. With Celsius, the outside temperature is always a two-digit number, whereas with Fahrenheit, triple-digit temperatures are common.
That depends on where you live, but in any case Celsius is so wasteful with the scale that there's huge room for improvement. You could maybe make the Fahrenheit degrees say 10% larger to reduce the frequency of 3 digit temperatures. But Celsius literally doesn't use half the scale *and* it has negative temperatures (which are even more inconvenient than three digit temperatures) more frequently than Fahrenheit.
If Celsius users needed more precision in reporting the weather, they could use decimals, but they hardly ever do, because 1 degree C is more than enough precision for weather reporting.
> Did people not adopt it because it was associated with weirdos?
I don't know about that, but it must have been dealt great blows by the Nazis and the USSR. Idk about the Nazi Germany ban, Stalin accused them of being spies (on account on having contacts abroad) and Zionists. I don't know if that qualifies for the original question, but it's not about "weirdness".
It’s kind of my experience that some people react to learning Esperanto as though it meant joining a new age religious movement, even though to me it just seems like a hobby for people who like languages.
It's funny, because the single most common argument I see for learning Esperanto is the community. It really does seem like a new age religious movement.
I actually do attend periodic events for people who learn languages as a hobby. There are always a good number of Esperanto speakers there, never a majority, though there was at least one who had been raised as a native speaker (bilingually with English; his parents presumably weren’t *that* heartless). They don’t seem noticeably more cultish than the rest, though I guess there may be a difference between “people who study languages as a hobby, one of which might be Esperanto”, and “people whose sole language-learning focus is Esperanto”.
I think that was the final nail in the coffin, but a greater problem is that even if people are open to the idea of the constructed language, you immediately get many trying to invent their own.
Ostensibly, because there is some defect that needs to be fixed, but mostly... I suspect that much larger motivation is that inventing your own language that other people would learn is high-status, while learning a language someone else invented is low-status. Kinda the same emotion that makes people "prove Einstein wrong" endlessly, except that in linguistics the things are way more subjective, and people can't even agree on which criteria the language should try to satisfy.
(Currently, a popular criticism of Esperanto is that it is too Euro-centric, i.e. that a *truly* neutral language would also include some Chinese characters, etc. But just a few decades ago, most people criticized Esperanto for being insufficiently similar to English or French, because it is unworthy of a civilized person to learn a language where the relation between writing and spelling is too straightforward.)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Delegation_for_the_Adoption_of_an_International_Auxiliary_Language - here is a historical example that any person sufficiently high-status to propose the use of Esperanto and be considered seriously, will also be irresistibly tempted to create his own language with many arbitrary "improvements". That's simply how status works. You don't get high status by ignoring the obvious opportunities to assert it.
There's a kind of perverse value in going the other direction, and making a language with rules and spellings so inconsistent that everyone will mess it up. Camaraderie through suffering.
(Did I have to look up how to spell 'camaraderie'? What do YOU think?)
I think there's an argument to be made that, at this point, spelling reform in English would be a tool of cultural imperialism, and actively harmful to linguistic diversity. It would encode one particular dialect (how about... Scouse), while everyone else would have a writing system that diverged even more from they way they pronounce English. Sure, there'll be a pull toward the Scouse pronunciation just from its use in writing, but that pull is ongoing today, just in a direction we don't normally notice, like water.
Alternatively, we could each adopt individual writing systems the same way some people adopt pronouns, as an expression of identity. That'd be fun!
If you emigrated, teach your children the heritage language and the local language, then do the same with grandchildren, but in all likelihood this won’t be necessary with great-grandchildren. Problem solved.
That's softening your previous stance quite a bit.
"Do whatever it takes to harm linguistic diversity" has an implication you probably didn't intend-- what really harms linguistic diversity is to take children from their families and beat them if they speak their native language. Did you have specific policies in mind?
That one of 6000 frog species that's going extinct? It must be preserved!!! Doesn't matter how many more humans will have to starve or freeze to death because of it, gotta save the frogs!
Polar bears? They're more important than all of humanity, obviously!
It's data. We're losing data. (Not to mention the problem of human death.)
Forget all those stupid useless "liberal arts" college degrees like "underwater basket weaving": we need to train half the human population as anthropological researchers NOW, so they can interview the other half, and record this irreplaceable data that we're losing every time someone dies or even forgets anything. I'm serious. There's stuff that's evolved for thousands of years, in conditions that will never be replicated, and it's being replaced by English and McDonalds and woke leftism. (And were I saying this more than 50 years ago, I'd include "Christianity", too.) This is data that future humans, or our AI successors, will curse us for not preserving, and we deserve whatever virtual hell they condemn us to.
But maybe Elon Musk will succeed with Neuralink and be able to record people's brains. That'd also do the job.
You aren’t disproving the parent poster’s point that it’s just hoarding. How about this viewpoint: notable data has already been written down, and data that hasn’t passed this filter isn’t worth preserving?
I don't think spelling reform in English would be conceivable right now, because there are too many different countries, but the British could have done it, in the 18th-19th centuries.
Klingon was deliberately devised to be as unlike human languages as possible while still being a language that could in principle be learned and pronounced by human actors. Its grammar is very weird - for instance the object-verb-subject word order, and the polypersonal verb agreement are things that very few natural languages do. Esperanto by contrast was deliberately devised to be easy to learn by as many people as possible (not fully successfully - it still has some unnecessary features that are complications that make it harder, like the accusative case, or its wide range of phonemes that many languages do not have, but it was a decent first attempt).
Klingon wasn't "unlike human languages", but rather "unlike common human languages". A lot of the grammar is based on Native American languages, which are mostly dead or dying.
Okay, fair enough; I guess “as unlike your own language as possible, for as large a number of people as possible, while still being useable as a language”. Though even then, if I remember rightly, the phonology really is like nothing on earth, with its asymmetry between unvoiced alveolar ’t’ and voiced retroflex ‘d’ and other features.
As opposed to Esperanto, whose phonology is just based on the particular dialect of Polish that Zamenhof spoke. I guess they're two ends of a spectrum.
I'd say yes, considering that there are millions of people who learned Esperanto voluntarily, despite the obvious lack of opportunities to use it.
Meanwhile, the popularity of Klingon is clearly based on popularity of Star Trek (as opposed to the linguistic qualities of the language itself), but despite the size of the sci-fi fandom and their famous willingness to study obscure things, I doubt that even the most hardcore fans are actually *using* Klingon to talk to each other (especially about topics unrelated to Star Trek).
So it seems that when people spend comparable effort to learn Esperanto and Klingon, they succeed at the former but fail at the latter. Which suggests that the former is an order of magnitude easier to learn. (This fact is completely obvious to anyone who actually learned Esperanto, but of course I am writing this argument for the ones who did not.)
You can learn basic Esperanto in one (hardcore) week. One year of normal education at school would give you a level comparable to people who use English as a second language on internet.
> You can learn basic Esperanto in one (hardcore) week.
If that's true, then IMO Esperanto is not ready for prime-time, because learning sufficient vocabulary to talk about anything besides "donde esta la biblioteca" will take longer than that (for the average person). One year of formal education might be more realistic (as you'd said).
However, the question remains: why should anyone learn Esperanto ? As you'd said, people learn Klingon more or less so they can pretend to be Klingons (the same goes for Elvish), and join an existing community of people who all share the same hobby. People learn English if they want to talk to an international community of ordinary people about ordinary things -- be it finance, technology, politics, or popular fiction. What niche does Esperanto fill ? From what I know of its history (and I could be wrong), it was supposed to be the common language of the glorious proletariat; but Communist countries are notoriously insular, so that didn't really work out...
People learn Esperanto so they can go to Esperanto conventions, so it's a lot more similar than you might think. It really is just a hobby with a passionate community. The difference is that you don't have to learn Klingon to be a Trekkie.
Well, it's easier to learn. But that's not really what I meant (I didn't mean Esperanto itself is better than something else), I just meant that if it had been more successful, then it would be useful, and people would consider it an "obviously" brilliant idea.
For 2, it seems a matter of degree? There are people who, to some degree, reject things like "cooked food", "clothing", "metal", and "cleaning wounds", but none of those have risen to the level of "tribal" yet.
Hm, "pervasive" doesn't fit the anti-vax stuff, not directly. Anti-vax isn't pervasive on the right, but pro-vax is pervasive on the left. Maybe it's enough to have the rejection of the rejection be tribal?
Yeah but not mainstream ones, I don't think. Like with being an "organic raw-food vegan", it's got an affiliation, but it's not pervasive? That's the distinction within the word "tribal" that I was trying to make, anyway.
1) Vaccines? Which also point to what I think is a part of the problem, where the "obviously good from an objective perspective" parts become less obvious when a bunch of people become highly motivated to seek out any flaws. (**Are** there inherent problems with mRNA vaccines? I have no idea. But they definitely get the job done in the short run.)
I had exchanges, some of them civil, with lots of anti-vaxxers on Twitter during the period when I hung out on medical Twitter as part of my volunteer work on Evusheld distribution. Some tried earnestly to convince me I was mistaken about the benefits of the covid vax, and sent me to their evidence. There is a whole world out there of studies, blogs and forums supporting the idea that the covid vax is utterly ineffective and/or very dangerous. Many of the sites are not obviously wacko, and lots of the people posting on them sound pleasant and caring. I see how people whose initial source of info was those sites came to believe that the vax was NOT obviously good from an objective perspective.
Everyone got Covid and so if the metric one looks at is avoiding getting infected then nothing worked. But if the metric is avoiding a severe case of Covid that leads to hospitalization and death then the data says mitigation measures that slowed spread until availability of the vaccines worked.
So we have reams of data with different states doing different degrees of mitigation measures and different populations with varying degrees of vaccination rates and it all points to mitigation measures reduced spread in 2020 and 2021 and vaccines reduced severity through the Delta variant. Oh, and no data indicates vaccines were dangerous or exacerbated spread or whatever anti-vaxxers said at various points in 2021.
I kept an open mind and listened to Alex Berenson in 2021…he was wrong about everything! Excess deaths are back to normal and so if the vaccines were as dangerous as the anti-vaxxers were saying we would see an uptick in excess deaths in highly vaccinated populations. I got 3 Pfizer shots and I’ve moved on with my life…I’m not sure what you want me to say. Is driving dangerous?? Because I drive a car.
Yeah, as biased as the media can be, I think if there were any common or severe short-term negative effects of the covid-19 vaccines, we'd have seen them by now, simply due to the number of people who got vaccinated in a short period of time. That said, I think it's a true statement that "there's no evidence that the covid-19 vaccines are safe in the long term". But by now we all know the problem with that, right? And in this case, we simply won't know until enough time has passed, which is an unavoidable problem when rushing out a new type of vaccine for a new disease.
Hey, I get it. Did I sound like the antivaxxers convinced me?
The thing about how the vax didn't prevent people's catching covid is very problematic. I understand that what the vax does is reduce severity, & by doing that saves lives and probably also reduces the chance of Long Covid and probably also reduces the contagiousness of the infected. But a LOT of people don't get that. Several well-educated people I know have expressed doubts about the usefulness of the vaccine because it did not prevent them or anyone they know from catching covid.
I understand why they have the wrong idea about the covid vax. Many of the vaxes we get do give sterilizing immunity. And the government for a long time dangled before us the idea that we could get to zero covid, stamping it out entirely, at least in the US, the way we did various other diseases we get vaxed for. The idea was also dangled as a justification for masking and lockdownish regulations. Meanwhile it was obvious to doctors & scientists who understood immunology that covid was not the kind of illness it is possible to stamp out. But the government was not informing the public, it was *herding* the public, by saying the things it believed would cause people to act in the way that it thought were most likely to reduce deaths. It later became clear the public had been misinformed, and I'm sure the resulting mistrust has helped power the anti-vax movement. Long term result of this is that US did terribly with covid, and is way up near the top of the list if countries for covid deaths per million. And now there's growing resistance to childhood vaccinations for a bunch of killer diseases that really can be stamped out.
I'm furious about all that. (Nor angry at you, though. Topic just triggered a rant.)
America has a high Covid death rate for two not entirely unrelated reasons—high poverty levels AND for some reason the mitigation measures became politicized. I believe the politicization happened because lower educated Trump supporters believed the elites/Deep State were using the pandemic to defeat Trump by tanking the economy. Now I’m educated and I’ve followed politics closely and the candidates I support generally lose and so I’m used to not getting my way in politics (I also was never anti-Trump because I agree with some of his 2016 platform and I hate Bush Republicans)…but Trump’s strongest supporters started following politics closely in 2015 and they feel they are entitled to always having their candidate win and so they threw a tantrum in 2020/21 when Trump lost because they believe it was the work of elites/Deep State.
Politicization happened on both ends, and very early. Nancy Pelosi somewhat famously tried to make light of the pandemic in February of 2020, inviting people to keep going outside and don't worry about it.
Prior to the election in 2020 major Democrat candidates and politicians were claiming the vax was unreliable and not to be trusted, with some (Andrew Cuomo) saying that they would ban it in their state until it was more thoroughly vetted than Trump planned to do. And Pfizer deliberately delayed release of the vaccine until after the election in order to hurt Trump. By that winter Democrats were publicly getting the shot and fully in support of it, and everything switched around.
I don't trust much on this issue, it's been thoroughly politicized. ETA: I find it hilarious that Trump continued to market the vaccine as one of his signature initiatives but his base didn't want it and his opponent's would never give him credit.
Yes, that's true. But you don't agree that dishonest communications from the government played a part? I think gov't failure to state clearly that it was going to be impossible to stamp out covid, no matter how many people masked and got vaxxed did great damage to people's trust. It even reduced *my* trust in government, which was not high to begin with.
For 2, how about the theory of evolution? Or for an invention, the printing press.
(1) seems harder because anything in that category is likely to be a spicy topic by definition. Ideologically, I'd suggest "homosexuality can be a lifestyle choice rather than innate" - situational homosexuality and evidence from other cultures suggest this to be true, but it pattern-matches to anti-gay religious arguments, so it's more politic to talk about sexual orientation being a fixed part of the identity that one discovers (which for many people it may well be).
It's hard to come up with a concrete invention for (1). Perhaps execution by gassing? I oppose the death penalty, but I'd much prefer nitrogen asphyxiation to a lethal injection.
Re: 2: "Brandon Hendrickson...has a post up responding to comments"
From the refered to post(there was no option to comment there but I did subscribe):
"this is too important an endeavor to succumb to pessimism and gloominess."
Pessimism meet Blake:
"We paint the world around us in the colours of the world inside. Just as the driver who complains how bad the traffic was fails to recognise that they themselves were the traffic, so too do those who complain about being trapped in a terrible world fail to realise the extent to which their choice of focus has helped create that world.”
--John Higgs, William Blake vs the World, 2021
How do we adjust the "world inside" - if we need to?
"Then she told herself to stop her nonsense. If you looked for things to make you feel hurt and wretched and unnecessary, you were certain to find them, more easily each time, so easily, soon, that you did not even realize you had gone out searching."
"if you looked for things to make you feel ...wretched...you were certain to find them"
A natural tendency. Da experts suggest habitual thankfulness for stuff we so often take for granted. Tim Urban wrote something about this on Twitter/X today.
How do you make yourself feel thankful, though? I'm not feeling wretched these days -- have my ups and downs, but do OK -- but I really have never experienced feeling grateful for the things I like -- the sunrise, my friends, my house, my parents. I have often felt *glad* these things are part of my life, but I just do not get gratefulness. Gratefulness is something you feel for things that someone has given you, or helped you with. Gratefulness implies a giver. I am an atheist. There is no giver! Am I supposed to feel grateful to luck? I really do not get it. And even if I did, I do not see how it is possible to form a habit of feeling a certain way. Do you think you could form a habit of feeling sociable, or cool and comfortable no matter what the weather, or curious, or not hungry?
[I wrote this in response to receiving an email notification of your post and now notice how similar it is to the other responses]
"How do you make yourself feel thankful"
I'd say you don't "make yourself" but you can direct your attention to advantages and stuff that you haven't always had and may not have in the future - which promotes a sense thankfulness and if we do it often enough a perpetual feeling of gratefulness.
"I urge you to please notice when you are happy, and exclaim or murmur or think at some point, if this isn't nice, I don't know what is.'“
--Kurt Vonnegut [humanist], “Knowing What’s Nice,” an essay from In These Times, 2003
"I'm an atheist"
I'd say that our brains evolved to believe in a higher power and not coming to terms with that puts one's reasoning and opportunity for happiness at a disadvantage. It may seem intellectually dishonest to 'believe in the gods' at one level while not believing on another. Our evolved primate minds do this sort of thing all. the. time. (1)
"We all believe many things which we have no good ground for believing, because, subconsciously, our nature craves certain kinds of action which these beliefs would render reasonable if they were true.”
--Bertrand Russell [atheist], Why Men Fight, 1916
I've been trying to model this and posted a draft in last week's open thread, if interested.
(1) I have a different but compatible approach to this one for those who believe in deity at 'all' levels.
When people do kind and helpful things for me, I do feel grateful. And I already do direct my attention to positive things in my life, and savor them, and feel happy that they are there. The part that sticks in my throat is feeling *grateful* for the things I'm enjoying and savoring that are not in my life because somebody provided them for me, but because they're part of the planet, or because of luck.
As for Bertrand Russell, ""We all believe many things which we have no good ground for believing, because, subconsciously, our nature craves certain kinds of action which these beliefs would render reasonable if they were true.” I'm sure I do believe things I have no good ground for believing -- in fact I can easily think of a couple of examples. But believing that someone or something gave me the wonderful gift of sunrises is just not one of those things.
Also, what is it about this gratitude thing that makes people who are into it so determined to convert others, even others like me who have a way of thinking about life that works for them?
I'm suggesting it doesn't have to. Thankful/grateful that we've been fortunate - to not take our current good health or full belly for granted, occasionally.
"The part that sticks in my throat is feeling *grateful* for the things...because somebody provided them for me"
The pleasurable things we experience in life are largely due to circumstances beyond our control - so 'good fortune.' Humans tend to personify, I'd say it's because of our social nature, but I digress. Consider digging around inside and get an explanation as to why "it sticks in your throat."
"I'm sure I do believe things I have no good ground for believing ...But believing that someone or something gave me the wonderful gift of sunrises is just not one of those things."
I'm *not* saying you should believe in 'the gods'(by any name).
I'm suggesting we should all consider evidence that our brains have evolved to do so and if there are penalties for not acknowledging this.
"what is it about this gratitude thing that makes people who are into it so determined to convert others"
It's simply a basic technique recommended over time by many historical persons and ScIeNcE. Why wouldn't we want to share it with others who in turn may do with it what they will?
It may be more useful at a time of acute adversity but better to have the habit in place beforehand, I say.
An atheist here. There's no Giver, but there are myriad small-g givers, people who helped along the way, did something they didn't have to out of their kindness or just no reason at all.
And definitely I feel grateful to luck. There are many random forks in the road of life. When I see a homeless person, "there but for the grace of God (i.e., Luck for a non-believer) go I" is a thought that crossed my mind more than once. A couple of random events could have turned what now is a comfortable good life into something much less pleasant.
I installed what I call "the cheerleader function". If anything is important enough to complain about when it's going badly, it's important enough to appreciate when it's going well.
For me, there's an added hook. There's more complaining than praise, so I can get originality points for noticing something good that a lot of people are ignoring.
I'm an agnostic, and perhaps I personify the universe.
I do consider gratefulness to be a double-edged sword so far as depression is concerned. It's a reminder that anything good is part of a system--good things can and eventually will go away.
For example, I recently got treatment-- a corticosteroid shot-- for a mild case of trigger finger, and that, and maybe some massage-- which has it just about healed.
I'm grateful for having a problem which was fairly minor and well-enough understood that there are good treatments for it.
Trigger finger (not to be confused with itchy trigger finger, a very different syndrome) is a problem with the tendons leading to a finger or thumb. The finger doesn't straighten easily. In severe cases the finger gets stuck in a bent position.
In my case, I could straighten the fourth finger on my left hand, but it took a bit of effort, and it popped into straightness rather than moving smoothly.
It's caused by a nodule on the ligament which interferes with a "pulley" which I think is a rounded bit of bone.
I could make a good guess that it was a ligament because it didn't feel like a problem in the joint.
Trigger finger is fairly common-- about one person in 50 gets it. No one is quite sure why. It might be overuse, injury, gout, diabetes (which I've got and quadruples the odds of getting it), and it can also happen spontaneously. I'm just surprised that it haven't heard of it before.
I'm also surprised that while the symptom was at the joint, the cause was a ways down below the pad under my finger.
Another surprise was the rather large building that was just for hand problems, and the building was just for one medical company. I'd never thought about how many people with hand problems there would be in a city the size of Philadelphia.
Another surprise-- I was talking about it with a friend, and she told me that carpal tunnel syndrome is now considered to be mostly hereditary rather than an overuse problem.
No one here has had trigger finger? I got comments from two or three people people on my facebook who had, and if it's one person in fifty who's had it, I would expect to hear of it from at least one person here.
"In the Divine Humanism that Blake practised and which his work represents, we have a responsibility to recognise the imaginative aspect of our lives and use it well. As Blake told us, how we see is as important as what we see, ‘For the Eye altering alters all.’ For Blake, there was a moral component to perception. As he wrote, ‘The tree which moves some to tears of joy is in the Eyes of others only a Green thing that stands in the way […] As a man is, So he Sees.’ We paint the world around us in the colours of the world inside. Just as the driver who complains how bad the traffic was fails to recognise that they themselves were the traffic, so too do those who complain about being trapped in a terrible world fail to realise the extent to which their choice of focus has helped create that world."
"if you've really learned how to think, how to pay attention, then you will know you have other options. It will actually be within your power to experience a crowded, loud, slow, consumer-hell-type situation as not only meaningful but sacred,”
I'm sure I'm not the only one who's heard proclamations over the last several years that biotech in the early 21st century is going to be the equivalent to the information technology revolution in the 80's and 90's. Bill Gates famously said that if he were a young person today that he would go into biotech and the general consensus (hype?) seems to be that biotech is posed to impact our lives the same way the computing and internet giants did back then.
The more I think about this the more I become skeptical, and the reason comes back to the question posed above. To put it another way, what is the biotech equivalent of the personal computer? What is the product that biotech will eventually put in every house in America and every pocket in the world? Because that's what the information revolution did and that's what made it a revolution. Perhaps I'm simply not imaginative enough, but I'm struggling to think of a product that could come out of biotech in the near future (10-20 years) that would have an equivalent impact.
I still have hope for the results of studying people who live into their 90s in good health. Last I heard, it's not that they have great genes for structure, it's that they have better than average protective genes.
It might take more than ten years for research and testing, though.
Speaking as a biologist that does not work on human aging (or indeed, humans) the impression I get from reading the research is that aging is a multifaceted process with no one cause, and therefore no one solution. It's probably too much to hope for a silver bullet, but the development of a constellation of treatments that cover most, if not all, of the causes of aging might be in the cards at some point.
While I doubt it will happen till I'm already old and grey, I'm keeping the faith. What else is there to do?
Amazing advancement, but didn't really involve biotech. More to do with adoption of modern farming techniques (i.e. fertilizer, mechanization) and better breeds of crops that grew more efficiently in an agricultural environment.
Right, but those breeds of crops were created using an early version of biotech. Monsanto took the next step by engineering transgenic corn, BTW. In fact, a lot of the produce that you eat today is transgenic, not just corn.
Not really. The GMO backlash, and a fairly conservative approach by regulators and large companies like Monsanto (now a division of Bayer), means that 99% of the GMO crops out there are some combination of double-stacked soybean, corn, cotton or canola.
The list of approved crops is slowly growing (see, for instance, https://www.isaaa.org/gmapprovaldatabase/cropslist/default.asp), but its still going to be a long time before we see transgenics dominate the fruit and veg aisle. And even then, its going to be overwhelmingly glyphosate resistance and BT rather than anything interesting.
Seriously, though, I'm with you on the skepticism. Biotech is not the wild west of the computing 80s. It is a mature and highly regulated industry that has been quietly working away for a full century at incremental improvements to public health. There are absolutely new and exciting developments in the pipeline (my new favorite is 'Inverse-Vaccines' which could potentially combat auto-immune disorders) but I've not encountered anything that would suggest the industry is about the upend the whole world like computing managed to do.
If "biotech" is defined to include all of pharma, one could argue that the contraceptive pill and the vaccines that mostly eliminated smallpox and many childhood diseases have had a bigger impact on society and people's lives than computing. So I guess it already did "upend" the world.
Are you not including medical care advances? It seems like there's been a lot of that in the last 20 years, including lots of marketable products found in homes - think medicines that are common and very helpful to people with ongoing conditions.
No, I'm not really thinking of medical advancements. Which isn't to say that medical advancements aren't great or that they haven't had significant impacts on society, but I don't see them being transformative in the way ubiquitous computing was and is.
Hmm, I guess I consider the medical industry to be pretty huge, and advances within it as well. There's a lot of variation on the value of medical and tech companies, but medical revenue looks to be about $1 trillion a year in the US ($12 trillion globally) and tech has lower revenues in both (hard to find good revenue information for US companies, but maybe half a trillion, and $4.2 trillion globally under "tech").
Very hard at that 30,000 foot view to determine how much of that is growth in technology and such, but life expectancy has gone up 11 years in the US since 1950, which is certainly not small - roughly a 16% increase. The list of previously fatal diseases that we can now treat or cure is also pretty impressive. HIV/AIDS being a more recent example. Cancer survival rates has increased significantly as well.
Of course, this is less Apples and Oranges and more Apples and Coal in terms of which is more "transformative" so maybe there's no way to determine which is more important, but I think you're downplaying how big of a deal medicine has been in society.
In the case of biotech, might we want to find a different formulation for “game-changing, universally-adopted application” that doesn’t involve the k-word?
Sure, if you're okay with the not-so-occasional brain blood clot or heart failure.
It's always funny when people market these vaccines as some completely novel technique that was mastered in a matter of months through a marvel of engineering. What they don't tell you is that mRNA vaccines have been known about and actively tested for decades, but were never rolled out because they always ended up being toxic over the long term.
> mRNA is a tricky technology. Several major pharmaceutical companies have tried and abandoned the idea, struggling to get mRNA into cells without triggering nasty side effects.
> The indefinite delay on the Crigler-Najjar project signals persistent and troubling safety concerns for any mRNA treatment that needs to be delivered in multiple doses
> Three former employees and collaborators close to the process said Moderna was always toiling away on new delivery technologies in hopes of hitting on something safer than what it had. (Even Bancel has acknowledged, in an interview with Forbes, that the delivery method used in Moderna’s first vaccines “was not very good.”)
> In order to protect mRNA molecules from the body’s natural defenses, drug developers must wrap them in a protective casing... dose too much, and the drug is too toxic for patients.
> Moderna’s scientists... scoured the medical literature for diseases that might be treated with just small amounts of additional protein. “And that list of diseases is very, very short,” said the former employee who described Bancel as needing a Hail Mary. Crigler-Najjar was the lowest-hanging fruit. Yet Moderna could not make its therapy work, former employees and collaborators said. The safe dose was too weak, and repeat injections of a dose strong enough to be effective had troubling effects on the liver in animal studies.
> Moderna has promised to engineer its way out of those traps... BioNTech are also testing several mRNA-based cancer vaccines in clinical trials... companies will need an mRNA drug that's safe and effective for repeated use throughout a patient's life. Some have been skeptical that's achievable. Early generations of Moderna's drugs didn't meet that standard in animal tests, acknowledges its president, Stephen Hoge; over time, liver toxicity and immune reactions reared their heads.
I wonder, was there some sudden breakthrough in the safety of the technology precisely in February 2020? Or was it a simple utilitarian calculation of "hundreds of thousands will die, but millions will be saved (and billions will be made)"?
Both great technologies. The mRNA vaccines in particular seem like they have great potential to speed up developments in several medical fields. But neither are really what I'm talking about. I'm thinking more of consumer products, something that the average person would purchase for their own personal use. More than that, consumer products that would become so ubiquitous that we can't imagine what life was like before them, a la the PC and the smartphone.
Something like ~20% of the worlds calories derive from genetically modified food crops (directly or via animal feed). So that's certainly mass market, unless you're unusual, dozens of products in your kitchen (basically anything with corn) are the fruits of biotech.
Also the ethanol that's blended into gasoline (~10% around here) is pretty much all from genetically engineered corn.
CRISPR seems to have tremendous potential to change genetic code. I don't know enough about the practical uses to be specific, but it seems like it could be revolutionary for healthcare, genetic modification of crops, and in the future, genetically modifying humans at their core. Whether it will actually deliver on that potential I can't say, but it is a huge advance over the types of gene editing we were able to do before.
CRIPSR is revolutionary, but not quite as revolutionary as you might think. It solved one problem in the genetic engineering pipeline; how to make quick and cheap target edits in the genome. But the process of engineering an organism involves a lot more than just that. At this point, the bottleneck is our understanding of fundamental metabolism (i.e. what does knocking out a particular gene actually do), which is a much bigger and thornier problem to solve.
Let's say I cook a meal-prep dish (e.g. classic lasagna) today Tuesday, and I plan to serve it at a dinner on Friday. From a taste perspective, should I store it in the fridge or the freezer? Or will it taste the same regardless? (I'm totally uninterested in food safety, only taste matters.)
Same as any other leftover. Cook as normal. Refrigerate. Depending on the dish put it in the oven at 350 for a while to reheat or microwave. Saucy perfection.
Huh. The way I usually cook pasta is to just boil it in salted water, no sauces added either during or after. Spaghetti doesn't do well when reheated later, it just becomes a sticky mess. I'm happy with eating cold fusilli or bow tie pasta though.
This might just be a matter of taste, I guess. So for spaghetti I would also boil it in salted water with no sauce. I would drain, and while the pasta is still warm, I combine it with sauce and any additions.
I think it reheats wonderfully but I guess one person's Saucy Perfection is another person's Sticky Mess.
Fridge unless you need to wait long enough that it might start going bad (in your case, if there's a chance you might not serve it on Friday). We've had times when we thought we would reheat something in a day or two and end up throwing it out 7-10 days later because something came up and we forgot.
Freezer causes ruptures in the food because ice crystals expand. I had to freeze a 7 pound prime rib roast once because we needed to postpone a dinner by a week. It was clearly not as good: mushy.
I'd go for the fridge. If it's the kind of dish that seems to be better when eaten as a leftover - and there are quite a few like that to my taste buds - then you'll get that effect from storing it in the fridge but not the freezer.
This will depend a lot on the dish, obviously. I don't know about lasagna, but e.g. chili tastes better after a few days in the fridge compared to freshly cooked.
The phrasing of the bet will likely be more interesting to people in comparison with the mathematical content. The mathematical content is whether the Fourier transform is the same as, or importantly similar to, the "Projective dual" - the FT being a vital tool in engineering/science, and the projective dual being a largely-forgotten tool in pure math that has become somewhat controversial because of its recent appearance in computer graphics (more detail in the link)
Here's the part that I think is interesting for PM people who don't care about math/fourier transform. Above I used the word "importantly" in that explanation, which is a highly subjective word, and that's a problem for the question. There are multiple *boring* connections one could make between the two things. Those wouldn't make the things "identical", but of course you could argue that they are enough to make them "arguably similar".
I've tried to solve this subjectivity problem by phrasing it in terms of teaching. Two things can be "similar enough" that a teacher would mention their similarity when teaching them. If they are REALLY similar or identical, it can be a no-brainer to bring up the similarity. If they were only a little similar, you might only bring up the similarity if you were personally keen on both. Currently, I do NOT bring up the similarity when teaching. Question is, is something about to change my mind?
Results from the PM were interesting. I started it out with 37% "yes". It shot up to almost 90% - but has slowly declined.
Liberals in western countries often show great admiration for the culture, art, religious traditions etc. of 'indigenous' peoples around the world, and this seems fairly independent of the specific aspects of these cultural traditions. It really seems like any kind of e.g. wood carving, no mater how basic, is treated as a great work of art so long as it came from the right kind of society.
Is it possible *in principle* for these sorts of people to broadly have a negative perception of a particular indigenous culture? Like believing, without malice, 'these customs are kind of backward', 'this style of art is very boring and lacks any real positive aesthetic qualities', 'these religious traditions are very basic and unintersting'. I really can't imagine this being so.
Cynically, it seems like belonging to the set of 'indigenous culture' is all that really matters here and anything made by primitive brown people lights up a part of their brains. Less cynically, the authenticity of these forms of culture that are neither commercial nor elite in nature can be said to inherently give them artistic as well as anthropological value and is something not usually experienced in developed countries.
And to be clear, I'm talking about the present day - whatever problematic views of indigenous culture espoused by otherwise progressive (for the time) westerners in the past aren't relevant to this.
Museums want people to come see their stuff. No museum is going to say "Come look at some of the worst art we have!", just like Del Taco won't run an advertisement saying "Our burritos are terrible!"
Same with the critics. If you go look on Amazon for Art History & Criticism all the bestsellers are books that are trying to tell you about something you like. Surrealism in Paris, Rembrandt, Picasso. No one is going to write a best seller bashing artists no one has ever heard of.
Serious question - let's say indigenous art is objectively terrible in the most propound sense imaginable. How am I going to make money off that?
This sounds like selection bias - of course you only ever hear people call things interesting, people don't talk about uninteresting things!
I'm not sure how an average western liberal would even *come in contact with* indigenous art/culture/etc that wasn't interesting or admirable to them, they only encounter those things when someone has curated them for that reason.
Hello, Western Liberal here. I genuinely think Northwestern Pacific art (and Haida art and storytelling in particular) are exceptionally beautiful/good as a style - for some historical examples see the British Museum's house pole (https://www.britishmuseum.org/collection/object/E_Am1903-0314-1) and copper shield held in the Canadian museum of
I haven't heard anyone praise, say, historical Australian aboriginal art in the same way.
I'm sure a small portion is people just virtue-signalling, but having swum in those circles I really don't think that's a big part of it (and, if anything, generically referring to 'indigenous art' gets the same kind of reaction as referring to Africa as a country in the 'liberal' (I'm not American, but it's approximately correct) circles I've been in.
I think part of the reason is that the good stuff gets shared, whereas the less interesting stuff doesn't. It's very similar to claims amongst certain kinds of white people that 'ethnic' food is better, or more flavourful, or whatnot, but that's just a selection effect. You don't see Mongolian (not hot pot, which is Chinese), Papua New Guinean, or Ugandan, restaurants around, because the food there is terrible, and instead we're just exposed to the best (for my biases, Ethiopian, Indian, and Thai).
>I haven't heard anyone praise, say, historical Australian aboriginal art in the same way.
Most American liberals aren't familiar with it, but Aboriginal art in Australia is extremely highly regarded, corporations and other organizations will pay big money to commission art from aboriginal artists, galleries will display their art etc.
And as far as customs go, it seems that in some ways aboriginals really were quite backward in a modern progressive sense, especially around their treatment of women. I remember seeing someone on reddit passionately arguing against the claim that colonization was not meaningfully different to intertribal war in pre-colonial australia. They claimed that unlike the colonists, aboriginals understood how sacred a people's land was and would almost never take it. They would instead "only" steal women (and other resources). So even widespread sex trafficking isn't enough to indict traditional aboriginal culture.
I'd agree on that point, e.g. those same Northwestern Pacific cultures whose art I admire widely practiced slavery and had a formalised hierarchy. Not great, widely lost in the genericisation of 'native' or 'aboriginal' cultures seen in Europe and North America, which seems to be some kind of romanticised meld of east coast cultures in Canada and the United States (some of whom, to be fair, did seem to be actually fairly egalitarian, such as the Mi'kmaq.
I see it as broadly the same impulse that has North Americans see Europeans as 'sophisticated' in some generic sense.
I would imagine a lot of this comes from a reflexive distaste for modern culture. If you don't like the world around you, you search for things from a different one, which at this point are mostly indigenous cultures. Everything else is becoming something of a mono-culture.
> 'this style of art is very boring and lacks any real positive aesthetic qualities',
You mean like Hallmark greeting cards? Landscape paintings on black velvet? Lava lamps? Plastic flamingos?
Who needs indigenous?
I would also like to propose a distinction between artifact and work of art. Looking at old stuff made by cultures that have somewhat vanished in the world, there is a lot of context that needs to be interpolated. Otherwise, you are just staring at an old piece of wood and wondering why it’s in a museum. I don’t think it’s realistic to try and judge art without any cultural context. Also, it’s not reasonable to view all these objects as intentional works of art per se there is a lot of shaping and decorative treatments that don’t necessarily imply some great secret or intellectual or cultural trope. But it is interesting to speculate on what the interest in those forms was, and what it signified.
A good example is the elephant dung paintings that were shown in New York, that Rudy Giuliani had a fit about. They were a mashup of Catholic imagery and a material that had sacred qualities to the indigenous people that the artist hailed from; a people that had had the Catholic religion introduced to them by foreigners. So it all comes down to one’s attitude about elephant dung. If you are not prepared to include that context in your viewing of the object, then it’s just sacrilege against the Virgin Mary. I don’t really know what the artists intention was because I have never spoken to the person, but it’s not hard for me to except that it is a fusion of the sacred across some cultural boundary, and I can look at it that way, as opposed to the way, it was described in the papers; someone splattering elephant shit on a canvas, and insulting Catholicism while they were at it.
The boomerang was a very practical hunting instrument, but sometimes they were decorated quite laboriously. How is that different from a colt 45 with gold inlay on the barrel they are in museums as well.
Chris Ofili. And I remembered the name off the top of my head. Thing about the "sacred indigenous" stuff is that he's thoroughly Westernised and was using it as a gimmick. Modern art is a cut-throat world and you need something to make you stand out; he was mixing Western Christian art with 'native' art and things like cut-outs from porn magazines, and it was novel and gimmicky enough for the galleries to boost him.
The 'shock' artists of the 90s onwards, you don't hear so much about them today because time has moved on and new gimmick artists are out there. Damien Hirst and the other 'Saatchi artists' became parodies of themselves (I have no idea what Tracy Emin is doing today, because they're not Controversial Art that is splashed all over the media anymore). In fact, they're so *uncontroversial*, some of them are now RAs (Royal Academicians, members of the Royal Academy of Arts, which is about as Establishment as you can get):
Ofili himself seems to have left London et al behind and is now living in Trinidad and Tobago, and again - he's CBE (Commander of the British Empire), so Establishment awarded for his controversial, shocking art.
The painting you mention is not particularly deep. Sure, there's a lot of surface shock value, but eh. Also, it's not done (despite the Wikipedia article) in the Black Madonna style; indeed, it's the stereotype golliwog/offensive black minstrel imagery style, which if a white artist had painted it would have caused immense offence. What Ofili was trying to do there? No idea 🤷♀️
"One of his paintings, The Holy Virgin Mary, a depiction of the Virgin Mary, was at issue in a lawsuit between the mayor of New York City, Rudy Giuliani, and the Brooklyn Museum of Art when it was exhibited there in 1999 as a part of the "Sensation" exhibit. The painting depicted a Black Madonna surrounded by images from blaxploitation movies and close-ups of female genitalia cut from pornographic magazines, and elephant dung."
He *did* get in trouble for what could be viewed as another 'religious' painting, "The Upper Room" which was thirteen portraits of macaque monkeys. The reference to the Last Supper can be made from that. But the trouble wasn't on the grounds of the Christian religion, but rather the real sacred value: offending against money:
"The Upper Room is an installation of 13 paintings of rhesus macaque monkeys by Ofili in a specially designed room. It was bought by the Tate Gallery in 2005 and caused controversy as Ofili was on the board of the Tate Trustees at the time of the purchase. In 2006 the Charity Commission censured the Tate for this purchase."
Again, it's very hard to portray yourself as some outsider artist rebelling against conventions when you're on the board of the Tate 😁
I looked the elephant dung thing up and I think you're misrepresenting it:
The work employs mixed media, including oil paint, glitter, and polyester resin, and also elephant dung, map pins and collaged pornographic images. The central Black Madonna is surrounded by many collaged images that resemble butterflies at first sight, but on closer inspection are photographs of female genitalia; an ironic reference to the putti that appear in traditional religious art. A lump of dried, varnished elephant dung forms one bared breast, and the painting is displayed leaning against the gallery wall, supported by two other lumps of elephant dung, decorated with coloured pins: the pins on the left are arranged to spell out "Virgin" and the one on the right "Mary".
I apologize for misrepresenting. It was not my intent. I was speaking largely from memory of the event, and my own vague assessment after reading the media firestorm at the time from all sides of the fence. also, I’m an artist, so I try and find the good in things.
I mean, taking a position on it at the time, was literally like having shit thrown at you.😆😆😆
Yeah it’s provocative alright. Clearly he is in someway challenging the notion of what is held sacred in different cultures. Was there any mention of what elephant dung means in that culture? I’ve never really explored that.
Edit: Elephants in Africa represent power. Dung is meant to suggest fertility. African art has always incorporated dung without meaning to be offensive -- there is an African mask in the Brooklyn Museum made of wood, honey, metal and dung.Oct 5, 1999
Are "challenge the notion of what is held sacred" and taking a rather literal shit on Catholicism in this case just two sides of the same coin? When I hear phrases like "he's an artist challenging the notion of what is held sacred" by incorporating porn and feces into traditional Catholic imagery, my mind drifts back to Reservoir Dogs and I think to myself "sure, and Like A Virgin is just a song about a sensitive girl who meets a nice fella."
I would imagine a person, living somewhere in a tribal culture and worshiping various forms of gods and various symbols of fertility (the main one here in this case), and then having Catholic missionaries come to them and overtime incorporating and blending sacred symbols would lead to another point of view. The piece made me think about all those things and I think they are things worth thinking about.
I mean, in terms of their own symbols and culture, they might will be venerating the Virgin Mary, and not desecrating her. I think it depends very much and how you view it.
I don’t mean to dispute your interpretation, but merely to offer mine.
"I would imagine a person, living somewhere in a tribal culture and worshiping various forms of gods and various symbols of fertility (the main one here in this case), and then having Catholic missionaries come to them and overtime incorporating and blending sacred symbols would lead to another point of view. "
Dude, he was born in Manchester and educated Catholic, it's not like he was a native Nigerian tribesman forcibly converted by the Jesuits 😁
"Ofili was born in Manchester, England, to parents May and Michael Ofili of Nigerian descent. When he was eleven, his father left the family and moved back to Nigeria. Ofili was for some years educated at St. Pius X High School for Boys, and then at Xaverian College in Victoria Park, Manchester."
Nigeria has a strong Catholic presence (broadly speaking it's divided between Christian South and Muslim North which, naturally, has led to tensions):
"Christianity was followed by an estimated 46.18% of the Nigerian population in 2020; one-quarter of Christians in Nigeria are Catholic (12.39% of the country's population)."
"Islam dominates northwestern Nigeria (Hausa, Nupe, Fulani and others), with 99% Muslim, and northeastern Nigeria (Kanuri, Fulani and other groups). In the west, the Yoruba people are predominantly Muslim with a significant Christian minority and a few adherents of traditional religions. Protestant and locally cultivated Christianity are widely practised in Western areas, while Roman Catholicism is a more prominent Christian feature of southeastern Nigeria. Both Roman Catholicism and Protestantism are observed in the Ibibio, Efik, Ijo and Ogoni lands of the south. The Igbos (predominant in the east) and the Ibibio (south) are 98% Christian, with 2% practising traditional religions. The middle belt of Nigeria contains the largest number of minority ethnic groups in Nigeria, who were found to be majority Christians and members of traditional religions, with a small proportion of Muslims."
Even the potted bio admits the elephant dung was a marketing ploy (he discovered it when visiting Zimbabwe, but his family background is Nigerian, so it would be like an Latin-American artist who had nothing to do with Switzerland except going on a visit there once deciding to use Swiss woodworking as trademark of his art):
"British painter of Nigerian descent, born in Manchester. He studied at Chelsea College of Art and Design and the Royal College of Art. While at the latter, Ofili won a travelling scholarship to Zimbabwe. There he discovered the material which was to be his trademark, elephant dung. This was a way of linking his art to his African heritage but it was also, at first, used as a clever marketing ploy. Stickers marked ‘elephant shit’ were placed on London street furniture and two ‘shit sales’ were held (more performance pieces than actual functioning market stalls), one in Berlin and one in Brixton market. Ofili's brilliantly coloured paintings also employ glitter and map pins (the ones with bright plastic balls on the end) to produce patterns and spell out names."
The guy knew that Exoticism sells:
"Ofili has commented on his work: ‘It's what people really want from black artists. We're the voodoo king, the voodoo queen, the witch doctor, the drug dealer, the magicien de la terre.’ Much of the debate around Ofili's work is about whether it has a critical element or simply panders to an appetite for the stereotype."
I mean...given the way that sort of cultural imperialism is usually thought of, that would certainly be going against a certain grain, if you were correct, but I fear you're giving credit where it likely isn't due.
I think we’re in a cultural period where people have deliberately entangled the art and the artist. I’m not familiar with the specific case you’re referencing with indigenous art. But more broadly, some art is prized because of the moral purity of the artist and other works are seen as disgusting because of the immorality of the artist. For example, I've been told I shouldn’t watch a film if the director or lead actor was accused of misbehavior, regardless of the quality of the film. Fiction and poetry competitions increasingly refuse to blind the names of the authors. Part of the draw for me for the ACX book review contest is that the author is blinded. This topic leads into hotbed culture war territory, but the point I’m trying to make that I think everyone can find common ground on is that the art and the artist are deeply entangled in our current culture. You can argue there’s a good reason for that due to historical injustice or there’s not a good reason for that because it's anti-meritocracy, but the common ground is that contemporary western culture sees the art and artist as inseparable.
Pretty much. Ironically I first downloaded Cultist Simulator as a protest against Alexis Kennedy's cancellation, and wound up actually getting addicted by the game!
"I think we’re in a cultural period where people have deliberately entangled the art and the artist."
As a lot of influential people have always done for as long as the concept of full-time artist has existed. A lot of them are doing it on a different specific basis than was applied by Roman elites, or Medici dukes, or popes and cardinals, or the Gilded Age founders of major 19th-century museums. It's the same approach to the art though.
I'm curious if you know of any way to quantify that entanglement? For contemporary art, you could do a art competition where the art or poetry is judged blinded versus non-blinded. Not sure how you'd quantify that retroactively to look at it in the Roman period.
Anything that involves blood or is otherwise gross is thoroughly ignored by the culturaly-curious. I'm thinking of : afghan buzkashi, scarification, entrails reading, even mexican bone washing.
I'm probably sufficiently woke leftie to answer :)
Regarding art in particular – I really don't think there's a fact of the matter about whether a particular art style is good. My personal taste is boring and parochial: I like John Constable paintings and made-for-Westerners Shin-Hanga prints. I don't particularly enjoy Aboriginal art and wouldn't use it to decorate my home. But I don't think my personal preferences should be universalised: I first-order value a world with lots of different kinds of expression, even if they don't all speak to me. I also enjoy the exercise of trying to appreciate the merits of things other people like that I don't. Finally, I would want future humans to preserve and study at least some of the things I value, simply because they're important to me.
Regarding cultural judgement more generally: I do think there's a tension here that people don't always admit to between liberal values on the one hand and liberal pluralism on the other. If I had a big red button in front of me labelled "end honour killings of women" I would push it. On the other hand, although I find ritual cannibalism distasteful, I wouldn't want to end that because my preference for pluralism outweighs my personal inclination.
While most liberals do value diversity for its own sake, I think it also serves as a second-order guardrail. "If you think you are right and this entire group of people from another culture are wrong, consider that people who have thought that in the past have caused great harm, and understand that your perspective is shaped by your cultural context". I don't think it's an injunction to fully disregard your own taste or morals, but rather a general spirit of openmindedness and a conservative (!) attitude toward cultural reform.
>It really seems like any kind of e.g. wood carving, no mater how basic, is treated as a great work of art so long as it came from the right kind of society.
I agree. When I see Aboriginal Australian art in a museum, there's never any sense that it's good or bad, or that it even COULD be good or bad. What does a masterpiece of Broken Bay Dharug art look like? What does their version of The Room look like? No idea. It's always presented in the same way by the museum curators: with bland, unfeeling veneration.
A steelman might be "it's not the place of white Westerners to pass judgment on another culture's style of art." But why shouldn't we? Isn't an important part of art that you are allowed to judge and critique it?
"Everything about your culture is bad!" is prejudicial, and "everything about your culture is good!" honestly isn't much better. Imagine an anime reviewer who gives Hayao Miyazaki's movies a 10/10, while also giving the same score to Loli Oppai Tentacle Rape 7 (or whatever), because he's white and thus shouldn't criticise Japanese culture. We'd regard that as an insult to Miyazaki!
Legend of the Overfiend was better than I thought it would be. There was a baroque creativity to the monsters and backgrounds, and the bit with Amano Jyaku realizing exactly how the Chojin was going to create a new world had a real sense of 'be careful what you wish for'.
> What does a masterpiece of Broken Bay Dharug art look like?
I know nothing about the Broken Bay Dharug specifically, but in general, this could be the wrong question to ask. What I want to ask is this: do indigenous people even *have* art, in the modern sense ? For example, at my desk right now there are tons of bills, printouts, and even a jury summons (curses !). All of these items have graphical and textual elements combined purposefully together, but are they art ? In some ways, I guess you could say that they are (especially the ones with logos or diagrams on them), but we generally don't see them as such; to us, they are just functional pieces of paper designed to carry specific information. But some future historian might dig them up and hang them up at a gallery, prompting the visitors to marvel at the stark rectangular outlines and artful font kerning and whatnot...
Indigenous people definitely had art in the modern sense - both objects that were solely decorative in nature (e.g. cave paintings) and objects that were useful but had embellishments unrelated to their function (e.g. painted pottery, fancy clothing, decorated weapons).
I feel like this comment is a long way of saying “I just don’t get it.“ fair enough. I am finding it difficult to see an objective issue here to discuss.
It’s like going to someone’s house for dinner and then on the way home talking about how hideous their drapes are.
I think anything made by a competent, committed craftsmen who is ignorant of modern conventions and modern competition is appealing to many modern people. I find things like that very appealing. They have a committed, unself-conscious quality that's refreshing, and of course they are unfamiliar -- novel -- and that is appealing too. I don't recall thinking of any of them as great works of art. I'm sort of doubtful that museums or anthropologists or whoever is showing or describing these things sees them as "great works of art". Are you sure you didn't add that detail out of an irritated craving to make those who like these products of indigenous peoples sound especially silly?
You're going to laugh, but that was one of the first things I noticed about reading Robert E. Howard's old Conan stories--he is entirely committed to his muscular heroes and giant snakes. No irony. I think a lot of people are sick of irony and want stuff made by people who want to make things that are beautiful.
I agree with you. I am pretty allergic to ”wokeness” but I haven’t really noticed what is described here as a problem. Objects from less developed cultures can be interesting even if they are not great art.
Well...museum curators seem to think that blank canvases and singular straight lines are great works of art worth millions, even when the artwork is by a white Westerner. By that standard, every Aboriginal should be offended that every artwork their culture has ever produced *isn't* considered a masterpiece.
I think the museum curators who think blank canvases and singular straight lines are great works of art have moved into a dimension where "greatness" and "worth a great sum of money" blur into each other. Our species adapts, you know? , and lines get blurred. Consider how a lot of people are enamored of wealth. Falling in love with someone partly because he's a billionaire isn't *entirely* different from falling from someone because they can be so funny you laugh til you cry, or because they have beautiful facial features.
According to a quick Google search, the estimate of laundered money in the United States is about $300 billion. Money laundered in the art market is estimated at three to $6 billion worldwide per year. It is by far not the biggest way to launder money.
You're comparing one estimate about a hard to estimate thing to a different estimate about a different hard to estimate thing and coming up with a conclusion? Do I have that straight?
In fact it would be a hilariously-terrible way to launder money at any sort of scale, for several reasons that are obvious with a couple minutes' thought.
Does anyone know whether there's any data on whether support groups are helpful for dealing with grief? My son passed away earlier this year and I'm not coping well despite my best efforts (e.g. psychotherapy, generally looking after my physical well-being, spending more time around other friends and family, somatic and breathing practices). I could theoretically drive over an hour to go to my closest perinatal loss group (which is facilitated by a professional) every few weeks but the travel time is a substantial hurdle. I'm also skeptical that it would do any good. People keep recommending support groups in the abstract but if talking to my therapist doesn't help I'm skeptical that talking to a group of strangers would help. It might be worth the drive and the emotional effort if there's evidence that it would help in the long term
Please don't give me anecdotes; I've heard from people who love support groups and from people who think they're actively harmful. I would like data but frankly my brain has been fried by everything that has happened and I'm not up for searching through databases for well-structured double-blind studies when I get home from my 9 to 5.
Something to consider is that there are now online support groups for a variety of issues, including perinatal loss. I doubt anyone can find studies on specifically online support groups, but at least it is lower risk since you will not have to make the commute.
I've already tried that (exactly because of that lower time investment) but I just actively dislike video calls. The fact that it's hard to understand people and keep track of who's talking makes it extremely unpleasant for me.
I am very sorry for your loss. I have no idea how anyone goes though this.
Support groups can help. Not going into details to protect my anonymity, just saying it's a personal experience. Talking to strangers going through similar experiences can be surprisingly relieving, in a way that talking to a therapist may not be. Just the realization that you are not alone with this, and there are people who otherwise look... fine... except going through an agonizing pain on the inside, who can genuinely say "I know what you're going through" without faking it, and sharing these experiences - it helps.
Do. Drive over an hour for a support group. At least give it a few tries.
OP asked very clearly not to be advised based on anecdotal data -- i.e., your own experience or that of someone you know:
"Please don't give me anecdotes; I've heard from people who love support groups and from people who think they're actively harmful. I would like data but frankly my brain has been fried by everything that has happened and I'm not up for searching through databases for well-structured double-blind studies"
Seems kind of rude to ignore the request of someone going through hell who clearly asks for one kind of info and not another.
thank you for telling me how other people think. I was trying to share the experience of grief, grieving, and recovery, not anything about support groups because I don't know anything about them, good or bad.
"Does anyone know whether there's any data on whether support groups are helpful for dealing with grief?"
That's the specific question. I don't have data on that. Do you have data, Eremolalos? Otherwise you're not answering the question either.
My complaint wasn't about your response,Deiseach, it was about a post where someone urged OP to try a support group, based on poster's anecdotal data, after OP had stated very clearly that they did not want to hear anecdotal data about support groups. You and I both gave OP some advice based on our own experience, but since it was not advice about support groups I did not think doing that would be objectionable to OP, and in fact OP voiced no objections to it, though they did eventually post a complaint about 1123581321's response. In fact, your advice and mine were pretty similar.
The person is in terrible grief fatigue. The request is not very well defined. No anecdotes but no data either. How many anecdotes does it take to make ‘data’.
I’ve seen enough people to come to these groups reluctantly. Resentfully. Dragged in. And yet getting help after a few sessions. Does 10 people make a data set? 20? I genuinely don’t know. Given the dearth of studies and the replication crisis maybe I can add something.
Sorry, not trying to be combative. Maybe I messed up out of good intentions.
I am quite positive that if someone had succeeded in dragging me to a group of that kind I would have fucking hated it. While that has in fact never happened when I have been bereaved, I have had a number of experiences where what I had in common with the other group members is some demographic, or some experience we have all had. THEY DO NOT WORK FOR ME. I an uncomfortable and creeped out at session 1, session 3, session 5 and, if I make it that long, session 10. While you, and a lot of people you. have seen, have been dragged in, resentful, and then felt helped , I, and. lot of people I have seen, have felt coerced to do something that goes against the grain, have found it to be as weird and unpleasant as we imagined, and have left, muttering "fuck this shit."
I agree that OP is in terrible grief fatigue. I think that is a reason to respect her wishes and give her exactly what she is clearly asking for. You see it as a reason to ignore her wishes and coerce her. If I were her I would tell you to fuck the fuck off.
No, I'm actually pretty annoyed that I asked if anyone had data and specifically requestrd no personal anecdotes, in one of the few places online that I thought people might honor that request, and then more than one person jumped in with anecdotes.
It occurred to me that if support groups vary quite a lot, this could make research difficult. You point out that the temperament of the potential new member would also make a huge difference.
Well, the variability of support groups adds noise to the results data, but if you had a study that looked at lots of groups and a lot of total members, and compared each to, say, wait list controls, you'd expect the signal to get through the noise. School meals probably vary a lot too, but research still finds that poor kids who get breakfast and lunch through the school are healthier than those who don't.
This literature review, at least, arrives at a small overall effect in lowering depression and grief in the short term (not so much in the long term/at follow-up) and a slightly larger effect in people suffering from persistent grief, as you might be. ( https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/32501773/ also available through sci-hub) The data are generally poor because of the diversity of bereavement groups and their combination with other interventions.
So, at first blush, it may seem like a vote for no, but if you'll forgive a stranger's presumption: a) it's highly individual and it's not the kind of thing that's easily captured with data; and b) in your position I think the bias should be heavily toward trying different things rather than not trying them. I'd consider going on a Pascal's Wager basis if nothing else, even if a long drive is involved.
Thank you for finding that literature review. I guess I shouldn't be surprised that it's a hard topic to study for exactly the reasons you cite. There are so many other things that are difficult to study because their quality depends so much on specific practitioners, subtleties of techniques, and interpersonal relationships--e.g. other therapeutic interventions, educational programs, etc.
Honestly the thing I worry about with support groups is just getting stuck in a rut and endlessly wallowing in grief. There aren't a lot of downsides to getting exercise, journaling, and eating vegetables; support groups just seem like they have a potential for much greater downsides. "Small chance of improvement in the short term" somewhat assuages my fears of that. I'll probably go. Thanks again.
I searched on Google Scholar, and could only find one study, 20 years old, that actual looked at whether those in a support group for perinatal loss fared better than those not in one, and study found no difference. There seems to be very little research on this subject, although there are numerous articles for professional about how to be supportive. My guess is that whether a support group is helpful depends on how easily you connect with people you don't know. Some people take it like a duck to water. I do not connect easily, and actively dislike the idea of telling the story and shedding tears in front of a group of strangers, even though all of them have been through a similar experience. I don't think a support group would work for me. But I know people who have felt immensely supported by one.
If you google things like 'perinatal loss support groups" a number of them show up. I expect quite a few are virtual, so you would be able to try out a support group that way without the drive.
I notice that the things you mention doing involve positive, officially "good-for-you" activities, and that you're trying to cope well. For what it's worth, what has helped me get through awful losses is allowing myself to really plumb their depths and cry as hard and often as I feel like it. (Though yeah, I do still go to work and eat meals in and around the bouts of intense mourning.) Also talking to a friend of mine who never, ever tries to convince me it's not so bad, or suggests things to help me feel better. He just says, "oh god, Eremolalos," and rubs my back.
Thank you for digging up that study; I appreciate it.
I wouldn't be surprised if you're right that it just varies so much from person to person. It probably depends on who else is in the group and who is facilitating it. That interpersonal seems to also be a difficult part of assessing effectiveness of psychotherapy--you could not like the therapist you get or their particular method of treatment could be bothersome. (I say this from the perspective of a patient, of course.) There's a body of data that says some things work more often for more people, but you don't know if you're one of those people until you make the attempt. Even if there were some data about the effectiveness of support groups, any given group would probably be hit or miss. But then, everything is hit or miss.
I'm sorry for your trouble. I don't have any experience with support groups or therapy, but I do know about grief in the aftermath of death.
It's going to hurt. It's going to hurt for a long time. It will pop up out of nowhere; you will be doing something routine and suddenly burst into tears because that thing will remind you of the lost person.
This is natural. People mean well, but they seem to think the Kubler Ross stages of grief are a list of directions to be followed - now you should be on stage three after this amount of time. No. It takes as long as it takes, and you are allowed to be sad and angry and fatigued past the time you are 'supposed' to be 'moving on'.
Therapy and such is helpful to make sure you don't stick in a rut of hashing over the same old thing over and over, but it is not intended to hurry you along so that all is hunky-dory in six months and you're back to what you were pre-the death. You will never be that, but you will recover.
When running into creative walls while slowly growing to hate a project, is it directionally better to train oneself to decouple creativity from flow (and over time to develop the discipline to proceed effectively at lower levels of reward); or to develop tricks to try to re-fool oneself into finding the thing interesting and to get oneself in a more flowing mental state (so try to get the reward back)?
Purely hand-waving here, but I suspect that it has something to do with low dopamine regulating the exploitation-exploration balance too far toward (premature/low-quality) exploitation. So, e.g., when you're deciding on a turn of phrase, or a musical solution, or an intermediate coding step or whatever, there is a strong pull toward good-enough, even when it really isn't. When you cave to this on the small sub-tasks, the quality of the outcome decreases, you perceive it, and you hate the thing even more.
In my experience, when bogged down at the “turn of phrase” level, it’s often best to forget trying to regain flow and just keep buggering on till you finish, say, the chapter. Then, perhaps the following day, switching to editing mode can help activate a more flowy state, and I’ll find myself quite easily coming up with those turns of phrase that eluded me before, plus the dopamine taps get turned back on.
I probably shouldn't comment considering how few projects I've finished, but hell if common sense will stop me.
There's a fairly famous experiment a photography teacher ran a while back.
https://austinkleon.com/2020/12/10/quantity-leads-to-quality-the-origin-of-a-parable/ The question becomes whether focusing on a single project falls under 'quality' or 'quantity'. I'd say it falls more into 'quality', and the best thing you can do is start up some other projects you can switch into when you start losing patience. You want to develop a flow for the process, not necessarily the project.
Haven't actually heard of this experiment, thanks. (Digression, but Ted Orland changing up media in his retelling of the parable annoys me much more than it does Kleon.)
I guess mining the process itself for reward and flow would fall on the 'seek to increase reward' rather than 'train to be effective in a low-reward environment' side of my little dichotomy. Decoupling the joy of the general from the misery of the specific is easier with some things than others, of course.
FYI: Michael Lewis's book about SBF will be coming out on 10/3. Its title is *Going Infinite.* He will also be covering the trial, which begins on 10/2, on his podcast *Against the Rules.*
That trial is going to be very interesting, I am curious to see if the other FTX founders are going to be hauled into court too or will they be state's evidence, as it were?
SBF's former girlfriend, someone who was also high up at his company, has pled guilty and is expected to give evidence for the prosecution. Can't remember her name.
Caroline Ellison. She was sort of left holding the bag, so it's hard to know how much she was aware of what was going on, and how much she just did what Sam told her to do. I imagine her lawyers will be leaning heavily on the second option there.
That's how SBF got sent to jail; he used the NYT to leak some of her diaries or other private information, of course they ran the story, and of course the judge - who was fed-up to the back teeth of reminding SBF that the conditions of his bail included NO GOING ONLINE which he constantly breached - threw him in the slammer:
This trial should be high entertainment, for those of us not involved with EA sufficiently to be wincing in anticipation of being dragged through the mud due to being an inspiration for him, lining up to take money for good causes, and backing him as a great guy altogether. But it's the other two guys who were co-founders with SBF that intrigue me; there has been very little said about them though it seems they too were milking the cash cow as hard as they could: Gary Wang and Nishad Singh.
It does seem that, whatever share of the responsibility he bears, SBF is being set up to take the majority or even all the blame, with the others claiming they were just following orders, as it were.
From my reading it appears that Caroline Ellison was facing charges amounting to 110 years in prison, but she got off scot-free by snitching on her collaborator. That's a helluva prisoner's dilemma (with the caveat that SBF probably couldn't have got the same deal by snitching on her instead).
I'm fairly certain that Ellison would have spent more than a year or three in Club Fed if she had stonewalled, but you should trust approximately no one who tells you how long a sentence was really likely unless you are paying them for legal advice.
Well, this is why the trial is going to be so interesting, to figure out who knew what. It's a very tangled structure, if you listen to John Jay trying to explain it. Caroline and another guy were in the sister structure to FTX, and that guy jumped ship early. Now, whether he knew it all looked dodgy and he was getting out before any police came knocking on the door, or he just wanted to cash in and have fun in very early retirement, who knows? But the end result is that Caroline was left as CEO of Alameda Research.
And from there on it gets murky. She's pleading that, basically, Sam told her to shuffle money around and she did what she was told because well, he was Sam, the high panjandrum and besides, she wasn't experienced or qualified enough to know what was going on.
I think what Sam did, which in hindsight was a bad decision, was being the very public face of the entire enterprise, the guy making all the statements, and taking the credit. There's allegations that the enterprise was treated as the Bankman-Fried Family Fund, and that's hard to deny given that he was shovelling out money to his brother for his brother's involvement with EA projects (and also getting the brother to do the political schmoozing in Washington) plus buying holiday home for mom and dad.
I perfectly understand why Caroline rolled over on Sam., and that was sensible. I think what Sam (belatedly) was trying to do, with the leak to the NYT, was "hey she's not the innocent victim she's portraying herself as", but being Sam he did it the exact wrong way to piss off the judge.
She's not the only one; Ryan Salame was co-operating as hard as he could, and Wang and Singh who are keeping very quiet also seem to have cut deals. Bankman-Fried, either through genuine gullibility or through refusal to believe that his genius couldn't magically fix all this, just kept powering on through with "I have a bail out arranged, just give me time" instead of holding his hands up and trying to cut a deal. And here we are today, with the trial forthcoming!
As I understand it, and things may have moved on from when last I was reading up on it, there are three sets of charges:
(1) SDNY Grand Jury charges on fraud
(2) SEC filing for jury trial in SDNY
(3) CTFC filing for jury trial in SDNY
As well as the bankruptcy statement by John Jay (the guy tasked with pulling any financial chestnuts out of this dumpster fire) which so aggrieved Bankman-Fried - he claimed they rushed to declare bankruptcy and pressured him into signing off too early, while he was working on the Magic Bailout Fix.
The bankruptcy filing is the best way to understand how complicated the entire house of cards was, and who was siphoning off big money (clue: someone with the initials SBF was getting the lion's share of 'loans' but he wasn't the only one):
Yeah, Deiseach, the trial and related events seems wonderfully juicy to me too. I've already pre-ordered Lewis's book. But I wonder uneasily what it means that I'm way more interested in the trial and its peripheral shenanigans than I ever was in SBF and EA. Why am I not perplexed and saddened by this failed marriage between young smartasses and the thin, gloomy, earnest EA people who want to reduce human suffering? The true answer is that I sort of do not believe in anything, except for certain people whom I warm up to and respect, Scott being one of them. You, though, have a lot of things you believe in, and none of them compel you to take SBF seriously, right? So you are free to find the whole mess, which takes place in a dimension you don't live in, wonderfully yummy. But is it ok for me to say YUM?
I think there's a sense in which SBF was "cheating" to get ahead, and there was a segment of the population who thought he was just so wonderfully intelligent and did everything so well that he was just better at it than anyone else.
Then you see the reality that he was really bad at this, especially running a business without breaking the law and making something that had real value instead of being mostly a Ponzi scheme. I still can't get over the fact that they didn't even keep a list of employees, or other basic business requirements. They were going to get shut down for one or more of dozens of reasons, even if their core business model was sound - which it was not.
I think for those on the outside, there's a feeling of relief that we are not so much worse at this stuff than some young kid, and a feeling of schadenfreude that he's getting his just desserts for doing some really bad things.
There was the One Weird Trick (the 'kimchi premium') that made a lot of money fast and worked for a short time, but it was only ever going to work once and for a short time.
I think the problem was he (1) got way too invested in all the praise for how smart he was to discover this OWT (2) was much too involved in wanting to be an EA saviour and (3) thought he was way smarter, everyone had always told him so after all, and that he could continue to get the golden goose to keep laying. The idea that "well, it was fun guys but now we're just yet another crypto outfit" doesn't seem to have sat well with him, he wanted to keep making huge money for ever more grandiose projects (and the resultant feeding of his self-importance).
It really was incestuous, with a lot of the personnel being "we used to date/we're dating/we're going to date" e.g. Caroline being Sam's (ex)girl friend. This is why you don't have workplace fraternisation! The relationships weren't just employer/employee, they were friends and more, and that makes it very hard to say "hang on, should we be doing this? I don't think you should be doing it that way".
"there was a segment of the population who thought he was just so wonderfully intelligent and did everything so well that he was just better at it than anyone else."
That Sequoia article. It's just - I can't think of a better, not so coarse, metaphor other than "sucking his dick". I mean, the One Weird Trick is *this* big a deal in financial circles? I think not:
"Among Wall Street’s financial elite, SBF’s Bitcoin arb is mentioned in the same hushed tones as Paul Tudor Jones’s 1987 shorting of the entire American economy, or George Soros’s 1992 raid on the Bank of England, or John Paulson’s 2008 bet against subprime mortgages."
You do raise a very good point: we should not be rejoicing over misfortune of others.
And really I'm not, because I don't know any of them and don't have any emotional or other attachment. He never picked *my* pocket, so I'm not out for vengeance. It's all "big money big names and they came a cropper, us in the cheap seats get to laugh at our betters with egg on their faces".
"Why am I not perplexed and saddened by this failed marriage between young smartasses and the thin, gloomy, earnest EA people who want to reduce human suffering?"
I think because, despite all the "look at our global centres" rhetoric, it's a very incestuous, closed-off little bubble of the same people who mostly hang out in the same circles in the same limited geographical dispersion. You don't know them and I don't know them except at second and third hand. It's too easy to call EA a cult, but it exhibits some of those tendencies: the sacred texts, the gurus, the in-group jargon, the purity spirals, the belief that they are doing something new and unique that will change the world!!!!
So for outsiders like us, seeing reports of alleged billions being thrown around and manufactured out of thin air, and being spent on (sorry EA people) vanity projects - well, it's easy to laugh when the big bad wolf blows down their house of straw. It's not real for us, not real like the church collection for good causes or the chuggers on the street rattling tins. If I give a donation to the local Vincent de Paul society, I have an idea where it's going. But some guy in the Silicon Valley bubble schmoozing politicians on both sides in Washington, with all the money coming from magic beans? That's up there with the Kardashians and their goings-on for all the relevance to my life it has. Because of the likes of this article, which the author must be ruing bitterly:
Published in September 2022, on behalf of an investment company which had thrown money at FTX in the early days, and serendipitously published just days before it all came tumbling down.
"UPDATE: Nov 9, 2022: Since this article was published, a liquidity crunch has created solvency risk for FTX and its future is uncertain. Many have been affected by this unexpected turn of events. For Sequoia, our fiduciary responsibility is to our LPs. To that end, we shared this letter with them today regarding our investment in FTX. For FTX, we believe its fiduciary responsibility is first to its customers, and second to its shareholders. As such, FTX is exploring all opportunities to ensure its customers are able to recover their funds as quickly as possible."
The article reads like a tryout for a new Gospel about the Messiah; you can dip in *anywhere* and pull out a plum. And of course, it is highly embarrassing for EA and associated philosophy because they are copiously quoted as being the major influences on Saviour Sam. Not really a good look when (alleged) mega-fraudster is inspired by your movement!
If Will MacAskill wasn't hiding under his bed after this came out, he must have a brass neck, since he's the guy portrayed as Bankman-Fried's guru.
"So I find myself convinced that, if SBF can keep his wits about him in the years ahead, he’s going to slay—that, just as Alameda was a stepping stone to FTX, FTX will be to the super-app. Banking will be disrupted and transformed by crypto, just as media was transformed and disrupted by the web. Something of the sort must happen eventually, as the current system, with its layers upon layers of intermediaries, is antiquated and prone to crashing—the global financial crisis of 2008 was just the latest in a long line of failures that occurred because banks didn’t actually know what was on their balance sheets. Crypto is money that can audit itself, no accountant or bookkeeper needed, and thus a financial system with the blockchain built in can, in theory, cut out most of the financial middlemen, to the advantage of all. Of course, that’s the pitch of every crypto company out there. The FTX competitive advantage? Ethical behavior. SBF is a Peter Singer–inspired utilitarian in a sea of Robert Nozick–inspired libertarians. He’s an ethical maximalist in an industry that’s overwhelmingly populated with ethical minimalists. I’m a Nozick man myself, but I know who I’d rather trust my money with: SBF, hands-down. And if he does end up saving the world as a side effect of being my banker, all the better."
You have to read this, it's so revelatory of the entire mindset behind what was going on, and why (in hindsight) it had to come crashing down - there were no adults in the room. There were no boring old guys in suits who had been working in finance for forty years. Nobody to put the brakes on or do it the old-fashioned, red-tape way. All the bright young traders who were moving fast and breaking things in the name of Bayesian utilitarian infinity calculations.
Turns out you *do* need book-keepers and auditors, who knew? 😁
So yeah: looking forward to entertainment (and maybe some educational value) from the trial.
"The article reads like a tryout for a new Gospel about the Messiah; you can dip in *anywhere* and pull out a plum. And of course, it is highly embarrassing for EA and associated philosophy because they are copiously quoted as being the major influences on Saviour Sam. Not really a good look when (alleged) mega-fraudster is inspired by your movement!"
Surely a Catholic, of all people, could see why EAs find this criticism very unfair. You have an actual Messiah and an actual Gospel, and countless people throughout history who murdered millions in its name. If that doesn't discredit Catholicism, why would SBF discredit EA? At least EA hasn't started its own Thirty Year War yet!
EA is that incredibly annoying blend of smugly morally superior, but also incredibly corrupt and incompetent in many ways when all the flashy language and 'new ideas' are pulled away.
I'll give them some credit for the pandemic prevention work and their focus on policy. But the practice of taking mainly Ivy-league kids with all the right status symbols, telling them they're important and to be even *more* ambitious, then giving them millions or billions of dollars to focus on moonshots is incredibly dangerous. FTX with their crypto grift is by far the least problematic area of funding for EA, and in a way the movement is lucky that a crypto grift is all that they dealt with.
Imagine this sort of incompetence coming out about a pandemic group, or a nuclear policy think thank, or (gasp) an AI safety company. I'm thinking we'll see a lot more of the third one in the coming months.
There's a traditional role that SBF was quite likely playing, whether he had knowingly signed up for it or not: in 1920s (NEP era) USSR it was called "sitting director" ("зицпредседатель"), a well-compensated figurehead chairman of a fly-by-night scam company whose responsibility consisted solely in taking the heat for his confederates in the event of failure, sitting in prison (during which, it was typically promised by the actual "brains" of the scheme, he would continue to be paid.)
I think it either was SBF, and he got too arrogant, *or* they were all greedy and trying to throw each other to the wolves and SBF became the fall guy because he had the highest profile. But we'll probably never know if, say, Caroline Ellison tricked him into it and is now profiting from the greater sympathy usually extended to women. Or maybe it's Singh or one of those other guys. Everyone's going to lie to make themselves look good.
Why haven't I had a cold since 2019? I've had all my Covid shots and every single booster that they offer- could that somehow be why? I don't really have a great immune system and have always had at least 1-2 head colds a year literally my entire life (more when I regularly rode public transportation). Since Covid though, I haven't had a single cold. I don't wear a mask and I certainly go out to public areas, bars, the supermarket, etc.
Could the Covid shots somehow have given me a cross-immunity? I went out of my way to mix and match them, including getting an unauthorized extra shot before boosters were a thing. I think I've now had 1 of every shot authorized in the US (i.e. not AstraZenaca). Did it give me a strange new immunity to the common cold?
Even if what you report is real and not just coincidence, it doesn't generalize. It's clear why the flu and cold-like infections were suppressed along with Covid as long as social distancing/ "lockdowns"/ mask mandates etc were in effect, but from what I read, heard and saw, they came back with a vengeance last winter when everyone was done with Covid.
Cross-immunity seems unlikely - AFAIK, how only a few of the 200 or so cold virus variants are remotely related to Covid.
My experience: Pre-covid I think I got a cold once or twice a year. I'm not sure, though. . I really never paid attention to cold frequency until covid. But during covid, I had 3 colds in total, all similar, all weird: They did not start with a sore throat, but with sneezes and an extremely runny nose -- so runny that (here comes some TMI) if I leaned over to do something I had to hold a tissue over my nose to prevent drops of watery stuff from falling all over whatever was below me. These colds did not progress to cough, congested sinuses, muscle aches, fever, etc., and they lasted about 36 hrs and then I was back to normal. The first cold happened before tests were available. During the second and third I tested a couple times a day, swabbing both nose and throat, and continuing for several days after symptoms abated. All tests were negative.
I have wondered why it was possible for me to get colds, but never to get covid. I have masked pretty intensely all through covid, and also used a high volume air purifier in my office. I've also developed a habit of doing the ritual Covid Hand Wash whenever I come in from outside, and before eating or any other activity that would make me touch my mouth or the rest of my face. Why did these precautions also not protect against colds? I've also wondered whether these weird colds corresponded with times when I got a load of covid up my nose, and my body went into nose-cleansing overdrive to get rid of the stuff before I was actually infected.
I think the likeliest explanation to the various things we've all noticed and wondered about is that Covid has made us all hypervigilant and hyper-interested in covid-like illnesses, so that we are all much more aware of the quantify and quality of our colds, and inclined to look for patterns.
Now that you mentioned it, I realized that I stopped having colds since covid, too. But the obvious confounder is that now I work from home half the time. That means less time spent in open-space offices, and less stress. (Also, my kids have grown up a bit, which means their immune systems are better, so they do not bring so many viruses home.)
So, the effect is visible, but I believe it is caused by lifestyle changes, not cross-immunity.
(Now I am wondering if there might be something I don't even know about. Like, maybe companies have upgraded air conditioning in offices to make it spread fewer viruses -- motivated by covid, but having an effect on all kinds of viruses. I have no evidence that anything like that happened, it just seems to make sense, and I probably wouldn't know about that if it happened.)
True. Though I have a school-age child in the house who's been back in fulltime public-school classrooms for nearly two years now. And he hasn't had a cold or flu during that time either....interesting.
I’ve had the same experience. Very bad cold at the end of 2019 (which could have been covid but unlikely) and nothing since, despite everyone in my family getting Covid in 2022.
I also used to get colds twice a year, but I think that was at least partially due to life being constantly stressful, and not getting enough sleep. Maybe your life has gotten better and your immune system is flourishing? :)
>Could the Covid shots somehow have given me a cross-immunity?
Probably not enough so to make a big difference. Some "common cold" strains are coronaviruses, and I think I remember hearing that there have some indications that exposure to common cold coronaviruses may give a bit of partial immunity to covid, but that won't be enough to stop you from getting colds. I'd expect any cross immunity to be small because named covid variants are much more closely related to one another than they are to common cold coronaviruses, and covid shots based on the original strain often only grant partial immunity to the named variants.
Also, only something like 15% of common cold cases are coronavirus-based. Most cold cases are caused by various rhinoviruses, and there's a long tail of adenovirus, RSV, parainfluenza, etc that also cause colds.
And then there's my own experience: I'm vaccinated and boosted, and I mixed and matched Pfizer and Moderna, but I still get colds. I've got a child in kindergarten, though, so I'm at much higher risk of exposure.
Guesses for why you haven't gotten a cold since 2019:
- Adults have gotten better about masking or staying home when they have symptomatic respiratory illnesses, and a lot of businesses and other indoor public spaces have changed their cleaning patterns specifically to guard against fomite transmission (only a very minor transmission vector for covid, as it turns out, but a major transmission factor for rhinoviruses), as well as improving air filtration to reduce the risk of droplet/aerosol transmission.
- The covid lockdowns may have knocked back the number of cold strains in widespread circulation a bit (similar to how the Yamagata strain of Influenza B hasn't been detected in the wild since 2021 and is suspected to have gone extinct), so when you do get exposed to cold viruses they're more likely to be ones you've had before.
- Do you have children, and if so, how old are they? If your children finished their schooling during the covid lockdowns or at least aged out of their prime plague-rat years, that alone would go a long way towards explaining why you aren't getting colds.
I think the decisions were reasonable given what was known at the time: fomites were a plausible transmission vector and one that's relatively simple to mitigate. It probably stuck around longer than it should have out of memetic inertia, but I did hear quite a bit about ventilation and filtration once it became clear that Covid was mainly spreading through droplets or aerosols, and there was a push to move stuff outdoors when practical from the beginning.
I'm in the exact same situation as nifty775. I haven't gotten a cold since 2019. My family has and I've been very exposed. I haven't gotten covid despite my family getting it twice and I didn't quarantine from them at all.
Prior to covid I got 1-2 colds a year for my entire life. A very average immune system. My only guess is what you mentioned, that maybe we've extincted some strains or that they haven't been able to mutate and I've got immunity.
My last cold was some time before Covid too. I have an untouched stack of Covid test kits in my bathroom. Knock on wood.
But I seem to be lucky in the natural immunity department.
I had a lot of cold like illnesses as a kid and a young adult running on minimal sleep but once I started to prioritize getting enough rest I seem to dodge a lot of bugs. Even before Covid I wasn’t getting a cold every year.
I wonder if all the mask wearing and isolation did a number on some of the other coronaviruses. They were having trouble finding a 'dominant strain' when creating flu vaccinations, if that's an indicator.
There was very little common cold in 2020 and 2021, because lots of people were very careful. And in 2022 and 2023, you should normally have 2-4 colds, but had zero. So do consider that you were just lucky.
Oh! I thought the Egan mentioned in the review for The Lost Tools of Learning was Greg Egan, the science fiction author. No, it's Kieran Egan.
I don't know whether Greg Egan has written anything substantial about education, but there's a lovely section in _Diaspora_ where the smart-human level AI learns a concept (momentum, I think) and spends a while connecting it to a great many things it already knows. This is a skill worth having in school.
I've seen some writing from teachers about how hard it is to deal with educational fads. I would love to see fairly early education (age 10? surely no later than 12) about how adults have different theories about what and how to learn.
I don't think I read this review the first time around, so I'll just note that the illustrations are unusually beautiful.
People vary a lot about whether they were taught it and whether it was useful for them. I've considered an extended survey of what people learned in school and which things were valuable to them.
I learned a bit of sentence diagramming, but it never seemed terribly useful. And once I started learning Latin, it became completely pointless. But maybe for other people it was helpful?
It sounds like the WGA won the writers' strike. That's not surprising - they were asking for rules and other changes that would have cost the studios millions, but had the ability to inflict far greater losses in the billions in lost programming and delayed schedules as long as they could avoid defection during the strike (which they did - they and their assorted fans on Twitter and elsewhere were pretty aggressive about attacking anyone who wasn't perceived as a supporter of the WGA). Eventually, the studios were going to decide that it wasn't worth it to contest the demands.
3. The comment on SpaceX is good. I'd add that I think the "waterfall" development style has persisted because of politics as well - it fits better with distributing parts of production and a supply chain across a broader area, and it's better at avoiding high-profile failures. No exploding rockets with the SLS program, for example - instead the failures show up earlier, and get labeled as lower profile "delays".
The replies to that comment were pretty good as well. The iterative development is mostly good early on - eventually you have to tighten down and ensure reliability, and that limits how much you can iteratively change the rocket as opposed to simply developing the new model of it.
I also wonder how much of it is just that they do almost all of it in-house. It speeds up communication time a lot.
Earlier today at my local outdoor swimming pool I overheard Rob Delaney saying something about the minimum staffing concession being a surprise, and that he’d expected the studios to cave on other points but not that one.
Just bits and pieces saying they conceded to something on minimum staffing, AI use, and streaming residuals - the key sticking points. We'll see what the actual deal ends up being.
In entertainment, the tricky thing is copyright - so far, the US Copyright Office has taken the stance that creative work done with Generative AI does not qualify for copyright protection, even though there is human curation involved. That may not be sustainable in the face of lawsuits and legislation, but we'll have to see.
If that gets resolved, you'd probably see a lot of it done by studios and companies outside of the usual Hollywood set (like how a lot of animation is done by companies outside of the US, even if the writers are in the US).
At some point though, it will just make American industries less competitive if significant pushback is achieved. Because unless other countries are hopeless at AI, AI will allow them to do well at things where the US traditionally has its advantages.
Even if they are, they could use the American AIs, couldn't they? I think the restrictions are against American companies using the AIs for their work, not against the AIs being used per se.
The obvious next step is American companies outsourcing the AI-sensitive parts of work to foreign companies, who will in turn run it on American servers. Heck, the foreign company can be fully owned by the American company.
So in the end, the only thing that will change for American companies is that they will need to create a "supplier of AI services" in some other country, which in turn will use the American AIs to do the work (an interface between you, and the cloud services you would rent from a third party anyway). Perhaps there will be specialized companies in India, where you can cheaply rent a guy who clicks the "run" button whenever you tell him.
Aren't there still freelance writers trying to sell scripts to major movie producers? If they use AI to help write it, they can achieve more for cheaper - presumably still doing a lot of human cleanup work and such, but still much faster than writing it all themselves.
Does the archaeology discovery of wooden structures from half a million years ago lead anyone to update on the probability of Ice Age civilizations? If you haven’t seen it, they found some notched logs from half a million years ago that indicate someone built a wooden structure in Zambia. It likely wasn’t from modern humans, but probably homo heidelbergensis. This would indicate that humans have built wooden structures for the entire existence of our species. [https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-023-06557-9].
The improbability of something wooden surviving for so long and also being found, makes me think that there were a ton of these wooden structures. But I could see it being argued either way for whether this means there were more advanced societies. So far our evidence is that:
p(discovery | wood surviving) * number of paleolithic wooden structures built > p(discovery | stone surviving) * number of paleolithic stone structures built
On the one hand, you could argue that if the probability of discovery is the same, and it’s safe to assume that probability of stone structures surviving >>> wood surviving, but we found wood anyway, so that’s evidence that there definitely wasn’t stone structures.
Or, you could argue that number of wooden structures >>> stone structures, so of course we found a wooden one first.
See the earlier post [https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/against-ice-age-civilizations]. Scott listed three categories of claims: 1) civilizations advanced enough to build Stonehenge, 2) civilizations about as advance as ancient Egypt, and 3) civilizations as advanced as 1700’s Britain. I’d suggest another option (I’d call it level 0): that there were likely larger tribes living in wooden longhouses with probably enough sophistication to build simple stone monuments. I should also note that the Ice Age argument is about societies 115k years ago to about 12k years ago and this is way older.
I’m not an archaeologist and so I also wonder what is that chance that this is a false positive. What if the logs just rubbed up against each other in a way that looks like they were shaped?
Seems to me that if an ancestor had the ability to use a stone tool for anything else, using it to make a slotted log structure is not hugely surprising.
Right. We shouldn't assume that a slotted log structure means a whole freaking log cabin. The minimal version might literally be two logs lying together on the ground so you could sit on them around a fire or something. Or maybe you could stand them up and lean bark against them to make a lean-to or something.
> I’m not an archaeologist and so I also wonder what is that chance that this is a false positive. What if the logs just rubbed up against each other in a way that looks like they were shaped?
I thought they found tools nearby which were dated to 3-4 hundred thousand years ago. That's a lot later than the wood, but still much older than any previously discovered structure. We already knew that hominids used tools even longer ago than that, so that part isn't surprising, but it could mean that groups of primates returned to the area repeatedly and thus is weak evidence for it being a structure and not natural.
As to the actual question, if it is what it appears to be, this doesn't seem like evidence of any of the 3 types of civilization that Scott considered. Some form of semi-permanent wooden habitation, with large-ish groups, would probably be surprising at that age, but it's still closer to pure hunter-gatherer than even to the Stonehenge society. Even prior to this discovery, there was no technological barrier to basic woodworking at 500,000 years ago. Probably not even several million years ago, since stone tools have been found that are that old. Making something like stonehenge would probably require more sophisticated technology, like ropes or levers, as well as a level of coordination, planning, and population density that there still is no evidence for. You can shape stone with basic stone tools; building anything of substantial size is blocked on other factors.
No offense to Scott, but his three types of civilization isn't how archaeologist define civilization.
The definition of civilization that archeologists and anthropologists use is that is (a) a society characterized by the presence of social complexity—i.e. status hierarchies, (b) professional specialization, and (c) permanently inhabited settlements (cities). Cultures can have very large temporary settlements in the same place for seasonal resource extraction, year after year, are not be considered civilizations. Likewise, permanent settlements that don't display the above list of social complexities aren't considered to be civilizations.
"No offense to Scott, but his three types of civilization isn't how archaeologist define civilization."
It’s possible I’ve misstated Scott’s position and I believe he was just trying to summarize other people’s position for clarity.
I think the functional part that I’m interested in could be stated as: “Large groups of people coordinating to build stuff.” And I guess the question is how large were those groups, and were they building out of wood or stone, and how long ago were they doing it.
So a lot of nomads who built a new tented city every 3 months including theatres and parliaments and court houses, and then moved on and re-erected the lot somewhere else, would not qualify? Doesn't look a great definition to me.
So? The theory being responded to isn't proposed by or given any credence by archeologists, and archeologists don't have a monopoly on the word "civilization." Is there any content to this post, or would it be completely pointless if Scott had used a different word?
Hey, I'm just repeating what I learned as an Anthropology undergrad. If you want to label !Kung or Yanamami societies as civilizations, be my guest! But no need to get pissy with the messenger.
I'm not "getting pissy" I just think that how archeologists define the word "civilization" is utterly irrelevant to what existed a hundred thousand years ago or more.
There's always the chance that the archaeologists are seeing what they want to see, but two logs with an interlocking cut notch would convince me! I think it's reasonable to assume that if early humans were making spears, they could also make shelters out of wood (and skins). Note: hafting technology for spears shows up in the European fossil record about 100K years after this site, though. So, this pushes woodworking back by a 100K years.
The definition of civilization is in the eye of the beholder. Of course, the dominant paradigm is to put the human cultures into an evolutionary sequence of types --> hunter-gatherer bands, larger tribes with chieftains, then settled agriculturalists, and finally settled agriculturalists with cities. That final stage with cities is usually what gets labeled as a civilization. As Graeber and Wengrow abundantly documented in their book, The Dawn of Everything, the archaeological evidence no longer supports this simplistic cultural hierarchy. They list various studies that show large numbers of people (enough to inhabit a neolithic city) gathered together for non-agricultural resource extraction. And large settlements that may have been occupied year-round predate agriculture.
Right now, the evidence shows that Neanderthals and Denisovans were probably spread pretty thin. And except for some megafauna slaughter sites, there's no evidence (yet) that large number of humans gathered together in large settlements before the end of the last ice age.
I don't know if they mentioned this in their book, but the Comanche were technologically a neolithic hunter-gatherer tribe in Wyoming in 1690, then they got horses and became nomadic and dominated the Great Plains with a generation or two and were organized in about five major sub-tribes within a few thousand in each and would sometimes meet up in groups of 20k. And that was all on nothing but hunting and gathering. I don't see any reason that neolithic tribes couldn't have done the same thing tens of thousands of years ago.
There's no evidence that the builders of Stonehenge farmed grains — at least the earliest levels of the site. They had domestic animals, and they foraged for nuts and fruit. "Unusually, there is very little evidence that people ate vegetables or ***cereals*** [my emphasis]. Burnt remains of crab apples, berries, hazelnut shells and other wild fruits are all that survive of this 'meat fest' diet. There was no evidence that any of the pots had been used for cooking greens or other vegetables."
Mammoth hunters where considered to be Paleolithic (I mistyped this on the first edit. The Paleo/Meso/Neo designations are usually defined by the type of (stone) tool kits they used.
You don't need hafting to make a spear. An all-wood spear, carved from a single piece of wood, isn't hafted. I think I read something about Neandertals making that kind of spear, with a heat-treated tip to harden the wood.
Except that there's evidence that they inserted a stone spearhead into a shaft of wood. And shatter analyses of stone points suggest that the points had been thrown — probably attached to the end of spears 500K years ago. Not sure how much confidence one can put into these shatter studies, though. (I haven't read the papers. YMMV.)
"Or, you could argue that number of wooden structures >>> stone structures, so of course we found a wooden one first."
That's what I think is the case. Cutting stone is much more laborious than cutting wood, and moving it requires greater coordination of people. A couple hundred people congregating together for a few weeks could probably throw up a decent-sized wooden structure - the stone would be much harder.
And with relatively few stone societies, it's much more likely they just haven't been found. They might be buried in deep layers of sediment in river deltas or now flooded continental shelves, or scavenged for useful stone by later civilizations.
We've found several cities where later civilizations (or maybe just hundreds of years of continuous use) were in the same places using many of the same walls and other structures. If you think about cities like Jerusalem or Jericho, they've been around a long time and have been rebuilt more than once after being conquered and destroyed.
If you're looking for more things to read - particularly on the concept of consumption, obselence, greed, internet culture, etc. I've been a marketer for 13 years and have recently created a substack exploring the concept of Humane Marketing. Goes in hand with doughnut economics and other concepts you've already heard of.
Would love to hear your thoughts on some of these topics and have you on my free substack.
Huh, interesting. On the Android app, you have to click on the name of the commenter to see their profile and then click through to their newsletter. Yet another way in which the interface varies across devices.
Jake seliger is a stoic with cancer who has no tongue- he’s also my husband. He’s written a wonderful essay on stoicism and facing the end AND he’s recorded a podcast on the Daily stoic (which is amazing considering the hurdles). He’s the most resilient man I know and also a beautiful writer. Give him a read (and a listen, podcast link at the top of the essay)
I'm so sorry to hear about your diagnosis and wishing you a lot of strength. I write a lot about healthcare and the clinical trial space, and so I hope you don't mind me asking if you've had genomic sequencing performed? I hate when people offer unsolicited advice re: roots and berries (i won't do that) , but I'm a doctor who can't help but notice that a number of patients are missing out on potential treatment (or trial) matches due to this lack of "non standard" sequencing, so I bring it up (We used CARIS). Though it's not standard it should be (Depending on your oncologist) and there are some molecularly targeted treatments that are easily missed otherwise and worth a conversation.
Stoicism, and most importantly, that generative urge Jake talks about have been life changing. I'm not a great stoic. Jake is an adept, I am a sack of feelings on legs, but I do try. I'll tell him you loved it. I'm biased, but I think everything he writes is wonderful. We're basically a book club. Do you have a particular book on the stoics you like? I'm always looking to add to the pile.
I’ve read a bit of Epictetus, Seneca and Marcus Aurelius but most of my reading on contemporary Stoicism has been online.
I’ve found that most of the value of Stoicism has been that third part of the Serenity Prayer: the wisdom to know the difference. I’m constantly surprised at how few people with cancer want to learn enough about their condition to make decisions. I find it empowering and it gives me the kind of control that your husband talks about.
I had a needle biopsy but the results were inconclusive, presumably because there was not enough tumour in the sample. My surgeon wanted to do a second biopsy which would be a full craniotomy and involve removing a big chunk of my temporal lobe which, I decided, was not worth the risk.
There are only a handful of standard molecular tests for a glioma but, sadly, there are only a handful of treatments too so full sequencing wouldn't really give any extra information. There are two kinds of chemo and the choice is determined by IDH-1 mutation status. There is one targeted therapy approved for a very rare BRAF mutation which I don't have. There is another target therapy (vorasedinib) that is showing dramatic results that is going through the approval process right now. If it is approved I will get second biopsy because vorasedinib targets IDH1-mt, the most common mutation. Other than vorasedinib, I decided that none of the current treatments are worth pursuing and that I would rather take my chances with the tumour. I decided that I did not want surgery or chemo unless the benefits were clear and, in my case, they are not.
I have had three people close to me who died of a brain tumour and they all died quite quickly. I expected to do the same and yet here I still am 18 months later. It is quite disorienting. It makes it hard to plan.
Also, Ragged Clown, you have my real sympathy. This is an awful state to be in.
Just read your blog. From the hospital name it looks like you're in the UK too. Would you mind sharing how you've got into the vorasidenib trial? Can I expect a positive response from my Stern Northern Oncologist? (You may well be able to identify him.)
I previously wrote about uncertainty but that was the wrong way to put it. There are no good brain tumours. I am very sorry.
I'm not in the vorasidenib trial. That's just a distant hope that one day it will be approved and that I will have access to it. Sorry for the confusion.
You probably know that the vorasidenib trial (INDIGO) was conducted in 10 countries including the UK. The trial only included patients who had resection, which I have not, so it's not clear that I would be eligible even if/when the drug is approved.
I'm British-Canadian and live in the UK. High-grade glioma diagnosed a bit under three years ago with obvious life-changing consequences. The surgeons managed a complete resection and I made it though that and radio- and chemotherapy with a good functional outcome. My survival this long already puts me off the life expectancy charts for the nature of the tumour. I've even returned to work.
My scans are down to six-monthly but the damn thing is going to come back at some point, with the usual consequences. It looks like there's decent early evidence vorasidenib helps put off that date by quite a lot, with only modest side effects.
Trouble is, as usual, the UK is behind with this stuff. The Guardian wrote last week to say the NHS isn't offering it on the expanded access to medicines program. Questions have been asked in Parliament. Vorasidenib may well become a standard treatment but my undead shade would be quite cross if it came too late.
I've messaged my oncologist but he'll probably tell me that we just have to hang on.
Is there any reasonable way of getting onto the American clinical trial? I meet all the requirements -- IDH-mutant status confirmed through biopsy, prior surgery, no current need for chemo or radiotherapy, otherwise well. I've got decent resources to put into this (my work is reasonably well-paid) but have no idea if I could afford US drug prices. Moving to America is probably a non-starter but shifting the family to Canada might be possible, though the clinical benefit would have to be very strong to justify so much upheaval.
If anybody can answer this question, it'll be you guys!
I lived in the States for 25 years but I came back home to England 5 years ago, so I am in the same NICE waiting game as you. You probably know that vorasidenib is not yet approved in the USA yet. I would expect that approval will happen quite quickly in the UK when it is since the benefits are so clear. Who knows if it will be soon enough!?
I have two tumour-friends in Canada and their treatment woes seem at least as bureaucratic as ours so I wouldn't put much weight on a Canada solution. AFAIK the expanded access option is only available in the states and I think it will be approved here as quickly as it will be in Canada.
I'm on six monthly scans. The last scan showed substantial growth with the tumour in two more lobes and it has crossed the midline. But I am perfectly well and still working with hardly any symptoms, none of them serious. I know it's just a matter of time though. My neurosurgeon says "ticking time bomb".
Just had a detailed boilerplate response from the trial manager. You can join from abroad, but only if you can find a US oncologist to "sponsor" you, and a US pharmacy which can accept delivery of the meds and send them on. It sounds challenging but perhaps not impossible.
IDH-1 mutants need to start with ivosidenib before going on the trial, however. Ivosidenib is not a nice drug. It's got pretty grim (and potentially fatal) side effects with limited clinical benefit in glioma patients. IDH-2 mutants don't have to do that.
The response suggests a clinical approach to Servier in the UK may be more fruitful, and I'll wait and see what comes back to my oncologist. The letter also hints at difficulty scaling up production of vorasidenib.
In short, the easiest way forward is to ignore this for a while until it gets UK approval. There may be ways to access the trial, particularly if you have American connections, but it's worth getting your oncologist to approach Servier directly as well if you're keen.
Okay. Stern Northern Oncologist is on-side after a little persuasion. We've approached both the trial manager (the email is available through the link in my previous post) and the manufacturer, Servier. There look to be two avenues:
(1) The trial itself. There is no obvious bar to non-Americans but I don't know where the money would come from. Paying full price for American meds could be steep but there's scope to ask NHS England for funding.
(2) Servier's own Managed Access Program for meds which don't yet have licensing approval. It looks like we meet the criteria but, again, funding may be an issue. It's a French company so buying the meds direct from them could be cheaper than the US.
Verasidenib is a truly exciting development. I went through a weird process on diagnosis, starting with the hope of some new treatment and ending with the realisation that my life expectancy was too short to get the benefit of anything that wasn't already in Phase 3 trials. Part of my adjustment process was giving up that hope. It's nice to change that a little.
It's worth talking to your oncologist (I can guess who she is!). The trial requires biopsy confirmation of IDH-mutant status, but the biopsy itself fulfils the surgery requirement, so it may be enough for you to have a second biopsy which confirms your tumour status (though even having that would be a big decision).
Diffuse glioma may well be non-operable but verasidenib seems to offer a good chance of extending life with relatively few side effects, and it was aimed at diffuse gliomas in the first place.
My tumour was solid rather than diffuse and I went through the whole standard treatment, so let me know if you want my perspective on what it's like to have surgery, radiotherapy and chemotherapy (though I was on temozolomide, which supposedly has only mild side-effects). We live in the same place so could even meet up in person if you want. I've got the same ticking time bomb as you, although from a slightly different route.
Also, don't rule out CVP chemotherapy. Sometimes people get unexpected results. I have a friend whose inoperable recurrent stage 4 vanished entirely under second-line chemotherapy with lomustine, which on its own is a largely obsolete agent from the 1970s. In fairness, the hospital said that was the first time it had ever happened, but it did happen.
I got fed up with 3 hours a day on Highway 85 in Silicon Valley. We sold both our cars and moved to a city where we did not need one. That was fortunate since I am not allowed to drive anymore with a brain tumour!
Low-traffic neighbourhoods and low-emission zones are a hot topic in England at the moment. They have been subsumed into the culture wars and may decide the next election. The Conservatives seem to think so anyway.
Why is northern New England so lightly settled, despite being one of the oldest parts of the country? Maine, New Hampshire and Vermont were settled before the US was even a country, yet they have population close to the Dakotas. Maine's largest city has a population of 60k, Vermont's 44k. The northern two-thirds of Maine is about as developed as rural Alaska. Why? You'd imagine that the oldest part of the country would have developed a larger population over time.
If the answer is 'well they're cold/inhospitable'- Anchorage Alaska's population is close to 300k. I don't see northern New England as being any colder or tougher to live than say Chicago (country's 3rd largest city), Minnesota (Minneapolis population 5.7 million) Boise, or Milwaukee. Is the soil really that much worse for growing crops?
Part of the answer has to be political, because- stop reading this and look at a Google maps of 1 of these states. On the Canadian side you see a much denser road network leading up to Maine, NH, Vermont, and even Michigan- then it abruptly stops at the US border. So this must reflect some kind of political or legal reason?
Seems like pretty decent sheep grazing country. Similar to Scotland.
Of course the question of "Why doesn't the US have a significant sheep industry" is another good one that could inspire another thread like this one. According to this article https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/08/travel/lens-sheep-island-maine.html there used to be a substantial sheep industry in Maine but the fields are now forests.
Scottish sheep grazing came with evicting the cottiers and clearing the land for intensive sheep raising (and deer for commercial shooting - renting out your estate for the hunting season was a thing and I think continues to be so*) rather than the small scale arable cultivation tenants engaged in. This was not popular amongst the tenantry, but the defence by the landlords was that they had to make their estates profitable or go under.
"The first phase resulted from agricultural improvement, driven by the need for landlords to increase their income – many had substantial debts, with actual or potential bankruptcy being a large part of the story of the clearances. This involved the enclosure of the open fields managed on the run rig system and shared grazing. These were usually replaced with large-scale pastoral farms on which much higher rents were paid. The displaced tenants were expected to be employed in industries such as fishing, quarrying or the kelp industry. Their reduction in status from farmer to crofter was one of the causes of resentment.
The second phase involved overcrowded crofting communities from the first phase that had lost the means to support themselves, through famine and/or collapse of industries that they had relied on. This is when "assisted passages" were common, when landowners paid the fares for their tenants to emigrate. Tenants who were selected for this had, in practical terms, little choice but to emigrate."
Land that is good for forestry and sheep rearing isn't going to support a large population of people or at least not at more than subsistence level, so the answer to "why isn't it more settled?" may lie there.
"Our main offering for guests is accompanied stalking for red, sika and occasional roe deer. We also have walked-up grouse shooting, duck flighting, rough shooting and occasional ptarmigan available by request on a first-come, first-served basis. Brown trout fishing is also available by request."
Settlement patterns in the Eastern US are heavily influenced by navigable waterways, since those were by far the best way to do medium-distance transport before railroads, especially in sparsely-developed colonies. From New Jersey southwards, there's a geological feature called the Eastern Seaboard Fall Line where the "Tidewater" coastal lowlands give way to the "Piedmont" Appalachian foothills and where rivers pretty much universally stop being navigable from the coast. There's a string of current or historically major cities (Montgomery, Macon, Augusta, Columbia, Raleigh, Petersburg, Richmond, DC, Baltimore, and Trenton) which started out as the last good river port before the Fall Line, where goods would be loaded and unloaded for land transport or portage around the fall line. Later, railroads and canals would be build inland from these cities.
In New York and New England, there isn't as pronounced a fall line, but a similar effect is at work. Compare a population density map of New England to a topographical map, and you'll see a pretty close correlation between the coastal lowlands and population density. And the inland port cities analogous to the Fall Line ports further south (Albany, Springfield, etc) are all in New York or Southern New England. In Northern New England, the coastal lowlands are a pretty narrow strip and the rivers are pretty lousy for navigation (to the point that a Continental Army attempt to invade Quebec via Maine in 1775 using canoes to traverse the Kennebec and Chaudlier rivers lost half of their soldiers to desertion, exposure, and starvation in the process). So as with the rest of the East Coast, the big cities grew up along either the aforementioned river ports or major coastal port cities (NYC, Boston), all of which were in New York or Southern New England.
Other cold/inhospitable parts of the US that did develop mid-sized or large cities later on, like most of your examples, have two big advantages over Vermont and Maine. One is that they're generally in prime transport hub locations (Chicago and Milwaukee are major Great Lakes ports, with Chicago in particular also being a major rail hub, Boise is on a major pass through the Rockies in the middle of good mining country, Minneapolis is a major river port on the junction between the Mississippi and Minnesota rivers, and Anchorage is the main port on Alaska's south coast). The other is lack of other nearby major cities sucking up all the oxygen: no need to make a new major city to serve as a commercial/industrial hub for New England, since Boston is already there.
The development difference between the Canadian and US sides of the border is actually more geographical than you'd think. The part of the border where the difference is starkest (western Maine) is where it is specifically to follow the Appalachian summits. The Canadian side as part of the St. Lawrence valley is a lot more hospitable to settlement, so that's built up, and the building up stops a little short of the summit line. If you continue west to the arbitrary horizontal line forming the northern borders of NH and VT, you'll see a more continuous gradient. The one place where there's a clearly political difference in development is the highway hugging the Canadian side of Maine's eastern border, which looks like Canada decided to build a road connecting Saint John with Riveiere du Loup through the best route that was entirely within Canadian territory. And even there, I see what appears to be American suburbs of Canadian towns along the road line. To the extent there is a general political difference in development patterns, I think the main difference is that the US had a lot more good land open to settlement in the West in the early 1800s than Canada did, so New England settlement and infrastructure projects looked to the Old Northwest (modern Midwest) while their Canadian equivalents put more work into developing closer to home.
Thanks- however, Bangor Maine is on a navigable waterway? It's situated on a large river that runs all the way down to the ocean and supports boat traffic. In Maine's logging heyday it was heavily used for timber extraction
True. And Bangor was one of American's 50 largest towns in the 1850s, being about the same size as Norfolk, VA or Savannah, GA. It was about 2/3 the size of Detroit, MI and half the size of Richmond, VA in the 1850 census.
Bangor had several disadvantages though that limited its growth and lead to it starting late and peaking (in relative terms) early. "Starting late" in particular did have a couple significant political dimensions. One was that Maine was a remote and neglected discontiguous hinterland of Massachusetts until it became its own state as part of the Compromise of 1820 to offset the admission of Missouri as a slave state. The other was that much of the Penobscot River basin was the subject of a border dispute between the US and the British colony of New Brunswick until 1842.
The big geographical disadvantages were that Bangor's harbor ices up in the winter and was too small for larger ocean-going ships, and that the economic value of the Penobscot River basin, while substantial in the mid 1800s, was of somewhat limited growth potential. As for the last, in the decades following the Civil War, the logging industry shifted South and West: Maine was about 5% of the total US lumber industry (by invested capital, number of workers, or total wages) in 1870, but only about 2-2.5% by the same metrics by 1900. Maine's lumber industry grew significantly in absolute terms, but declined by more than half in relative terms. Part of this was political and infrastructure limits to other potential lumber-producing areas lifting, and part of it was probably a shift in demand patterns as the shipbuilding industry that had been one of the main customers for Maine's lumber output shifted from wood to metal as the main structural material.
Does it go the other way too? Do any of the existential horrors (particularly the marine ones) kvetch about hazards to navigation in upland New England's rivers? :-)
Between Hawthorne, Lovecraft and King (with support from other writers who had or have some connection), New England really does seem like "for the love of God, your sanity, and your soul, get out of here as fast as possible. There are monsters in the woods, there are monsters in the hills, there are monsters in the city, there are monsters in the villages, there are monsters in the sea - there are pretty much monsters everywhere."
I think it has a literary tradition because it got colleges earlier, and some of them became horror writers. Also it gets cold in the winter and people get depressed.
OK, and maybe Randall Flagg *is* an avatar of Nyarlathotep.
If there's one thing I've learned from Peter Ziehan, it's the importance of rivers to historic (and current) development. You'd think that if rivers are good, seas and oceans would be better, but that's just not true without a protected harbor. Navigable rivers are basically good protected harbor on their whole navigable length. Inland New England (except Massachusetts) is mountainous and rocky terrain far from useful harbors or rivers. The Midwest is defined by its access to rivers.
The image in this Wikipedia article gets the point across well.
All else equal, every piece of land in the Mississippi watershed is going to be more economically useful than inland Vermont, NH, or Maine. And as other commenter have noted, all else is not equal.
Before railroads, the cost of shipping over water vs over land, per mile, was several orders of magnitude. Railroads reduced that cost differential to roughly one order of magnitude in flat conditions. Interstates nearly reduced that differential to anywhere the highways went (though never got as cost-competitive as railroads, obviously). Until the interstate system, shipping from Albany to Omaha was less expensive than shipping from Albany to Burlington.
I don’t actually see a discontinuity in roads at the border. It looks like the flat area around Lake Champlain, including Plattsburgh on the New York side and Burlington on the Vermont side, is continuous in road development with the flat terrain north to Montreal, and the discontinuity is at the rough terrain. Similarly, in northern Maine, there’s a cluster of roads in the east, around Caribou and Presque Isle, connecting to the development in New Brunswick around the St John river, stretching up to Edmundston in Quebec, where the roads stop as you cross the rough terrain to the St Lawrence river. This seems to me to reinforce the idea that there’s a geographic factor more than a political one.
I don't see how we could be looking at the same map. Are you zoomed in enough? Look at northwestern Maine versus the road network around Quebec City, or northern New York versus the road network around Ottawa. Way denser on the Canadian side
Northwestern Maine is a place where the discontinuity does line up with the border - but that's also a place where the terrain discontinuity lines up with the border. But northern New York is a place where there is very clearly no discontinuity at the border - the area within 10 or 15 miles of the St Laurence River has about equal roadway density on both sides of the border, and there's only a difference when you get farther from the border, near Ottawa, or into the mountains that exist on the New York side.
But even in northwest Maine, the discontinuity in roadway only partially follows the border. To my eye, it looks like the discontinuity gets a bit south of the border once you're at northern New Hampshire, and goes north of the border once you're farther up, near Pocatière and Saint-Pascal in Quebec. And thn it doesn't follow the border at all when you get farther east.
I wonder if the Maine-Canada border itself is a result of the terrain- they drew the line where they hit a natural barrier or something. (I vaguely recall there being some kind of early 19th century skirmish over the border there). I've never actually been up that way so I'm just speculating
Much of northern New England had its countryside depopulate back in the 1800s when the US was still mostly rural, because of better lands out west. New immigrants went into the cities, but the smaller cities didn't really have much to attract folks outside of a narrow set of industries compared to places like Boston and New York City that were relatively close by.
Take this with a huge grain of salt since I’ve never even been to most of these places, but from my understanding northern New England is not just cold and snowy, but also very rugged, rocky terrain, which is costly to develop, impractical to farm and would’ve been near impossible to traverse in winter, even on horseback. Chicago by comparison has a lot going for it for industrial production, e.g. fertile farmland, access to major waterways for shipping, and easy surrounding terrain for building rail and highway infrastructure.
Anchorage isn’t a good comparison because it actually has a very temperate climate for Alaska (very rainy, more comparable to Seattle than the Alaskan mountain winters you’re probably imagining), and again with its easy ocean access, makes a no-brainer of a staging point for a lot of natural resource extraction.
If you look at other rugged regions like those in the Rockies, you see a similar trend of using them as needed for resource extraction, then eventually transitioning to a more recreation/tourism/2nd-home sort of economy as the resources get used up. Colorado has very low population density outside of the front range, which itself is just on the border of the mountains, not actually in them.
If you made a true apples to apples comparison that captures the confluence of terrain and climate, I think northern New England is probably pretty average.
Alaska has abundant natural resources; there's a fund that literally pays you for living there. Meanwhile Maine has abundant crab apples for pies. Strangely, most people seem not to value apple pie as much as they value natural gas. (Something is probably wrong with them, but IDK maybe they reason mushy store bought pies are good enough? I mean people eat at McDonalds, maybe they don't eat food for taste, and just want to gain as much weight per sitting as possible)
As for the Canadian buildup, I think the reason is basically national: Canadians are Canadian, and so while they want to live in areas that are further south, and offer the ability to pass easily into the US for employment and trade, they also want to stay in Canada.
The eerie canal opened up the Midwest as the agricultural hub for New York and the east. The north east stops being a major agricultural hub, and population declines.
> just want to gain as much weight per sitting as possible
McDonalds specifically has a very low price menu that appeals to people on very tight budgets. When it became federally mandated for interstate food supplies to include the calorie counts on menus, quite a few people are literally doing the math in their head for what offers the highest calories per dollar.
New England is so rocky that fitting the rocks into mortarless walls is a major thing for farmland. The freeze/thaw cycle keeps pushing rocks up to the surface so it's not like you can just clear a field and be done with it..
It's like tetris with freeform rocks. You collect rocks and you look at them and figure out what will fit where. People dream about their rocks. This is from a book, I haven't done it myself.
Sooooo. I build dry stone walls as part of my work. There is a great book about traditional New England (New Hampshire, precisely) walls, called 'The Granite Kiss', that I can recommend for the layperson, and I've taken several professional workshops through The Stone Trust, in VT. I'm about to go to PA for a week to do another set of classes this fall.
It's much less like Tetris because you want even courses across the face, a slight slope to the inside (what we call 'batter'), and to cross your seams so you don't have running joints that will cause weak areas to form. We also do a lot of shaping to keep the stone sitting squarely on the course below. But you can break the rules if you are skilled enough! Which is super fun when you have the chance to get creative.
The Stone Trust teaches traditional English pasture walls as the basic type, but Kentucky stone fences and New England stone walls are very similar. The history of stone walls is fascinating, beginning with the Acts of Enclosure in England, and the parallel emergence of walls for structures and for livestock in the New World.
Yeah, doing more than a little bit of shaping takes fairly specific tools that a farmer or non stone mason is unlikely to have access to, especially in New England where were have really hard granitic rock that really requires carbide to cut well. Most old walls were built but the person who lived on the land, and some of their work was excellent! There are great examples of 200 year old foundations that still support barns and houses despite the lack of mortar. Field walls were not normally structural beyond 'not falling over immediately'.
My great-grandfather and his brother immigrated to New York City from Italy as uneducated teenagers, without their parents, around 1910, and by 1920 they had bought a farm (with a mortgage) in Connecticut. Obviously there's a lot to unpack there regarding immigration and labor and so on, but the fact that two migrant workers could get a mortgage on a hundred-odd acres of abandoned CT farmland speaks to how depopulated the area was a hundred years ago. Everyone had moved west. Before cars and rail lines spread everywhere, you had to be really close to market to make produce or dairy work, and grain production thrives on scale - grain keeps well so you might as well grow it out in the Plains where land is cheap and flat.
Yep. I have a lot of yeoman ancestors or relatives who were in northern NE during the 1700s and who all during the 1800s fled westward, or southward to NYC. They seem to have just walked away from those VT/NH/ME rock farms without a second glance.
That's part why those states today have all significantly reforested, and have significantly more acreage in conservation ownership, compared to 150 years ago.
Can confirm. I was never a landowner there, but the silent eloquence of the old walls with stones fallen beside them, crying out mutely in the returning wilderness for someone to heft them up and put them into place is real.
When I look at the megaliths of our ancestral homelands, I suspect that this sort of thing must truly be in the blood.
Fedeen walls are my favorite, which I haven't had a chance to build yet, and Wales has done crazy walling styles that make use of the slate that is so abundant there. But Irish walls are pretty cool! I build dry stone walls for work, and we take a lot of classes through The Stone Trust in VT, USA, but they are really an offshoot of the DWSA in Great Britain.
The second link seems to be walls made at least partly of shaped (worked?) stone, which is contrasted with found stones. I think the classic New England wall is entirely made of found stones.
Dagny did some dry stone work when she was away from Taggart Transcontinental, though I think it was a road rather than a wall. This is the only dry stone work I know of from fiction.
Now I'm wondering if you created your user name just to riff on crab apples for pies or if you've been lurking for years waiting for the chance to make and apple pie related comment. - yes, kidding
I stole crab apples going through my hooligan phase as a 12 year old. As close as I ever came to feeling like a big time gangster.
No one ever really cared about their crab apple crop from the single tree in their front yard in my Midwest small town.
The homeowners probably would have laughed their asses off if they knew how our juvenile hearts were racing when we sneaked onto their property to steal a couple sour as hell apples.
Modern Americans think of distance in terms of miles, but a better way to think of distance is in terms of time (at least when thinking of things 200+ years ago). Rome to Alexandria, Egypt was a shorter trip than Rome to whatever the 100AD equivalent of Munich would be.
And American roads (maybe western roads in general) were *terrible* back then. Getting on a boat and going up or down the coast was much faster. Similarly, river travel (or, eventually, artificial rivers in the form of canals) was faster than going over land.
So ... Boston has a wonderful harbor and New York was pretty good and Philadelphia was also quite good. North of Boston near the water you have ... Portland, Maine. Maybe if Portland had been developed before Boston it would have won out as a major harbor, but I doubt it.
So a huge part of the answer is that the roads back then were terrible and north of Boston (in the USA) you didn't have much water access.
Notice, too, that Canada north of New England has the St. Lawrence River, which is nice and navigable. Combine this with wanting to be in Canada and not in the USA and you get ...
Is ethnicity a constant like race which it is often paired with? People can be of multiple races and ethnicities but are the labels used consistently and constant over time?
Regarding or from recommended book: "The racial categories that the schools use are completely bonkers,..." --goodreads
wow.
Race has genetic markers but ethnicities [def: 'people sharing a common cultural or national heritage and often sharing a common language or religion'] are significantly varied in a moment in time and much more so over time esp. with the advent of modern transportation and communication tech.
Any thoughts on how it is used colloquially? 'I'm Greek" or 'I'm an ethnic Greek' (traditional?)
Ethnic greek means ancestry similar to the majority of the greek population/dating back some certain length of time. Greek can mean born in or long-term resident of Greece as well as being an ethnic greek.
I was surprised that a "long-term resident" would refer to themselves as such but it fits. There's a portion of Minnesota, USA in Canada that has no US land bridge. Angel Inlet I think. Anyway, during the pandemic it was an issue and long story short, the year-round residents don't distinguish themselves from the northern locals.
It’s fun to read the history of the creation Northwest Angle. It’s the result of various treaties with France and goes back to Benjamin Franklin as the US negotiator.
In a nutshell, the problem was the area had yet to be surveyed. Initially it was assumed the source of the Mississippi was further north than it actually is. The other problem was determining just where the most northwesterly point of an irregularly shaped lake actually is.
In the end the US gained an exclave with a population of 119 at latest count.
It’s accessible without passing through Canada by boat in the summer or by ice road when the lake ice is thick enough to safely support motor vehicles.
Why is SF so dirty, dangerous and super-expensive?
Whose fault is it? City govt?
If this is a city of super-smart people, as many claim, and as evidenced by some of the businesses and innovation that exist here, why can't they solve this problem?
Is there a path from what it is now, to a safer city? (Even if it remains dirty and expensive)?
The ideology of many of the people in san francisco has certain beliefs about the causes and effects of crime that don't work in practice.
In addition, there is widespread corruption and graft, and giant armies of bureaucrats and non-profits who are raking in hundreds of millions of dollars to "manage" the problems instead of fix them.
"Build thousands of new community behavioral health beds in state-of-the-art residential settings to house Californians with mental illness and substance use disorders, which could serve over 10,000 people every year in residential-style settings that have on-site services – not in institutions of the past, but locations where people can truly heal."
Those proposals seem like they will run right into the objections to half-way houses and drug treatment centres and homeless refuges - not here, not in my nice neighbourhood, we don't want criminals and junkies hanging round our kids.
That's not simple NIMBYism, there are real concerns. But good luck finding someplace to build all those "thousands of new beds".
Also I have to laugh at "so we're gonna re-invent asylums but not call them that". Sure, Gavin.
Most of SF is not particularly dirty or dangerous. You can look at maps of violence crimes, homelessness encampment reports, poop on the streets, etc, and they all tend to highlight a relatively small section of the city. Things can look _really_ bad in those areas, and they get outsized attention, but the vast majority of the city is actually quite nice. Most neighborhoods are getting by just fine, and a few are thriving.
(The only real city-wide epidemic is car break-ins. They're a huge problem, but also mostly avoidable if you exercise the right precautions.)
That's why it's still so expensive. There are lots of nice neighborhoods where you can enjoy top-notch city life with very little downside. And, of course, it's still one of the best collections of tech talent on the globe.
But make no mistake, conditions in those parts of the city are _bad_. And even outside that area, you're still more likely than not to see at least one homeless person taking up a bus shelter, or on occasion yelling at you on the street. A lot of us locals have simply grown inured. Doesn't mean it's acceptable.
A big part of understanding the state of the city is that these things are connected. A lot of the city is bad _because_ it's been so successful in those other ways. For one thing, a booming tech sector let city government enjoy massive tax revenue and pay less attention to street-level problems. And rising cost of living has exacerbated those problems, particularly homelessness.
You have all these powerful trends all meeting in the same place:
1. SF's utter failure to produce housing, which lead to rising rents and a significant homegrown homelessness problem.
2. The city's somewhat tolerant approach of homelessness, and liberal attitudes in general, has meant less aggressive crackdowns in general.
3. Combine that with a national fentanyl crisis, and now SF becomes a magnet for open drug use.
4. Oh, and many cities are currently under an injunction that keeps them from sweeping homeless off the street unless they can offer shelter elsewhere. SF has hugely under-built its shelter network, so it has a hard time removing big camps.
One of the most common and vicious arguments is whether SF's homelessness problem is caused by locals, or by out-of-towners coming in for drug tourism. And there's a ton of data that points to _both_ things being factors. Lots of people want to argue it's one or the other but I think it's not reducible in that way.
Then you have this whole _other_ tangle of big trends which hit SF harder than most:
4. Tech companies were among the strongest to move to remote work in the pandemic, and since SF's economy is so dominated by it, that leads to an empty downtown which makes street problems worse.
5. Most big cities are suffering with poor police recruitment, due to persistent disparities in pay and perceived welcomeness. SF's liberal nature seems to be working against it, as is the local cost of living.
So why can't we fix it?
1. Well, for starters, these are not problems you fix in a day, or even a year. Fixing housing policy and supply will take _years_. Some things are actually moving in the right direction, but not at the speed that social media expects.
2. SF's government has reached comical levels of bureaucracy in a way that seems very very difficult to fix. City hiring is _insanely_ complicated, and the city government has amassed tons of committees & strictures that make it hard to get anything done quickly.
3. Nobody knows how to solve the fentanyl crisis, short of mega-duper-mass incarceration, maybe. SF's drug problems aren't worse than many other places, but in SF the national fentanyl crisis has combined with a local homelessness crisis, making both issues even harder to solve.
4. And while all of SF's problems are very, very real - people also judge it based on social media and reputation, and for many people SF is not a real place with real problems, but rather an avatar of Why Liberals Mean We Can't Have Nice Things. For these people, it will never be clean or safe enough.
So when someone complains about SF, you really need to look hard at what they're saying, and figure out if they're engaging in a good-faith discussion, or partisan axe-grinding.
>Most of SF is not particularly dirty or dangerous. You can look at maps of violence crimes, homelessness encampment reports, poop on the streets, etc, and they all tend to highlight a relatively small section of the city.
Huh, I'd never thought about it this way before! The thing is that I almost entirely experience SF along where BART goes, and in my experience the area around every BART stop up to 24th St Mission is pretty gross and sketchy, to a greater or lesser extent. So pretty much every time I'm in SF (especially post-pandemic) I'm like "wow this is incredibly terrible!" But now that you mention it, the times I've ventured further afield (to Golden Gate Park, the Presidio, or Dogpatch), those have all been basically fine and even pleasant or vibrant. The problem is that getting to those places always requires taking a car or walking for multiple hours (I used to take MUNI sometimes but it is SO slow and also kind of confusing and it doesn't feel worth it to me; occasionally I also take buses but figuring out bus schedules in an unfamiliar area is a pain), so I very rarely go to them. My guess is a lot of other people's experience of SF is colored by the same thing — BART is the easiest way to get around, but BART only takes you to the really bad parts.
> The problem is that getting to those places always requires taking a car or walking for multiple hours
Not so! E-bike rental is extremely convenient, and a great way to get around the city. There are docks all over the place. You can also rent electric scooters if you prefer that.
I think the big difference between San Francisco and other North American cities is that a lot of the worst parts of San Francisco are right next to major tourist destinations and there's no attempt to hide this from the visitors. Other West Coast cities have similar problems with homelessness and drug use but put a lot more effort into cordoning off the blight.
Mine is **trying** to cordon off the blight, but not doing a great job. Although they seem to have discovered that intensive street cleaning on a semi-daily basis not only removes the pervasive odor of urine and feces, but also forces encampments to move and prevents new ones from starting, without offending far-left sensibilities. That, and I'm coming to suspect that they're deliberately being less strict about encampments in the far-left part of the city that was home to the worst BLM stuff. In my city, this is a distinct area from the standard tourist destinations, but I get the impression that this isn't the case for other west coast cities?
What I remember is that if you walk up a hill, particularly a steep one, from anywhere, the number of homeless drops off. Presumably it’s a bit of a struggle to move up and down for people who are not so healthy.
I don't know why people are so reticent to admit that people who spend their whole lives living in their own shit taking drugs are probably lacking in a lot of personal virtues.
It’s true. Some of them are just fuck ups plain and simple.
I try to keep in mind that some of them are also struggling with hereditary mental health issues.
And then there are those that caught a series of bad breaks in life and don’t yet have the skills or haven’t had an opportunity to get their lives back on track.
Yeah. "Calories In Calories Out" may not be a perfect model for weight loss, but not having eaten for a few days does have an effect on my judgement of which activities are worthwhile. And that's for intentional fasting, when I know I could eat whatever I want, whenever I want.
"My guess is a lot of other people's experience of SF is colored by the same thing — BART is the easiest way to get around, but BART only takes you to the really bad parts."
Washington DC is similar in this respect. The Mall (grassy strip between the US Capitol Building and the Lincoln Memorial) is the place of choice for sightseers, with its monuments and museums and Greek revival government architecture. Scattered all around it, however, are some very poor neighborhoods, and the local bus system drives through nearly all of them. The local rail (DC Metro) goes under many of them, but not all. Tourists from out of town frequently remark on the ones they pass.
Yep. The Powell & Civic Center stops are right in the rough parts of town. And while the Mission has gone downhill a bit, by far the worst spots are the 16th & 24th plazas, which have turned into mostly-illegal street markets.
What's also bad is that the downtown BART stations themselves attract the homeless, and vandals. They're mostly dirty because they're poorly designed and weren't set up to be easily cleaned, but they're also de facto shelters for the local homeless.
Walk around North Beach, Telegraph, Upper Nob Hill, Wharf, Marina, Presidio, Richmond, GGP, Sunset, Haight, Duboce, Castro, Noe, Hayes Valley, etc., and it's a completely different story. And that's where most of the city lives or goes for recreation.
But if you come into downtown via BART you are absolutely seeing some rough stuff.
Everyone I know who's lived there tells me that the dirty & dangerous parts are just a couple of neighborhoods, and the rest of the city is fine. I haven't been in a long time, but I've had like 5 different people tell me this
That's New York. I used to hate all cities because my experience of big cities was colored by dismal, ugly San Fransisco. New York is a giant traffic jam, but it's got culture in a way that San Fransisco really doesn't.
Ah, Alan Watts giving talks on KPFA, The Grateful Dead's Jerry Garcia as de facto mayor of The Haight, Owsley Stanley cranking our high quality acid, Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters...
Though I'm reminded of the counter-meme that black folk think white food is bland because they only experience it in my school or prison. My coleslaw is spicy and highly sought-after both.
That depends on what you mean by "white". If you mean "American of European descent", then I guess it'd be something like potato salad or the aforementioned coleslaw. If you mean "person with white skin", then there's no such thing as "white food" because there's no such thing as "culturally white" (in that sense). Just ask a Frenchman what he thinks about Lithuanian food.
This is just an impression, but I think African-American food isn't all that strongly flavored-- you have to go to Latin America and the Caribbean for the strong spices.
To be fair, (pre)historically speaking, spiciness is inversely proportionate to latitude due to reasons of food spoilage. And if that's what we're talking about, then yes, the homelands of white people used a lot less spice.
In context, it probably means the cuisine of white Americans, whose families have been in America long enough that they don't identify with any particular part of Europe.
I suggest mincing jalapenos and adding them to the sauce with the raw garlic the day before. If you're making the mayonnaise yourself or using hollandaise, you can just chuck them in the blender. But that can get too spicy pretty quick. Grated onion kicks it up a notch too.
I am interested in learning more about the sort of *stereotypically* feminine person who is content letting others make decisions, following orders and spending their life caring for others. Any reading recommendations on this subject? Preferably nonfiction.
I think you're making a mistake in assuming that being stereotypically feminine is about letting others make decisions.
A stereotypically feminine person in a traditional relationship makes a lot of decisions. She has near total autonomy over the house and the children, the environment in which she spends her time. (Contrast to her husband, who goes to work where he generally doesn't exercise total control over everything.) She goes along with the decisions that her husband makes about certain things, just as her husband goes along with decisions like what's for dinner. Of course she should take her husband and children's views in mind when making these decisions, but it's up to her.
I mean, you're talking about a different phenomenon than I am. You can be a housewife and still have a strong personality. Not the thing I'm interested in.
Also, see the Heinlein version, in which a very good marriage includes a woman convincing her husband that he came up with doing the thing she wants. Not a bad deal for the husband if she has good judgement about what to do.
Is there a "stereotypically feminine" person who just follows orders from the men in her life? I know that for some Evangelical non-denominations, there's a big thing about Headship and the husband is the head of the house and master of all, but in practice I imagine very few women just unquestioningly go "yes, darling" on every single thing.
I imagine there are people who do need/want that kind of relationship where their partner makes all the decisions, but I tend to think of that as being somehow lacking, and it's got nothing to do with being a 'traditional' woman.
From John Charles Daly, describing I think a very traditional relationship:
""Look there is nothing to it. When we got married, we made a pact. We agreed she would make the small decisions and I would make the big decisions. We never violated that agreement. As a result, we have never had a cross word with one another for twenty years and we are going to go along for twenty more on the same basis [...] Mary decides, for instance, where I work; should we buy a house; where the kids go to school; you know that kind of thing. I make the big decisions, should we recognize Red China? What are we going to do about Nasser?"
It would probably be worth looking into biblical sources. Even if you don't want to read through the Bible to see all that it says about femininity I'm sure that you could Google around to find the appropriate passages.
I think of the bit of proverbs where it is describing the virtuous woman (for ~900BC Israel from the view of a man, most likely). It contains this: "She considereth a field, and buyeth it: with the fruit of her hands she planteth a vineyard."
And I'm thinking that, yeah, the rest of the thing pretty much has her being nice and obeying her husband and caring for the kids and so on. And also she is expected to go out and make a major real estate transaction on her own :-)
Not cheeky, per-se, but a bit more independent than I might have guessed.
She's a lot busier than that. Read the whole thing.
Proverbs 31:10--31
(10) A woman of valour who can find? For her price is far above rubies. (11) The heart of her husband safely trusts in her, And he has no lack of gain. (12) She does him good and not evil all the days of her life. (13) She seeks wool and flax, And works willingly with her hands. (14) She is like the merchantships; She brings her food from afar. (15) She rises also while it is yet night, And gives food to her household, And a portion to her maidens. (16) She considers a field, and buys it; With the fruit of her hands she plants a vineyard. (17) She girds her loins with strength, And makes strong her arms. (18) She perceives that her merchandise is good; Her lamp goes not out by night. (19) She lays her hands to the distaff, And her hands hold the spindle. (20) She stretches out her hand to the poor; Yea, she reaches forth her hands to the needy. (21) She is not afraid of the snow for her household; For all her household are clothed with scarlet. (22) She makes for herself coverlets; Her clothing is fine linen and purple. (23) Her husband is known in the gates, When he sits among the elders of the land. (24) She makes linen garments and sells them; And delivers girdles unto the merchant. (25) Strength and dignity are her clothing; And she laughs at the time to come. (26) She opens her mouth with wisdom; And the law of kindness is on her tongue. (27) She looks well to the ways of her household, And eats not the bread of idleness. (28) Her children rise up, and call her blessed; Her husband also, and he praises her: (29) ’Many daughters have done valiantly, But you rise above them all.’ (30) Grace is deceitful, and beauty is vain; But a woman that fears the LORD, she shall be praised. (31) Give her of the fruit of her hands; And let her works praise her in the gates.
As far as I know, the idea of the passive upper class woman is Victorian. Medieval upper class women ran what might be best thought of as a medium-sized manufacturing enterprise with many different products.
Yeah, the textile industry hugely changed domestic life in a way that's not really even apparent to most people. Most of us have grown a carrot or a tomato and thought, wow, it'd be a lot of work to feed my family this way, but we mostly all think of fabric as coming from a black box (or Joanne's). But linen production was a major part of subsistence farming in Europe for centuries.
In Europe, even queens worked with textiles! The second wife of Henry VIII got mad at him for still wearing the clothes his first wife made. Thousands of years earlier, Alexander the Great gave some purple thread to the Queen of Persia, and she was insulted by implication that she should work, so then he had to explain that it was a cultural misunderstanding; his own mother would have appreciated the gift.
It might also be a result of 1950s household appliances. Prior to that there was far too much to be done around a household (men's and women's work) for people to be idle. Bored housewives wasn't really a thing before that, and their work was vitally important to the family surviving and thriving.
Related, prior to widespread appliances it was actually more common for the middle class (let alone upper middle class) to employ servants. Think about It's a Wonderful Life, set in the period around WWII, where the main family is constantly considered fairly poor but still has a household servant and didn't consider that any kind of extravagance.
Even in households where the man was clearly the head, women were far from "passive" throughout most of history.
I once had a conversation with my coworkers (software engineers at a Big Tech company) where I said that people with our kind of money would've had servants back in the day and none of them could believe it. There was a lot of trying to figure out how well-paid professionals would not have servants, because the idea of having servants was unthinkable.
Meanwhile I had read enough 19th century literature to notice that even down-on-their-luck professionals would have a housekeeper.
> Think about It's a Wonderful Life, set in the period around WWII, where the main family is constantly considered fairly poor but still has a household servant and didn't consider that any kind of extravagance.
Or the famous quote from Agatha Christie, that she couldn't imagine being too poor to afford a servant, or being wealthy enough to afford a car.
I agree, but sort of think that it's why it's important. The Bible is imo a big source of ideas about stereotypical feminine virtues, but it paints a more complicated picture than just "listen to your husband and pop out babies."
I guess I'm less interested in reading men lecturing women about how we should be and more interested in the internal experience of being one of these non-assertive "nurturing" women.
Laurel Thatcher Ulrich is known for the quote "Well-behaved women seldom make history", which to her was a critique of historians ignoring most women. You might be interested in her work attempting to correct that.
"Non-assertive" is a very broad label. Traditionally it was the man is the breadwinner, sure, but the woman runs the domestic side of things and has the last word there.
They're not "assertive" in the sense of challenging every decision, but they do operate on "this falls within my sphere so I decide on it". Households where the man insists on being in control of every little thing and making all decisions can veer towards the abusive.
Mind you, I can't speak for what American households of that sort are like.
Hiding one's purchases maybe used to be more of a thing. A friend of my grandmother's would buy a piece of furniture and stick it in the attic. Then after an interval, she would "bring it down from the attic" as if it had been there all along.
There's an old joke about a man who says he's in charge--"I decide what to do about Russia and China, and my wife decides where we live and how the money spent."
Secondly, why not just go to your local evangelical church, find a woman who does believe in that role, and talk to them about it? They aren't some extinct breed, you could just ask one to coffee and tell than that you're interested.
Huh. I doubt that such a woman would be willing to talk to me, but admittedly I haven't tried it. I have talked to religious people about their religion, but mostly I was trying to be polite so didn't ask many searching questions.
It might be more helpful to read books written by modern people about their ideas of biblical womanhood, which are perhaps more informed by the last few centuries of theology and western Christian culture rather than the text of the bible. I unfortunately don't have any specific recommendations; I left evangelical Christianity in early adulthood so the only books I know off the top of my head are e.g. Lies Young Women Believe, and Girl Defined, which aren't exactly nuanced philosophical ruminations on the virtues and subtleties of femininity and womanhood. But biblical womanhood, male headship, traditional marriage -- those might be good search terms to find books, if you haven't tried them yet.
I didn't mention this because I thought it might be too obvious, but just to be sure, the other thing would be the "trad wives" stuff. Googling that term (and scrolling) will get you articles by people who believe in the traditional marriage role. I don't know enough about the movement to recommend anything specific though and to note, it's controversial movement so will perhaps be not quite what you are looking for. Once again, I don't know the details, just that it's related. Perhaps another commented can give a more detailed perspective
Any number of memoirs would if still read quickly disabuse one of the notion that women "work harder now than ever" or indeed "work now where they didn't work before" but one I especially enjoyed because it was funny and because it illustrated just how late into the 20th century people were living a 19th century life, is "Little Heathens" by Mildred Armstrong Kalish.
_More Work for Mother_ is a history of housework which argues that the hard physical labor of housework of, say, the 1920's was eliminated by mechanization, but the amount of time required for a socially acceptable home has remained the same. Standards for cleanliness and childcare have gone up a lot.
I've never seen a claim that women work harder than men, just that they're spending more time on housework than men and have much less uninterrupted time.
I thought the strong claim WAS the uninterrupted time - an hour or recreation broken up into little slices doesn't have the same relaxation benefits, leading to a subjective experience of working harder overall.
I recall a book (novel) that is a little bit about that, sort of in the breach - albeit centering on, essentially, a woman of the nobility: "Pavilions of Women" by Pearl Buck. It is surely a forgotten book and I expect it is probably more faithful to the mind of the writer than to that of a Chinese woman, though who knows - still, the very fact that its themes would bewilder readers now, may suggest it is along the lines of renunciation of self, and then, of duty.
Thanks! I haven't read it, but from Google it seems like it is more the opposite story of a traditional woman moving towards independence and self-determination. I'm more interested in the sort of person who is content NOT determining herself.
In "Pavilions of Women", the traditional woman moving towards independence is contrasted with other women characters NOT doing that and defending their choice not to. It might fit what you are looking for!
May be hard to find. Even Middlemarch, which famously concludes by eulogizing "those who rest in unmarked, graves” or unvisited graves or something, but made the world “not so hard for you and me“ chronicles a very determined and discontented woman. This tends to be the personality of lady writers. It may be a blind spot.
I suspect that most people in the past were like this, regardless of gender. Everyone was a part of a larger system (family, tribe), everyone had a role to play.
It's a modern thing to have enough money to buy (or rent) your own place, and an impersonal legal system that mostly guarantees that people leave you alone.
If you are surrounded by other people, you either do what they tell you, or you spend your life in constant conflict. You only achieve relative peace by playing your role sufficiently well *and* being sufficiently high-status so that people don't bother you anyway for bullshit reasons. (Hell is other people. Modern civilization is the virtual and literal walls between you and them.)
An excellent YouTube channel that delves into the (sub)plots and themes of classic (Foundation, Hyperion) and contemporary (Three Body Problem, Blindsight) science fiction: https://www.youtube.com/@QuinnsIdeas
I've never seen an objection to seconding. There's probably a limit. Five agreements? Ten? I don't see people doing that. If you're feeling nervous, mention a favorite video or somesuch.
A lot of people from the US, at least as far as I can see (I don't live in the US) are talking about a terrible downturn in the IT sector, with lots of layoffs and bad experience job-searching. Is this really happening, to an extent that can't be chalked up to typical "frictional unemployment", and if yes, why? I heard ChatGPT thrown around, in the "AI has finally come for your jobs" sense, but I don't believe it - seems too soon.
As someone else said, cheap money is part of the story. If you're growing by high single or even double-digit percents each year and have a supply of money available in low single digit percents, your incentive is to grow like crazy for as long as that position holds.
Growing like that, you're very likely to make a lot of poor hiring decisions (too many, lower skill, unnecessary roles). If your growth-minus-cost stays positive, there's not much reason to slow down to be more careful. As money has gotten more expensive in the last few years, companies have been taking a look and realizing that they've got $millions or $billions on payroll that aren't really producing value. Facebook was looking at declining earnings when they started making cuts. Twitter was also cutting around the same time, which helped set the stage.
If interest rates remain high, or go higher, then we should expect to see the same. Also, executives or financers are looking at places like Facebook and Twitter and realizing that there may be a lot of money to be made by cutting. Let's assume Google has even 10% of its workforce not producing good value (my guess would be much higher, but it's hard to say). Google apparently had 190k employees at the end of 2022 and has an average salary (presumably not including benefits and other costs) of $140k. Factoring in a low estimate of what benefits costs, cutting 10% would likely save well over $3 billion dollars a year. When they're gaining more profit per year, each year, than that 10% costs, then there's not much incentive to weed it out. While you're growing you need more people anyway, not less. It might be a matter of better utilizing, rather than removing. From 2021 to 2022, Google's profit declined by $16 billion. When the cost of a senior VP is about $1 million, that person can justify their salary many times over by pointing out the ability to save a few billion with staff cuts, once the extreme growth slows down enough to open up other priorities.
My non-economist theory, which I haven’t seen anyone more qualified state but to me is intuitively true, is that its the rise in interest rates. VC’s are more willing to be patient waiting for a company to be profitable if there is cheap money to borrow around.
In my experience, ChatGPT helps with productivity, but you still need someone who knows what they’re doing. Though I guess some employers might be trying to get away with fewer code monkeys.
It’s not as bad as the 2001 crash, imho, though kids these days don’t remember that.
The more I've worked with AI tools the more I have come to a similar conclusion to you. They are a tool, a sophisticated one, but they are not yet a replacement for human intelligence. Most of them require a lot of hand holding and direction to produce a useful output, and that requires people to be employed to use them. Over time I think they will reshape the way we work, but I don't think they will lead to mass unemployment in their current form.
Strong agree. I liken current AI forms to Microsoft Office's transformation of middle management and data. As a productivity enhancer, it worked great. Lots of people previously hired as number crunchers or letter writers could be reassigned more effectively. Places that couldn't afford either now had access. All good things, pretty transformative. Not that much different than other productivity enhancers that have come along.
Maybe some future AI will do more, and some people will get a lot more out of this than others (like Excel gurus that go far above what most people can). For most people it will be either no difference or a minor difference, while a significant number will be modestly helped by better efficiency.
Do you see that as different from the current generation coming up who always had Google and can look things up at all times?
To me, domain knowledge is still necessary because Google doesn't always have the answers (or at least correct ones) and there's a lot of specific knowledge about how to do things that can't be looked up, like how such and such organization runs things.
That's with current LLMs for sure, and likely more advanced AI as well.
I see a difference because Google doesn't make things up. There are lies, but they're hand-crafted artisanal human lies, not mass-produced lies that are more numerous.
It's like the old joke about computers being able to make arithmetic errors much faster than human beings.
I wonder if it's just a natural correction with supply catching up to demand. Now that 'everyone knows' IT jobs are the really good jobs, whoever can train for such a job is doing so, and the supply of personnel is now getting to the point that employers can be picky about who they hire (instead of taking any warm body). This means not enough jobs for everyone with any kind of qualification and drop in wages. The really highly qualified, talented and experienced will do just fine, everyone else is meeting the reality of what it is like looking for work just like the non-STEM schlubs.
Didn't the same thing happen with law? Becoming a lawyer was supposed to be a good paying, fairly high status job, so the supply outstripped demand with the resultant lack of jobs for all the qualified and salaries, status, etc. going down?
I've thought that any line of work which is widely accepted as a good way to make an above average income will become overcrowded.
This is why recommending the trades might not be great advice. Plumbers make good money because there aren't very many plumbers compared to the demand.
That’s been the case for two decades now. And IT workers have had global competition for decades as well. Yet salaries remain high, although not spectacular outside google etc.
Yeah, and though IT workers have had global competition for decades, the pandemic made remote work the norm around the world. Once companies figured out that their teams could work from rural America, ot was only a matter of time for them to just hire folks in Mumbai instead.
No that’s what happened. Outsourcing has been around long before Covid and in fact companies are eager to bring people back to the office, not work from home - with resistance from workers.
If anything the highest point of outsourcing is over - Russia and China are not going to be sources of outsourcing labour anymore.
I realize this is a one-data-point anonymous anecdote, but I just got laid off along with ~5% of my company and everyone who was asked to leave was in the US or UK, after a big round of hiring in India and Costa Rica in early summer. I do think companies want certain people back in the office, but I think there are other roles that they just want done and don't care if they ever see you.
(And I already have another job lined up, so no worries for me).
Most of the new jobs are normal companies that are expanding their IT footprint and becoming more digital-centric. The people who can't find jobs are either too niche, non-competitive (skills are out of date or under developed), or are too used to getting 350k+ salaries and won't come back down to Earth.
Likely no one cries for the "350+ and won't come down to earth", but it is a genuinely unenviable position to find yourself in: typically, even if you don't absolutely need to stay at that level to pay your bills (as many SV people probably do), you are likely to be rejected as "overqualified, will jump ship the first chance he gets" when trying out for "down to earth" work.
I'm not in a sector (and I think a lot of commenters are), but I think it is more a correction from the pandemic era. i.e. the pandemic/WFH era was a tremendous boom time for Silicon valley, and a lot of IT companies assumed this was going to be a `new normal' and engaged in a huge amount of hiring. Then the pandemic/WFH era ended and things returned to something more like the 2019 norm, leaving those firms hugely overstaffed. Hence the apparent downturn. (i.e. not really a downturn relative to 2019, but a huge downturn relative to 2021).
I read the book in an online reading group some years back, and I thought it was just neurowoo. But I'm not a professional in this area. I also looked up reviews of it, and the closer the reviewer to neuroscience, the more damning the review. In an interview here (https://web.archive.org/web/20180711192147/http://frontierpsychiatrist.co.uk/interview-with-iain-mcgilchrist/), when asked "Is your right/left brain conflict best viewed as a metaphor or something more ‘real’?" he says that even if the neuroscience doesn't pan out, the thesis of his book can stand without it. That says all I need to know to pay the book no further attention.
He went deeper into his thesis in The Matter With Things. I mean, there sure were a lot of citations in there as to the different effects of left-hemisphere and right-hemisphere dysfunction, but most of it is philosophy. It definitely made a compelling case that philosophy of science is rather important, as the naïve reductionism many scientists adopt may in fact be an error.
A while back on SSC there was a post about understanding Friston on Free Energy, but it's been years and now I would like to make my own attempt. I've been looking through the sources Scott pulled from, and (might) have a start on the basic idea, but the math and how the math could relate to the actual neurons is escaping me and I want more perspectives. Does anyone have recommendations for books/papers/posts on the subject that would be good for someone who is also trying to teach themselves about variational Bayes? More recent than 2018 would be extra cool. (or if you just have an opinion about free energy or predictive processing feel free to share.)
Here's a textbook on Active Inference from 2022: https://tinyurl.com/4387awe2 . Friston is a co-author and it was written under his supervision but the writing is by someone else, so it's more clear than his typical paper.
The model seems like a rabbit hole to me. I’ve started seeing the “predictive processing” pattern in all kinds of human systems. Not saying this means anything about the math or the accuracy of this model, but rather than I think it has a ton of implications which people haven’t fully unpacked.
Fairly odd recommendation I know, but I recently happened to stumble across the Wikipedia article on Paraguay (specifically its history) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paraguay#History. Turns out it's actually very weird and lurid, definitely not what I expected. I recommend reading without spoilers, but if you need convincing then we've got:
A country ruled directly by the Jesuits
A utopian idealist totalitarian state with mandatory interracial marriage.
A war that kills half the total population, and even more of the adult male population.
A postwar Nazi hideout (I guess most people know this bit though).
I am somewhat late to this, but since I’ve noticed some Polish people here, what is your take on relatively recent (September 6) decision if Polish central bank to cut interest rates?
Main take from international sources, which are tradionally quite hostile to current Polish government, seems to be that this is politically motivated to help the government win the upcoming elections. That seems... odd?
Like, I get a generalized mechanism “central bank lowers interest rates to boost incomes and employment in the short term, which is popular, but it leads to long-term instability”, but in this case, since the elections are on October 15, there doesn’t seem to be enough time for the boost to materialize?
So, main effect visible to voters, unless Polish households owe huge amount of floating rate debt, seems to be very conspicouos fall in the value of Polish currency (2.7 % in last 30 days; admittedly, this isn’t so bad, but looking on the chart makes it obvious to everyone that it was caused by “something” which happened on September 6: https://www.xe.com/currencycharts/?from=PLN&to=EUR&view=1M).
It is as Faza says, the immediate political significance here is for mortgage payments. (The importance of which is downstream from an all-around housing crisis.)
But I guess it's also worth noting that inflation is, in fact, expected to continue going significantly down due to (largely planned, and therefore foreseeable) reduction of energy prices.
There's a lot of floating-rate mortages out there, and rising interest rates led to significant increases in monthly payments, on top of inflation everywhere else. Even new fixed-rate loans, combined with persistently high housing prices, are seen as too expensive for the typical household.
So, the effect on mortgage payments is likely to be the most visible to the typical voter.
The Biden question has an insanely low quality prediction. 35% chance he's still a Presidential candidate on Jan 31? He's not *that* old. That's four months away. 90+% chance, easy.
The selection bias here seems like it's going to do a lot of damage to accuracy until they get the bad predictors out by weighting on Brier scores.
It's been at 81-86% on manifold, so meaningfully lower than your >90%, fwiw. I'm team NO there at those prices, with probably a 70-75% estimate on it. I'm lower for a few reasons, e.g., because of the tremendous amount of signalling from the media and many within the party regarding Biden's suitability. OTOH the most obvious alternative candidates are not great options either...
I think he will still be running because he must have died or feel that he should step down, neither of which is super likely. He cannot even have lost a primary (which, against Marianne Williamson and RFK Jr is unlikely), because the first primary happens on Feb 4. All the the signaling he should step down is not paired with any meaningful possible person he could step down for.
I think the idea might be "cognitive decline is real, he steps down to give Kamala the nomination" or something of that nature, rather than "he'll drop dead before then".
It's a problem for both sides, if they say "your candidate is too old/too unhealthy", well, so is your guy.
I think that you're a little overconfident here. If the economy crashes it will be much harder for him to run, his age plus whatever chances you assign to the Hunter Biden corruption stuff, plus just something random and bad happening seem like over 10% to me. Probably not 65% though
Right. There's no point to crowdsourced predictions _unless_ they're a betting market, because otherwise stuff like this happens (through wishful thinking or whatever) and there's no mechanism for correcting it.
I recently got pissed off by yet another online "expert" telling me I needed to excersise an hour daily, with another expert telling me I needed to meditate for 30 minutes daily, have a morning ritual etc etc.
I get the impression most of these online experts are 22 year old kids with no family or demanding jobs. Wrote a post about it:
The Attack of the Online "Productivity" "Experts":
"I recently got pissed off by yet another online "expert" telling me I needed to excersise an hour daily, with another expert telling me I needed to meditate for 30 minutes daily, have a morning ritual etc etc."
You can keep going. The exercise experts will disagree massively among themselves about what to do, how to do it and how often to do it. I expect the same for the meditation folks.
So don't worry about it too much.
MUCH of the benefit of all of these is obtained by "enough" that is "good enough."
Going to the gym three times a week and doing something moderately intense is much better than doing nothing (going for a 30 minute walk daily is also better than doing nothing). More might be better, but the big win is getting in some basic exercise regularly. 3 times a week vs 6? Not nearly as important as 3 times vs zero.
"Best" exercise mix versus okay/fine/good enough is not nearly as important as exercise or not.
So let the experts go off an make recommendations that will not be followed by almost anyone.
Reformation is just a cousin of the demigod Change. Only True Believers promote Change. Everything must Change, because we've become so spiritually advanced we just can't contain ourselves. Green hair and face piercings are markers of piety, and if one throws in sexual disorientation, a full house.
It's hard to be humble when you're perfect. Two beers a month should do it.
The major problem is that all these 'experts' are working in isolation. It's like teachers giving homework; everyone tells you to do X amount, but they are not co-ordinating, so if you really did it all it would take several hours a night.
Each expert is going on their field, so the exercise guy will tell you do so many hours a week/day, the spirituality/wellness guy will talk about mediation and journaling and the rest of it, and so on. In reality you couldn't do all this unless you were independently wealthy, could hire a cook to do the two hours from scratch home-cooked meals and have people to deep clean the bathroom and do the weeding and mind the kids while you did the mediation, journaling, exercise, and the rest of it.
Besides, it's all content generation. They need to come up with new articles every so often, so then it's "Why you should stand on your head for fifteen minutes every four hours" stuff.
In what context is this engagement happening - arguing with someone on social media, paying for a consulting service, a lifestyle article you chose to read with citations, youtube personality, or websites that shill products?
I don't think most of these cases can be mistaken for one where you're dealing with experts.
Possibly of interest-- a man describes getting a lot of good out of the Five Tibetans (a cross between yoga and calisthenics) while just putting in a few minutes on a lot of days.
"I am 51 years old but my body (and mind!) is less than 30 years old."
My friend, have you got any mirrors in your house? Because you do not look 30, I regret to inform you.
Besides, I'm about as inactive as a tree sloth and I recently got complimented on looking much younger (about 15 years or so) than my actual age. Fat is the answer here: facial fat means no wrinkles 😁 Also the person was a lot younger, and young people think all old people are the same age.
There is more in it than just the five exercises (actually six, but most modern presentations leave out the sixth).
Something I discovered by chance some years ago when trying to google for the origins of T5T is the existence of one Victor A. Croley, who in the early 1940's was smacked down more than once by the American Medical Association for selling medical advice by mail without a licence. I gather (without having seen it) that Croley was selling a description of the Tibetan Rites, presented as direct advice, instead of being cloaked in fiction. Croley and his business partner, Charles B. Roth, put it out as a booklet written as by one Emile Raux. They distributed it by mail, through small ads. I could discover nothing of Emile Raux at the time, but I see a book purporting to be based on his book is now available on Amazon. The Emile Raux pseudonym might be based on Pierre-Paul Emile Roux, a doctor of lung diseases that a Victor A. Croley (the same one?) wrote an obituary of in the "Journal of Outdoor Life" in 1935. In another article, Croley writes about Roux's work on tuberculosis, which Croley had suffered from as a child.
Kelder's book had a copyright date of 1939 (supposedly — are there any original copies in existence?). If true, why did Croley take the risk of presenting it as direct advice? I have to wonder if Croley himself wrote the book after having been prevented from distributing the Emile Raux version, backdating its copyright date to avoid the connection with himself.
But if so, where did Croley get the exercises? Whatever their origin, they have existed since the 1940's at least.
Here's a completely speculative story. Someone — Croley or someone else — travels in India or Tibet in the early part of the 20th century, encounters exercises like these, practises them, and finds them valuable. He returns to the West and wants to teach them. He begins by putting out the Emile Raux version, but falls foul of the AMA. So he rewrites it as fiction. Or perhaps "Peter Kelder" does publish the original story in 1939 and Croley tries to rip this off. "Kelder" is fictionalising his own synthesis of what he has learned , in order to dress it up in the clothes that readers of the time would expect, ancient knowledge from secret masters in hidden monasteries.
But that's assuming that the Kelder book and the Raux book actually existed. The legal record shows that something by Raux existed, but was it these exercises? I wonder if the Library of Congress has actual, physical copies? It does have catalogue entries for three copies of "Ancient secret of the fountain of youth", but these are (or purport to be) revised editions of "The Eye" with publication dates no earlier than 1985.
DO NOT buy the Raux book on Amazon. I bought the Kindle version out of curiosity, and immediately left a 1-star review (on amazon.co.uk, but it hasn't appeared there yet).
Carolinda Witt's _T5T_ has an excellent selection of adaptations for different body types. It's the most thorough book of directions for exercise I've seen.
Oh, look, the LoC has two copies of the Raux book "Hindu secrets of virility and rejuvenation": https://lccn.loc.gov/39011384. Does anyone live nearby who could pop in and take a look?
I don't think it's necessary done deliberately, but it succeeds partly because 'impossible' advice is unfalsifiable: you can't do it, so you can't complain it doesn't work. All you can do is feel bad that you didn't live up to their standards (since they seem to do it in their videos!). Same as other unattainable lifestyle goals marketed.
Achievable productivity advice usually comes off sounding boring, obvious common sense, or is immediately falsifiable from experience. So what thrives is the unattainable stuff.
Thats a very great and deep point-- give impossible advice, and when no one succeeds you can just blame them.
In a way, that's what "Get-rich-online" type Gurus do as well, right? Have a complicated formula, and if you fail to get rich its because "Gee, you didn't follow the formula right"
I was at a gathering of insurance agency owners and the speaker was a best-selling author on building a business with streamlined and repeatable processes. Basically about being able to remove yourself from the business and let it run itself. (Sorry can't remember his name at the moment.) During Q&A one of the owners asked a geniunely thoughtful question regarding the challenges faced and how they've tried to do this but it just doesn't seem to work giving examples. The speaker's answer was something like: "You're not doing it right. You need to enroll in special 3-day followup course we're running for your group this upcoming week."
With the exception of things that are? China and India's economic reforms for instance, brought massive improvement to the lives of literally billions of people. Would you say those don't qualify?
great article, thanks! To your examples, I would add: Movie critics watch dozens of movies every week, and so they like those weird indie arty-farty (read: boring) movies, and have nothing but contempt for "commercial" cinema.
I watch maybe 1-2 movies a month (in cinema), and love the brainless "superhero beats up villain" Marvel types, which critics tell me are causing the decline of civilisation :)
Is that really a good example? There seem to be far less of those coming out now, and people talk about being burned out on them post-Endgame. (This was my own impression after watching a few - the Campbellian trick works once or twice, if the ground is fallow, but then the fourth time you're watching some grand dramatic arc with droning Hans Zimmer soundtrack and weightless special effects everywhere, you quickly get bored no matter how big the CGI explosions are.)
Actually, people do still talk about how every movie is a superhero movie (demonstrably false) and how creativity is dying (which sounds a lot like ‘damn kids get off my lawn’ 😀). Including a few times here in the comments.
I mentioned this because every few days I hear someone complain about how Disney/Marvel are destroying art/cinema, and I’m like ‘But I love them!😎)
I'm likewise deeply annoyed by various "experts" offering laughably time-consuming and/or occasionally wildly unrealistic advice, particularly when it comes to domestic tasks.
In addition to the hour of exercise and 30 minutes of meditation and 15-30 minutes of journaling and two hours of organic, from-scratching cooking every day plus clean-up, you should also be examining/dusting every houseplant every day, looking over all your finances daily, flossing AND waterpicking, and your "weekly" tasks should include deep-cleaning your washing machine, refrigerator, dishwasher, shower(s)/sink(s)/toilet(s), car(s), trash cans, coffee maker and/or kettle, vacuuming your upholstery, curtains, and mattress(es), and and and and AND AND AND.
Then there's the laughably insurmountable random advice:
Counterfeit honey is a thing - so develop a relationship with a local beekeeper and source your honey from their apiary!
Have jewelry? Take it all to a jeweler once a year for prong and clasp checks!
Vague medical symptom? Just get your doctor to deeply investigate it!
And so on.
About *everything.*
I *suppose* all of this might be possible in a family where one of the adults is a permanent, stay-at-home "homemaker," but also no way.
Wanted to write the same comment. Yes, exercise is an important thing (by the way, you should do strength exercise *and* cardio *and* stretching; are you sure 1 hour is enough for all of that?), but so is meditation, and taking care of your finances (both classical and crypto), and cooking healthy meals, and socializing, and gratitude journaling, and writing your to-do lists, and practicing space repetition, and learning new things, and listening to motivational speeches, and cleaning up your room... and you should also get 8 hours of sleep, and keep a full-time job. Even without kids, impossible. With kids, doubly so.
Hypothetically, with flawless division of labor and no kids, only one partner having the full-time job, the other staying at home and doing the healthy meals and clean rooms and finances... yeah, maybe. If they are both like robots all day long. Definitely no time for hobbies or internet. (So maybe it's your comment that is unfalsifiable -- no person who follows the advice precisely has enough free time to come to ACX and contradict you!)
ha! Yes, I forgot all the other "advice" of what we are supposed to do. The big one from your list is financial planning, where you log every expense and then track your spending/saving. One of those things that sounds great in theory.
>Vague medical symptom? Just get your doctor to deeply investigate it!
This really pisses me off. Dont know how it is in other countries, but here in the UK its impossible to get a doctors appointment unless its an emergency (and sometimes, not even then). And so when an app tells me to "Check with my doctor" I just delete it.
>> I *suppose* all of this might be possible in a family where one of the adults is a permanent, stay-at-home "homemaker," but also no way.
My wife is a stay-at-home mom, and no, she doesn't have time for any of it!
Whenever I've read comments mentioning that it's basically impossible to get a doctor's appointment, it's almost always referring to the UK. The UK seems to have a rather subpar healthcare system. There isn't often much pushback against it, probably because the vast majority of commenters are from English-speaking countries like the UK and the US. (And the US isn't much better on that front it seems - and clearly much worse when it comes to other aspects of healthcare.)
My country is supposedly plagued by a shabby healthcare system and a severe lack of doctors and nurses, but when I compare how long it takes me to get an appointment for just about anything to other countries, it appears to be quite impressive. (For any non-emergency, it typically takes 1 to 4 weeks, on average it would be 10 days.) So, in my case, checking with my doctor would be a helpful piece of advice because I absolutely forget to do that all the time.
My favorite part of literally *every* diet/exercise article/video segment is "talk to your doctor before starting." I know they have to say that to avoid liability issues, but LOLOLOLOLOL. If people actually took that advice no doctor would be able to see anyone for anything else.
I'm in the U.S. on a not-great but not-terrible HMO (one company is both healthcare provider and insurer; so you can only see providers within the company. Insurance won't cover specialists etc outside of the company, and the company doesn't necessarily attract the top physicians or deeply granular specialties. Access is thus pretty limited! Probably the closest experience to what you have in the UK). This past year I've had many, many appointments with both my primary doc and specialists which were booked 8-10+ weeks get canceled a day or two before the appointment, and when I call to reschedule the next opening is 8-10 weeks away. It's become such a regular thing that I've started preemptively booking two week "follow-up" appointments with my regular ones, so that when the regular one gets canceled, at least I only have to wait two weeks.
But anyway. In an HMO, specialists are gatekept by one's primary care doctor, so advice like, "have your dermatologist do an annual skin check" is laughable.
In fairness, the one piece of advice that I think actually is practical more often than not is "check with a lawyer." It's not cheap, of course, but if you've gotten into a situation where the advice is "check with a lawyer," it might indeed be *incredibly* helpful to spend the money to check with a lawyer, even if it only buys you peace of mind about your contract/property line/speeding ticket/etc.
Isn't it amazing that you can get an appointment with a lawyer at the drop of a hat and not with a physician? Maybe it's because you go to a lawyer with a check/cash/card and to a doctor with a secondary payer than may or may not pay at all. And people's solution is always to make it less free market.
Google tells me there are about 1.3 million lawyers in the United States of America, 75% of which are in private practice/general law. Google tells me there are just over 1 million licenses doctors in the United States and only 113,000 of them are general practitioners, the rest break down into various specialties. I speculate that a lot of people in this country will go through life without needing a lawyer more than five or 10 times. I don’t want to guess at how many people in the course of their life will need to see doctors and how many times, but I’ve got to believe it’s a lot more than five or 10. Based on these numbers, I don’t think your question is hard to answer. .
That's part of it. Another part of the problem is that in the 90s, health care policy analysts decided that we were training too many doctors and that this was going to drive up health care costs somehow (*). The solution was to cap the number of Medicare residency slots at an unreasonably low level., which Congress implemented in the mid 90s and has been policy ever since.
(*) The uncharitable take is that they thought supply and demand worked backwards from the way it normally does. The charitable take is that the concern was a combination of "wasting resources training too many providers" and "surplus doctors will make work for themselves by recommending unnecessary procedures".
This is very, very true. I recently strong-armed my mother into joining a concierge medical practice and boy-howdy is her experience different from mine.
Basically everyone who succeeds in life sleeps 6 hours or less each night, either naturally or by using coke. So the recipe for succeeding is "be born with a body that naturally doesn't sleep".
The lack of sleep to be successful and healthy idea contradicts findings about how much sleep most people need. Those guys on LinkedIn getting 5 hours sleep and hitting the gym are losing on the roundabouts what they gain on the swings.
I quite objectively succeeded in life (happy marriage, professor position at good university, happy with my social life), but I need 9 hours sleep per night. If I only get 8 or less, I will have at least mild headache throughout the day.
It's a disadvantage, but not impossible to overcome.
If by "succeed" do you mean "runs a billion dollar company or a major country". Pretty sure your average happily married doctor or engineer sleeps a full night.
I'm not average but as a happily married engineer in my 6 years in engineering I have rarely gotten a full night sleep and wow I wish I could do it more
I don't disagree with your thesis, but regular excercise is objectively good for humans and we should probably do more to organize society and culture around increasing it a bit.
Also, you've already stated it: they're still effectively kids, figuring out their place in the world and trying dumb things. Maybe they need constructive encouragement with an encounter from different perspectives which challenge their views.
I'm over 70 years old and have always made time for exercise, even during the most career-intensive and child-raising years of my life. Now retired, I can look back and evaluate that practice.
It seems to me that if I'd taken less exercise and devoted that extra time to a career-focused routine, I could have made. more money. On the other hand, I did well-enough in my career to enjoy a comfortable retirement, and for all I know, being attractively fit contributed whatever success I had working in television, journalism, and finally in healthcare administration.
Similarly, my wife has also been a lifelong regular exerciser, and probably could have earned more if she didn't deliberately choose a career that would allow her an hour a day, four days a week to exercise. Neither of us is particularly athletic in build, and we are not into competitive sports.
We currently have no chronic health issues, take no medications except for my wife's osteoporosis pill, and remain fit and active. I look forward to each day, and feel pretty good about everything. I feel like a goddam 26-year-old.
If I could, would I go back in time and exchange the inconvenience and effort of regular exercise for more money? Not on your life. Money is great, but it's utility begins to break down when your health breaks down.
My advice to young people is to make fitness a part of your identity. Internalize the statement, "I am the sort of person who exercises frequently" or the statement "I am not the sort of person who lets himself get out of shape". Commit yourself to regular cardio. Don't drink (you can really see the difference between those who do and don't by their late sixties. I quit about age 50.). I've been a vegetarian for 40 years, and never regretted it., although I can't say for sure what role that has played in my health.
tl;dr: I'm in my seventies, and looking back, I can say with firm conviction that the time and effort I invested in regular exercise has been well worth it.
im 39, 100% agree. regular exercise, good nutrition and proper sleep are the most important things you can do for yourself. feeling good has infinitely more value than money.
Im saying for most adults, at least those of us with kids, taking out 45-60 minutes for excercise isnt always possible. In which case, doing anything, even 10 minutes of walking, is better than doing nothing.
> Im saying for most adults, at least those of us with kids, taking out 45-60 minutes for excercise isnt always possible.
That is not what you had said. Notwithstanding, it's generally possible for parents to set aside a block of time to exercise a few times a week, if not every day. Evening leisure time is there, it's just spent on other things. I'm a parent of an infant/toddler, and I'm fairly tired in the evening. I won't exercise *a lot* but there's no legitimate "expert" opinion out there, should you seek it, that will pull a hard number like 60 min per day and suggest it is a necessity.
60 minute a day is not a prescription I see cited in the wild or lifestyle websites. Usually it's 4-5 hours a week of moderate intensity, and that's for highly "optimal" cardiovascular health. Doing 20-30 minutes, on top of walking, is certainly not a wasted effort. I think
Yeah, I think when you have young kids, life gets insane in a way that few people who don’t have young kids can grasp. The perpetuation of the species depends on people being willing and able to either sacrifice their health and sanity for a while, or make sacrifices in their kids health and sanity, or some combination of those two.
Are you having fun? What could be done to make this game of life more fun and interesting? I'm not having much fun, but I think it's largely because of skill issues. How do you "get good"?
Life is inherently fun and trippy, but you have to look at it from a different angle. You might want to start taking spirituality seriously, as the rewards of "getting it" are seriously major.
Yeah, Epicurus basically figured it out. Then Alain de Botton packaged it in YouTube form with footage of discarded taxis, Mediterranean peasants, and a convincing British accent. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=irornIAQzQY&t=420s
A combination of strategy and self-knowledge. Notice the small things that make a big difference, then optimize. For example, a boring thing can be less boring when you do it with a friend. You can literally improve your mood by pressing a button, if that button turns on a CD player with your favorite songs. Small improvements, done repeatedly, can make a big change on the scale of months. It always helps to have smart friends who care about you.
My experience is that the more I think about and refine the concept “what truly matters to me”, and love accordingly, the happier I am and thus, in part, the more fun I have. Right now I have young kids which means what I really want more of is sleep and time where nobody expects anything from me.
Find some area where the common opinion is that it is boring, and become an expert in it.
Why? 1) when you become an expert in something, it seizes to be boring. 2) Because the common perception is that it is boring, fewer others go into it, hence the competition is less intense & it is easier to maintain a sane work-life balance.
In all the discussions about AI Doom, there is a lot of variability about what "doom" means. (Thus the confusion between AI not-kill-everyonism vs AI not-racist).
I've never found a classifications of the levels of success/failure we're trying to work with.
So here's, humbly, my classification of terrible AI scenarios from worst to best:
1) An AI that is not quite fully general accidentally kills all life on earth, then shuts off because it doesn't know how to keep itself working. Life doesn't come back. It so happens that earth was the only life in the universe. The end.
2) Same but aliens come some time later and discover the great works of humans and celebrate our dead civilisation.
3) After the first human civilisation disappears, a new intelligent species rises and builds it own civilisation.
4) An AI accidentally kills all life on earth, and then keeps running until the sun dies.
5) An AI voluntarilly kills all life on earth and fullfills its internal goal (whatever it was)
6) An AI decides to pave the universe with computronium / paperclips / whatever, but is not smart enough to get out of the solar system.
7) An AI decides to pave the universe with computronium / paperclips / whatever, and succeeds.
8) An AI decides to pave the universe with computronium / paperclips / whatever. In the process of doing so, it discovers a lot of knowledge about physics, mathematics, engineering, even philosophy.
9) An AI decides to pave the universe with "meaningful" computronium. I.e. computronium that we would recognise as having qualias.
10) An AI decides to pave the universe with "meaningful" computronium. That computronium makes works of art, has feelings.
11) Same but there's a memetic relationship between the new art and the works of humans.
12) The AI-God decides to keep the human race in a zoo while it conquers the universe
13) The AI-God decides to keep all the humans that were alive at the time of its birth in a zoo where they can live forever.
14) The human zoo is so well endowed that humans can create great works of art, and achieve the apogee of what the human race can do.
15) Humans manage to fuse together with the AI, or upload their consciousness, so that they have the intellectual power to meaningfully contribute to the future of the AI civilisation.
16) It turns out that the rules of the universe make it impossible for an AI to work without humans overseeing it. The resulting civilisation looks like Star Wars / Foundation / Dune.
17) The god of the bible exists and has/will ensure that none of the doom scenarios occur.
I had most trouble on the last part of this classification : what would constitute for you a perfect success vis-à-vis AI ?
> I had most trouble on the last part of this classification : what would constitute for you a perfect success vis-à-vis AI ?
I think it's fun to imagine science-fictional scenarios; certainly, something like the Culture (arguably #14 on your list) would be interesting to explore. But then, so would the world of Harry Potter, or even Battletech (minus all the Succession Wars). But what is our goal here -- to imagine the most interesting scenario, or a scenario that is actually likely to come to pass in our Boring But Practical (tm) physical reality ?
If it's the latter, then IMO the best we can hope for with AI is that humanity somehow gets its act together, and uses AI tools for good rather than, you know, what usually happens. So, we get automatic real-time machine translation, art generation, complex system modeling, etc.; but no automated spam, endless piles of repetitive content, automated incarceration, total surveillance, etc. In reality, of course, I think the opposite will happen -- but hey, a man can dream...
What do people here think are the odds that LLMs/AGI(???) overshadow the (usa) presidential race next year? I think that it is a long shot, but might barely happen if there is a lot of progress in solving hallucinations over the next 13 months.
( A Trump/Biden/GPT5 debate would be fun to watch. )
Overshadow them how ? I have a feeling that ChatGPT would already make a better President than either one of our actual candidates; but then, so would Eliza...
That Eliza would be a better President than either of the plausible candidates? Could be...
I will always remember Trump as the President who recommended investigating whether Covid could be treated by injecting disinfectant. As far as I know, that was a unique statement for a United States President to make. I'm reasonably sure Eliza wouldn't have done that...
I'm 80/20 on there being at least one question of the presidential debate on AI ; but that's conditional on 40/60 that Biden even accepts to debate the previous president.
If there were primaries that would be a perfect opportunity for a one-issue candidate to raise hell about this, but it doesn't look like any of the parties is interrested in plurality.
But no, AI being the major topic of 2024 : 8/92.
Has the actually-left Left (i.e AOC/Bernie) taken a position on AI stealing our jobs ?
One possible signature: If searches for AGI or GPT became more common than for Biden or Trump in Goggle Trends.
Another possible signature (harder to quantify) would be if the number of AI-related top stories exceeded the number about the presidential race or the candidates. Presumably something similar could happen on social media, but this gets even fuzzier...
In terms of plausible stories: Novel applications being reported and human layoffs being reported.
If that contest were held today (_including_ chatGPT's hallucinations) ... well, there isn't anything in the legend of John Henry about both sides accidentally _dropping_ their hammers, while with Trump vs. chatGPT this is probably par for the course... :-)
I do not think our species has adapted well to the kinds of tech that substitute electronically-delivered input from and about other members of our species for in-person interaction. Television increased loneliness and alienation, social media on the internet worsened them and greatly increased anger between people and low mood as a result of being chronically angry and often attacked. So I'm inclined to think that even AI that never tries to take over, make everything into paperclips, etc. will nevertheless result in a great worsening of our quality of life. I think there will be much more depression and addiction, more deaths of despair, more weird and destructive social trends like wacko cults, more online crime, more and realer forms of porn, more and realer forms of snuff films.
So I see 2 paths to decent outcomes:
(1) Stop developing AI now, except for AI in the form of specialized tools for specific tasks.
(2) Find or develop a group of people who can function as intermediaries linking AGI or ASI to the rest of our species. These people would need to be resilient to the stresses and weird demands the come with lots of interaction with an electronic semi-fake of a semi-person, but also empathic and social enough to do well in their communications with other human beings. Perhaps such people already exist, and we need to figure out how to identify them. Or maybe they would need to have special training when they are young. Or maybe it would take genetic engineering to produce one.
What if we view 9) as what we should be shooting for ourselves, i.e. if the ultimate moral goal per utilitarianism is to bring about the greatest pleasure for the greatest number possible, then either us or AI should be turning the universe into as many minds as possible experiencing maximum pleasure? In that case it would be a success condition for civilization/technological progress, not a doom scenario.
That's a lot more detailed than my classificstion:
Doom means we are all, or very nearly all, dead.
Catastrophe means a lot of us are dead.
Dystopia means we are alive, but unhappy and/or lose control of the planet.
Types of Doom
Foom Doom. The first recursively self-improving AI becomes a sovereign, defeating rival AI's and killing or dominating humans.
Multipolar Doom: Powerful AIs kill humans as a result of fighting each other, and/or preventing humans from building further AIs.
Types of Dystopia
Foom Dystopia. The first recursively self-improving AI becomes a sovereign, defeating rival AI's and enslaving humans.
Hot war Dystopia: Humans retain control of powerful multipolar AIs, use them to wage war.
Cold war Dystopia: Humans retain control of powerful multipolar AIs, don't use them to wage war, but sink huge resources into developing them just in case.
Utopia Dystopia: AIs take control and follow human instructions to improve human wellbeing in unintended ways, eg. putting everyone on a dopamine drip. AIs do what we say but not what mean.
Human Zoo Dystopia AKA benevolent dictatorship. AIs take control, do not kill or harm humans, but humans no longer have control over themselves or AI.
Economic Dystopia: Humans retain control of many AIs, capitalism retains control of humans, AIs do most of the work, mass unemployment ensues, nobody implements UBI.
"Economic Dystopia: Humans retain control of many AIs, capitalism retains control of humans, AIs do most of the work, mass unemployment ensues, nobody implements UBI."
Yup. Note that this _only_ requires AGI, not ASI. I think of it as AI becoming essentially a competing species, but cheaper to maintain than humans - perhaps with a small variation where humans gradually lose control of many AIs, but capitalism (or any analogous competitive structure) retains control of the AIs.
And this is distinct from all of Florent's scenarios, all but the last of which require ASI.
The e/acc guys make a big deal of the idea that if we're getting replaced, but there is some way that we can call the new AI "our children", that's not a doom scenario.
I tend to agree with them on that judgement, and this is why I included the distinction between 10) and 11). I just don't believe it's at all likely given current course.
> The e/acc guys make a big deal of the idea that if we're getting replaced, but there is some way that we can call the new AI "our children", that's not a doom scenario.
Would you be happy if you knew that a serial killer is going to kill you tomorrow, but in your honor he will continue posting ACX comments in your style using your account? Why is there a difference if the killer happens to be a robot?
In your scenario, I have no causal relationship with my killer. The comparison is more like : I have biological children, I take a risk that might cause my death but will ensure their survival, and I die proud of what I brought into the world.
So in other words, the mindset of every woman before pre-modern times, and most men who went to war to defend their families. I can see the appeal, but I'm not a pre-modern woman whose life goal is to have as many children as possible, the risk to myself be damned. Even if I was, I had no role in creating the robots, so in no way are they *my* children. A better comparison is if another tribe is so fertile that they built a huge army and slaughtered my entire tribe. Their women might be proud of their sons, but why would I be happy with the result?
I was assuming that either we were alone, or that all civilisations trying to make AGI end up with the same scenario. So it's a comparison between : each civilation paves it's own solar system with computronium and goes no further or at least one civilation 'conquers' the galaxy.
The ideal scenario would result in something unexpected and interesting without being too harmful. It would result in a reality that is more fun than what we currently have.
My wife and I have big problems with reoccurring miscarriage in the early stages. We are pretty desperate. We checked a lot of stuff and identified some possible, but not sure, problems and somehow managed them. However we are again in an unsuccessful pregnancy. Still in the early stages, but before any miscarriage the doctors diagnosed a non-progressing pregnancy, and advise us to remove it as it might cause infection.
We are thinking about IVF as some sort of solution. Does anybody have any similar experience or some kind of expert advice in this situation?
I have a relative who was in the same situation. She is a medical professional herself, from a family of medical professionals. They never figured out what was wrong - she had to hire a surrogate to carry her baby to term.
I am also guessing IVF would not solve your problem, because it doesn't change much about your situation - if there's something that prevents the pregnancies from working out, it would probably still be there. But IVF might speed up the process of either getting a pregnancy that sticks or finding out that none of them will, though, since you can produce and implant many embryos at once.
Now, here is something that's important to know about IVF, if you do decide to go that way. Anecdotally, and according to some studies, frozen embryos may work much better than fresh embryos in older women (over 35 years or so). (Looking at the literature, they also work better for women with certain medical issues.) Presumably, the woman's body is better prepared for pregnancy by the frozen cycle. Also, you might be able to get your frozen embryos screened for abnormalities. If you decide to go the IVF way, it may be a better bet to do a frozen cycle. IVF is no picnic, though, and there is no guarantee of anything.
It's possible your wife has the M2 haplotype, which increases your risk of early pregnancy loss by about 4x. About 15% of women have it.
I know Genomic Prediction offers a test for this, and I don't believe it's particularly expensive (I recall it being a few hundred dollars but I might be misremembering). https://www.lifeview.com/tests_m2.html
If she has it, you can bring your odds of miscarriage back down to approximately normal levels with L2 heparin injections during pregnancy.
How many are we talking about? And how early? I lost three and then had two healthy live births. No issue found or corrected- just a run of bad luck. If you are trying, you are probably taking pregnancy tests early. Most reported miscarriage rates are based on known pregnancies and a lot of people are farther in before finding out so many miscarriage happen and the woman doesn’t even know she was pregnant. Estimates for loss are as high as 50% on conceptions. My point is, given that, the odds of a run of losses aren’t all that low.
But, worth talking to a specialist. Fetal maternal medicine is what you want. You might consider genetic testing. There are various things that can make certain combinations the two of you might have incompatible. Ivf may be able to help screen those out.
I'm not a medical professional, but know a number of people who have had IVF. Based on what I know, IVF does not seem like it addresses the problem. IVF helps with becoming pregnant, not with sustaining the pregnancy. Seems like you need to find out why the early miscarriages are happening. Are the embryos abnormal? If so, why? If the embryos are normal, what is causing your wife to miscarry? You need to see a specialist.
Sorry to hear this, and not a solution but just well wishes from a stranger on the internet who wishes you weren’t suffering from this. I’m so sorry you are dealing with this.
Had she been checked for a certain kind of blood clotting disorder? A friend of mine had to be on blood thinners before she's could get a successful pregnancy going because of this issue.
Have you seen an OB subspecialist in “maternal-fetal medicine” yet? Not intuitive from their name, but their area of expertise relates to high risk pregnancy - including, explicitly, working up repeat miscarriages.
For sure your wife’s OB has tested her for this, but just in case: Antiphospholipid Syndrome is a common cause of repetetition miscarriages and can be diagnosed through blood testing. But its something an OB surely has in mind when managing a patient with several miscarriges. Anyway, if you have been trying unsuccessfully to get pregnant for more than 6 months you shoud be referred to a gynecology reproduction unit or check with a reproduction specialist.
We had some test for this, she was somewhat negative, but then after more digging we discovered that she has MTHFR heterozygous mutation. This time when we discovered the pregnancy we managed to get prescription for Lovenox shots (and it was a struggle to get it, OB here in France are not very many and very helpful, but we pushed and we got it).
This is the first time we have a problem that seems at least superficially different than the just outright miscarriage. So it was very stressful when they told us it is not progressing and that we need to get it out (5-6 weeks, no cardiac activity).
However since the doctors are very few and we have to go to the emergency room at midnight when they are tired and sleepy to get a examination, we are skeptical if they are thinking about our case sufficiently.
Would it possibly make sense to go to another country where medical care is better? I have known of cases where people had good outcomes from "medical tourism" to various asian countries. Treatments there are not covered by insurance, of course, but are much less expensive than in the US -- don't know how they compare to France.
That's a really tough situation to be in Ludi. I really hope you are successful. I'm sorry I don't have something more practical but I wanted to add that I think you should twin track this with some investment in your mental health. Not being able to have children is a hard form of grief, society hasn't adequately adapted to supporting an absence without a definitive event and nor even have you. It's a hard thing to process. I hope you don't have to but I guess I'm saying, maybe it's worth trying to limit the downside a little even as you fight for what you deserve.
Not at all intrusive. Regular thyroid function tests were normal but we had a motivated and thorough endocrinologist (not easy to come by in the UK NHS sometimes) who suggested an autoantibody screen. I'm sorry, but I can't recall what prompted this test in particular. It was a relatively simple blood test which unearthed a subclinical autoimmune thyroiditis, managed conservatively during the pregnancy. My wife took aspirin 75mg as a result of this finding (haven't looked into the physiology etc) but then had no further miscarriages to date and we now have two healthy boys.
I am medically trained but way over my skis with the nuances of endocrinology.
I understand that there are many screening services around the globe that can help identify common fertility problems, but this may actually be a part of the usual IVF workup which I don't really have any experience with.
I wish you and your wife all the best - if you have any other questions I'm more than happy to try and answer them.
I've read about the usual cheap thyroid tests just checking for the amount of hormone in the blood, but there there are problems, you also need to check for whether the hormone is being absorbed.
https://lookinthemirror8.wordpress.com/2023/10/01/9-11-was-possibly-done-by-david-bowie/
Dark humour, not for everyone but I think it's pretty funny/ interesting.
OC ACXLW Nuclear Proliferation history/Does sex belong in science 9/30/23
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1H8BpUe5zWMBVFf1DFJ65AnnSoHEbLNrFvv9w925zCbs/edit?usp=sharing
Hello Folks!
We are excited to announce the 44th Orange County ACX/LW meetup, happening this Saturday and most Saturdays thereafter.
Host: Michael Michalchik
Email: michaelmichalchik@gmail.com (For questions or requests)
Location: 1970 Port Laurent Place
(949) 375-2045
Date: Saturday, Sept 30, 2023
Time: 2 PM
Conversation Starters :
This week we have specific cases of situations that have broader implications on how we go into the future. We look at nuclear proliferation (which could be viewed as a special case of the more general problem of controlling dangerous technologies) and biological sex as a thought paradigm in anthropology (which can be seen as a specific case of socially controversial ideas struggling to find a place in scientific discourse).
Are nuclear weapons and the international agreements about them a good model for other technological existential threats (ASI, Bioengineered pathogens, nanotechnology, smart e-viruses, psychological warfare technologies)
How much should the scientific community change its research program to account for the sensitivities of the general population and potential harms? Is there a way to reconcile these conflicts? Will censorship and self-censorship cause more harm in the long run? Are there truths about people and society it’s better we just not know. Are there research agendas that, if we allow ourselves to pursue them, will lead to more wrong ideas than right ones?
Video, with YouTube transcript available:
Why Every Nuclear Power Built the Bomb (And Everyone Else Hasn't)
https://youtu.be/l8MkjxFq7pI?si=vrqqSlRwOFXM60UN
More mishigas: Two anthropology societies cancel an accepted symposium on sex and gender because it would “harm” their members
https://whyevolutionistrue.com/2023/09/27/more-mishigas-two-anthropology-societies-cancel-accepted-symposium-on-sex-and-gender-because-it-would-harm-their-members/?fbclid=IwAR0xsMUMuWYki3rQXXlLyqz_mJqdHgJ05nCoYlrAWfwEf--oB8ulr6xfb5M#
Walk & Talk: We usually have an hour-long walk and talk after the meeting starts. Two mini-malls with hot t
takeout food are easily accessible nearby. Search for Gelson's or Pavilions in the zip code 92660.
Share a Surprise: Tell the group about something unexpected that changed your perspective on the universe.
Future Direction Ideas: Contribute ideas for the group's future direction, including topics, meeting types, activities, etc.
Is the Chinese Communist Party Communist?
Arguments against: they are no longer in strong alignment with the ideas espoused by Karl Marx, who popularised the word "Communism" or various other historical groups who have called themselves Communist.
Arguments for: Communism is as Communism does. The Chinese Communist Party has 98 million members and vastly outweigh any other Communist group in the world, so if they say they're Communist then who are we to disagree? Karl Marx is just one guy, and he's dead, why don't the 98 million members of the CCP get a say in the definition of what Communism is? Saying that the CCP isn't Communist is like saying the Pope isn't Catholic; if one billion Catholics agree that the Pope is Catholic then he is, regardless of what St Peter might have thought.
The party just isn't very ideological
"Guidance of Marxism-Leninism" is still refered to in the preamble of the Chinese Constitution (https://english.www.gov.cn/archive/lawsregulations/201911/20/content_WS5ed8856ec6d0b3f0e9499913.html).
Now you might argue that they interpretation of Sacred Texts is Wrong, and has nothing in common with True Marxism. Many people, said the same about Soviet communists.
Imho it is far from clear whether, had there be a ressurection and second coming of Marx now, he would prefer Soviet interpretation of his ideas to Chinese interpretation.
Argument against: the "Chinese Communist Party" is only the "Chinese Communist Party" in English. In its native Chinese it is the 中國 | 共產 | 黨 (Zhōng guó - China | gòngchǎn | dǎng - Party), with 共產 being the neologism invented to translate the word "Communist" into Chinese. But where "Communist" comes by way of French from the Latin "Communis" (common/universal/of the community), 共產 is a compound that includes both the morphene "共 /gòng" in the sense of common/shared but also the morphene "產 / chǎn" in the sense of to produce/beget/yield. "Chǎnpǐn" hyperliterally "produced-article" is the compound for "product" and "Chǎnjià" is "begetting-dates" and the compound for maternity leave, to give you a sense of other compounds formed with 產 / chǎn.
Which is all to say that the word for Communism in Chinese, 共產主義, could be hyperliterally back-translated as "Shared/Common-Producing/Begetting-Ideology." Feels a little different, no?
I don't want to overstate the importance of this. In Chinese, compounds are words and the morphene components of neologism aren't given any more weight in everyday use than we would give etymological origins in English; "電腦" means "computer" to a Chinese person and they don't think of it as a "electric-brain" even if that's the meaning of the morphene components 電 and 腦.
But I do wonder if, in a Sapir-Whorf way, the etymological divergence when "communist" got translated into "gòngchǎn", with the "chǎn" emphasizing outcomes and products, may have contributed to Chinese Communism's emphasis on instrumental ends rather than ideology. Certainly Chinese Communists have a tendency to write sentences that cohere queerly when translated into Western languages, such as Deng-era reformers observations that "[Western democracies with public health care] were doing Communism better than us" or that "Communism is about getting rich." Clearly some semantic drift has occurred in translation!
So: the Chinese Communist Party is definitely gòngchǎn but it is not Communist in the sense that the word is usually used in Latin languages.
Okay but was literally founded as a 'Marxist-Leninist' party. What terms they used to represent this seem much less important.
China seems to have been a centralized empire for about 2000 years, with the occasional era of warring states and dynastic cycle. They may just be returning to form.
"Yes" and "no" are both... not "wrong" answers per se, but bad answers that indicate a misunderstanding of how language works.
The answer that gives a correct insight into the relationship between communism and the CCP is "communism is an ambijective word; some things are unambiguously communist and some are unambiguously not communist, but the CCP falls in the zone of ambiguity, so to make meaningful statements you need to expand the word out".
Seconding the above.
The big question is 'who gets to define a word?
The definition of democracy is 'Government by the people, exercised either directly or through elected representatives.' According to wikipedia, 'A republic, based on the Latin phrase res publica ('public affair'), is a state in which political power rests with the public and their representatives—in contrast to a monarchy.' Every time I look at a country that has the words 'democratic republic' in the official name, it's had some form of elected body that on paper serves as the place where political power rests.
The thing we need to be careful of is people that choose tortured definitions of words that only serve to benefit them. You can go with an expansive definition that includes everything or a very narrow definition that only encompasses a small area; both are equally rational. You can't, however, switch back and forth depending on what benefits you.
In any case, It ultimately doesn't help. Saying China isn't truely communist doesn't protect communism from people that think communists are bad, it just switches their arguments from 'communists are bad' to 'people that call themselves communists are bad'.
>Arguments for: Communism is as Communism does.
Totalitarian regimes often coopt other terminology that they fail to espouse. No one outside of propogandists claims that the Democratic People's Republic of Korea is actually a democracy, and few people will take seriously the any claim that the National Socialists (aka Nazis) were actually socialists.
Of course, terms can also have separate meanings in the context of a country - c.f. American usage of "liberal" and how disjoint it is from the actual concept of liberalism.
“few people will take seriously any claim that the National Socialists (aka Nazis) were actually socialists.”
They actually… were…
"Socialism is the science of dealing with the common weal. Communism is not Socialism. Marxism is not Socialism. The Marxians have stolen the term and confused its meaning. I shall take Socialism away from the Socialists. Socialism is an ancient Aryan, Germanic institution. Our German ancestors held certain lands in common. They cultivated the idea of the common weal. Marxism has no right to disguise itself as socialism. Socialism, unlike Marxism, does not repudiate private property. Unlike Marxism, it involves no negation of personality, and unlike Marxism, it is patriotic. We might have called ourselves the Liberal Party. We chose to call ourselves the National Socialists. We are not internationalists. Our socialism is national. We demand the fulfilment of the just claims of the productive classes by the state on the basis of race solidarity. To us state and race are one." Hitler, 1923.
Hitler was pretty clearly talking about a socialism that's different than every other form of socialism that's ever existed, particularly those that trace their roots back to Marx.
He rejected Marxism, yet, as others pointed out, his actual policies had a lot in common with those of the USSR of that period. But I don't want to grind this on, suffice it to say that the original premise that "few people will take seriously the any claim that the National Socialists (aka Nazis) were actually socialists" is a bit flimsy. Plenty will.
Those policies aren't a function of socialism - they're a function of total war.
The United States, for example, took over factories and used them to make tanks. The U.S. employed rationing - with the government deciding how much each person could consume. The U.S. established the Office of Censorship.
None of this really fits with our notion of a liberal, capitalist society - at least not during peacetime.
Are we going to say that the U.S. itself was a socialist country during World War 2, and that WWII was just a battle among socialists on the one side and socialists on the other?
Well, you could argue that yes, the U.S. did in fact become a quasi-socialist country during the war. And absolutely, two socialist regimes, German and Soviet, went at each others' throats - after a notable period of friendship and collaboration in the 30's right up to June 22 1941. And the propaganda in both countries was railing against the evil capitalists, with the added poison of antisemitism on the German side. The USSR took up the antisemitism thing after the war.
So yes, it's a mess.
Hitler's politics were much closer to the socialism that modern American progressives long for. https://reason.com/2007/08/15/hitlers-handouts/
This only works at a level of generality that would make every government to ever face war a socialist government.
During war, the government usually raises taxes or borrows money to pay for soldiers and their families. That was true of George Washington's Continental Army. It was also true of Hitler's Wehrmacht.
If we go even one step deeper, the comparison stops working. From the Reason article you cited, "Aly argues that theft accounted for a full 70 percent of the Reich's wartime revenues, ensuring that the burdens of war fell squarely on the shoulders of the conquered."
Can you point me to something that, say, Bernie Sanders ever said that would suggest he wants to enact a similar policy?
I mean, I'm sure Bernie Sanders *says* he would just have to tax the *millionaires and billionaires* and we'd all have infinite free money, but his actual policy proposals would require approximately the highest tax rates in the world, imposed on the vast majority of the populace.
Regardless, Hitler's "socialism" wasn't just a gimmick to raise wartime revenue - a core part of his ideology since the early 1930s was having a large "social safety net" to ensure the security of the Aryan people.
Both Chinese "communism" and North Korean juche are explicitly nationalistic. Chinese "communism" certainly has private property. There's also the motte-and-bailey shell game where Western leftists will describe the Scandinavian social democratic governments as socialism.
Or you could just go to the defintions of socialism. The first search that comes up for me is:
socialism
sō′shə-lĭz″əm
noun
1. Any of various theories or systems of social organization in which the means of producing and distributing goods is owned collectively or by a centralized government that often plans and controls the economy.
2. The stage in Marxist-Leninist theory intermediate between capitalism and communism, in which the means of production are collectively owned but a completely classless society has not yet been achieved.
3. Specifically, in Germany, legislation, supported by Prince Bismarck, intended to improve the condition of the working-man. Among the measures included were the insurance of workmen against accident, sickness, and old age, and the establishment of cooperative associations under state protection.
>the means of production are collectively owned but a completely classless society has not yet been achieved.
I think this is important. A completely classless society is the goal that wreaks havoc. It’s impossible and too many people get killed trying to make it happen. Hitler may have had many socialist ideas. but a classless society was not one of them.
That certainly rules out definition 2 from applying to Hitler. Now we need to look at the other two.
For definition one, Hitler was certainly not opposed to state control of the economy, even before the war. For names you may recognize: Volkswagen.
Definition three may be the most applicable. It's certainly possible to argue that the political policies of the party were heavily influenced by the social democratic policies pushed decades before to head off the rise of communism. While this may not be applicable to modern socialism, it would have been very applicable to a Germany where these policies would be something a lot of people would remember.
Certain parts of Nazism will fit with the definition of socialism. Others won't. That's pretty typical of any economy. We could call them all mixed economies, but that erases a lot of the nuance.
Regardless, it's clear that Nazism is totally distinct from Marxism. Virtually all of the self-described socialist countries that have ever existed trace their lineage back to Marx. Nazi Germany did not.
Thus including Nazi Germany with the socialists is usually step one of making an argument according to the noncentral fallacy - the argument being that modern socialists have something meaningful in common with Nazi Germany. They don't. Hitler was very clear that his socialism was completely distinct from Marxism, as the quote discusses.
There's a lot in this reply that needs to be examined.
First, I never mentioned Marx. At the time Hitler came to power, there would have been only one self-described socialist country. That that particular form of socialism (Marxist) came to spread so much was entirely because that country was on the winning side of the war. Presumably, if the Nazis had won, there would have been more non-Marxist socialist governments.
Second, by using your logic, dis-including Nazi Germany from being socialist is usually step one of making an argument according to the noncentral fallacy - the argument being that the modern free market / capitalist political side has something meaningfully in common with Nazi Germany. Hitler was very clear that he was socialist (in terms of central economic control but not ownership in the service of the public good), even if not Marxist.
Finally, the point of the discussion originally was 'is China communist?'.. Aside from theoretical allegiance to the ideas of Marx (which leftists in this thread have pointed out has little bearing on Chinese policy) and retaining a rubber stamp elected legislature (which falls under the "democratic republic falsehood' argument), how, in practice, is the PRC different than Nazi Germany? Because even if modern socialists don't expect their government to end up like Nazi Germany, the fact that the most successful 'socialist' economy in practice looks an awful lot like Nazi Germany is a good argument that it is the natural evolution of socialist governance.
Trying to avoid the noncentral fallacy, both China and Germany:
Legally allow private property, including the means of production (China has 495 billionaires).
One party government.
Security state with brutal suppression of dissent.
Private companies exist at the whims of the party / government.
Militaristic and expansionist.
Uppity minorities sent to concentration camps in an effort to force conformance to dominant culture.
Government control of art / entertainment in the name of culture.
Strong central leader eliminates political rivals in own party.
What are the central differences?
I could make the argument that the Nazis cared more about the working class and the environment before the war, but that doesn't help your case.
I think that the "noncentral fallacy" is often over applied. Like, you can't say "a central example of rape would be forcible sexual intercourse by a man not wearing a pirate costume, and I totally wore a pirate costume, therefore this is a noncentral example of rape and shouldn't be punished".
To vastly simplify, a modern socialist would say "socialism is good, and Nazism was bad, therefore Nazism is a non-central example of socialism and doesn't count". A modern anti-socialist would say "socialism is bad, and Nazism is bad for exactly the same reasons, therefore it's a perfectly central example of socialism with a different coat of paint".
Ayn Rand once defined socialism as something like "an ideology that puts the good of society over the rights of the individual" -- under this definition all forms of socialism are evil for the same reason.
The standard counterargument is that the first people the nazis killed were the actual socialist party (while leaving the non-Jewish capitalists fine and dandy). Hillter took Marx's discussions of class and substituted "The Jews" for "capitalists", which is sort of a fundamental change.
This is a difficult discussion to have because there's no broadly agreed-upon definition of what socialism "is". I've previously argued that "leftist" should, at minimum, mean anticapitalist; socialist *should* ideally have the same distinction, but even I have used it in much fuzzier circumstances.
What definition of "socialism" are you using?
The standard counterargument falls apart very easily. It's certainly easy to find other Socialist governments that have purged rival socialist parties. Certainly the Bolsheviks purged the Mensheviks very early.
1st - agreed it’s a difficult discussion. “Socialism” at this point has lost almost all meaning. In US, many Republicans use it for policies they don’t like, while young idealistic people use it to call policies they like.
I use it to describe the system in the USSR. While Nazis didn’t directly nationalize industries, they did exert significant control.
CINO, communist in name only.
But seriously, no, they are not even claiming to have communism as the goal the way the Communist Party of the Soviet Union was.
To use your analogy, if the Pope proclaimed that God didn't exist and the Bible was just another adventure fiction book, and who needs to waste time on Mass anyway... that would be kind of where the CCP is now.
New working paper: Discursive Competence in ChatGPT, Part 2: Memory for Texts, https://new-savanna.blogspot.com/2023/09/discursive-competence-in-chatgpt-part-2.html
Abstract: In a few cases ChatGPT responds to a prompt (e.g. “To be or not to be”) by returning a specific text word-for-word. More often (e.g. “Johnstown flood, 1889”) it returns with information, but the specific wording will vary from one occasion to the next. In some cases (e.g. “Miriam Yevick”) it doesn’t return anything, though the topic was (most likely) in the training corpus. When the prompt is the beginning of a line or a sentence in a famous text, ChatGPT always identifies the text. When the prompt is a phrase that is syntactically coherent, ChatGPT generally identifies the text, but may not properly locate the phrase within the text. When the prompt cuts across syntactic boundaries, ChatGPT almost never identifies the text. But when told it is from a “well-known speech” it is able to do so. ChatGPT’s response to these prompts is similar to associative memory in humans, possibly on a holographic model.
Good article in Science News, about brain implants treating depression.
https://www.sciencenews.org/article/brain-implant-depression-electrode-stimulation-surgery
Interesting that the model is not biochemicals.
I have zapped myself a few times doing amateur home electrical repair without turning off the circuit breakers first. It's generally been helpful for my depression and PTSD, with noticeable effects lasting around 12 hours. I haven't been crazy/gutsy enough to intentionally repeat it, but have merely been a bit ... as a Catholic might say about unprotected sex, open to providence.
ECT and TMS have also been helpful but not a cure, as with the guy in the article. Dunno why this would be any different?
Oh my. I’m becoming hopelessly unhip. Just working tomorrow’s Times XWord. Got FINSTA on the crossings but I had to look it up.
That doesn't sound like something you'd find in the Times crossword. Are you sure it wasn't the New York Times crossword?
Was there genuine confusion here? Curious as to what value you assign:
P('The times crossword' == 'NYT crossword' | comment on an American blog) ?
Yep it’s the NYT XWord.
I suppose I should be more considerate of the non U.S. readers. I’m in the habit of using this sort of shorthand. The Times, The Post even occasionally The Journal if I’m absently thinking everyone must know I’m referring to a big time US newspaper.
I only know about it because I once read about a Congressman (apparently even less hip than me) who asked a tech executive if he was going to "ban finsta."
I'm dated too, because I had no idea what that was and had to look it up. And of course, by the time it made it to the NYT, the concept is already lame and no longer cool 😁 From 2021, so the crossword is already 2 years behind the trends, as to be expected when your parents finally hear about the Hot New Thing:
https://mashable.com/article/gen-z-instagram-finstas
"From 2015 to 2018 finstas ruled the teenage digital landscape. Slang for fake Instagram accounts, finstas were the first place teens would post photos they didn't want to share on main. Creating a finsta was a rite of passage, and following someone's shadow feed felt like you were really part of their close inner circle.
...But if you ask any teen, they’ll probably tell you that finsta is already a dated concept.
In a 2021 survey from financial services firm Piper Sandler, only 22 percent of teenagers said Instagram was their favorite social media platform, coming in third after Snapchat and TikTok, respectively. Compare that with the results of Piper Sandler’s 2015 data that show Instagram at the top of the list among teenagers, with 33 percent of participants claiming the photo-sharing app as their favorite."
It's just an alt account, right? People have had those for years.
It's the word females came up with for alt account, and thought it was some original thing.
I figured it was kids in general. Not sure if it's girls more than boys, though I guess they use social media more.
Perhaps the point is that they're alt accounts which are used similarly.
I'm looking for a scene in a movie -- or it could be from something on TV, or some YouTube video -- that contains an example of what I would call a good fight: Both parties are quite hurt and angry and say and that, via raised voices, tears, etc. But they refrain from treating each other badly. So they are not sarcastic, belittling, mocking, and they don't accuse each other of huge character flaws -- stupidity, not caring about anyone except oneself, profound sneakiness or dishonesty. They stick with the topic, each talking about why their point of view makes sense, and how hurtful and infuriating they find the other's point of view.
"I hate it when you do X. I've told you that many times and you keep doing it anyway."
"You know why I keep doing X? It comes naturally to me. I've done it all my life. And nobody else complains about it. You didn't either, til last year."
"That's true, but a lot of things changed last year, and that affected how I feel about X, and I think that's a valid reason to object to it now. And I've told you that too, but you still keep doing X."
"Yeah, OK, things did change, but . . ."
That kind of argument. Seen any examples of it?
I can't find scenes online any more, but season 1 of "Luther" has some very good stuff between John Luther, Zoe Luther, and Mark North.
This TNG scene kinda fits, though it lacks some of the emotional aspect:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vMKtKNZw4Bo
Well, I guess it depends how well-reasoned everyone has to be in the scene. Maybe the Fisher King? It's pretty one-sided and there's a couple of snipes but that's the topic under discussion.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BevEBQsAoPk
For another suggestion, there's probably something from the TV series "Babylon 5" that counts. I can't recall anything off the top of my head, but maybe someone else can?
No video examples come to mind right away, but there's a short bit in a D&D stick figure comic that I think might fit:
https://www.giantitp.com/comics/oots0854.html
You are right, that's an excellent example of what I'm looking for. Here is some normative information for you: It is extremely rare to put in a request with as many fine-grained details as mine and get a response that meets all the little criteria. I've probably put up on ACX a dozen requests this detailed and picky, and I usually do not get a single answer that meets all the criteria. On this thread somebody posted a question and only had one criterion: They wanted research data, and did not want anecdotal data, which they'd already gotten a lot of from acquaintances. Out of about 5 responses they got, one was anecdotal data accompanied by pressure to act in line with the poster's view, based on anecdotal data.
So, MM, I'd say that even in the ACX population you are 90-something percentile in accurate responsiveness to detailed requests. You've done it before, too. It's a really good quality to have -- some combo of regular smarts and emotional intelligence.
Yeah I stepped into it, didn’t I? FWIW I apologized to the original poster.
Lesson in reading comprehension for me: I re-read the post, and yes, clear request not to use personal anecdotes, and somehow I assigned too low a weight to it, overridden by “I know this situation and can help” impulse.
I'm sorry I spoke kind of harshly to you -- though I don't think I was *awful.*. But I had a particularly strong reaction to your post because if I were in OP's situation I think I too would be sick to death of people pushing me to be in a support group because on helped them or their son-in-law or whoever.
Thank you and no worries. You were right in the end, the OP really didn't like my reply.
Here I was, worried that there wasn't enough back-and-forth...
Hmm. Well, I do wish there was more back and forth on our private correspondence. But it seems to me that about the most important topics we are both so distressed that we need a near-perfect response, without which we will feel even worse than we already do about the stuff we’re disclosing. And while I feel sure I will respond with intelligent empathy, I’m not sure that I can produce a perfect response. Plus of course each of us is the same gender as the person who did the awful stuff. So mostly I feel like, ah well, either this will work or it won’t, & I can’t influence the outcome except by fakery, which I’m not about to engage in.
:-) I shall work on the first, tomorrow. I'm generally tolerant of imperfection, so don't worry too much about that, or the gender thing. I think a big part is that my standards for myself are too high relative to my new lower level of capability. And my memory issues mean that one day in which I resolve to do it tomorrow, is much like any other day in which I resolve to do it tomorrow. :-/
My therapist recommended that I stop trying to "create intimacy" on dates and instead "cultivate intimacy." This means no hugging, telling jokes, etc. How do I affirmatively do this?
For context, I am a white American man in the US, and Chinese women are WAY more interested in me than anyone else is. (This only applies to women born in China. Chinese-American women ignore me completely.) What does a successful date look like in China?
I have no actionable advice. It sounds to me that "cultivating" would mean letting the woman lead and leaning into topics she brings up, as opposed to "creating" where you're telling a dirty joke* or going in for a hug and forcing an accept/reject response from her.
*(I assume by "jokes" you meant dirty jokes. Unless your therapist thinks you're so incredibly unfunny that it scares people.)
The joke in question was a non-sexual play on words that my date didn't get (English not being her first language).
Oh. Yeah that'll do it too. I remember a training video or somesuch for interpreters, where the host makes a pun and the interpreter says "their joke is untranslatable, please laugh."
Definitely ask the therapist what they mean.
I can see being a little cautious about pushing hugs, but not telling jokes?
Are there any Chinese women you can talk with about dating behavior?
I'm hardly a huge success story (though I did have two girlfriends for a while), but I've heard lifting weights helps some people. You no longer fit one of the key parts of the nerd stereotype, and unlike a lot of the other redpill advice (exposing your balls to UV light, say) it's healthy taken in isolation.
I also wonder if you might try to find another therapist (though I guess it can be hard these days). If they can't explain the difference between 'creating' and 'cultivating' intimacy (which are two different words with the overlapping meaning of 'make something appear' with different connotations that could definitely be used in a non-intuitive way by mental health people), well, they're not doing their job.
You might try checking out the "Chinese Doom Scroll" substack, and looking through the archives for some accounts of dating. They appear to do things very differently over there. The substack is basically a daily translation of some of the top stories, plus occasional commentary. The glimpses of the dating and marriage scene over there appear grim to me.
https://weibo.substack.com/
To toss off a completely unfounded speculation, maybe you somehow both match the things they expect and want, and simultaneously fail to match the things they expect but don't want. (Like the book "The Princess Bride": maybe you're the "Good Parts Version".)
I have read this. Complaining about one's in-laws appears to be the national pastime.
I know one Chinese man who came to the US a few years ago and is dating. His ideas about dating and marriage are quite different from US ones, at least US ones among educated professionals, which is what he and the women he dates are. He believes that his being in a profession that will probably make him quite rich gives him a huge advantage. (I told him it probably was a modest advantage. Female doctors and lawyers make pretty good money on their own, and people who got graduate degrees in things like philosophy and medieval history probably just don't care much about money.). He believes that women older than 28 or so have much lower standards in men because their shelf life is expiring. (I told him that it's very common among professionals to be unmarried at 28, because most don't finish their training til then, and 28 does not have an "old maid" tint to it in people's minds.) And he is kind of bewildered by the stuff I say about chemistry and falling in love and looking for a partner who is also a best friend. All this stuff about the quality of the connection seems weird to him. His picture of mate-finding is much more transactional than that. I have no idea whether his ideas are typical of the attitudes of other Chinese people, though.
I don't really understand the difference between "creating intimacy" and "cultivating it," and how hugs and jokes come into it. Do you have a clear picture of what your therapist had in mind?
Also don't know what to make of Chinese women, but no other women, finding you attractive. Never heard that from anyone before. Are you unusual in some way -- looks, circumstances, interests?
Is your Chinese acquaintance having success dating?
I believe he wants me to postpone all flirting-type behaviors until I have internalized her body language, etc. So I have "don'ts" but no "dos."
I am a short ugly weirdo! My therapist believes that I fit in so poorly with mainstream American culture that I'm only attractive to women who don't care about that culture. (Indian women are a distant second.)
Oh, and I have been getting into salsa dancing. Last night, I saw this older fat balding guy that looked like a creepy pedo, but that danced quite well, dancing with women wildly out of his league, young women too.
I was so impressed I walked up to him and asked him if this works, and he told me that yeah, it works for meeting women, but progressing further depends on you, so he apparently does pull, against all odds.
I insist, do not underestimate what confidence can do for you, and maybe get into salsa dancing or something similar.
I just wanted to share that I knew a guy who was short, fat, and effeminate, a gamer too, and he ultimately ended up marrying a girl quite out of his league in terms of looks. He had the gift of the gab though, and he hit on lots of girls, to the point people at the office snickered at him behind his back about it.
Don't underestimate what confidence can do for you. You shouldn't believe mainland Chinese women are your only prospects.
I think I probably would have fallen in love with Wally Shawn if he and I were somehow thrown together a lot because we were on the same boat or working on the same project or something. https://i.imgur.com/XQZdOXm.png
Neat! I wonder if you could describe what you like about Wally Shawn? I did love My Dinner With Andre.
Woulda fallen for Phillip Seymour Hoffman, too.
Yes, I mostly remember him from Dinner with Andre too, and don't know much about what he's really like. But I imagine him as being smart, funny, and I-yam-what-I-yam.
And if he was in fact like that, his looks would not have been an obstacle. In fact, I would have started liking his looks, because he looked like Wally and I really liked Wally. And in fact different parts of him would have started looking like various things I liked -- like his turned up nose would look like the locus of his puckishness. That is how it has always worked for me for people that I like. I have an acquaintance, M, whom I like a lot -- not romantically -- who had average looks, and a big nose. He recently got surgery to reduce the size of his nose, and while I can see that from the point of view of conventional good looks he has improved his appearance, I felt disturbed by the change, til I got used to it, because it made him look less like M.
Shortness is definitely a disadvantage, though if you are taller than 5'7 or so you will be taller than most women, and for many women the important thing is that the man be taller than them. So being short-ish, like 5'7, knocks out at most 1/3 or 1/2 of the women. (And for a woman to hold out for someone who is tall seems really vacuous to me. Good grief, that's just not important! You're probably better off without women who demand 6 feet of height at least.). Are you genuinely *ugly,* (as opposed to not being handsome?) Has someone else confirmed that your appearance truly is a lot worse than average? If your face truly is ugly according to current tastes, it really might be worth considering cosmetic procedures, especially for things that are pretty easily correctable, like acne scars or a misshapen nose. If your body is way worse than average, then you should probably lose weight or gain weight and/or go to the gym and get in better shape.
So the suggestions above about improving your appearance apply most strongly if you are searching for dates on dating apps. I think dating apps are just inhumane and awful. Seems much better to find something you like doing that puts you in a setting where there are lots of other people who share a common interest, and hunting there for someone to ask out. And if you are weird, join up with some group where lots of people are weird the way you are. (ACX meetups?)
Even if Chinese women aren't disturbed by the way you are "weird," that doesn't guarantee they are going to be able to appreciate and savor your weirdness. You need to find someone who gets you.
In response to your question about how my Chinese acquaintance is doing with dating: He is having a bad time of it. Mostly does not much like the women he meets, and after a while gets tired of emitting the behaviors he thinks they wants. Fell really hard for somebody who, I could tell, was desplaying quite moderate interest. When she ended it, he was terribly distressed.
I have obvious facial asymmetry that is not correctable without very invasive surgery. I am only moderately overweight, which is probably the only part of the situation that I can do anything about.
I generally have much better things to do than hang out in groups that are >80% male, with the few women disproportionately uninterested in men. (This describes literally everything I enjoy.)
>I generally have much better things to do than hang out in groups that are >80% male, with the few women disproportionately uninterested in men.
Yeah, I get that, it's true of a lot of guys that the things they are most interested in do not interest women. But consider this: Are you sure you want to be in a relationship with a woman, then? Because what exactly are you going to do together and talk about? Even excellent and frequent sex is only going to fill up at hr/day on average, and not many modern women are going to be on board with cooking meals and darning your socks while you're gaming or attending sports events with other males during your hours of free time.
You know, for a long time I figured exactly that. Women don't like nerd stuff, a few do but they are going to be snapped up by the few most skillful nerd men, so romance is pointless (for me anyway, normal guys obviously do it and like it).
That and I had late-90s feminism making me guilty about wanting to have sex and convinced any flubbed approach would lead to a harassment lawsuit. Which is probably true now, but not back then.
That was half of what ended my last relationship: we talked about nothing but work because the only thing we had in common was being employed. (The other half was her asexuality.)
I suppose I have a fantasy of meeting a woman who shares my level of curiosity and indulging in whatever directions it takes us. However, this is firmly in the category of "dream" rather than "goal."
Huh, well Trump has one less trial to prepare for: a New York state judge just issued a summary judgement that Trump, his three adult children, his business and a couple other officers of that business are all liable for obvious business fraud committed repeatedly for a decade. The ruling says basically that the repeated fraud is so obvious from the documented facts that holding a trial would be a waste of a jury's time.
In the US adversarial legal system, motions for summary judgement are routinely filed by both sides despite being very rarely granted. I just asked two veteran trial attorneys of my acquaintance who each said they have never, during their successful legal careers, had a motion for summary judgement be granted. One guy said his law partner did once.
I assume Trump et al will appeal this ruling. In the meantime though the case moves on to a penalty phase.
Selection bias really plays a role here. Summary judgment motions aren't often granted because if you knew to a certainty that you'd lose on summary judgment, you'd either settle or dismiss it yourself.
The threat of summary judgment weeds out a lot of cases that otherwise would be proper for summary judgment.
Sure, so you need one side to be making non-rational tactical choices. By for instance having a client who refuses to accept his lawyers' analysis that his defense is untenable.
In fairness to Trump, his options are most likely constrained in ways not typical of other litigants. Because he's a really high-profile figure, any settlement agreement would be scrutinized endlessly. Because he's a high-profile political figure, a generous settlement deal would be career suicide for any AG that offered it.
For what it's worth, Trump's side did offer to settle with the AG in the civil fraud trial. The AG rejected the settlement offer.
Isn't it great how one person can just decide that? It's even better that judges are made out of better stuff than commoners and can be relied on to look at only the facts and not their own prejudices.
It's also great when judges know more about valuation than banks do! 'Cause obviously those poor simpleton banks were terribly hoodwinked by that sly Trump and totally relied on him for the terms of those loans! And that awful Trump, trying to cover up his fraud by paying back everything that was lent to him, with interest! That'll teach him (and future generations!) to abuse the comply-with-the-terms-of-the-agreement loophole!
I like the idea of 'fraud is impossible because the person being defrauded would have known more about the situation than a judge/jury, so they must have been correct in their initial assessment and the judge/jury must be wrong'.
I like the reciprocal idea that "the party who made a profit in the transaction was defrauded."
Especially when said defrauded party is not a party to the lawsuit.
It does seem to make summary judgment a bit of a stretch. More than that, I understand the judge said that Mar-a-lago was worth between $18-27 million, despite the fact that much smaller properties (less than an acre, single house, compared to 20 acres and multiple buildings) next door were worth more than that. The judge may be right, but that really seems like the kind of thing you should, you know, have to show in court.
Summary judgment is about things that, even if all the facts were exactly as stipulated by the person making the claim, would still not permit any answer but one.
The defrauded party is the people of the State of New York, per state Executive Law 63|12. Every state has a similar law on the books. The basic idea is that someone who engages in "repeated fraudulent or illegal acts" or "persistent fraud or illegality in the carrying on, conducting or transaction of business" is degrading the fundamental trust in business practices upon which a vibrant state economy depends. The keywords are "repeated" and "persistent", the law is aimed at fraudulent action being used as a business strategy. The attorney general is specified in the law as the official who is supposed to bring such persistent patterns of fraudulent practice to the attention of the state courts.
The specifics laid out in the court's ruling are pretty wild. For instance Trump repeatedly listed his personal condo at three times its actual square footage (and hence market value) despite multiple on-the-record notifications of its actual size -- one of those having been published in the pages of Forbes magazine.
Despite having received valuations of $30M or less from five different professional fair-market appraisers (!), he listed a parcel as being worth at least $261M in four different annual sets of Trump Org sworn financial statements. Then yet another outside appraisal came in at $56M but Trump stuck with, and even tried to defend in court, a valuation of $291M. [The ruling reads as if this is the one that really pushed this judge over into summary-judgement territory.]
Regarding the 40 Wall Street building, Trump Org seems to have for years taken outside appraisers' numbers and simply doubled them in the company financial statements, loan applications, etc.
Regarding Mar A Lago, it isn't the judge who valued it at between $18-27M but rather the local county assessor in Florida, who placed its value in that range 12 years in a row. The reason for that valuation is that the property is not legally subdividable or developable: Trump in 2002 signed an irrevocable deed in which he surrendered all rights to develop or use any part of the parcel for any purposes other than the existing social club. He did that in order to get a large tax deduction for the resulting historic-preservation easement. That easement is permanent, it "goes with the land", that's why he had to sign and record a fresh deed in order to receive the tax benefit.
Hence most of the Mar A Lago property's market value was legally extinguished, and comparisons to neighboring properties on which new houses or other structures have been built are specious. The county assessor correctly based its valuations, and Trump's annual property tax bills, on comparable properties having the same sort of deed restrictions on them. But Trump kept basing his sworn financial statements on the idea that the Mar A Lago parcel could be sold at any time for something like half a billion.
There's more, but those are the headline properties. The stuff about his golf courses seems closer to just eye-rolling hyperbole than actual fraud and probably wouldn't have led to this case or this ruling on their own. They are more icing on the cake in the context of the above. (Well maybe excepting the valuation of refundable club membership deposits, which Trump has been in the habit deciding are not actually a liability because reasons. That just flat-out violates Generally Accepted Accounting Principles.)
"The defrauded party is the people of the State of New York, per state Executive Law 63|12. Every state has a similar law on the books. The basic idea is that someone who engages in "repeated fraudulent or illegal acts" or "persistent fraud or illegality in the carrying on, conducting or transaction of business" is degrading the fundamental trust in business practices upon which a vibrant state economy depends. "
So... "The People of the State of New York" (which includes literally zero actual humans, being an abstract entity) is being defrauded. The harm is not obtaining the maximum possible profit in any given transaction I guess? Oh no, because a "vibrant economy" (yet another abstract entity for which 'vibrant' cannot possible apply) requires *trust* (and only some kinds of people can degrade this trust, absolutely NOT government employees, they can't degrade trust nosireebob.) But this purported harm to "The Trust" of "The People" can totally be quantified and a concrete punishment righteously laid out against the human malefactor.
I don't think Trump was perfectly fine in what he was doing, but I do have a problem with this being decided in summary judgment. As I mentioned before, that's when there's no question of facts and cannot be decided otherwise as a matter of law. The valuation of properties is not so clear cut. Trump may have lost this one in court no matter what, but summary judgment is not the right approach and he'll likely win that on appeal.
Could be, I dunno.
If he does though I don't think it will be on the basis of valuations of properties being inherently subjective. They obviously are, but both the law and GAAP are clear that a reasonableness standard has to be applied. In some spots state or federal laws place explicit ranges on that (just as an example, a 501(c)(3) tax-exempt organization cannot rely on a valuation that is more than 20 percent different from that of an independent outside appraiser).
That type of specifics varies from state to state and I am not knowledgeable about New York State law. But across the board a sworn financial statement that is prepared for lenders and investors to rely upon has to be within some reasonable bound on things like the values of assets. The judge is certain that in this case that reasonable bound was being exceeded and not by a little bit, and there is no question that it was a habit (year after year for decades). Judges hate being reversed on appeal and it seems doubtful that this judge would have risked it on such a fundamental point to the case.
Also an attorney has pointed out to me that the defense lawyers' behavior before this judge created additional support for summary judgement. The Trump attorneys in hearings before the judge kept bringing back up arguments which the judge had already ruled out as legally irrelevant. Besides being irritating to that judge, doing that raised the prospect that those lawyers would do the same in open courtroom with a jury present. Which adds fuel to the idea that (a) the defense had no real defense to offer and (b) the defense would by its actions poison a jury pool just trying to get a mistrial. basically stall stall stall and try to run out the state's patience and clock. The appeals court is going to look _very_ negatively upon that.
If only someone had gotten around to this back before 2015...
What difference did you imagine that would have made?
Mostly, it would have been the right thing to do. If there are laws, prosecute those who break them, or repeal them. Fiat justitia ruat caelum. It is shameful that he got away with his shit when he was friends with the powerful. That they turn on him when he's out of favor is no credit to them.
" If there are laws, prosecute those who break them, or repeal them. "
But then you wouldn't be able to use prosecutorial discretion to advance your or your allies' interests.
While I agree about law should apply to everyone and not "too well-connected to prosecute", is Ms. James now going to go after the other 7 million New Yorkers who fibbed on their tax returns, maximised their answers on "how much you earnin'?" for mortgage applications and loans, and vastly inflated their value when looking for love on dating apps?
Ex-mayor Bloomberg, for instance: he is totally squeaky-clean and never claimed a penny more in worth than he actually possessed, and certainly never ever had accountants doing the fandango around tax laws and minimising liability? I'm positive this is all so and Ms. James wasn't engaged in partisanship!
A lot of this is about fraud-- substantially over-valuing one's properties. It's not a crime most New Yorkers are in a position to commit.
Not at those levels, sure. But I fill in wage details for mortgage applications for staff at my place of work, and they ask "put down that I'm working so many hours a week" or that I put in the higher level they got paid (they work standard hours but sometimes work more in a week).
That's technically fraud.
I'm sure Donald Trump isn't the only business mogul in NY doing it, and I'm sure a lot of people at all income levels fudge their tax and their loan applications. So if Ms. James is going after this crime because it's A CRIME and not because of partisan politics, she'll be hauling a heck of a lot of people into court, and they won't all be millionaires.
I think it would have taken some of the glamour off him. Maybe it would have kept him doing reality TV, instead of running for President. Or maybe the media wouldn't have built him up as much during the primaries. Or maybe the left would have had more success attacking him for his lying and bullshit, instead of making up the Russia stuff.
In the big picture, I don't know. It's possible that Hillary Clinton or Jeb Bush or whoever would have produced worse outcomes, by my measures, in the areas I care about. My thinking in this area is distorted.
" Or maybe the left would have had more success attacking him for his lying and bullshit, instead of making up the Russia stuff."
Er, they *did* try the "not a real billionaire" stuff - see Hillary (oh God) and her ideas of what is funny with her quip about liking real billionaires. Are you really forgetting all the tax returns demands to prove he wasn't as rich as he claimed? None of it worked, because for Trump supporters, he's rich even if not as hugely rich as the others. When you've got 5 billion moneybags sneering at Trump for only having 1 billion, or maybe not even a billion at all, that is less effective than the "party of the little guy, the poor, the disempowered, the minorities and the working class" might hope. Because you know that the moneybags are sneering even harder about you, the little poor guys, and at least Trump isn't.
And the more the moneybags and their ilk sneer and seethe, the better. So you're going to stick with Trump, because he drives them crazy. So what if he only has tens of millions? That's a hell of a lot more money than you will ever see in your entire life. That's rich enough, as far as you're concerned.
https://www.npr.org/2016/08/03/488568418/hillary-clinton-uses-billionaire-supporters-to-undermine-donald-trump
"On Monday, Clinton sat on an Omaha, Neb., stage behind Buffett, grinning widely as he attacked Trump for not releasing his tax returns. "How many of you would be afraid to have your tax return made public?" Buffett asked the cheering crowd. "You're only afraid if you've got something to be afraid about."
Buffett even offered a kind of deal, saying he'd release his tax returns if Trump did.
For the Clinton campaign, appearances by figures such as Buffett and Cuban can subtly help erode Trump's reputation for wealth and success, Democratic consultant Hank Sheinkopf said.
"The kind of endorsements from Cuban and Warren Buffett and Mike Bloomberg and other like that are ways of saying, 'Donald Trump is not the businessman he says, 'cause if he was, real businessmen would be endorsing him,' " Sheinkopf said.
It's also a way of scaring off potential donors, at a time when Trump appeared to be starting to finally gain some ground in fundraising, though major contributors have been holding back."
That's the same Buffett who talked about paying less tax than his secretary, yes? Yeah, I'm pink-collar/blue-collar/lower middle class white collar worker, I'm sure impressed by rich guy going to tell all about exactly how rich he is and how much, much richer than my guy he is, so I should vote for the candidate of the rich, rich people. We can see how well that worked out in the election.
https://www.politico.com/story/2016/08/hillary-clinton-billionaires-226538
“Billionaires for Hillary” isn’t a group the Clinton campaign will be trotting out anytime soon to win over die-hard Bernie Sanders supporters, but in recent days, quite a few megarich business moguls have been publicly appearing with the Democratic nominee to sing her praises.
Just in the past week, Dallas Mavericks owner Mark Cuban made a surprise appearance with Clinton in Pittsburgh, Michael Bloomberg slammed Donald Trump at the Democratic convention in Philadelphia last week and on Monday night, investing guru Warren Buffett, the “Oracle of Omaha,” touted Clinton at a campaign stop in his Nebraska hometown."
So if they had gone after him in 2015, what would have been the difference? City Attorney General who is in the bag for the Democrats goes after potential Republican candidate? Oh my, that will certainly make all the Republican voters reconsider who they might support!
That's the problem with making a blatantly political attack. Whereas if somebody had been going after him before he ran, it wouldn't have been brushed off so easily. But no one seemed to want to do the work, or have principles. If any of the attacks had done as much research as this silly piece about his hair treatment, things might have turned out differently.
https://www.gawker.com/is-donald-trump-s-hair-a-60-000-weave-a-gawker-invest-1777581357
Nobody went after him before he ran because (a) they never considered he would go for political office (b) he was hanging out on good terms with Democrats (see the photos endlessly posted online of him at black tie events with Bill'n'Hill all smiling and laughing and having a high old time) (c) when he did announce it, he was treated as a joke candidate - the Clinton campaign allegedly helped boost him because they were so confident that were he the Republican choice, Hillary would win by about 100% instead of having to deal with a genuine contender.
Well, we've seen how well that worked out, haven't we? Trump, precisely because he was an outsider and precisely because all the glitterati were laughing at him, appealed to voters who were "a plague on both your houses". Silly little snobby magazine hit-pieces about how he liked his steak done and ketchup with it, how *low class*? Even if you like your steak rare, if you're "low class" by the PMC standards, you're going to go "Well to hell with you, I'm working class who doesn't qualify for the fancy restaurants you like either, he's my guy and you're not".
Have you looked at how many people went after Trump for being an obvious fraudster before 2015? Everybody who was paying attention knew the man was a crook. albeit sometimes a profitable one to do business with if you were careful about it. Trump's dishonesty was a standing joke in the mainstream media.
Everyone who was eventually going to go out and *vote* for Donald Trump, either affirmatively disbelieved the mainstream media that was saying Donald Trump was a crook, or simply didn't care. Adding one more New York Times story to the long list of pre-2015 New York Times stories saying "yet another court has determined that Trump done defrauded someone", was not going to change that.
I think there are very few of us whose thinking in this area is not distorted. I find it impossible to think about without getting furious and despairing, and once I'm feeling that way my priorities become either to shout all my thoughts, or to find someone who disagrees with me and go after them.
I mean, it's hard to think about this counterfactual without my PTSD acting up. I'm not proud to say this, but I truly enjoyed how the mere presence of Trump made my outgroup suffer. When people, whom I once thought were my friends but later learned were not, moved to Canada in advance of his election, I laughed from schadenfreude, and from their self-inflicted misjudgement of his character.
Would Hillary or Jeb have provided me this joy? I doubt it.
I do not think this is healthy, but I try to be honest about the way I was and am. Maybe one day I will not be like this, as I once was not.
I didn't vote for him (I thought he was dangerously incompetent and narcsissistic), but I didn't find him as aggravating as most of the progressives around me do, and I did enjoy watching them seethe.
Jeb would have been relentlessly hammered as Chimpy McHitler 2 and another one of the warmongering Bush dynasty who only made it on nepotism rather than merit. So I don't think it made much difference which Republican won the White House, the fury over depriving Hillary of Her Turn Now would have been the same.
I know a more-or-less conservative who talked about wanting to make liberals' heads explode. This strikes me as a very corrupting impulse.
Jeb would still be President now I guess.
He might not have coasted to the nomination and if he did still do that he might not have taken the electoral college by small margins in a few states.
And then I might not have spent four years shouting Dunning Kruger at my TV.
I’m turning it into a sort of joke with the last remark but it took a good deal of gallows humor to ride out the storm.
I know the guy won fair and square but imo he doesn’t belong in a position as important as the presidency.
Thank God we're back to a state of social harmony and economic stability, right? 2022 was so much better than 2018!
(Said No One)
From my perspective, honestly, yeah? Not 2022, but 2023 is pretty back-to-normal in terms of both economic and social factors (outside of what the news media would like to talk about, anyway- that has been notably degrading since 2018). Far fewer people are losing their jobs from cancellation, ZIRP isn't leading to private equity rugpulling the hell out of small businesses to the same extent, and there have been a spate of Supreme Court decisions that have been mostly good (with a few notable exceptions). Maybe not "so much" better, but it certainly feels like 2020-2021 was the last gasp for a lot of extremely unfortunate social phenomena. (Not particularly catalyzed by the President or anything, honestly- I think the most recent two presidents are both products of the emergent social consensus at the time, not reagents for it.)
"there have been a spate of Supreme Court decisions that have been mostly good (with a few notable exceptions)."
Gasp! You mean the same Supreme Court that Trump packed with conservative Catholic theocrats, a theme upon which many grave periodicals and sober media outlets issued warning articles?
https://www.newyorker.com/news/daily-comment/the-sins-of-the-high-courts-supreme-catholics
"The overturn of Roe v. Wade is part of ultra-conservatives’ long history of rejecting Galileo, Darwin, and Americanism."
https://verdict.justia.com/2023/05/03/how-did-six-conservative-catholics-become-supreme-court-justices-together
"Have you ever wondered how six conservative Catholic Supreme Court Justices were able to be on the Supreme Court at the same time? There is an additional liberal Catholic, Justice Sotomayor, but all conservatives on the Court now were raised Catholic. Doesn’t it strike you as odd that all of the conservatives are Catholic, and that no evangelical is among them, given the abortion litmus test among Republicans? Compare the current Court’s conservative makeup with the face of today’s anti-abortion movement, which is mostly evangelical in the headlines, though the Catholic Church hierarchy has always lobbied to make abortion illegal. Period. No exceptions for rape, incest, or any other reason. Six Catholics overturned Roe v. Wade in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization. Of course, Supreme Court appointments are mired in politics, but in a country with extraordinary religious diversity, this configuration demands explanation."
https://constitutioncenter.org/blog/the-justices-faith-and-their-religion-clause-decisions
"Going back to that television viewer, an unstated and accurate aspect of the message was the lack of religious diversity on the Roberts Court. With five, maybe six, Catholic conservative justices and one Catholic liberal justice (Sonia Sotomayor), seven out of nine justices are of the same religion. Justice Elena Kagan is Jewish and new Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson has said she is a nondenominational Protestant.
Just as the court is beginning to look more like America with four female justices and two Black justices, religious diversity reflecting the nation’s multi-religions is another factor in inspiring public confidence in the court’s rulings and the institution’s legitimacy."
https://www.theglobalist.com/the-u-s-supreme-court-now-a-roman-catholic-institution/
"Conservative Supreme Court Justices are making unaccountable and undemocratic decisions, much like the Vatican Congregation of the Doctrine of the Faith."
https://apnews.com/article/abortion-supreme-court-catholic-ee063f7803eb354b4784289ce67037b4
"But the justices in the Dobbs majority aren’t simply cradle Catholics. Several have ties to intellectual and social currents within Catholicism that, for all their differences, share a doctrinal conservatism and strong opposition to abortion."
Too many Papists means the nation is now being ruled from the Vatican! Alas that the warnings of long ago went unheeded! /s
https://chrc-phila.org/thomas-nast-anti-catholic-cartoons/
Mea culpa, 2018 didn't have complete zero interest rates, just very low ones (lower than any year from 1970 to 2009). Not enough to really make bond investments a good choice.
To be fair, half the horsemen of the apocalypse showed up in between.
Well at least you didn’t CapsLock it.
> deflects as a form of cope
You read my mind.
That turns out to be because they kept bringing back up arguments that he had already ruled on. Few things are as likely to irritate a trial judge.
Does anybody have good examples of either, or both, of the following? Of the two, I'm more interested in the second:
1. An idea or tool that should rightfully be popular and widespread, but it has been rejected by a segment of the population due to tribal association? (ie the thing is obviously good from an objective perspective, but it has failed to catch on in the wider population because it became associated with the lower/upper class, the political left/right, femeninity/masculinity, etc)
2. An idea or tool that has escaped the aforementioned trap (ie something that *has* caught on in the wider population, without its popularity being bogged down by tribal affiliation).
Boring, mundane examples are perfectly good!
Also on that note, is there a single word or short phrase to describe the phenomenon of "being robbed of support because one tribe rejects it due to association with competing tribes"?
Driving stick VS automatic. The latter is obviously superior for everyday driving. Now explain that to Italians.
I mean, consequentialism.
I would say phonics in education. It is objectively the best way to teach children to read, but a proportion of educators are opposed to it because it is too...prescriptive? conservative? boring to teach? I'm honestly not sure what the root of the disagreement is.
>1. An idea or tool that should rightfully be popular and widespread, but it has been rejected by a segment of the population due to tribal association?
To some degree, in western societies, masking when you're sick. At the beginning of the *2020 thing* i was somewhat enthousiast at the thought that we'd start wearing mask when we're sick, which seems like a sensible behaviour, but the insane mania around mandatory masking really poisoned that well by placing a sort of social stigma around the dude who still mask in 2023.
Masks or lack thereof is a definite missed opportunity.
Just a bit of mindfulness about not coughing germs on your coworker would have been a nice evolutionary step.
I used to send anyone home from my team if they dared come in with a red sniffling nose.
I mostly just stay home when I'm sick, which is much easier in the post-COVID era of remote work. But I agree it would have been nice if we could have found a sane, happy medium on masking, rather than making masks somewhere between a tribal marker and a religious icon.
Yeah, I keep wanting to join my local GOP but their general attitude around masking kinda pisses me off (and I'm afraid of getting COVID).
I thought the GOP didn't believe in covid... 🙄
Yeah, that's the problem.
Maybe it just proves I'm gray and not red tribe.
Seated urination. Men overwhelmingly reject this, despite its obvious advantages (less urine on clothes, on floor, etc) due to its association with femininity. There are cases where it's debatable (public restrooms, esp. with urinals), but at the very least, sitting in one's own home is strictly superior.
"(less urine on clothes, on floor, etc)"
This is how you signal you're so high-status that you've never had to clean a womens restroom.
I take it you've never had haemorrhoids
- Signed a former sitter
Do you serve fries with them?
also bidets
Have you ever peed in the men’s room at a sports stadium? It’s all long stainless steel toughs. In that case rapid through put is important. I’m in and out and my wife has advanced to the halfway point of the women’s queue.
But yeah, I take your point in spite of my joke about the water in the bowl being too cold below.
Ah the sweet aroma of the pee running along the trough... smells like...
Oh, this is my life hack. And I never leave the seat up!
My penis hits the toilet wall, it's strictly inferior to standing.
Mine dangles right into the water and down the drain.
But of course that happens when I stand up too.
I'm confused how this could be the case, physically. Do you suffer from priapism?
I believe there's a fair amount of variation in how much men's penes shrink when flaccid: "grow-ers" vs. "show-ers"?
They make the seats too small, so you get the choice of scooting back and pooping on the seat rim or scooting forward and rubbing your dick against the inside of the toilet. And that's without arousal, which also causes the problem of "now I'm sitting down and aiming completely out of the toilet at the air in front of me." You can mitigate that when you're standing.
Huh, yeah I can imagine that being a problem.
That water is always pretty cold too.
For 1, I vote dresses and skirts, especially in hot environments. Very associated with femininity post horseback riding, and it still hasn't gone back to being gender neutral, despite how few men are riding horses.
Maybe the solution is to bring back horseback riding. The Mongols have got you covered.
https://correctmongolia.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/08/blue-deel.jpg
Speaking of this, I don't understand why women's clothing either doesn't have pockets, or has tiny useless decorative pockets.
Purses!
Women's dresses have start having way more pockets in them lately, I'm happy to report!
Men don't get to wear dresses, and women don't get to have pockets. I say we combine them and make unisex cargo dresses.
Isn't that Utilikilts? I suppose they're more of a "skirt" than a "dress", though.
https://utilikilts.com/
For a counterpoint, check out these awesome pants:
https://redantspants.com/
Because the clothing is "decorative", rather than "practical"? That is, instead of enhancing thing-based physical capabilities, it enhances aesthetic-based interpersonal capabilities.
1) Automatic cars in the UK. I'm an immigrant here, I'm mostly fond of the country, but the reluctance to adopt an almost strictly superior technology for 99% of users is completely baffling. It's associated with 'being a bad driver', so much so that if you get your license with an automatic car it's a lesser license (you can't drive non-automatics, which is a material restriction re: rentals etc). So I suffered through learning to drive with a manual car in London, despite having no intention to ever drive a manual again.
2) ...the entirety of modernity? Say, dishwashers and washing machines (which I continue to hold to be two of the high points of civilisation).
I agree that automatic transmissions are in general superior to manual, but the "you must pass a driving test using stick in order to be licensed to drive stick" restriction seems perfectly reasonable to me. Driving stick is difficult if you only know how to drive automatic, and incompetent stick drivers are dangerous (stalling at intersections/in stop-and-go traffic, rolling backwards on hills). The reverse is not true; anyone who can drive stick can also drive automatic.
The state thus has a perfectly reasonable interest in making sure that only people who can actually drive stick are allowed to do so. I think this fully explains the licensing asymmetry, without any appeal to the UK's irrational "manual is better" attitude.
Have a manual transmission in the US is becoming something like anti theft technology. Fewer and fewer US drivers have ever used a stick.
Sorry you find it annoying but I grew up with stick shift vehicles and prefer them to automatics. I like the feeling of connection to the machinery.
I taught my wife how to drive a standard and she really took to it. The only glitch was her first time at a stoplight facing uphill on a steep San Francisco hill. The driver behind her was right on our rear bumper so she was afraid of rolling back a bit at the light change.
She set the parking brake and we switched seats so I would drive away from the light. It was just that one time though and now she can handle that situation without a problem.
I was hoping you were going to say you switched seats and then you rolled back into the car behind 😉
Your comment is perfectly congruent with your username!
My aunt is a long-distance driver, and went from a stick shift to a Prius, and complains that "it's not really 'driving', it's a golf cart".
I found driving a Tesla remarkably similar to a golf cart, though I attributed that to the floor design and seat positioning.
1) nuclear power -- rejected because it was associated with war-hawks, capitalism and atheism (many of the early hippies believed in God: e.g.: The Farm commune, which influenced The Green movement profoundly)
2) almost everything that is popular
Solar cells. Scott knew it ten years ago https://slatestarcodex.com/2013/07/29/links-for-july/ --- They would become so dirt cheap that investion in a nuclear power plant makes no sense at all. And now the time has come: https://www.pv-magazine.de/2023/09/22/modulpreiscrash-und-kein-ende-in-sicht/
I'm talking about our failure to invest in nuclear over the past 50 years because of the so-called Green Movement. Imagine how many coal plants we could have gotten rid of back then but for goddamn dirty hippies.
Yeah, we need to invest in nuclear. (fission!)
When Canadians rejected Target and booted the company out mostly due to Anti-American sentiment and pro-Canadian rhetoric. When it would have actually been great to have Target and when so called Canadian classics like Tim Hortons are actually owned by Americans... all about perception.
Canadians, I believe, (as I speak for all of them) would have loved to welcome Target into our retail world-scape. But Target was determined to punch themselves in the nuts at every opportunity.
It's a Harvard business case study !
https://hbr.org/2015/01/why-targets-canadian-expansion-failed
It spawned numerous long-form articles, of which this one is the best!
https://canadianbusiness.com/ideas/the-last-days-of-target-canada/
Nice! Thanks for the links. I don’t know about the rest of Canada either but I was living in Toronto at the time and there was a lot of anti-American sentiment. Trump was campaigning and all over the news and I sensed people really rejected Target because of this. That was the impression I got. Which I was bummed about cause one opened near where I was living and then closed and there was no comparable store.
Joke for 1) Bacon in the Middle East.
they do lamb bacon and turkey salami at the local supermarket.
On your point (2), several entire scientific fields had to pass through that crucible during the 19th century because each of them was in the process of debunking the Christian Bible as literal account of the world's beginnings. Devotion to that story, that the Earth and all its living things dated from a specific day 6,000 years ago, was thoroughly mainstream across Europe and North America. Paleontologists, geologists, and evolutionary biologists all had to deal with extensive fallout based on that reaction to what they were learning and documenting. For those objecting it felt very much [though they of course used contemporary wordings to express this] as if a core piece of their shared identity was being torn away.
#1. It's hard to come up with examples where the thing is "obviously good", since nearly everything is debatable.
One example of #1 could be spelling reform. For educated people (people who have successfully learnt to write), mastering irregular spellings becomes a status symbol and not mastering them is associated with ignorant people. (Of course, the idea of spelling reform is not associated with uneducated people.)
(Other similar examples could be found throughout the world.)
Arguably the non adoption of the metric system in America/Britain.
Vaccination? -- Probably there are people who reject vaccination because they want to belong to the "anti vax" "tribe". But that maybe wouldn't be their conscious reason for rejecting vaccination. (There are probably also historical examples of this.)
Sobriety has been rejected by certain groups of men because it is associated with women and religion.
Also, some young people engage in silly or risky behavior because they want to reject older people, or the "squares".
Esperanto would be an obviously brilliant idea if more people had adopted it. Did people not adopt it because it was associated with weirdos?
2. As far as #2 is concerned, there must be so many examples of this, that it is hard to come up with "good" examples. I mean, so many ideas and tools have been transmitted from one culture to another.
The use of the metric system in so many places could be an example.
I'll adopt meters and kilograms if the metric people agree to switch to the obviously superior Fahrenheit system. It's not like anyone multiplies temperatures by 1000, and having the 0-100 range encompass more of the normal variation in weather is really useful. But the fact that the metric people insist on using Celsius too suggests that it's just empty cultural posturing based on what they're personally familiar with.
"having the 0-100 range encompass more of the normal variation in weather is really useful."
How is it useful?
It allows more precision in reporting temperature with a convenient number of digits.
That seems backwards. With Celsius, the outside temperature is always a two-digit number, whereas with Fahrenheit, triple-digit temperatures are common.
That depends on where you live, but in any case Celsius is so wasteful with the scale that there's huge room for improvement. You could maybe make the Fahrenheit degrees say 10% larger to reduce the frequency of 3 digit temperatures. But Celsius literally doesn't use half the scale *and* it has negative temperatures (which are even more inconvenient than three digit temperatures) more frequently than Fahrenheit.
If Celsius users needed more precision in reporting the weather, they could use decimals, but they hardly ever do, because 1 degree C is more than enough precision for weather reporting.
We have cherry picked the metric system in the UK, car performance figures are in miles per litre! 🫣
> Did people not adopt it because it was associated with weirdos?
I don't know about that, but it must have been dealt great blows by the Nazis and the USSR. Idk about the Nazi Germany ban, Stalin accused them of being spies (on account on having contacts abroad) and Zionists. I don't know if that qualifies for the original question, but it's not about "weirdness".
It’s kind of my experience that some people react to learning Esperanto as though it meant joining a new age religious movement, even though to me it just seems like a hobby for people who like languages.
It's funny, because the single most common argument I see for learning Esperanto is the community. It really does seem like a new age religious movement.
I actually do attend periodic events for people who learn languages as a hobby. There are always a good number of Esperanto speakers there, never a majority, though there was at least one who had been raised as a native speaker (bilingually with English; his parents presumably weren’t *that* heartless). They don’t seem noticeably more cultish than the rest, though I guess there may be a difference between “people who study languages as a hobby, one of which might be Esperanto”, and “people whose sole language-learning focus is Esperanto”.
I think that was the final nail in the coffin, but a greater problem is that even if people are open to the idea of the constructed language, you immediately get many trying to invent their own.
Ostensibly, because there is some defect that needs to be fixed, but mostly... I suspect that much larger motivation is that inventing your own language that other people would learn is high-status, while learning a language someone else invented is low-status. Kinda the same emotion that makes people "prove Einstein wrong" endlessly, except that in linguistics the things are way more subjective, and people can't even agree on which criteria the language should try to satisfy.
(Currently, a popular criticism of Esperanto is that it is too Euro-centric, i.e. that a *truly* neutral language would also include some Chinese characters, etc. But just a few decades ago, most people criticized Esperanto for being insufficiently similar to English or French, because it is unworthy of a civilized person to learn a language where the relation between writing and spelling is too straightforward.)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Delegation_for_the_Adoption_of_an_International_Auxiliary_Language - here is a historical example that any person sufficiently high-status to propose the use of Esperanto and be considered seriously, will also be irresistibly tempted to create his own language with many arbitrary "improvements". That's simply how status works. You don't get high status by ignoring the obvious opportunities to assert it.
There's a kind of perverse value in going the other direction, and making a language with rules and spellings so inconsistent that everyone will mess it up. Camaraderie through suffering.
(Did I have to look up how to spell 'camaraderie'? What do YOU think?)
If you are not already a fan of https://badconlangingideas.tumblr.com , you’re probably about to become one.
I think there's an argument to be made that, at this point, spelling reform in English would be a tool of cultural imperialism, and actively harmful to linguistic diversity. It would encode one particular dialect (how about... Scouse), while everyone else would have a writing system that diverged even more from they way they pronounce English. Sure, there'll be a pull toward the Scouse pronunciation just from its use in writing, but that pull is ongoing today, just in a direction we don't normally notice, like water.
Alternatively, we could each adopt individual writing systems the same way some people adopt pronouns, as an expression of identity. That'd be fun!
Not sure that the written word would have any impact on accents.
A reading of a sentence by a Scouser vs a Scotsman would still sound completely different from how it's written...!
By all means, do whatever it takes to harm linguistic diversity. Accents, dialects, languages, none of this has any upside.
Losing the ability to talk with your older generations is an actual loss.
If you emigrated, teach your children the heritage language and the local language, then do the same with grandchildren, but in all likelihood this won’t be necessary with great-grandchildren. Problem solved.
That's softening your previous stance quite a bit.
"Do whatever it takes to harm linguistic diversity" has an implication you probably didn't intend-- what really harms linguistic diversity is to take children from their families and beat them if they speak their native language. Did you have specific policies in mind?
"
But it's a thing that exists, so we have to preserve it! It's a HUMAN RIGHT!!! https://www.ohchr.org/en/stories/2019/10/many-indigenous-languages-are-danger-extinction
That one of 6000 frog species that's going extinct? It must be preserved!!! Doesn't matter how many more humans will have to starve or freeze to death because of it, gotta save the frogs!
Polar bears? They're more important than all of humanity, obviously!
These people are like hoarders. Absolutely vile.
It's data. We're losing data. (Not to mention the problem of human death.)
Forget all those stupid useless "liberal arts" college degrees like "underwater basket weaving": we need to train half the human population as anthropological researchers NOW, so they can interview the other half, and record this irreplaceable data that we're losing every time someone dies or even forgets anything. I'm serious. There's stuff that's evolved for thousands of years, in conditions that will never be replicated, and it's being replaced by English and McDonalds and woke leftism. (And were I saying this more than 50 years ago, I'd include "Christianity", too.) This is data that future humans, or our AI successors, will curse us for not preserving, and we deserve whatever virtual hell they condemn us to.
But maybe Elon Musk will succeed with Neuralink and be able to record people's brains. That'd also do the job.
You aren’t disproving the parent poster’s point that it’s just hoarding. How about this viewpoint: notable data has already been written down, and data that hasn’t passed this filter isn’t worth preserving?
I disagree, but I'll leave it at that.
I don't think spelling reform in English would be conceivable right now, because there are too many different countries, but the British could have done it, in the 18th-19th centuries.
> Esperanto would be an obviously brilliant idea if more people had adopted it.
Is that true ? I don't know anything about Esperanto, but is it obviously and objectively better than Quenya or Klingon ?
Klingon was deliberately devised to be as unlike human languages as possible while still being a language that could in principle be learned and pronounced by human actors. Its grammar is very weird - for instance the object-verb-subject word order, and the polypersonal verb agreement are things that very few natural languages do. Esperanto by contrast was deliberately devised to be easy to learn by as many people as possible (not fully successfully - it still has some unnecessary features that are complications that make it harder, like the accusative case, or its wide range of phonemes that many languages do not have, but it was a decent first attempt).
Klingon wasn't "unlike human languages", but rather "unlike common human languages". A lot of the grammar is based on Native American languages, which are mostly dead or dying.
Okay, fair enough; I guess “as unlike your own language as possible, for as large a number of people as possible, while still being useable as a language”. Though even then, if I remember rightly, the phonology really is like nothing on earth, with its asymmetry between unvoiced alveolar ’t’ and voiced retroflex ‘d’ and other features.
As opposed to Esperanto, whose phonology is just based on the particular dialect of Polish that Zamenhof spoke. I guess they're two ends of a spectrum.
I'd say yes, considering that there are millions of people who learned Esperanto voluntarily, despite the obvious lack of opportunities to use it.
Meanwhile, the popularity of Klingon is clearly based on popularity of Star Trek (as opposed to the linguistic qualities of the language itself), but despite the size of the sci-fi fandom and their famous willingness to study obscure things, I doubt that even the most hardcore fans are actually *using* Klingon to talk to each other (especially about topics unrelated to Star Trek).
So it seems that when people spend comparable effort to learn Esperanto and Klingon, they succeed at the former but fail at the latter. Which suggests that the former is an order of magnitude easier to learn. (This fact is completely obvious to anyone who actually learned Esperanto, but of course I am writing this argument for the ones who did not.)
You can learn basic Esperanto in one (hardcore) week. One year of normal education at school would give you a level comparable to people who use English as a second language on internet.
> You can learn basic Esperanto in one (hardcore) week.
If that's true, then IMO Esperanto is not ready for prime-time, because learning sufficient vocabulary to talk about anything besides "donde esta la biblioteca" will take longer than that (for the average person). One year of formal education might be more realistic (as you'd said).
However, the question remains: why should anyone learn Esperanto ? As you'd said, people learn Klingon more or less so they can pretend to be Klingons (the same goes for Elvish), and join an existing community of people who all share the same hobby. People learn English if they want to talk to an international community of ordinary people about ordinary things -- be it finance, technology, politics, or popular fiction. What niche does Esperanto fill ? From what I know of its history (and I could be wrong), it was supposed to be the common language of the glorious proletariat; but Communist countries are notoriously insular, so that didn't really work out...
People learn Esperanto so they can go to Esperanto conventions, so it's a lot more similar than you might think. It really is just a hobby with a passionate community. The difference is that you don't have to learn Klingon to be a Trekkie.
Just wait until you try Toki Pona
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eLn6LC1RpAo
I thought it was supposed to be a language which would make war less likely.
Well, it's easier to learn. But that's not really what I meant (I didn't mean Esperanto itself is better than something else), I just meant that if it had been more successful, then it would be useful, and people would consider it an "obviously" brilliant idea.
If it had been more successful, it would have developed the features that natural languages have.
For 2, it seems a matter of degree? There are people who, to some degree, reject things like "cooked food", "clothing", "metal", and "cleaning wounds", but none of those have risen to the level of "tribal" yet.
Some Christian sects reject blood transfusions and, in the extreme cases, all modern medicine.
Hm, "pervasive" doesn't fit the anti-vax stuff, not directly. Anti-vax isn't pervasive on the right, but pro-vax is pervasive on the left. Maybe it's enough to have the rejection of the rejection be tribal?
Yeah but not mainstream ones, I don't think. Like with being an "organic raw-food vegan", it's got an affiliation, but it's not pervasive? That's the distinction within the word "tribal" that I was trying to make, anyway.
Short phrase: “tainted by association”?
1) Vaccines? Which also point to what I think is a part of the problem, where the "obviously good from an objective perspective" parts become less obvious when a bunch of people become highly motivated to seek out any flaws. (**Are** there inherent problems with mRNA vaccines? I have no idea. But they definitely get the job done in the short run.)
I had exchanges, some of them civil, with lots of anti-vaxxers on Twitter during the period when I hung out on medical Twitter as part of my volunteer work on Evusheld distribution. Some tried earnestly to convince me I was mistaken about the benefits of the covid vax, and sent me to their evidence. There is a whole world out there of studies, blogs and forums supporting the idea that the covid vax is utterly ineffective and/or very dangerous. Many of the sites are not obviously wacko, and lots of the people posting on them sound pleasant and caring. I see how people whose initial source of info was those sites came to believe that the vax was NOT obviously good from an objective perspective.
Everyone got Covid and so if the metric one looks at is avoiding getting infected then nothing worked. But if the metric is avoiding a severe case of Covid that leads to hospitalization and death then the data says mitigation measures that slowed spread until availability of the vaccines worked.
So we have reams of data with different states doing different degrees of mitigation measures and different populations with varying degrees of vaccination rates and it all points to mitigation measures reduced spread in 2020 and 2021 and vaccines reduced severity through the Delta variant. Oh, and no data indicates vaccines were dangerous or exacerbated spread or whatever anti-vaxxers said at various points in 2021.
> no data indicates vaccines were dangerous
Are you sure about that claim, or would you like to revise your phrasing?
I just want to be clear on your position so you can't move the goalposts after I utterly obliterate that claim.
I kept an open mind and listened to Alex Berenson in 2021…he was wrong about everything! Excess deaths are back to normal and so if the vaccines were as dangerous as the anti-vaxxers were saying we would see an uptick in excess deaths in highly vaccinated populations. I got 3 Pfizer shots and I’ve moved on with my life…I’m not sure what you want me to say. Is driving dangerous?? Because I drive a car.
Ok, so is your claim now that vaccines are dangerous, but the danger is so minimal that no one should worry about it?
Yeah, as biased as the media can be, I think if there were any common or severe short-term negative effects of the covid-19 vaccines, we'd have seen them by now, simply due to the number of people who got vaccinated in a short period of time. That said, I think it's a true statement that "there's no evidence that the covid-19 vaccines are safe in the long term". But by now we all know the problem with that, right? And in this case, we simply won't know until enough time has passed, which is an unavoidable problem when rushing out a new type of vaccine for a new disease.
Hey, I get it. Did I sound like the antivaxxers convinced me?
The thing about how the vax didn't prevent people's catching covid is very problematic. I understand that what the vax does is reduce severity, & by doing that saves lives and probably also reduces the chance of Long Covid and probably also reduces the contagiousness of the infected. But a LOT of people don't get that. Several well-educated people I know have expressed doubts about the usefulness of the vaccine because it did not prevent them or anyone they know from catching covid.
I understand why they have the wrong idea about the covid vax. Many of the vaxes we get do give sterilizing immunity. And the government for a long time dangled before us the idea that we could get to zero covid, stamping it out entirely, at least in the US, the way we did various other diseases we get vaxed for. The idea was also dangled as a justification for masking and lockdownish regulations. Meanwhile it was obvious to doctors & scientists who understood immunology that covid was not the kind of illness it is possible to stamp out. But the government was not informing the public, it was *herding* the public, by saying the things it believed would cause people to act in the way that it thought were most likely to reduce deaths. It later became clear the public had been misinformed, and I'm sure the resulting mistrust has helped power the anti-vax movement. Long term result of this is that US did terribly with covid, and is way up near the top of the list if countries for covid deaths per million. And now there's growing resistance to childhood vaccinations for a bunch of killer diseases that really can be stamped out.
I'm furious about all that. (Nor angry at you, though. Topic just triggered a rant.)
America has a high Covid death rate for two not entirely unrelated reasons—high poverty levels AND for some reason the mitigation measures became politicized. I believe the politicization happened because lower educated Trump supporters believed the elites/Deep State were using the pandemic to defeat Trump by tanking the economy. Now I’m educated and I’ve followed politics closely and the candidates I support generally lose and so I’m used to not getting my way in politics (I also was never anti-Trump because I agree with some of his 2016 platform and I hate Bush Republicans)…but Trump’s strongest supporters started following politics closely in 2015 and they feel they are entitled to always having their candidate win and so they threw a tantrum in 2020/21 when Trump lost because they believe it was the work of elites/Deep State.
Politicization happened on both ends, and very early. Nancy Pelosi somewhat famously tried to make light of the pandemic in February of 2020, inviting people to keep going outside and don't worry about it.
Prior to the election in 2020 major Democrat candidates and politicians were claiming the vax was unreliable and not to be trusted, with some (Andrew Cuomo) saying that they would ban it in their state until it was more thoroughly vetted than Trump planned to do. And Pfizer deliberately delayed release of the vaccine until after the election in order to hurt Trump. By that winter Democrats were publicly getting the shot and fully in support of it, and everything switched around.
I don't trust much on this issue, it's been thoroughly politicized. ETA: I find it hilarious that Trump continued to market the vaccine as one of his signature initiatives but his base didn't want it and his opponent's would never give him credit.
Yes, that's true. But you don't agree that dishonest communications from the government played a part? I think gov't failure to state clearly that it was going to be impossible to stamp out covid, no matter how many people masked and got vaxxed did great damage to people's trust. It even reduced *my* trust in government, which was not high to begin with.
For 2, how about the theory of evolution? Or for an invention, the printing press.
(1) seems harder because anything in that category is likely to be a spicy topic by definition. Ideologically, I'd suggest "homosexuality can be a lifestyle choice rather than innate" - situational homosexuality and evidence from other cultures suggest this to be true, but it pattern-matches to anti-gay religious arguments, so it's more politic to talk about sexual orientation being a fixed part of the identity that one discovers (which for many people it may well be).
It's hard to come up with a concrete invention for (1). Perhaps execution by gassing? I oppose the death penalty, but I'd much prefer nitrogen asphyxiation to a lethal injection.
I hear the Scriveners' Guild is on strike against the printing press... :-)
Re: 2: "Brandon Hendrickson...has a post up responding to comments"
From the refered to post(there was no option to comment there but I did subscribe):
"this is too important an endeavor to succumb to pessimism and gloominess."
Pessimism meet Blake:
"We paint the world around us in the colours of the world inside. Just as the driver who complains how bad the traffic was fails to recognise that they themselves were the traffic, so too do those who complain about being trapped in a terrible world fail to realise the extent to which their choice of focus has helped create that world.”
--John Higgs, William Blake vs the World, 2021
How do we adjust the "world inside" - if we need to?
Not terribly actionable, but:
"Then she told herself to stop her nonsense. If you looked for things to make you feel hurt and wretched and unnecessary, you were certain to find them, more easily each time, so easily, soon, that you did not even realize you had gone out searching."
- Dorothy Parker
"if you looked for things to make you feel ...wretched...you were certain to find them"
A natural tendency. Da experts suggest habitual thankfulness for stuff we so often take for granted. Tim Urban wrote something about this on Twitter/X today.
How do you make yourself feel thankful, though? I'm not feeling wretched these days -- have my ups and downs, but do OK -- but I really have never experienced feeling grateful for the things I like -- the sunrise, my friends, my house, my parents. I have often felt *glad* these things are part of my life, but I just do not get gratefulness. Gratefulness is something you feel for things that someone has given you, or helped you with. Gratefulness implies a giver. I am an atheist. There is no giver! Am I supposed to feel grateful to luck? I really do not get it. And even if I did, I do not see how it is possible to form a habit of feeling a certain way. Do you think you could form a habit of feeling sociable, or cool and comfortable no matter what the weather, or curious, or not hungry?
[I wrote this in response to receiving an email notification of your post and now notice how similar it is to the other responses]
"How do you make yourself feel thankful"
I'd say you don't "make yourself" but you can direct your attention to advantages and stuff that you haven't always had and may not have in the future - which promotes a sense thankfulness and if we do it often enough a perpetual feeling of gratefulness.
"I urge you to please notice when you are happy, and exclaim or murmur or think at some point, if this isn't nice, I don't know what is.'“
--Kurt Vonnegut [humanist], “Knowing What’s Nice,” an essay from In These Times, 2003
"I'm an atheist"
I'd say that our brains evolved to believe in a higher power and not coming to terms with that puts one's reasoning and opportunity for happiness at a disadvantage. It may seem intellectually dishonest to 'believe in the gods' at one level while not believing on another. Our evolved primate minds do this sort of thing all. the. time. (1)
"We all believe many things which we have no good ground for believing, because, subconsciously, our nature craves certain kinds of action which these beliefs would render reasonable if they were true.”
--Bertrand Russell [atheist], Why Men Fight, 1916
I've been trying to model this and posted a draft in last week's open thread, if interested.
(1) I have a different but compatible approach to this one for those who believe in deity at 'all' levels.
When people do kind and helpful things for me, I do feel grateful. And I already do direct my attention to positive things in my life, and savor them, and feel happy that they are there. The part that sticks in my throat is feeling *grateful* for the things I'm enjoying and savoring that are not in my life because somebody provided them for me, but because they're part of the planet, or because of luck.
As for Bertrand Russell, ""We all believe many things which we have no good ground for believing, because, subconsciously, our nature craves certain kinds of action which these beliefs would render reasonable if they were true.” I'm sure I do believe things I have no good ground for believing -- in fact I can easily think of a couple of examples. But believing that someone or something gave me the wonderful gift of sunrises is just not one of those things.
Also, what is it about this gratitude thing that makes people who are into it so determined to convert others, even others like me who have a way of thinking about life that works for them?
[from earlier] "Gratefulness implies a giver."
I'm suggesting it doesn't have to. Thankful/grateful that we've been fortunate - to not take our current good health or full belly for granted, occasionally.
"The part that sticks in my throat is feeling *grateful* for the things...because somebody provided them for me"
The pleasurable things we experience in life are largely due to circumstances beyond our control - so 'good fortune.' Humans tend to personify, I'd say it's because of our social nature, but I digress. Consider digging around inside and get an explanation as to why "it sticks in your throat."
"I'm sure I do believe things I have no good ground for believing ...But believing that someone or something gave me the wonderful gift of sunrises is just not one of those things."
I'm *not* saying you should believe in 'the gods'(by any name).
I'm suggesting we should all consider evidence that our brains have evolved to do so and if there are penalties for not acknowledging this.
"what is it about this gratitude thing that makes people who are into it so determined to convert others"
It's simply a basic technique recommended over time by many historical persons and ScIeNcE. Why wouldn't we want to share it with others who in turn may do with it what they will?
It may be more useful at a time of acute adversity but better to have the habit in place beforehand, I say.
(Carefully reads the post three times)
An atheist here. There's no Giver, but there are myriad small-g givers, people who helped along the way, did something they didn't have to out of their kindness or just no reason at all.
And definitely I feel grateful to luck. There are many random forks in the road of life. When I see a homeless person, "there but for the grace of God (i.e., Luck for a non-believer) go I" is a thought that crossed my mind more than once. A couple of random events could have turned what now is a comfortable good life into something much less pleasant.
I installed what I call "the cheerleader function". If anything is important enough to complain about when it's going badly, it's important enough to appreciate when it's going well.
For me, there's an added hook. There's more complaining than praise, so I can get originality points for noticing something good that a lot of people are ignoring.
I'm an agnostic, and perhaps I personify the universe.
I do consider gratefulness to be a double-edged sword so far as depression is concerned. It's a reminder that anything good is part of a system--good things can and eventually will go away.
For example, I recently got treatment-- a corticosteroid shot-- for a mild case of trigger finger, and that, and maybe some massage-- which has it just about healed.
I'm grateful for having a problem which was fairly minor and well-enough understood that there are good treatments for it.
Trigger finger (not to be confused with itchy trigger finger, a very different syndrome) is a problem with the tendons leading to a finger or thumb. The finger doesn't straighten easily. In severe cases the finger gets stuck in a bent position.
In my case, I could straighten the fourth finger on my left hand, but it took a bit of effort, and it popped into straightness rather than moving smoothly.
It's caused by a nodule on the ligament which interferes with a "pulley" which I think is a rounded bit of bone.
I could make a good guess that it was a ligament because it didn't feel like a problem in the joint.
Trigger finger is fairly common-- about one person in 50 gets it. No one is quite sure why. It might be overuse, injury, gout, diabetes (which I've got and quadruples the odds of getting it), and it can also happen spontaneously. I'm just surprised that it haven't heard of it before.
I'm also surprised that while the symptom was at the joint, the cause was a ways down below the pad under my finger.
Another surprise was the rather large building that was just for hand problems, and the building was just for one medical company. I'd never thought about how many people with hand problems there would be in a city the size of Philadelphia.
Another surprise-- I was talking about it with a friend, and she told me that carpal tunnel syndrome is now considered to be mostly hereditary rather than an overuse problem.
No one here has had trigger finger? I got comments from two or three people people on my facebook who had, and if it's one person in fifty who's had it, I would expect to hear of it from at least one person here.
There’s a recipe: https://fs.blog/david-foster-wallace-this-is-water/
Never in all my life until now (which hasn't been that short) have I felt such an urge to ritually disembowel a man.
"As a man is, So he Sees" (per below)
"In the Divine Humanism that Blake practised and which his work represents, we have a responsibility to recognise the imaginative aspect of our lives and use it well. As Blake told us, how we see is as important as what we see, ‘For the Eye altering alters all.’ For Blake, there was a moral component to perception. As he wrote, ‘The tree which moves some to tears of joy is in the Eyes of others only a Green thing that stands in the way […] As a man is, So he Sees.’ We paint the world around us in the colours of the world inside. Just as the driver who complains how bad the traffic was fails to recognise that they themselves were the traffic, so too do those who complain about being trapped in a terrible world fail to realise the extent to which their choice of focus has helped create that world."
--John Higgs, William Blake vs the World, 2021
The mere fact you actually had something to say to this bizarre disembowelment comment is kind of amazing...
Yes!
Think different.
Agreed!
"if you've really learned how to think, how to pay attention, then you will know you have other options. It will actually be within your power to experience a crowded, loud, slow, consumer-hell-type situation as not only meaningful but sacred,”
--David Foster Wallace, This Is Water, 2005
That’s a wonderful quote.
What is biotech's killer app?
I'm sure I'm not the only one who's heard proclamations over the last several years that biotech in the early 21st century is going to be the equivalent to the information technology revolution in the 80's and 90's. Bill Gates famously said that if he were a young person today that he would go into biotech and the general consensus (hype?) seems to be that biotech is posed to impact our lives the same way the computing and internet giants did back then.
The more I think about this the more I become skeptical, and the reason comes back to the question posed above. To put it another way, what is the biotech equivalent of the personal computer? What is the product that biotech will eventually put in every house in America and every pocket in the world? Because that's what the information revolution did and that's what made it a revolution. Perhaps I'm simply not imaginative enough, but I'm struggling to think of a product that could come out of biotech in the near future (10-20 years) that would have an equivalent impact.
Slowing aging is one possibility.
How about exercise in a pill?
That would be amazing. But baring some major advancements I REALLY don't see that happening in the near future (next ~10 years).
I still have hope for the results of studying people who live into their 90s in good health. Last I heard, it's not that they have great genes for structure, it's that they have better than average protective genes.
It might take more than ten years for research and testing, though.
Speaking as a biologist that does not work on human aging (or indeed, humans) the impression I get from reading the research is that aging is a multifaceted process with no one cause, and therefore no one solution. It's probably too much to hope for a silver bullet, but the development of a constellation of treatments that cover most, if not all, of the causes of aging might be in the cards at some point.
While I doubt it will happen till I'm already old and grey, I'm keeping the faith. What else is there to do?
Does the Green Revolution count ?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Green_Revolution
Amazing advancement, but didn't really involve biotech. More to do with adoption of modern farming techniques (i.e. fertilizer, mechanization) and better breeds of crops that grew more efficiently in an agricultural environment.
Right, but those breeds of crops were created using an early version of biotech. Monsanto took the next step by engineering transgenic corn, BTW. In fact, a lot of the produce that you eat today is transgenic, not just corn.
Not really. The GMO backlash, and a fairly conservative approach by regulators and large companies like Monsanto (now a division of Bayer), means that 99% of the GMO crops out there are some combination of double-stacked soybean, corn, cotton or canola.
The list of approved crops is slowly growing (see, for instance, https://www.isaaa.org/gmapprovaldatabase/cropslist/default.asp), but its still going to be a long time before we see transgenics dominate the fruit and veg aisle. And even then, its going to be overwhelmingly glyphosate resistance and BT rather than anything interesting.
Potatoes, tomatoes, corn, rice, beans, and other staples are all on that list, though.
Penicillin.
Seriously, though, I'm with you on the skepticism. Biotech is not the wild west of the computing 80s. It is a mature and highly regulated industry that has been quietly working away for a full century at incremental improvements to public health. There are absolutely new and exciting developments in the pipeline (my new favorite is 'Inverse-Vaccines' which could potentially combat auto-immune disorders) but I've not encountered anything that would suggest the industry is about the upend the whole world like computing managed to do.
If "biotech" is defined to include all of pharma, one could argue that the contraceptive pill and the vaccines that mostly eliminated smallpox and many childhood diseases have had a bigger impact on society and people's lives than computing. So I guess it already did "upend" the world.
The pill may be the best answer I've seen so far. But as you point out, that was developed decades ago.
Are you not including medical care advances? It seems like there's been a lot of that in the last 20 years, including lots of marketable products found in homes - think medicines that are common and very helpful to people with ongoing conditions.
No, I'm not really thinking of medical advancements. Which isn't to say that medical advancements aren't great or that they haven't had significant impacts on society, but I don't see them being transformative in the way ubiquitous computing was and is.
Hmm, I guess I consider the medical industry to be pretty huge, and advances within it as well. There's a lot of variation on the value of medical and tech companies, but medical revenue looks to be about $1 trillion a year in the US ($12 trillion globally) and tech has lower revenues in both (hard to find good revenue information for US companies, but maybe half a trillion, and $4.2 trillion globally under "tech").
Very hard at that 30,000 foot view to determine how much of that is growth in technology and such, but life expectancy has gone up 11 years in the US since 1950, which is certainly not small - roughly a 16% increase. The list of previously fatal diseases that we can now treat or cure is also pretty impressive. HIV/AIDS being a more recent example. Cancer survival rates has increased significantly as well.
Of course, this is less Apples and Oranges and more Apples and Coal in terms of which is more "transformative" so maybe there's no way to determine which is more important, but I think you're downplaying how big of a deal medicine has been in society.
Growing replacement organs for people.
Some type of biological interface for AI.
In the case of biotech, might we want to find a different formulation for “game-changing, universally-adopted application” that doesn’t involve the k-word?
I did not consider that and now that you've pointed it out...yeah, that was a bad decision on my part.
Perhaps the "biotech PC", just to complete the analogy.
We can still hope for "cancer-killing" treatments, right?
No doubt.
Examples could be the covid vaccines and semaglutide.
Sure, if you're okay with the not-so-occasional brain blood clot or heart failure.
It's always funny when people market these vaccines as some completely novel technique that was mastered in a matter of months through a marvel of engineering. What they don't tell you is that mRNA vaccines have been known about and actively tested for decades, but were never rolled out because they always ended up being toxic over the long term.
https://www.statnews.com/2017/01/10/moderna-trouble-mrna/
> mRNA is a tricky technology. Several major pharmaceutical companies have tried and abandoned the idea, struggling to get mRNA into cells without triggering nasty side effects.
> The indefinite delay on the Crigler-Najjar project signals persistent and troubling safety concerns for any mRNA treatment that needs to be delivered in multiple doses
> Three former employees and collaborators close to the process said Moderna was always toiling away on new delivery technologies in hopes of hitting on something safer than what it had. (Even Bancel has acknowledged, in an interview with Forbes, that the delivery method used in Moderna’s first vaccines “was not very good.”)
> In order to protect mRNA molecules from the body’s natural defenses, drug developers must wrap them in a protective casing... dose too much, and the drug is too toxic for patients.
> Moderna’s scientists... scoured the medical literature for diseases that might be treated with just small amounts of additional protein. “And that list of diseases is very, very short,” said the former employee who described Bancel as needing a Hail Mary. Crigler-Najjar was the lowest-hanging fruit. Yet Moderna could not make its therapy work, former employees and collaborators said. The safe dose was too weak, and repeat injections of a dose strong enough to be effective had troubling effects on the liver in animal studies.
https://www.science.org/content/article/can-multibillion-dollar-biotech-prove-its-rna-drugs-are-safe-rare-disease
> Moderna has promised to engineer its way out of those traps... BioNTech are also testing several mRNA-based cancer vaccines in clinical trials... companies will need an mRNA drug that's safe and effective for repeated use throughout a patient's life. Some have been skeptical that's achievable. Early generations of Moderna's drugs didn't meet that standard in animal tests, acknowledges its president, Stephen Hoge; over time, liver toxicity and immune reactions reared their heads.
I wonder, was there some sudden breakthrough in the safety of the technology precisely in February 2020? Or was it a simple utilitarian calculation of "hundreds of thousands will die, but millions will be saved (and billions will be made)"?
Both great technologies. The mRNA vaccines in particular seem like they have great potential to speed up developments in several medical fields. But neither are really what I'm talking about. I'm thinking more of consumer products, something that the average person would purchase for their own personal use. More than that, consumer products that would become so ubiquitous that we can't imagine what life was like before them, a la the PC and the smartphone.
Something like ~20% of the worlds calories derive from genetically modified food crops (directly or via animal feed). So that's certainly mass market, unless you're unusual, dozens of products in your kitchen (basically anything with corn) are the fruits of biotech.
Also the ethanol that's blended into gasoline (~10% around here) is pretty much all from genetically engineered corn.
CRISPR seems to have tremendous potential to change genetic code. I don't know enough about the practical uses to be specific, but it seems like it could be revolutionary for healthcare, genetic modification of crops, and in the future, genetically modifying humans at their core. Whether it will actually deliver on that potential I can't say, but it is a huge advance over the types of gene editing we were able to do before.
CRIPSR is revolutionary, but not quite as revolutionary as you might think. It solved one problem in the genetic engineering pipeline; how to make quick and cheap target edits in the genome. But the process of engineering an organism involves a lot more than just that. At this point, the bottleneck is our understanding of fundamental metabolism (i.e. what does knocking out a particular gene actually do), which is a much bigger and thornier problem to solve.
Let's say I cook a meal-prep dish (e.g. classic lasagna) today Tuesday, and I plan to serve it at a dinner on Friday. From a taste perspective, should I store it in the fridge or the freezer? Or will it taste the same regardless? (I'm totally uninterested in food safety, only taste matters.)
A few days in the fridge is perfect for pasta.
I routinely cook pasta dishes knowing I won't eat any that day. 2-4 day old pasta is ideal.
Uh... are you serious? How do you cook and then reheat the pasta?
Same as any other leftover. Cook as normal. Refrigerate. Depending on the dish put it in the oven at 350 for a while to reheat or microwave. Saucy perfection.
Huh. The way I usually cook pasta is to just boil it in salted water, no sauces added either during or after. Spaghetti doesn't do well when reheated later, it just becomes a sticky mess. I'm happy with eating cold fusilli or bow tie pasta though.
This might just be a matter of taste, I guess. So for spaghetti I would also boil it in salted water with no sauce. I would drain, and while the pasta is still warm, I combine it with sauce and any additions.
I think it reheats wonderfully but I guess one person's Saucy Perfection is another person's Sticky Mess.
One of the nontrivialities of reheating frozen lasagne is that you can't exactly stir it to distribute the heat evenly.
Fridge unless you need to wait long enough that it might start going bad (in your case, if there's a chance you might not serve it on Friday). We've had times when we thought we would reheat something in a day or two and end up throwing it out 7-10 days later because something came up and we forgot.
Freezer causes ruptures in the food because ice crystals expand. I had to freeze a 7 pound prime rib roast once because we needed to postpone a dinner by a week. It was clearly not as good: mushy.
Was it cooked when you froze it?
Freezing can still ruin the texture even when something is cooked. I've run into this with potatoes.
Oh sure, I suspect it would be even worse if it was cooked.
No
Fridge, and why stop at three days?
Definitely the fridge. Make sure it’s wrapped/closed tightly.
Freezing may cause liquid separation and crappy consistency as a result.
I'd go for the fridge. If it's the kind of dish that seems to be better when eaten as a leftover - and there are quite a few like that to my taste buds - then you'll get that effect from storing it in the fridge but not the freezer.
This will depend a lot on the dish, obviously. I don't know about lasagna, but e.g. chili tastes better after a few days in the fridge compared to freshly cooked.
Signal-boost for a prediction market I've set up on a small open mathematical question: https://manifold.markets/HamishTodd/in-2025-will-i-teach-people-that-pr
The phrasing of the bet will likely be more interesting to people in comparison with the mathematical content. The mathematical content is whether the Fourier transform is the same as, or importantly similar to, the "Projective dual" - the FT being a vital tool in engineering/science, and the projective dual being a largely-forgotten tool in pure math that has become somewhat controversial because of its recent appearance in computer graphics (more detail in the link)
Here's the part that I think is interesting for PM people who don't care about math/fourier transform. Above I used the word "importantly" in that explanation, which is a highly subjective word, and that's a problem for the question. There are multiple *boring* connections one could make between the two things. Those wouldn't make the things "identical", but of course you could argue that they are enough to make them "arguably similar".
I've tried to solve this subjectivity problem by phrasing it in terms of teaching. Two things can be "similar enough" that a teacher would mention their similarity when teaching them. If they are REALLY similar or identical, it can be a no-brainer to bring up the similarity. If they were only a little similar, you might only bring up the similarity if you were personally keen on both. Currently, I do NOT bring up the similarity when teaching. Question is, is something about to change my mind?
Results from the PM were interesting. I started it out with 37% "yes". It shot up to almost 90% - but has slowly declined.
Liberals in western countries often show great admiration for the culture, art, religious traditions etc. of 'indigenous' peoples around the world, and this seems fairly independent of the specific aspects of these cultural traditions. It really seems like any kind of e.g. wood carving, no mater how basic, is treated as a great work of art so long as it came from the right kind of society.
Is it possible *in principle* for these sorts of people to broadly have a negative perception of a particular indigenous culture? Like believing, without malice, 'these customs are kind of backward', 'this style of art is very boring and lacks any real positive aesthetic qualities', 'these religious traditions are very basic and unintersting'. I really can't imagine this being so.
Cynically, it seems like belonging to the set of 'indigenous culture' is all that really matters here and anything made by primitive brown people lights up a part of their brains. Less cynically, the authenticity of these forms of culture that are neither commercial nor elite in nature can be said to inherently give them artistic as well as anthropological value and is something not usually experienced in developed countries.
And to be clear, I'm talking about the present day - whatever problematic views of indigenous culture espoused by otherwise progressive (for the time) westerners in the past aren't relevant to this.
This is a function of capitalism, not leftism.
Museums want people to come see their stuff. No museum is going to say "Come look at some of the worst art we have!", just like Del Taco won't run an advertisement saying "Our burritos are terrible!"
Same with the critics. If you go look on Amazon for Art History & Criticism all the bestsellers are books that are trying to tell you about something you like. Surrealism in Paris, Rembrandt, Picasso. No one is going to write a best seller bashing artists no one has ever heard of.
Serious question - let's say indigenous art is objectively terrible in the most propound sense imaginable. How am I going to make money off that?
This sounds like selection bias - of course you only ever hear people call things interesting, people don't talk about uninteresting things!
I'm not sure how an average western liberal would even *come in contact with* indigenous art/culture/etc that wasn't interesting or admirable to them, they only encounter those things when someone has curated them for that reason.
Hello, Western Liberal here. I genuinely think Northwestern Pacific art (and Haida art and storytelling in particular) are exceptionally beautiful/good as a style - for some historical examples see the British Museum's house pole (https://www.britishmuseum.org/collection/object/E_Am1903-0314-1) and copper shield held in the Canadian museum of
history (https://www.historymuseum.ca/cmc/exhibitions/tresors/treasure/images/233_1b.gif), and I also quite like the more contemporary takes using the style (such as here: https://nativecanadianarts.com/gallery/haida-dog-salmon-skaagi/).
I haven't heard anyone praise, say, historical Australian aboriginal art in the same way.
I'm sure a small portion is people just virtue-signalling, but having swum in those circles I really don't think that's a big part of it (and, if anything, generically referring to 'indigenous art' gets the same kind of reaction as referring to Africa as a country in the 'liberal' (I'm not American, but it's approximately correct) circles I've been in.
I think part of the reason is that the good stuff gets shared, whereas the less interesting stuff doesn't. It's very similar to claims amongst certain kinds of white people that 'ethnic' food is better, or more flavourful, or whatnot, but that's just a selection effect. You don't see Mongolian (not hot pot, which is Chinese), Papua New Guinean, or Ugandan, restaurants around, because the food there is terrible, and instead we're just exposed to the best (for my biases, Ethiopian, Indian, and Thai).
>I haven't heard anyone praise, say, historical Australian aboriginal art in the same way.
Most American liberals aren't familiar with it, but Aboriginal art in Australia is extremely highly regarded, corporations and other organizations will pay big money to commission art from aboriginal artists, galleries will display their art etc.
And as far as customs go, it seems that in some ways aboriginals really were quite backward in a modern progressive sense, especially around their treatment of women. I remember seeing someone on reddit passionately arguing against the claim that colonization was not meaningfully different to intertribal war in pre-colonial australia. They claimed that unlike the colonists, aboriginals understood how sacred a people's land was and would almost never take it. They would instead "only" steal women (and other resources). So even widespread sex trafficking isn't enough to indict traditional aboriginal culture.
I'd agree on that point, e.g. those same Northwestern Pacific cultures whose art I admire widely practiced slavery and had a formalised hierarchy. Not great, widely lost in the genericisation of 'native' or 'aboriginal' cultures seen in Europe and North America, which seems to be some kind of romanticised meld of east coast cultures in Canada and the United States (some of whom, to be fair, did seem to be actually fairly egalitarian, such as the Mi'kmaq.
I see it as broadly the same impulse that has North Americans see Europeans as 'sophisticated' in some generic sense.
I would imagine a lot of this comes from a reflexive distaste for modern culture. If you don't like the world around you, you search for things from a different one, which at this point are mostly indigenous cultures. Everything else is becoming something of a mono-culture.
> 'this style of art is very boring and lacks any real positive aesthetic qualities',
You mean like Hallmark greeting cards? Landscape paintings on black velvet? Lava lamps? Plastic flamingos?
Who needs indigenous?
I would also like to propose a distinction between artifact and work of art. Looking at old stuff made by cultures that have somewhat vanished in the world, there is a lot of context that needs to be interpolated. Otherwise, you are just staring at an old piece of wood and wondering why it’s in a museum. I don’t think it’s realistic to try and judge art without any cultural context. Also, it’s not reasonable to view all these objects as intentional works of art per se there is a lot of shaping and decorative treatments that don’t necessarily imply some great secret or intellectual or cultural trope. But it is interesting to speculate on what the interest in those forms was, and what it signified.
A good example is the elephant dung paintings that were shown in New York, that Rudy Giuliani had a fit about. They were a mashup of Catholic imagery and a material that had sacred qualities to the indigenous people that the artist hailed from; a people that had had the Catholic religion introduced to them by foreigners. So it all comes down to one’s attitude about elephant dung. If you are not prepared to include that context in your viewing of the object, then it’s just sacrilege against the Virgin Mary. I don’t really know what the artists intention was because I have never spoken to the person, but it’s not hard for me to except that it is a fusion of the sacred across some cultural boundary, and I can look at it that way, as opposed to the way, it was described in the papers; someone splattering elephant shit on a canvas, and insulting Catholicism while they were at it.
The boomerang was a very practical hunting instrument, but sometimes they were decorated quite laboriously. How is that different from a colt 45 with gold inlay on the barrel they are in museums as well.
Chris Ofili. And I remembered the name off the top of my head. Thing about the "sacred indigenous" stuff is that he's thoroughly Westernised and was using it as a gimmick. Modern art is a cut-throat world and you need something to make you stand out; he was mixing Western Christian art with 'native' art and things like cut-outs from porn magazines, and it was novel and gimmicky enough for the galleries to boost him.
The 'shock' artists of the 90s onwards, you don't hear so much about them today because time has moved on and new gimmick artists are out there. Damien Hirst and the other 'Saatchi artists' became parodies of themselves (I have no idea what Tracy Emin is doing today, because they're not Controversial Art that is splashed all over the media anymore). In fact, they're so *uncontroversial*, some of them are now RAs (Royal Academicians, members of the Royal Academy of Arts, which is about as Establishment as you can get):
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Young_British_Artists
Ofili himself seems to have left London et al behind and is now living in Trinidad and Tobago, and again - he's CBE (Commander of the British Empire), so Establishment awarded for his controversial, shocking art.
The painting you mention is not particularly deep. Sure, there's a lot of surface shock value, but eh. Also, it's not done (despite the Wikipedia article) in the Black Madonna style; indeed, it's the stereotype golliwog/offensive black minstrel imagery style, which if a white artist had painted it would have caused immense offence. What Ofili was trying to do there? No idea 🤷♀️
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chris_Ofili
"One of his paintings, The Holy Virgin Mary, a depiction of the Virgin Mary, was at issue in a lawsuit between the mayor of New York City, Rudy Giuliani, and the Brooklyn Museum of Art when it was exhibited there in 1999 as a part of the "Sensation" exhibit. The painting depicted a Black Madonna surrounded by images from blaxploitation movies and close-ups of female genitalia cut from pornographic magazines, and elephant dung."
He *did* get in trouble for what could be viewed as another 'religious' painting, "The Upper Room" which was thirteen portraits of macaque monkeys. The reference to the Last Supper can be made from that. But the trouble wasn't on the grounds of the Christian religion, but rather the real sacred value: offending against money:
"The Upper Room is an installation of 13 paintings of rhesus macaque monkeys by Ofili in a specially designed room. It was bought by the Tate Gallery in 2005 and caused controversy as Ofili was on the board of the Tate Trustees at the time of the purchase. In 2006 the Charity Commission censured the Tate for this purchase."
Again, it's very hard to portray yourself as some outsider artist rebelling against conventions when you're on the board of the Tate 😁
"What Ofili was trying to do there? No idea"
You said it yourself:
"Modern art is a cut-throat world and you need something to make you stand out; "
Again, a white guy wouldn't have gotten away with it.
It sounded like it all worked out well for him.
I looked the elephant dung thing up and I think you're misrepresenting it:
The work employs mixed media, including oil paint, glitter, and polyester resin, and also elephant dung, map pins and collaged pornographic images. The central Black Madonna is surrounded by many collaged images that resemble butterflies at first sight, but on closer inspection are photographs of female genitalia; an ironic reference to the putti that appear in traditional religious art. A lump of dried, varnished elephant dung forms one bared breast, and the painting is displayed leaning against the gallery wall, supported by two other lumps of elephant dung, decorated with coloured pins: the pins on the left are arranged to spell out "Virgin" and the one on the right "Mary".
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Holy_Virgin_Mary
I don't know that it's possible to interpret that as anything other than intentionally provocative.
I apologize for misrepresenting. It was not my intent. I was speaking largely from memory of the event, and my own vague assessment after reading the media firestorm at the time from all sides of the fence. also, I’m an artist, so I try and find the good in things.
I mean, taking a position on it at the time, was literally like having shit thrown at you.😆😆😆
Yeah it’s provocative alright. Clearly he is in someway challenging the notion of what is held sacred in different cultures. Was there any mention of what elephant dung means in that culture? I’ve never really explored that.
Edit: Elephants in Africa represent power. Dung is meant to suggest fertility. African art has always incorporated dung without meaning to be offensive -- there is an African mask in the Brooklyn Museum made of wood, honey, metal and dung.Oct 5, 1999
Are "challenge the notion of what is held sacred" and taking a rather literal shit on Catholicism in this case just two sides of the same coin? When I hear phrases like "he's an artist challenging the notion of what is held sacred" by incorporating porn and feces into traditional Catholic imagery, my mind drifts back to Reservoir Dogs and I think to myself "sure, and Like A Virgin is just a song about a sensitive girl who meets a nice fella."
Well, that’s a point of view.
I would imagine a person, living somewhere in a tribal culture and worshiping various forms of gods and various symbols of fertility (the main one here in this case), and then having Catholic missionaries come to them and overtime incorporating and blending sacred symbols would lead to another point of view. The piece made me think about all those things and I think they are things worth thinking about.
I mean, in terms of their own symbols and culture, they might will be venerating the Virgin Mary, and not desecrating her. I think it depends very much and how you view it.
I don’t mean to dispute your interpretation, but merely to offer mine.
"I would imagine a person, living somewhere in a tribal culture and worshiping various forms of gods and various symbols of fertility (the main one here in this case), and then having Catholic missionaries come to them and overtime incorporating and blending sacred symbols would lead to another point of view. "
Dude, he was born in Manchester and educated Catholic, it's not like he was a native Nigerian tribesman forcibly converted by the Jesuits 😁
"Ofili was born in Manchester, England, to parents May and Michael Ofili of Nigerian descent. When he was eleven, his father left the family and moved back to Nigeria. Ofili was for some years educated at St. Pius X High School for Boys, and then at Xaverian College in Victoria Park, Manchester."
Nigeria has a strong Catholic presence (broadly speaking it's divided between Christian South and Muslim North which, naturally, has led to tensions):
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catholic_Church_in_Nigeria
"Christianity was followed by an estimated 46.18% of the Nigerian population in 2020; one-quarter of Christians in Nigeria are Catholic (12.39% of the country's population)."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nigeria#Religion
"Islam dominates northwestern Nigeria (Hausa, Nupe, Fulani and others), with 99% Muslim, and northeastern Nigeria (Kanuri, Fulani and other groups). In the west, the Yoruba people are predominantly Muslim with a significant Christian minority and a few adherents of traditional religions. Protestant and locally cultivated Christianity are widely practised in Western areas, while Roman Catholicism is a more prominent Christian feature of southeastern Nigeria. Both Roman Catholicism and Protestantism are observed in the Ibibio, Efik, Ijo and Ogoni lands of the south. The Igbos (predominant in the east) and the Ibibio (south) are 98% Christian, with 2% practising traditional religions. The middle belt of Nigeria contains the largest number of minority ethnic groups in Nigeria, who were found to be majority Christians and members of traditional religions, with a small proportion of Muslims."
Even the potted bio admits the elephant dung was a marketing ploy (he discovered it when visiting Zimbabwe, but his family background is Nigerian, so it would be like an Latin-American artist who had nothing to do with Switzerland except going on a visit there once deciding to use Swiss woodworking as trademark of his art):
https://artuk.org/discover/artists/ofili-chris-b-1968
"British painter of Nigerian descent, born in Manchester. He studied at Chelsea College of Art and Design and the Royal College of Art. While at the latter, Ofili won a travelling scholarship to Zimbabwe. There he discovered the material which was to be his trademark, elephant dung. This was a way of linking his art to his African heritage but it was also, at first, used as a clever marketing ploy. Stickers marked ‘elephant shit’ were placed on London street furniture and two ‘shit sales’ were held (more performance pieces than actual functioning market stalls), one in Berlin and one in Brixton market. Ofili's brilliantly coloured paintings also employ glitter and map pins (the ones with bright plastic balls on the end) to produce patterns and spell out names."
The guy knew that Exoticism sells:
"Ofili has commented on his work: ‘It's what people really want from black artists. We're the voodoo king, the voodoo queen, the witch doctor, the drug dealer, the magicien de la terre.’ Much of the debate around Ofili's work is about whether it has a critical element or simply panders to an appetite for the stereotype."
I mean...given the way that sort of cultural imperialism is usually thought of, that would certainly be going against a certain grain, if you were correct, but I fear you're giving credit where it likely isn't due.
I think we’re in a cultural period where people have deliberately entangled the art and the artist. I’m not familiar with the specific case you’re referencing with indigenous art. But more broadly, some art is prized because of the moral purity of the artist and other works are seen as disgusting because of the immorality of the artist. For example, I've been told I shouldn’t watch a film if the director or lead actor was accused of misbehavior, regardless of the quality of the film. Fiction and poetry competitions increasingly refuse to blind the names of the authors. Part of the draw for me for the ACX book review contest is that the author is blinded. This topic leads into hotbed culture war territory, but the point I’m trying to make that I think everyone can find common ground on is that the art and the artist are deeply entangled in our current culture. You can argue there’s a good reason for that due to historical injustice or there’s not a good reason for that because it's anti-meritocracy, but the common ground is that contemporary western culture sees the art and artist as inseparable.
Pretty much. Ironically I first downloaded Cultist Simulator as a protest against Alexis Kennedy's cancellation, and wound up actually getting addicted by the game!
"I think we’re in a cultural period where people have deliberately entangled the art and the artist."
As a lot of influential people have always done for as long as the concept of full-time artist has existed. A lot of them are doing it on a different specific basis than was applied by Roman elites, or Medici dukes, or popes and cardinals, or the Gilded Age founders of major 19th-century museums. It's the same approach to the art though.
I'm curious if you know of any way to quantify that entanglement? For contemporary art, you could do a art competition where the art or poetry is judged blinded versus non-blinded. Not sure how you'd quantify that retroactively to look at it in the Roman period.
Anything that involves blood or is otherwise gross is thoroughly ignored by the culturaly-curious. I'm thinking of : afghan buzkashi, scarification, entrails reading, even mexican bone washing.
FWIW, Eric Kauffman talks about this briefly near the beginning of 'Whiteshift', calling it 'left-modernism'.
I'm probably sufficiently woke leftie to answer :)
Regarding art in particular – I really don't think there's a fact of the matter about whether a particular art style is good. My personal taste is boring and parochial: I like John Constable paintings and made-for-Westerners Shin-Hanga prints. I don't particularly enjoy Aboriginal art and wouldn't use it to decorate my home. But I don't think my personal preferences should be universalised: I first-order value a world with lots of different kinds of expression, even if they don't all speak to me. I also enjoy the exercise of trying to appreciate the merits of things other people like that I don't. Finally, I would want future humans to preserve and study at least some of the things I value, simply because they're important to me.
Regarding cultural judgement more generally: I do think there's a tension here that people don't always admit to between liberal values on the one hand and liberal pluralism on the other. If I had a big red button in front of me labelled "end honour killings of women" I would push it. On the other hand, although I find ritual cannibalism distasteful, I wouldn't want to end that because my preference for pluralism outweighs my personal inclination.
While most liberals do value diversity for its own sake, I think it also serves as a second-order guardrail. "If you think you are right and this entire group of people from another culture are wrong, consider that people who have thought that in the past have caused great harm, and understand that your perspective is shaped by your cultural context". I don't think it's an injunction to fully disregard your own taste or morals, but rather a general spirit of openmindedness and a conservative (!) attitude toward cultural reform.
>It really seems like any kind of e.g. wood carving, no mater how basic, is treated as a great work of art so long as it came from the right kind of society.
I agree. When I see Aboriginal Australian art in a museum, there's never any sense that it's good or bad, or that it even COULD be good or bad. What does a masterpiece of Broken Bay Dharug art look like? What does their version of The Room look like? No idea. It's always presented in the same way by the museum curators: with bland, unfeeling veneration.
A steelman might be "it's not the place of white Westerners to pass judgment on another culture's style of art." But why shouldn't we? Isn't an important part of art that you are allowed to judge and critique it?
"Everything about your culture is bad!" is prejudicial, and "everything about your culture is good!" honestly isn't much better. Imagine an anime reviewer who gives Hayao Miyazaki's movies a 10/10, while also giving the same score to Loli Oppai Tentacle Rape 7 (or whatever), because he's white and thus shouldn't criticise Japanese culture. We'd regard that as an insult to Miyazaki!
I dunno, I kinda liked Loli Oppai Tentacle Rape 7.
Legend of the Overfiend was better than I thought it would be. There was a baroque creativity to the monsters and backgrounds, and the bit with Amano Jyaku realizing exactly how the Chojin was going to create a new world had a real sense of 'be careful what you wish for'.
Fair enough, but for me, it's tentacle rapin' or bust!
> What does a masterpiece of Broken Bay Dharug art look like?
I know nothing about the Broken Bay Dharug specifically, but in general, this could be the wrong question to ask. What I want to ask is this: do indigenous people even *have* art, in the modern sense ? For example, at my desk right now there are tons of bills, printouts, and even a jury summons (curses !). All of these items have graphical and textual elements combined purposefully together, but are they art ? In some ways, I guess you could say that they are (especially the ones with logos or diagrams on them), but we generally don't see them as such; to us, they are just functional pieces of paper designed to carry specific information. But some future historian might dig them up and hang them up at a gallery, prompting the visitors to marvel at the stark rectangular outlines and artful font kerning and whatnot...
Indigenous people definitely had art in the modern sense - both objects that were solely decorative in nature (e.g. cave paintings) and objects that were useful but had embellishments unrelated to their function (e.g. painted pottery, fancy clothing, decorated weapons).
I feel like this comment is a long way of saying “I just don’t get it.“ fair enough. I am finding it difficult to see an objective issue here to discuss.
It’s like going to someone’s house for dinner and then on the way home talking about how hideous their drapes are.
Not passing judgement would presumably be being neutral rather than enthusiastic.
I think anything made by a competent, committed craftsmen who is ignorant of modern conventions and modern competition is appealing to many modern people. I find things like that very appealing. They have a committed, unself-conscious quality that's refreshing, and of course they are unfamiliar -- novel -- and that is appealing too. I don't recall thinking of any of them as great works of art. I'm sort of doubtful that museums or anthropologists or whoever is showing or describing these things sees them as "great works of art". Are you sure you didn't add that detail out of an irritated craving to make those who like these products of indigenous peoples sound especially silly?
You're going to laugh, but that was one of the first things I noticed about reading Robert E. Howard's old Conan stories--he is entirely committed to his muscular heroes and giant snakes. No irony. I think a lot of people are sick of irony and want stuff made by people who want to make things that are beautiful.
I agree with you. I am pretty allergic to ”wokeness” but I haven’t really noticed what is described here as a problem. Objects from less developed cultures can be interesting even if they are not great art.
Well...museum curators seem to think that blank canvases and singular straight lines are great works of art worth millions, even when the artwork is by a white Westerner. By that standard, every Aboriginal should be offended that every artwork their culture has ever produced *isn't* considered a masterpiece.
I think the museum curators who think blank canvases and singular straight lines are great works of art have moved into a dimension where "greatness" and "worth a great sum of money" blur into each other. Our species adapts, you know? , and lines get blurred. Consider how a lot of people are enamored of wealth. Falling in love with someone partly because he's a billionaire isn't *entirely* different from falling from someone because they can be so funny you laugh til you cry, or because they have beautiful facial features.
Art is the most ideal field imaginable for laundering vast sums of money.
According to a quick Google search, the estimate of laundered money in the United States is about $300 billion. Money laundered in the art market is estimated at three to $6 billion worldwide per year. It is by far not the biggest way to launder money.
You're comparing one estimate about a hard to estimate thing to a different estimate about a different hard to estimate thing and coming up with a conclusion? Do I have that straight?
In fact it would be a hilariously-terrible way to launder money at any sort of scale, for several reasons that are obvious with a couple minutes' thought.
I set up a market on NAEP score decline in 2024, curious for this group's take!
https://www.metaculus.com/questions/18402/2024-naep-scores-decline/
Does anyone know whether there's any data on whether support groups are helpful for dealing with grief? My son passed away earlier this year and I'm not coping well despite my best efforts (e.g. psychotherapy, generally looking after my physical well-being, spending more time around other friends and family, somatic and breathing practices). I could theoretically drive over an hour to go to my closest perinatal loss group (which is facilitated by a professional) every few weeks but the travel time is a substantial hurdle. I'm also skeptical that it would do any good. People keep recommending support groups in the abstract but if talking to my therapist doesn't help I'm skeptical that talking to a group of strangers would help. It might be worth the drive and the emotional effort if there's evidence that it would help in the long term
Please don't give me anecdotes; I've heard from people who love support groups and from people who think they're actively harmful. I would like data but frankly my brain has been fried by everything that has happened and I'm not up for searching through databases for well-structured double-blind studies when I get home from my 9 to 5.
Something to consider is that there are now online support groups for a variety of issues, including perinatal loss. I doubt anyone can find studies on specifically online support groups, but at least it is lower risk since you will not have to make the commute.
I've already tried that (exactly because of that lower time investment) but I just actively dislike video calls. The fact that it's hard to understand people and keep track of who's talking makes it extremely unpleasant for me.
I am very sorry for your loss. I have no idea how anyone goes though this.
Support groups can help. Not going into details to protect my anonymity, just saying it's a personal experience. Talking to strangers going through similar experiences can be surprisingly relieving, in a way that talking to a therapist may not be. Just the realization that you are not alone with this, and there are people who otherwise look... fine... except going through an agonizing pain on the inside, who can genuinely say "I know what you're going through" without faking it, and sharing these experiences - it helps.
Do. Drive over an hour for a support group. At least give it a few tries.
OP asked very clearly not to be advised based on anecdotal data -- i.e., your own experience or that of someone you know:
"Please don't give me anecdotes; I've heard from people who love support groups and from people who think they're actively harmful. I would like data but frankly my brain has been fried by everything that has happened and I'm not up for searching through databases for well-structured double-blind studies"
Seems kind of rude to ignore the request of someone going through hell who clearly asks for one kind of info and not another.
Thank you for typing this out so that I didn't have to.
thank you for telling me how other people think. I was trying to share the experience of grief, grieving, and recovery, not anything about support groups because I don't know anything about them, good or bad.
"Does anyone know whether there's any data on whether support groups are helpful for dealing with grief?"
That's the specific question. I don't have data on that. Do you have data, Eremolalos? Otherwise you're not answering the question either.
My complaint wasn't about your response,Deiseach, it was about a post where someone urged OP to try a support group, based on poster's anecdotal data, after OP had stated very clearly that they did not want to hear anecdotal data about support groups. You and I both gave OP some advice based on our own experience, but since it was not advice about support groups I did not think doing that would be objectionable to OP, and in fact OP voiced no objections to it, though they did eventually post a complaint about 1123581321's response. In fact, your advice and mine were pretty similar.
The person is in terrible grief fatigue. The request is not very well defined. No anecdotes but no data either. How many anecdotes does it take to make ‘data’.
I’ve seen enough people to come to these groups reluctantly. Resentfully. Dragged in. And yet getting help after a few sessions. Does 10 people make a data set? 20? I genuinely don’t know. Given the dearth of studies and the replication crisis maybe I can add something.
Sorry, not trying to be combative. Maybe I messed up out of good intentions.
I am quite positive that if someone had succeeded in dragging me to a group of that kind I would have fucking hated it. While that has in fact never happened when I have been bereaved, I have had a number of experiences where what I had in common with the other group members is some demographic, or some experience we have all had. THEY DO NOT WORK FOR ME. I an uncomfortable and creeped out at session 1, session 3, session 5 and, if I make it that long, session 10. While you, and a lot of people you. have seen, have been dragged in, resentful, and then felt helped , I, and. lot of people I have seen, have felt coerced to do something that goes against the grain, have found it to be as weird and unpleasant as we imagined, and have left, muttering "fuck this shit."
I agree that OP is in terrible grief fatigue. I think that is a reason to respect her wishes and give her exactly what she is clearly asking for. You see it as a reason to ignore her wishes and coerce her. If I were her I would tell you to fuck the fuck off.
She certainly has every right to tell me that.
But would you consider for a moment that maybe you got a tad too angry with me on her behalf?
No, I'm actually pretty annoyed that I asked if anyone had data and specifically requestrd no personal anecdotes, in one of the few places online that I thought people might honor that request, and then more than one person jumped in with anecdotes.
It occurred to me that if support groups vary quite a lot, this could make research difficult. You point out that the temperament of the potential new member would also make a huge difference.
Well, the variability of support groups adds noise to the results data, but if you had a study that looked at lots of groups and a lot of total members, and compared each to, say, wait list controls, you'd expect the signal to get through the noise. School meals probably vary a lot too, but research still finds that poor kids who get breakfast and lunch through the school are healthier than those who don't.
I'm sorry for your loss.
This literature review, at least, arrives at a small overall effect in lowering depression and grief in the short term (not so much in the long term/at follow-up) and a slightly larger effect in people suffering from persistent grief, as you might be. ( https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/32501773/ also available through sci-hub) The data are generally poor because of the diversity of bereavement groups and their combination with other interventions.
So, at first blush, it may seem like a vote for no, but if you'll forgive a stranger's presumption: a) it's highly individual and it's not the kind of thing that's easily captured with data; and b) in your position I think the bias should be heavily toward trying different things rather than not trying them. I'd consider going on a Pascal's Wager basis if nothing else, even if a long drive is involved.
Thank you for finding that literature review. I guess I shouldn't be surprised that it's a hard topic to study for exactly the reasons you cite. There are so many other things that are difficult to study because their quality depends so much on specific practitioners, subtleties of techniques, and interpersonal relationships--e.g. other therapeutic interventions, educational programs, etc.
Honestly the thing I worry about with support groups is just getting stuck in a rut and endlessly wallowing in grief. There aren't a lot of downsides to getting exercise, journaling, and eating vegetables; support groups just seem like they have a potential for much greater downsides. "Small chance of improvement in the short term" somewhat assuages my fears of that. I'll probably go. Thanks again.
I searched on Google Scholar, and could only find one study, 20 years old, that actual looked at whether those in a support group for perinatal loss fared better than those not in one, and study found no difference. There seems to be very little research on this subject, although there are numerous articles for professional about how to be supportive. My guess is that whether a support group is helpful depends on how easily you connect with people you don't know. Some people take it like a duck to water. I do not connect easily, and actively dislike the idea of telling the story and shedding tears in front of a group of strangers, even though all of them have been through a similar experience. I don't think a support group would work for me. But I know people who have felt immensely supported by one.
If you google things like 'perinatal loss support groups" a number of them show up. I expect quite a few are virtual, so you would be able to try out a support group that way without the drive.
I notice that the things you mention doing involve positive, officially "good-for-you" activities, and that you're trying to cope well. For what it's worth, what has helped me get through awful losses is allowing myself to really plumb their depths and cry as hard and often as I feel like it. (Though yeah, I do still go to work and eat meals in and around the bouts of intense mourning.) Also talking to a friend of mine who never, ever tries to convince me it's not so bad, or suggests things to help me feel better. He just says, "oh god, Eremolalos," and rubs my back.
Thank you for digging up that study; I appreciate it.
I wouldn't be surprised if you're right that it just varies so much from person to person. It probably depends on who else is in the group and who is facilitating it. That interpersonal seems to also be a difficult part of assessing effectiveness of psychotherapy--you could not like the therapist you get or their particular method of treatment could be bothersome. (I say this from the perspective of a patient, of course.) There's a body of data that says some things work more often for more people, but you don't know if you're one of those people until you make the attempt. Even if there were some data about the effectiveness of support groups, any given group would probably be hit or miss. But then, everything is hit or miss.
I'm sorry for your trouble. I don't have any experience with support groups or therapy, but I do know about grief in the aftermath of death.
It's going to hurt. It's going to hurt for a long time. It will pop up out of nowhere; you will be doing something routine and suddenly burst into tears because that thing will remind you of the lost person.
This is natural. People mean well, but they seem to think the Kubler Ross stages of grief are a list of directions to be followed - now you should be on stage three after this amount of time. No. It takes as long as it takes, and you are allowed to be sad and angry and fatigued past the time you are 'supposed' to be 'moving on'.
Therapy and such is helpful to make sure you don't stick in a rut of hashing over the same old thing over and over, but it is not intended to hurry you along so that all is hunky-dory in six months and you're back to what you were pre-the death. You will never be that, but you will recover.
Good luck.
When running into creative walls while slowly growing to hate a project, is it directionally better to train oneself to decouple creativity from flow (and over time to develop the discipline to proceed effectively at lower levels of reward); or to develop tricks to try to re-fool oneself into finding the thing interesting and to get oneself in a more flowing mental state (so try to get the reward back)?
Purely hand-waving here, but I suspect that it has something to do with low dopamine regulating the exploitation-exploration balance too far toward (premature/low-quality) exploitation. So, e.g., when you're deciding on a turn of phrase, or a musical solution, or an intermediate coding step or whatever, there is a strong pull toward good-enough, even when it really isn't. When you cave to this on the small sub-tasks, the quality of the outcome decreases, you perceive it, and you hate the thing even more.
I'm not very good at getting things done but in all my struggles have always found that discipline to finish is far more important than motivation.
Sometimes Brian Eno's Oblique Strategies cards help with situations like that.
In my experience, when bogged down at the “turn of phrase” level, it’s often best to forget trying to regain flow and just keep buggering on till you finish, say, the chapter. Then, perhaps the following day, switching to editing mode can help activate a more flowy state, and I’ll find myself quite easily coming up with those turns of phrase that eluded me before, plus the dopamine taps get turned back on.
I probably shouldn't comment considering how few projects I've finished, but hell if common sense will stop me.
There's a fairly famous experiment a photography teacher ran a while back.
https://austinkleon.com/2020/12/10/quantity-leads-to-quality-the-origin-of-a-parable/ The question becomes whether focusing on a single project falls under 'quality' or 'quantity'. I'd say it falls more into 'quality', and the best thing you can do is start up some other projects you can switch into when you start losing patience. You want to develop a flow for the process, not necessarily the project.
Haven't actually heard of this experiment, thanks. (Digression, but Ted Orland changing up media in his retelling of the parable annoys me much more than it does Kleon.)
I guess mining the process itself for reward and flow would fall on the 'seek to increase reward' rather than 'train to be effective in a low-reward environment' side of my little dichotomy. Decoupling the joy of the general from the misery of the specific is easier with some things than others, of course.
> Decoupling the joy of the general from the misery of the specific is easier with some things than others, of course.
Is this a more current way of saying “God (or the Devil) is in the details.”?
I feel like you’re asking an interesting question but I am not fluent in your vocabulary.
FYI: Michael Lewis's book about SBF will be coming out on 10/3. Its title is *Going Infinite.* He will also be covering the trial, which begins on 10/2, on his podcast *Against the Rules.*
That trial is going to be very interesting, I am curious to see if the other FTX founders are going to be hauled into court too or will they be state's evidence, as it were?
SBF's former girlfriend, someone who was also high up at his company, has pled guilty and is expected to give evidence for the prosecution. Can't remember her name.
Caroline Ellison. She was sort of left holding the bag, so it's hard to know how much she was aware of what was going on, and how much she just did what Sam told her to do. I imagine her lawyers will be leaning heavily on the second option there.
That's how SBF got sent to jail; he used the NYT to leak some of her diaries or other private information, of course they ran the story, and of course the judge - who was fed-up to the back teeth of reminding SBF that the conditions of his bail included NO GOING ONLINE which he constantly breached - threw him in the slammer:
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/08/11/technology/sam-bankman-fried-jail.html
Not a nice slammer, either; lack of vegan food and being bullied meant he had to be moved elsewhere:
https://www.bbc.com/news/business-66589797
This trial should be high entertainment, for those of us not involved with EA sufficiently to be wincing in anticipation of being dragged through the mud due to being an inspiration for him, lining up to take money for good causes, and backing him as a great guy altogether. But it's the other two guys who were co-founders with SBF that intrigue me; there has been very little said about them though it seems they too were milking the cash cow as hard as they could: Gary Wang and Nishad Singh.
https://www.coindesk.com/layer2/2022/11/22/who-is-gary-wang-the-mysterious-co-founder-of-ftx-and-alameda-research/
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/02/28/technology/ftx-guilty-plea-fraud.html
It does seem that, whatever share of the responsibility he bears, SBF is being set up to take the majority or even all the blame, with the others claiming they were just following orders, as it were.
From my reading it appears that Caroline Ellison was facing charges amounting to 110 years in prison, but she got off scot-free by snitching on her collaborator. That's a helluva prisoner's dilemma (with the caveat that SBF probably couldn't have got the same deal by snitching on her instead).
Charges amounting to 110 years in prison, I suspect in roughly the same way that selling whale sushi is punishable by eleventy million years in prison. https://www.popehat.com/2013/02/05/crime-whale-sushi-sentence-eleventy-million-years/
I'm fairly certain that Ellison would have spent more than a year or three in Club Fed if she had stonewalled, but you should trust approximately no one who tells you how long a sentence was really likely unless you are paying them for legal advice.
Well, this is why the trial is going to be so interesting, to figure out who knew what. It's a very tangled structure, if you listen to John Jay trying to explain it. Caroline and another guy were in the sister structure to FTX, and that guy jumped ship early. Now, whether he knew it all looked dodgy and he was getting out before any police came knocking on the door, or he just wanted to cash in and have fun in very early retirement, who knows? But the end result is that Caroline was left as CEO of Alameda Research.
And from there on it gets murky. She's pleading that, basically, Sam told her to shuffle money around and she did what she was told because well, he was Sam, the high panjandrum and besides, she wasn't experienced or qualified enough to know what was going on.
I think what Sam did, which in hindsight was a bad decision, was being the very public face of the entire enterprise, the guy making all the statements, and taking the credit. There's allegations that the enterprise was treated as the Bankman-Fried Family Fund, and that's hard to deny given that he was shovelling out money to his brother for his brother's involvement with EA projects (and also getting the brother to do the political schmoozing in Washington) plus buying holiday home for mom and dad.
I perfectly understand why Caroline rolled over on Sam., and that was sensible. I think what Sam (belatedly) was trying to do, with the leak to the NYT, was "hey she's not the innocent victim she's portraying herself as", but being Sam he did it the exact wrong way to piss off the judge.
She's not the only one; Ryan Salame was co-operating as hard as he could, and Wang and Singh who are keeping very quiet also seem to have cut deals. Bankman-Fried, either through genuine gullibility or through refusal to believe that his genius couldn't magically fix all this, just kept powering on through with "I have a bail out arranged, just give me time" instead of holding his hands up and trying to cut a deal. And here we are today, with the trial forthcoming!
As I understand it, and things may have moved on from when last I was reading up on it, there are three sets of charges:
(1) SDNY Grand Jury charges on fraud
(2) SEC filing for jury trial in SDNY
(3) CTFC filing for jury trial in SDNY
As well as the bankruptcy statement by John Jay (the guy tasked with pulling any financial chestnuts out of this dumpster fire) which so aggrieved Bankman-Fried - he claimed they rushed to declare bankruptcy and pressured him into signing off too early, while he was working on the Magic Bailout Fix.
The bankruptcy filing is the best way to understand how complicated the entire house of cards was, and who was siphoning off big money (clue: someone with the initials SBF was getting the lion's share of 'loans' but he wasn't the only one):
https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/23310507-ftx-bankruptcy-filing-john-j-ray-iii
Highlights from his presentation to Congress:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zEHgEiuniNY
Make the popcorn and sit back to watch the circus when the trial starts!
(Minor correction: it's "John Ray". (Random trivia: "John Jay" was the first chief justice of the US Supreme Court.))
In this particular case, I tend to lean toward the reaction "good for her!".
Yeah, Deiseach, the trial and related events seems wonderfully juicy to me too. I've already pre-ordered Lewis's book. But I wonder uneasily what it means that I'm way more interested in the trial and its peripheral shenanigans than I ever was in SBF and EA. Why am I not perplexed and saddened by this failed marriage between young smartasses and the thin, gloomy, earnest EA people who want to reduce human suffering? The true answer is that I sort of do not believe in anything, except for certain people whom I warm up to and respect, Scott being one of them. You, though, have a lot of things you believe in, and none of them compel you to take SBF seriously, right? So you are free to find the whole mess, which takes place in a dimension you don't live in, wonderfully yummy. But is it ok for me to say YUM?
I think there's a sense in which SBF was "cheating" to get ahead, and there was a segment of the population who thought he was just so wonderfully intelligent and did everything so well that he was just better at it than anyone else.
Then you see the reality that he was really bad at this, especially running a business without breaking the law and making something that had real value instead of being mostly a Ponzi scheme. I still can't get over the fact that they didn't even keep a list of employees, or other basic business requirements. They were going to get shut down for one or more of dozens of reasons, even if their core business model was sound - which it was not.
I think for those on the outside, there's a feeling of relief that we are not so much worse at this stuff than some young kid, and a feeling of schadenfreude that he's getting his just desserts for doing some really bad things.
There was the One Weird Trick (the 'kimchi premium') that made a lot of money fast and worked for a short time, but it was only ever going to work once and for a short time.
I think the problem was he (1) got way too invested in all the praise for how smart he was to discover this OWT (2) was much too involved in wanting to be an EA saviour and (3) thought he was way smarter, everyone had always told him so after all, and that he could continue to get the golden goose to keep laying. The idea that "well, it was fun guys but now we're just yet another crypto outfit" doesn't seem to have sat well with him, he wanted to keep making huge money for ever more grandiose projects (and the resultant feeding of his self-importance).
It really was incestuous, with a lot of the personnel being "we used to date/we're dating/we're going to date" e.g. Caroline being Sam's (ex)girl friend. This is why you don't have workplace fraternisation! The relationships weren't just employer/employee, they were friends and more, and that makes it very hard to say "hang on, should we be doing this? I don't think you should be doing it that way".
"there was a segment of the population who thought he was just so wonderfully intelligent and did everything so well that he was just better at it than anyone else."
That Sequoia article. It's just - I can't think of a better, not so coarse, metaphor other than "sucking his dick". I mean, the One Weird Trick is *this* big a deal in financial circles? I think not:
"Among Wall Street’s financial elite, SBF’s Bitcoin arb is mentioned in the same hushed tones as Paul Tudor Jones’s 1987 shorting of the entire American economy, or George Soros’s 1992 raid on the Bank of England, or John Paulson’s 2008 bet against subprime mortgages."
You do raise a very good point: we should not be rejoicing over misfortune of others.
And really I'm not, because I don't know any of them and don't have any emotional or other attachment. He never picked *my* pocket, so I'm not out for vengeance. It's all "big money big names and they came a cropper, us in the cheap seats get to laugh at our betters with egg on their faces".
"Why am I not perplexed and saddened by this failed marriage between young smartasses and the thin, gloomy, earnest EA people who want to reduce human suffering?"
I think because, despite all the "look at our global centres" rhetoric, it's a very incestuous, closed-off little bubble of the same people who mostly hang out in the same circles in the same limited geographical dispersion. You don't know them and I don't know them except at second and third hand. It's too easy to call EA a cult, but it exhibits some of those tendencies: the sacred texts, the gurus, the in-group jargon, the purity spirals, the belief that they are doing something new and unique that will change the world!!!!
So for outsiders like us, seeing reports of alleged billions being thrown around and manufactured out of thin air, and being spent on (sorry EA people) vanity projects - well, it's easy to laugh when the big bad wolf blows down their house of straw. It's not real for us, not real like the church collection for good causes or the chuggers on the street rattling tins. If I give a donation to the local Vincent de Paul society, I have an idea where it's going. But some guy in the Silicon Valley bubble schmoozing politicians on both sides in Washington, with all the money coming from magic beans? That's up there with the Kardashians and their goings-on for all the relevance to my life it has. Because of the likes of this article, which the author must be ruing bitterly:
https://web.archive.org/web/20221110031633/https://www.sequoiacap.com/article/sam-bankman-fried-spotlight/
Published in September 2022, on behalf of an investment company which had thrown money at FTX in the early days, and serendipitously published just days before it all came tumbling down.
"UPDATE: Nov 9, 2022: Since this article was published, a liquidity crunch has created solvency risk for FTX and its future is uncertain. Many have been affected by this unexpected turn of events. For Sequoia, our fiduciary responsibility is to our LPs. To that end, we shared this letter with them today regarding our investment in FTX. For FTX, we believe its fiduciary responsibility is first to its customers, and second to its shareholders. As such, FTX is exploring all opportunities to ensure its customers are able to recover their funds as quickly as possible."
The article reads like a tryout for a new Gospel about the Messiah; you can dip in *anywhere* and pull out a plum. And of course, it is highly embarrassing for EA and associated philosophy because they are copiously quoted as being the major influences on Saviour Sam. Not really a good look when (alleged) mega-fraudster is inspired by your movement!
If Will MacAskill wasn't hiding under his bed after this came out, he must have a brass neck, since he's the guy portrayed as Bankman-Fried's guru.
"So I find myself convinced that, if SBF can keep his wits about him in the years ahead, he’s going to slay—that, just as Alameda was a stepping stone to FTX, FTX will be to the super-app. Banking will be disrupted and transformed by crypto, just as media was transformed and disrupted by the web. Something of the sort must happen eventually, as the current system, with its layers upon layers of intermediaries, is antiquated and prone to crashing—the global financial crisis of 2008 was just the latest in a long line of failures that occurred because banks didn’t actually know what was on their balance sheets. Crypto is money that can audit itself, no accountant or bookkeeper needed, and thus a financial system with the blockchain built in can, in theory, cut out most of the financial middlemen, to the advantage of all. Of course, that’s the pitch of every crypto company out there. The FTX competitive advantage? Ethical behavior. SBF is a Peter Singer–inspired utilitarian in a sea of Robert Nozick–inspired libertarians. He’s an ethical maximalist in an industry that’s overwhelmingly populated with ethical minimalists. I’m a Nozick man myself, but I know who I’d rather trust my money with: SBF, hands-down. And if he does end up saving the world as a side effect of being my banker, all the better."
You have to read this, it's so revelatory of the entire mindset behind what was going on, and why (in hindsight) it had to come crashing down - there were no adults in the room. There were no boring old guys in suits who had been working in finance for forty years. Nobody to put the brakes on or do it the old-fashioned, red-tape way. All the bright young traders who were moving fast and breaking things in the name of Bayesian utilitarian infinity calculations.
Turns out you *do* need book-keepers and auditors, who knew? 😁
So yeah: looking forward to entertainment (and maybe some educational value) from the trial.
"Peter Singer–inspired utilitarian"
'Killing babies is maximally utilitarian. Here's why.'
"The article reads like a tryout for a new Gospel about the Messiah; you can dip in *anywhere* and pull out a plum. And of course, it is highly embarrassing for EA and associated philosophy because they are copiously quoted as being the major influences on Saviour Sam. Not really a good look when (alleged) mega-fraudster is inspired by your movement!"
Surely a Catholic, of all people, could see why EAs find this criticism very unfair. You have an actual Messiah and an actual Gospel, and countless people throughout history who murdered millions in its name. If that doesn't discredit Catholicism, why would SBF discredit EA? At least EA hasn't started its own Thirty Year War yet!
EA is that incredibly annoying blend of smugly morally superior, but also incredibly corrupt and incompetent in many ways when all the flashy language and 'new ideas' are pulled away.
I'll give them some credit for the pandemic prevention work and their focus on policy. But the practice of taking mainly Ivy-league kids with all the right status symbols, telling them they're important and to be even *more* ambitious, then giving them millions or billions of dollars to focus on moonshots is incredibly dangerous. FTX with their crypto grift is by far the least problematic area of funding for EA, and in a way the movement is lucky that a crypto grift is all that they dealt with.
Imagine this sort of incompetence coming out about a pandemic group, or a nuclear policy think thank, or (gasp) an AI safety company. I'm thinking we'll see a lot more of the third one in the coming months.
There's a traditional role that SBF was quite likely playing, whether he had knowingly signed up for it or not: in 1920s (NEP era) USSR it was called "sitting director" ("зицпредседатель"), a well-compensated figurehead chairman of a fly-by-night scam company whose responsibility consisted solely in taking the heat for his confederates in the event of failure, sitting in prison (during which, it was typically promised by the actual "brains" of the scheme, he would continue to be paid.)
SBF wasn't just the fall guy, he was also the primary publicity guy.
In this case, who would the "brains" be?
I think it either was SBF, and he got too arrogant, *or* they were all greedy and trying to throw each other to the wolves and SBF became the fall guy because he had the highest profile. But we'll probably never know if, say, Caroline Ellison tricked him into it and is now profiting from the greater sympathy usually extended to women. Or maybe it's Singh or one of those other guys. Everyone's going to lie to make themselves look good.
Why haven't I had a cold since 2019? I've had all my Covid shots and every single booster that they offer- could that somehow be why? I don't really have a great immune system and have always had at least 1-2 head colds a year literally my entire life (more when I regularly rode public transportation). Since Covid though, I haven't had a single cold. I don't wear a mask and I certainly go out to public areas, bars, the supermarket, etc.
Could the Covid shots somehow have given me a cross-immunity? I went out of my way to mix and match them, including getting an unauthorized extra shot before boosters were a thing. I think I've now had 1 of every shot authorized in the US (i.e. not AstraZenaca). Did it give me a strange new immunity to the common cold?
Even if what you report is real and not just coincidence, it doesn't generalize. It's clear why the flu and cold-like infections were suppressed along with Covid as long as social distancing/ "lockdowns"/ mask mandates etc were in effect, but from what I read, heard and saw, they came back with a vengeance last winter when everyone was done with Covid.
Cross-immunity seems unlikely - AFAIK, how only a few of the 200 or so cold virus variants are remotely related to Covid.
My experience: Pre-covid I think I got a cold once or twice a year. I'm not sure, though. . I really never paid attention to cold frequency until covid. But during covid, I had 3 colds in total, all similar, all weird: They did not start with a sore throat, but with sneezes and an extremely runny nose -- so runny that (here comes some TMI) if I leaned over to do something I had to hold a tissue over my nose to prevent drops of watery stuff from falling all over whatever was below me. These colds did not progress to cough, congested sinuses, muscle aches, fever, etc., and they lasted about 36 hrs and then I was back to normal. The first cold happened before tests were available. During the second and third I tested a couple times a day, swabbing both nose and throat, and continuing for several days after symptoms abated. All tests were negative.
I have wondered why it was possible for me to get colds, but never to get covid. I have masked pretty intensely all through covid, and also used a high volume air purifier in my office. I've also developed a habit of doing the ritual Covid Hand Wash whenever I come in from outside, and before eating or any other activity that would make me touch my mouth or the rest of my face. Why did these precautions also not protect against colds? I've also wondered whether these weird colds corresponded with times when I got a load of covid up my nose, and my body went into nose-cleansing overdrive to get rid of the stuff before I was actually infected.
I think the likeliest explanation to the various things we've all noticed and wondered about is that Covid has made us all hypervigilant and hyper-interested in covid-like illnesses, so that we are all much more aware of the quantify and quality of our colds, and inclined to look for patterns.
Now that you mentioned it, I realized that I stopped having colds since covid, too. But the obvious confounder is that now I work from home half the time. That means less time spent in open-space offices, and less stress. (Also, my kids have grown up a bit, which means their immune systems are better, so they do not bring so many viruses home.)
So, the effect is visible, but I believe it is caused by lifestyle changes, not cross-immunity.
(Now I am wondering if there might be something I don't even know about. Like, maybe companies have upgraded air conditioning in offices to make it spread fewer viruses -- motivated by covid, but having an effect on all kinds of viruses. I have no evidence that anything like that happened, it just seems to make sense, and I probably wouldn't know about that if it happened.)
More people working remotely means less opportunity for diseases to spread between them and evolve into more vigorous strains
True. Though I have a school-age child in the house who's been back in fulltime public-school classrooms for nearly two years now. And he hasn't had a cold or flu during that time either....interesting.
Now that you mention it, yea -- I'm struggling now to even remember when I last had a cold. Will ask my wife this question this evening as well.
I can confirm from records that I haven't taken a sick day from work since 2019 for any health-related reason except my two bouts with COVID.
I’ve had the same experience. Very bad cold at the end of 2019 (which could have been covid but unlikely) and nothing since, despite everyone in my family getting Covid in 2022.
I also used to get colds twice a year, but I think that was at least partially due to life being constantly stressful, and not getting enough sleep. Maybe your life has gotten better and your immune system is flourishing? :)
Sleep is the most convincing explanation for me. I go to bed at the same time every day now, even at weekends. That was not so in 2019.
>Could the Covid shots somehow have given me a cross-immunity?
Probably not enough so to make a big difference. Some "common cold" strains are coronaviruses, and I think I remember hearing that there have some indications that exposure to common cold coronaviruses may give a bit of partial immunity to covid, but that won't be enough to stop you from getting colds. I'd expect any cross immunity to be small because named covid variants are much more closely related to one another than they are to common cold coronaviruses, and covid shots based on the original strain often only grant partial immunity to the named variants.
Also, only something like 15% of common cold cases are coronavirus-based. Most cold cases are caused by various rhinoviruses, and there's a long tail of adenovirus, RSV, parainfluenza, etc that also cause colds.
And then there's my own experience: I'm vaccinated and boosted, and I mixed and matched Pfizer and Moderna, but I still get colds. I've got a child in kindergarten, though, so I'm at much higher risk of exposure.
Guesses for why you haven't gotten a cold since 2019:
- Adults have gotten better about masking or staying home when they have symptomatic respiratory illnesses, and a lot of businesses and other indoor public spaces have changed their cleaning patterns specifically to guard against fomite transmission (only a very minor transmission vector for covid, as it turns out, but a major transmission factor for rhinoviruses), as well as improving air filtration to reduce the risk of droplet/aerosol transmission.
- The covid lockdowns may have knocked back the number of cold strains in widespread circulation a bit (similar to how the Yamagata strain of Influenza B hasn't been detected in the wild since 2021 and is suspected to have gone extinct), so when you do get exposed to cold viruses they're more likely to be ones you've had before.
- Do you have children, and if so, how old are they? If your children finished their schooling during the covid lockdowns or at least aged out of their prime plague-rat years, that alone would go a long way towards explaining why you aren't getting colds.
Do you think they should have pushed for better ventilation?
I think the decisions were reasonable given what was known at the time: fomites were a plausible transmission vector and one that's relatively simple to mitigate. It probably stuck around longer than it should have out of memetic inertia, but I did hear quite a bit about ventilation and filtration once it became clear that Covid was mainly spreading through droplets or aerosols, and there was a push to move stuff outdoors when practical from the beginning.
I think people were being told to stay indoors for quite a while.
I'm in the exact same situation as nifty775. I haven't gotten a cold since 2019. My family has and I've been very exposed. I haven't gotten covid despite my family getting it twice and I didn't quarantine from them at all.
Prior to covid I got 1-2 colds a year for my entire life. A very average immune system. My only guess is what you mentioned, that maybe we've extincted some strains or that they haven't been able to mutate and I've got immunity.
I've had plenty of colds and I've had 4 covid shots after which I also got covid
My last cold was some time before Covid too. I have an untouched stack of Covid test kits in my bathroom. Knock on wood.
But I seem to be lucky in the natural immunity department.
I had a lot of cold like illnesses as a kid and a young adult running on minimal sleep but once I started to prioritize getting enough rest I seem to dodge a lot of bugs. Even before Covid I wasn’t getting a cold every year.
I wonder if all the mask wearing and isolation did a number on some of the other coronaviruses. They were having trouble finding a 'dominant strain' when creating flu vaccinations, if that's an indicator.
This is very little data to build a theory on it.
There was very little common cold in 2020 and 2021, because lots of people were very careful. And in 2022 and 2023, you should normally have 2-4 colds, but had zero. So do consider that you were just lucky.
I'm middle aged and I've had a bare minimum of 1 (more like 2) colds every single year for my entire life. A 3 year absence is pretty notable
Oh! I thought the Egan mentioned in the review for The Lost Tools of Learning was Greg Egan, the science fiction author. No, it's Kieran Egan.
I don't know whether Greg Egan has written anything substantial about education, but there's a lovely section in _Diaspora_ where the smart-human level AI learns a concept (momentum, I think) and spends a while connecting it to a great many things it already knows. This is a skill worth having in school.
I've seen some writing from teachers about how hard it is to deal with educational fads. I would love to see fairly early education (age 10? surely no later than 12) about how adults have different theories about what and how to learn.
I don't think I read this review the first time around, so I'll just note that the illustrations are unusually beautiful.
Here's a substantial discussion of sentence diagramming: https://www.facebook.com/nancy.lebovitz/posts/pfbid02xuDx93EAJKamkgiZiAPvvr2Hu249A5CNgSvu6oksGMwbfGi5nHL7R5ju1GDvnft5l
And a little more: https://nancylebov.dreamwidth.org/1117333.html
People vary a lot about whether they were taught it and whether it was useful for them. I've considered an extended survey of what people learned in school and which things were valuable to them.
I learned a bit of sentence diagramming, but it never seemed terribly useful. And once I started learning Latin, it became completely pointless. But maybe for other people it was helpful?
It was definitely helpful for some people.
It sounds like the WGA won the writers' strike. That's not surprising - they were asking for rules and other changes that would have cost the studios millions, but had the ability to inflict far greater losses in the billions in lost programming and delayed schedules as long as they could avoid defection during the strike (which they did - they and their assorted fans on Twitter and elsewhere were pretty aggressive about attacking anyone who wasn't perceived as a supporter of the WGA). Eventually, the studios were going to decide that it wasn't worth it to contest the demands.
3. The comment on SpaceX is good. I'd add that I think the "waterfall" development style has persisted because of politics as well - it fits better with distributing parts of production and a supply chain across a broader area, and it's better at avoiding high-profile failures. No exploding rockets with the SLS program, for example - instead the failures show up earlier, and get labeled as lower profile "delays".
The replies to that comment were pretty good as well. The iterative development is mostly good early on - eventually you have to tighten down and ensure reliability, and that limits how much you can iteratively change the rocket as opposed to simply developing the new model of it.
I also wonder how much of it is just that they do almost all of it in-house. It speeds up communication time a lot.
> It sounds like the WGA won the writers' strike.
The article I saw didn't have any details on the terms of the deal- have you seen something else that indicates the WGA won specifically?
Earlier today at my local outdoor swimming pool I overheard Rob Delaney saying something about the minimum staffing concession being a surprise, and that he’d expected the studios to cave on other points but not that one.
Just bits and pieces saying they conceded to something on minimum staffing, AI use, and streaming residuals - the key sticking points. We'll see what the actual deal ends up being.
The AI restrictions are interesting. This could be the start of a pushback across all industries.... that are unionised. Therefore, not much.
In entertainment, the tricky thing is copyright - so far, the US Copyright Office has taken the stance that creative work done with Generative AI does not qualify for copyright protection, even though there is human curation involved. That may not be sustainable in the face of lawsuits and legislation, but we'll have to see.
If that gets resolved, you'd probably see a lot of it done by studios and companies outside of the usual Hollywood set (like how a lot of animation is done by companies outside of the US, even if the writers are in the US).
At some point though, it will just make American industries less competitive if significant pushback is achieved. Because unless other countries are hopeless at AI, AI will allow them to do well at things where the US traditionally has its advantages.
> unless other countries are hopeless at AI
Even if they are, they could use the American AIs, couldn't they? I think the restrictions are against American companies using the AIs for their work, not against the AIs being used per se.
The obvious next step is American companies outsourcing the AI-sensitive parts of work to foreign companies, who will in turn run it on American servers. Heck, the foreign company can be fully owned by the American company.
So in the end, the only thing that will change for American companies is that they will need to create a "supplier of AI services" in some other country, which in turn will use the American AIs to do the work (an interface between you, and the cloud services you would rent from a third party anyway). Perhaps there will be specialized companies in India, where you can cheaply rent a guy who clicks the "run" button whenever you tell him.
Business, uh... finds a way.
Aren't there still freelance writers trying to sell scripts to major movie producers? If they use AI to help write it, they can achieve more for cheaper - presumably still doing a lot of human cleanup work and such, but still much faster than writing it all themselves.
Does the archaeology discovery of wooden structures from half a million years ago lead anyone to update on the probability of Ice Age civilizations? If you haven’t seen it, they found some notched logs from half a million years ago that indicate someone built a wooden structure in Zambia. It likely wasn’t from modern humans, but probably homo heidelbergensis. This would indicate that humans have built wooden structures for the entire existence of our species. [https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-023-06557-9].
The improbability of something wooden surviving for so long and also being found, makes me think that there were a ton of these wooden structures. But I could see it being argued either way for whether this means there were more advanced societies. So far our evidence is that:
p(discovery | wood surviving) * number of paleolithic wooden structures built > p(discovery | stone surviving) * number of paleolithic stone structures built
On the one hand, you could argue that if the probability of discovery is the same, and it’s safe to assume that probability of stone structures surviving >>> wood surviving, but we found wood anyway, so that’s evidence that there definitely wasn’t stone structures.
Or, you could argue that number of wooden structures >>> stone structures, so of course we found a wooden one first.
See the earlier post [https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/against-ice-age-civilizations]. Scott listed three categories of claims: 1) civilizations advanced enough to build Stonehenge, 2) civilizations about as advance as ancient Egypt, and 3) civilizations as advanced as 1700’s Britain. I’d suggest another option (I’d call it level 0): that there were likely larger tribes living in wooden longhouses with probably enough sophistication to build simple stone monuments. I should also note that the Ice Age argument is about societies 115k years ago to about 12k years ago and this is way older.
I’m not an archaeologist and so I also wonder what is that chance that this is a false positive. What if the logs just rubbed up against each other in a way that looks like they were shaped?
Various similar "anachronistic artifacts" regularly turn up in the imaginations of people fixated on finding them, e.g. https://www.ancient-origins.net/unexplained-phenomena/300-million-year-old-screw-or-just-fossilized-sea-creature-002899 (or see the "underwater pyramids" discussed by Scott in https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/contra-kavanaugh-on-fideism )
Wait? There aren't really canals on Mars?
Well, not yet anyway.
Seems to me that if an ancestor had the ability to use a stone tool for anything else, using it to make a slotted log structure is not hugely surprising.
Right. We shouldn't assume that a slotted log structure means a whole freaking log cabin. The minimal version might literally be two logs lying together on the ground so you could sit on them around a fire or something. Or maybe you could stand them up and lean bark against them to make a lean-to or something.
Misplaced reply to this above. Tldr, some places are stoneless.
I read the misplaced comment and was like, hm, interesting, good to know
> I’m not an archaeologist and so I also wonder what is that chance that this is a false positive. What if the logs just rubbed up against each other in a way that looks like they were shaped?
I thought they found tools nearby which were dated to 3-4 hundred thousand years ago. That's a lot later than the wood, but still much older than any previously discovered structure. We already knew that hominids used tools even longer ago than that, so that part isn't surprising, but it could mean that groups of primates returned to the area repeatedly and thus is weak evidence for it being a structure and not natural.
As to the actual question, if it is what it appears to be, this doesn't seem like evidence of any of the 3 types of civilization that Scott considered. Some form of semi-permanent wooden habitation, with large-ish groups, would probably be surprising at that age, but it's still closer to pure hunter-gatherer than even to the Stonehenge society. Even prior to this discovery, there was no technological barrier to basic woodworking at 500,000 years ago. Probably not even several million years ago, since stone tools have been found that are that old. Making something like stonehenge would probably require more sophisticated technology, like ropes or levers, as well as a level of coordination, planning, and population density that there still is no evidence for. You can shape stone with basic stone tools; building anything of substantial size is blocked on other factors.
No offense to Scott, but his three types of civilization isn't how archaeologist define civilization.
The definition of civilization that archeologists and anthropologists use is that is (a) a society characterized by the presence of social complexity—i.e. status hierarchies, (b) professional specialization, and (c) permanently inhabited settlements (cities). Cultures can have very large temporary settlements in the same place for seasonal resource extraction, year after year, are not be considered civilizations. Likewise, permanent settlements that don't display the above list of social complexities aren't considered to be civilizations.
"No offense to Scott, but his three types of civilization isn't how archaeologist define civilization."
It’s possible I’ve misstated Scott’s position and I believe he was just trying to summarize other people’s position for clarity.
I think the functional part that I’m interested in could be stated as: “Large groups of people coordinating to build stuff.” And I guess the question is how large were those groups, and were they building out of wood or stone, and how long ago were they doing it.
So a lot of nomads who built a new tented city every 3 months including theatres and parliaments and court houses, and then moved on and re-erected the lot somewhere else, would not qualify? Doesn't look a great definition to me.
So? The theory being responded to isn't proposed by or given any credence by archeologists, and archeologists don't have a monopoly on the word "civilization." Is there any content to this post, or would it be completely pointless if Scott had used a different word?
Hey, I'm just repeating what I learned as an Anthropology undergrad. If you want to label !Kung or Yanamami societies as civilizations, be my guest! But no need to get pissy with the messenger.
I'm not "getting pissy" I just think that how archeologists define the word "civilization" is utterly irrelevant to what existed a hundred thousand years ago or more.
Of course. And the way mathematicians defined the value for Pi was utterly irrelevant to how the Indiana legislature wanted to define it.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indiana_Pi_Bill
There's always the chance that the archaeologists are seeing what they want to see, but two logs with an interlocking cut notch would convince me! I think it's reasonable to assume that if early humans were making spears, they could also make shelters out of wood (and skins). Note: hafting technology for spears shows up in the European fossil record about 100K years after this site, though. So, this pushes woodworking back by a 100K years.
The definition of civilization is in the eye of the beholder. Of course, the dominant paradigm is to put the human cultures into an evolutionary sequence of types --> hunter-gatherer bands, larger tribes with chieftains, then settled agriculturalists, and finally settled agriculturalists with cities. That final stage with cities is usually what gets labeled as a civilization. As Graeber and Wengrow abundantly documented in their book, The Dawn of Everything, the archaeological evidence no longer supports this simplistic cultural hierarchy. They list various studies that show large numbers of people (enough to inhabit a neolithic city) gathered together for non-agricultural resource extraction. And large settlements that may have been occupied year-round predate agriculture.
Right now, the evidence shows that Neanderthals and Denisovans were probably spread pretty thin. And except for some megafauna slaughter sites, there's no evidence (yet) that large number of humans gathered together in large settlements before the end of the last ice age.
https://www.amazon.com/Dawn-Everything-New-History-Humanity-ebook/dp/B08R2KL3VY/ref=sr_1_1?crid=2USAM0XQHPC9T&keywords=the+dawn+of+everything+david+graeber&qid=1695656789&sprefix=the+dawn+of+%2Caps%2C138&sr=8-1
I don't know if they mentioned this in their book, but the Comanche were technologically a neolithic hunter-gatherer tribe in Wyoming in 1690, then they got horses and became nomadic and dominated the Great Plains with a generation or two and were organized in about five major sub-tribes within a few thousand in each and would sometimes meet up in groups of 20k. And that was all on nothing but hunting and gathering. I don't see any reason that neolithic tribes couldn't have done the same thing tens of thousands of years ago.
That might well be what was going on here: https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/60-mammoths-house-russia-180974426/
(They weren't "neolithic". Neolithic peoples were farmers without metal.)
Oh, interesting link. Thanks for that. I was thinking about building with wood versus stone. Bone didn't cross my mind.
And would "mesolithic" then be the correct term?
Paleolithic, I think, but I'm pretty fuzzy on the difference between mesolithic and paleolithic.
There's no evidence that the builders of Stonehenge farmed grains — at least the earliest levels of the site. They had domestic animals, and they foraged for nuts and fruit. "Unusually, there is very little evidence that people ate vegetables or ***cereals*** [my emphasis]. Burnt remains of crab apples, berries, hazelnut shells and other wild fruits are all that survive of this 'meat fest' diet. There was no evidence that any of the pots had been used for cooking greens or other vegetables."
https://www.ucl.ac.uk/news/2015/oct/feeding-stonehenge-what-was-menu-stonehenges-builders-2500-bc#:~:text=Burnt%20remains%20of%20crab%20apples,in%20huge%20numbers%2C%20particularly%20pigs.
Stonehenge is neolithic, sure. The mammoth hunters were not.
Mammoth hunters where considered to be Paleolithic (I mistyped this on the first edit. The Paleo/Meso/Neo designations are usually defined by the type of (stone) tool kits they used.
You don't need hafting to make a spear. An all-wood spear, carved from a single piece of wood, isn't hafted. I think I read something about Neandertals making that kind of spear, with a heat-treated tip to harden the wood.
And this just came across my TwiXter feed. Behind a paywall, tho.
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41559-019-0990-3
Except that there's evidence that they inserted a stone spearhead into a shaft of wood. And shatter analyses of stone points suggest that the points had been thrown — probably attached to the end of spears 500K years ago. Not sure how much confidence one can put into these shatter studies, though. (I haven't read the papers. YMMV.)
Hafting technology...
https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.1227608
And "When Did Humans Begin Hurling Spears?"
https://www.science.org/content/article/when-did-humans-begin-hurling-spears#
"Or, you could argue that number of wooden structures >>> stone structures, so of course we found a wooden one first."
That's what I think is the case. Cutting stone is much more laborious than cutting wood, and moving it requires greater coordination of people. A couple hundred people congregating together for a few weeks could probably throw up a decent-sized wooden structure - the stone would be much harder.
And with relatively few stone societies, it's much more likely they just haven't been found. They might be buried in deep layers of sediment in river deltas or now flooded continental shelves, or scavenged for useful stone by later civilizations.
> or scavenged for useful stone by later civilizations
Good point. The wood was disintegrating which makes it hard to find, but the stone might've been repurposed, which would also make it hard to find.
We've found several cities where later civilizations (or maybe just hundreds of years of continuous use) were in the same places using many of the same walls and other structures. If you think about cities like Jerusalem or Jericho, they've been around a long time and have been rebuilt more than once after being conquered and destroyed.
If you're looking for more things to read - particularly on the concept of consumption, obselence, greed, internet culture, etc. I've been a marketer for 13 years and have recently created a substack exploring the concept of Humane Marketing. Goes in hand with doughnut economics and other concepts you've already heard of.
Would love to hear your thoughts on some of these topics and have you on my free substack.
Link?
Oh sorry, yes, I thought I'd keep it clean since you can get to it via my profile.
Here's the link - https://humantohumans.substack.com/
Substack puts a link to the person's Substack above every comment, right next to their name.
Huh, interesting. On the Android app, you have to click on the name of the commenter to see their profile and then click through to their newsletter. Yet another way in which the interface varies across devices.
Jake seliger is a stoic with cancer who has no tongue- he’s also my husband. He’s written a wonderful essay on stoicism and facing the end AND he’s recorded a podcast on the Daily stoic (which is amazing considering the hurdles). He’s the most resilient man I know and also a beautiful writer. Give him a read (and a listen, podcast link at the top of the essay)
https://jakeseliger.com/2023/09/18/stoic-philosophy-finding-a-meaningful-life-and-the-cancer-treatment-struggle/
I found the Stoics very helpful when I was diagnosed with terminal brain cancer last year.
https://www.raggedclown.com/2022/04/27/the-taste-of-cancer/
I loved Jake's essay and I now have like 12 tabs open to read everything he linked to. I wish you both well.
I'm so sorry to hear about your diagnosis and wishing you a lot of strength. I write a lot about healthcare and the clinical trial space, and so I hope you don't mind me asking if you've had genomic sequencing performed? I hate when people offer unsolicited advice re: roots and berries (i won't do that) , but I'm a doctor who can't help but notice that a number of patients are missing out on potential treatment (or trial) matches due to this lack of "non standard" sequencing, so I bring it up (We used CARIS). Though it's not standard it should be (Depending on your oncologist) and there are some molecularly targeted treatments that are easily missed otherwise and worth a conversation.
Stoicism, and most importantly, that generative urge Jake talks about have been life changing. I'm not a great stoic. Jake is an adept, I am a sack of feelings on legs, but I do try. I'll tell him you loved it. I'm biased, but I think everything he writes is wonderful. We're basically a book club. Do you have a particular book on the stoics you like? I'm always looking to add to the pile.
I’ve read a bit of Epictetus, Seneca and Marcus Aurelius but most of my reading on contemporary Stoicism has been online.
I’ve found that most of the value of Stoicism has been that third part of the Serenity Prayer: the wisdom to know the difference. I’m constantly surprised at how few people with cancer want to learn enough about their condition to make decisions. I find it empowering and it gives me the kind of control that your husband talks about.
I had a needle biopsy but the results were inconclusive, presumably because there was not enough tumour in the sample. My surgeon wanted to do a second biopsy which would be a full craniotomy and involve removing a big chunk of my temporal lobe which, I decided, was not worth the risk.
There are only a handful of standard molecular tests for a glioma but, sadly, there are only a handful of treatments too so full sequencing wouldn't really give any extra information. There are two kinds of chemo and the choice is determined by IDH-1 mutation status. There is one targeted therapy approved for a very rare BRAF mutation which I don't have. There is another target therapy (vorasedinib) that is showing dramatic results that is going through the approval process right now. If it is approved I will get second biopsy because vorasedinib targets IDH1-mt, the most common mutation. Other than vorasedinib, I decided that none of the current treatments are worth pursuing and that I would rather take my chances with the tumour. I decided that I did not want surgery or chemo unless the benefits were clear and, in my case, they are not.
More details about decision making here:
https://www.raggedclown.com/2023/07/25/a-time-to-choose/
I have had three people close to me who died of a brain tumour and they all died quite quickly. I expected to do the same and yet here I still am 18 months later. It is quite disorienting. It makes it hard to plan.
Also, Ragged Clown, you have my real sympathy. This is an awful state to be in.
Just read your blog. From the hospital name it looks like you're in the UK too. Would you mind sharing how you've got into the vorasidenib trial? Can I expect a positive response from my Stern Northern Oncologist? (You may well be able to identify him.)
I previously wrote about uncertainty but that was the wrong way to put it. There are no good brain tumours. I am very sorry.
I'm not in the vorasidenib trial. That's just a distant hope that one day it will be approved and that I will have access to it. Sorry for the confusion.
You probably know that the vorasidenib trial (INDIGO) was conducted in 10 countries including the UK. The trial only included patients who had resection, which I have not, so it's not clear that I would be eligible even if/when the drug is approved.
This leads to a very important question: how can a non-American access the vorasidenib expanded access program?
https://clinicaltrials.gov/study/NCT05592743
I'm British-Canadian and live in the UK. High-grade glioma diagnosed a bit under three years ago with obvious life-changing consequences. The surgeons managed a complete resection and I made it though that and radio- and chemotherapy with a good functional outcome. My survival this long already puts me off the life expectancy charts for the nature of the tumour. I've even returned to work.
My scans are down to six-monthly but the damn thing is going to come back at some point, with the usual consequences. It looks like there's decent early evidence vorasidenib helps put off that date by quite a lot, with only modest side effects.
Trouble is, as usual, the UK is behind with this stuff. The Guardian wrote last week to say the NHS isn't offering it on the expanded access to medicines program. Questions have been asked in Parliament. Vorasidenib may well become a standard treatment but my undead shade would be quite cross if it came too late.
I've messaged my oncologist but he'll probably tell me that we just have to hang on.
Is there any reasonable way of getting onto the American clinical trial? I meet all the requirements -- IDH-mutant status confirmed through biopsy, prior surgery, no current need for chemo or radiotherapy, otherwise well. I've got decent resources to put into this (my work is reasonably well-paid) but have no idea if I could afford US drug prices. Moving to America is probably a non-starter but shifting the family to Canada might be possible, though the clinical benefit would have to be very strong to justify so much upheaval.
If anybody can answer this question, it'll be you guys!
I lived in the States for 25 years but I came back home to England 5 years ago, so I am in the same NICE waiting game as you. You probably know that vorasidenib is not yet approved in the USA yet. I would expect that approval will happen quite quickly in the UK when it is since the benefits are so clear. Who knows if it will be soon enough!?
I have two tumour-friends in Canada and their treatment woes seem at least as bureaucratic as ours so I wouldn't put much weight on a Canada solution. AFAIK the expanded access option is only available in the states and I think it will be approved here as quickly as it will be in Canada.
I'm on six monthly scans. The last scan showed substantial growth with the tumour in two more lobes and it has crossed the midline. But I am perfectly well and still working with hardly any symptoms, none of them serious. I know it's just a matter of time though. My neurosurgeon says "ticking time bomb".
Good luck to us both!
Just had a detailed boilerplate response from the trial manager. You can join from abroad, but only if you can find a US oncologist to "sponsor" you, and a US pharmacy which can accept delivery of the meds and send them on. It sounds challenging but perhaps not impossible.
IDH-1 mutants need to start with ivosidenib before going on the trial, however. Ivosidenib is not a nice drug. It's got pretty grim (and potentially fatal) side effects with limited clinical benefit in glioma patients. IDH-2 mutants don't have to do that.
The response suggests a clinical approach to Servier in the UK may be more fruitful, and I'll wait and see what comes back to my oncologist. The letter also hints at difficulty scaling up production of vorasidenib.
In short, the easiest way forward is to ignore this for a while until it gets UK approval. There may be ways to access the trial, particularly if you have American connections, but it's worth getting your oncologist to approach Servier directly as well if you're keen.
Okay. Stern Northern Oncologist is on-side after a little persuasion. We've approached both the trial manager (the email is available through the link in my previous post) and the manufacturer, Servier. There look to be two avenues:
(1) The trial itself. There is no obvious bar to non-Americans but I don't know where the money would come from. Paying full price for American meds could be steep but there's scope to ask NHS England for funding.
(2) Servier's own Managed Access Program for meds which don't yet have licensing approval. It looks like we meet the criteria but, again, funding may be an issue. It's a French company so buying the meds direct from them could be cheaper than the US.
https://servier.com/en/research-innovation/medicinal-product-managed-access-programs/
Verasidenib is a truly exciting development. I went through a weird process on diagnosis, starting with the hope of some new treatment and ending with the realisation that my life expectancy was too short to get the benefit of anything that wasn't already in Phase 3 trials. Part of my adjustment process was giving up that hope. It's nice to change that a little.
It's worth talking to your oncologist (I can guess who she is!). The trial requires biopsy confirmation of IDH-mutant status, but the biopsy itself fulfils the surgery requirement, so it may be enough for you to have a second biopsy which confirms your tumour status (though even having that would be a big decision).
Diffuse glioma may well be non-operable but verasidenib seems to offer a good chance of extending life with relatively few side effects, and it was aimed at diffuse gliomas in the first place.
My tumour was solid rather than diffuse and I went through the whole standard treatment, so let me know if you want my perspective on what it's like to have surgery, radiotherapy and chemotherapy (though I was on temozolomide, which supposedly has only mild side-effects). We live in the same place so could even meet up in person if you want. I've got the same ticking time bomb as you, although from a slightly different route.
Also, don't rule out CVP chemotherapy. Sometimes people get unexpected results. I have a friend whose inoperable recurrent stage 4 vanished entirely under second-line chemotherapy with lomustine, which on its own is a largely obsolete agent from the 1970s. In fairness, the hospital said that was the first time it had ever happened, but it did happen.
(I see from your posts you're also a car-free-city sort of person, and therefore our sort of person)
I got fed up with 3 hours a day on Highway 85 in Silicon Valley. We sold both our cars and moved to a city where we did not need one. That was fortunate since I am not allowed to drive anymore with a brain tumour!
Low-traffic neighbourhoods and low-emission zones are a hot topic in England at the moment. They have been subsumed into the culture wars and may decide the next election. The Conservatives seem to think so anyway.
I enjoyed reading your link. I wish you both well.
Thank you
Why is northern New England so lightly settled, despite being one of the oldest parts of the country? Maine, New Hampshire and Vermont were settled before the US was even a country, yet they have population close to the Dakotas. Maine's largest city has a population of 60k, Vermont's 44k. The northern two-thirds of Maine is about as developed as rural Alaska. Why? You'd imagine that the oldest part of the country would have developed a larger population over time.
If the answer is 'well they're cold/inhospitable'- Anchorage Alaska's population is close to 300k. I don't see northern New England as being any colder or tougher to live than say Chicago (country's 3rd largest city), Minnesota (Minneapolis population 5.7 million) Boise, or Milwaukee. Is the soil really that much worse for growing crops?
Part of the answer has to be political, because- stop reading this and look at a Google maps of 1 of these states. On the Canadian side you see a much denser road network leading up to Maine, NH, Vermont, and even Michigan- then it abruptly stops at the US border. So this must reflect some kind of political or legal reason?
Rockier soil, less ability to support agriculture?
Seems like pretty decent sheep grazing country. Similar to Scotland.
Of course the question of "Why doesn't the US have a significant sheep industry" is another good one that could inspire another thread like this one. According to this article https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/08/travel/lens-sheep-island-maine.html there used to be a substantial sheep industry in Maine but the fields are now forests.
Scottish sheep grazing came with evicting the cottiers and clearing the land for intensive sheep raising (and deer for commercial shooting - renting out your estate for the hunting season was a thing and I think continues to be so*) rather than the small scale arable cultivation tenants engaged in. This was not popular amongst the tenantry, but the defence by the landlords was that they had to make their estates profitable or go under.
See the Highland Clearances:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Highland_Clearances
"The first phase resulted from agricultural improvement, driven by the need for landlords to increase their income – many had substantial debts, with actual or potential bankruptcy being a large part of the story of the clearances. This involved the enclosure of the open fields managed on the run rig system and shared grazing. These were usually replaced with large-scale pastoral farms on which much higher rents were paid. The displaced tenants were expected to be employed in industries such as fishing, quarrying or the kelp industry. Their reduction in status from farmer to crofter was one of the causes of resentment.
The second phase involved overcrowded crofting communities from the first phase that had lost the means to support themselves, through famine and/or collapse of industries that they had relied on. This is when "assisted passages" were common, when landowners paid the fares for their tenants to emigrate. Tenants who were selected for this had, in practical terms, little choice but to emigrate."
Land that is good for forestry and sheep rearing isn't going to support a large population of people or at least not at more than subsistence level, so the answer to "why isn't it more settled?" may lie there.
*https://countrysportscotland.com/provider-230-jahama-highland-estates/
"Our main offering for guests is accompanied stalking for red, sika and occasional roe deer. We also have walked-up grouse shooting, duck flighting, rough shooting and occasional ptarmigan available by request on a first-come, first-served basis. Brown trout fishing is also available by request."
Settlement patterns in the Eastern US are heavily influenced by navigable waterways, since those were by far the best way to do medium-distance transport before railroads, especially in sparsely-developed colonies. From New Jersey southwards, there's a geological feature called the Eastern Seaboard Fall Line where the "Tidewater" coastal lowlands give way to the "Piedmont" Appalachian foothills and where rivers pretty much universally stop being navigable from the coast. There's a string of current or historically major cities (Montgomery, Macon, Augusta, Columbia, Raleigh, Petersburg, Richmond, DC, Baltimore, and Trenton) which started out as the last good river port before the Fall Line, where goods would be loaded and unloaded for land transport or portage around the fall line. Later, railroads and canals would be build inland from these cities.
In New York and New England, there isn't as pronounced a fall line, but a similar effect is at work. Compare a population density map of New England to a topographical map, and you'll see a pretty close correlation between the coastal lowlands and population density. And the inland port cities analogous to the Fall Line ports further south (Albany, Springfield, etc) are all in New York or Southern New England. In Northern New England, the coastal lowlands are a pretty narrow strip and the rivers are pretty lousy for navigation (to the point that a Continental Army attempt to invade Quebec via Maine in 1775 using canoes to traverse the Kennebec and Chaudlier rivers lost half of their soldiers to desertion, exposure, and starvation in the process). So as with the rest of the East Coast, the big cities grew up along either the aforementioned river ports or major coastal port cities (NYC, Boston), all of which were in New York or Southern New England.
Other cold/inhospitable parts of the US that did develop mid-sized or large cities later on, like most of your examples, have two big advantages over Vermont and Maine. One is that they're generally in prime transport hub locations (Chicago and Milwaukee are major Great Lakes ports, with Chicago in particular also being a major rail hub, Boise is on a major pass through the Rockies in the middle of good mining country, Minneapolis is a major river port on the junction between the Mississippi and Minnesota rivers, and Anchorage is the main port on Alaska's south coast). The other is lack of other nearby major cities sucking up all the oxygen: no need to make a new major city to serve as a commercial/industrial hub for New England, since Boston is already there.
The development difference between the Canadian and US sides of the border is actually more geographical than you'd think. The part of the border where the difference is starkest (western Maine) is where it is specifically to follow the Appalachian summits. The Canadian side as part of the St. Lawrence valley is a lot more hospitable to settlement, so that's built up, and the building up stops a little short of the summit line. If you continue west to the arbitrary horizontal line forming the northern borders of NH and VT, you'll see a more continuous gradient. The one place where there's a clearly political difference in development is the highway hugging the Canadian side of Maine's eastern border, which looks like Canada decided to build a road connecting Saint John with Riveiere du Loup through the best route that was entirely within Canadian territory. And even there, I see what appears to be American suburbs of Canadian towns along the road line. To the extent there is a general political difference in development patterns, I think the main difference is that the US had a lot more good land open to settlement in the West in the early 1800s than Canada did, so New England settlement and infrastructure projects looked to the Old Northwest (modern Midwest) while their Canadian equivalents put more work into developing closer to home.
Thanks- however, Bangor Maine is on a navigable waterway? It's situated on a large river that runs all the way down to the ocean and supports boat traffic. In Maine's logging heyday it was heavily used for timber extraction
True. And Bangor was one of American's 50 largest towns in the 1850s, being about the same size as Norfolk, VA or Savannah, GA. It was about 2/3 the size of Detroit, MI and half the size of Richmond, VA in the 1850 census.
Bangor had several disadvantages though that limited its growth and lead to it starting late and peaking (in relative terms) early. "Starting late" in particular did have a couple significant political dimensions. One was that Maine was a remote and neglected discontiguous hinterland of Massachusetts until it became its own state as part of the Compromise of 1820 to offset the admission of Missouri as a slave state. The other was that much of the Penobscot River basin was the subject of a border dispute between the US and the British colony of New Brunswick until 1842.
The big geographical disadvantages were that Bangor's harbor ices up in the winter and was too small for larger ocean-going ships, and that the economic value of the Penobscot River basin, while substantial in the mid 1800s, was of somewhat limited growth potential. As for the last, in the decades following the Civil War, the logging industry shifted South and West: Maine was about 5% of the total US lumber industry (by invested capital, number of workers, or total wages) in 1870, but only about 2-2.5% by the same metrics by 1900. Maine's lumber industry grew significantly in absolute terms, but declined by more than half in relative terms. Part of this was political and infrastructure limits to other potential lumber-producing areas lifting, and part of it was probably a shift in demand patterns as the shipbuilding industry that had been one of the main customers for Maine's lumber output shifted from wood to metal as the main structural material.
Thanks for this.
Where is that Maine authority Stephen King when you need him?
He’s a Bangor Maine resident.
IIRC in “11/22/1963”, New England states end up becoming part of Canada as an unanticipated consequence of preventing the Kennedy assassination.
Was going to say this; Maine is sparsely populated because of all the existential horror monsters that constantly roam around there.
Does it go the other way too? Do any of the existential horrors (particularly the marine ones) kvetch about hazards to navigation in upland New England's rivers? :-)
Between Hawthorne, Lovecraft and King (with support from other writers who had or have some connection), New England really does seem like "for the love of God, your sanity, and your soul, get out of here as fast as possible. There are monsters in the woods, there are monsters in the hills, there are monsters in the city, there are monsters in the villages, there are monsters in the sea - there are pretty much monsters everywhere."
I think it has a literary tradition because it got colleges earlier, and some of them became horror writers. Also it gets cold in the winter and people get depressed.
OK, and maybe Randall Flagg *is* an avatar of Nyarlathotep.
"For the fishman I really fear
Is the one that's in the mirror,
and he looks like me..."
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3tTHn2tHhcI
That's excellent, including the special effects.
I misread it as fisherman rather than fishman, and thought is was going to be a warning about the the dangers of your own biases.
In a way, it is :-)
If there's one thing I've learned from Peter Ziehan, it's the importance of rivers to historic (and current) development. You'd think that if rivers are good, seas and oceans would be better, but that's just not true without a protected harbor. Navigable rivers are basically good protected harbor on their whole navigable length. Inland New England (except Massachusetts) is mountainous and rocky terrain far from useful harbors or rivers. The Midwest is defined by its access to rivers.
The image in this Wikipedia article gets the point across well.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inland_waterways_of_the_United_States
All else equal, every piece of land in the Mississippi watershed is going to be more economically useful than inland Vermont, NH, or Maine. And as other commenter have noted, all else is not equal.
Huh, OK I was going to say the Appalachian highlands, https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/6/65/Map_of_Appalachian_Highlands_and_Appalachian_Lowlands.png
All the good farm land near the Saint Lawrence, is part of Canada.
Before railroads, the cost of shipping over water vs over land, per mile, was several orders of magnitude. Railroads reduced that cost differential to roughly one order of magnitude in flat conditions. Interstates nearly reduced that differential to anywhere the highways went (though never got as cost-competitive as railroads, obviously). Until the interstate system, shipping from Albany to Omaha was less expensive than shipping from Albany to Burlington.
I don’t actually see a discontinuity in roads at the border. It looks like the flat area around Lake Champlain, including Plattsburgh on the New York side and Burlington on the Vermont side, is continuous in road development with the flat terrain north to Montreal, and the discontinuity is at the rough terrain. Similarly, in northern Maine, there’s a cluster of roads in the east, around Caribou and Presque Isle, connecting to the development in New Brunswick around the St John river, stretching up to Edmundston in Quebec, where the roads stop as you cross the rough terrain to the St Lawrence river. This seems to me to reinforce the idea that there’s a geographic factor more than a political one.
I don't see how we could be looking at the same map. Are you zoomed in enough? Look at northwestern Maine versus the road network around Quebec City, or northern New York versus the road network around Ottawa. Way denser on the Canadian side
Northwestern Maine is a place where the discontinuity does line up with the border - but that's also a place where the terrain discontinuity lines up with the border. But northern New York is a place where there is very clearly no discontinuity at the border - the area within 10 or 15 miles of the St Laurence River has about equal roadway density on both sides of the border, and there's only a difference when you get farther from the border, near Ottawa, or into the mountains that exist on the New York side.
But even in northwest Maine, the discontinuity in roadway only partially follows the border. To my eye, it looks like the discontinuity gets a bit south of the border once you're at northern New Hampshire, and goes north of the border once you're farther up, near Pocatière and Saint-Pascal in Quebec. And thn it doesn't follow the border at all when you get farther east.
I wonder if the Maine-Canada border itself is a result of the terrain- they drew the line where they hit a natural barrier or something. (I vaguely recall there being some kind of early 19th century skirmish over the border there). I've never actually been up that way so I'm just speculating
Looking at different parts of the same map, maybe. The difference is very abrupt on Maine's western border, less so elsewhere.
I'll just add that from personal experience in both places, Maine winters are much rougher than Chicago's.
(An observation being reinforced in real time right now as I have a close colleague who relocated from Chicago to Maine last winter.)
Much of northern New England had its countryside depopulate back in the 1800s when the US was still mostly rural, because of better lands out west. New immigrants went into the cities, but the smaller cities didn't really have much to attract folks outside of a narrow set of industries compared to places like Boston and New York City that were relatively close by.
Take this with a huge grain of salt since I’ve never even been to most of these places, but from my understanding northern New England is not just cold and snowy, but also very rugged, rocky terrain, which is costly to develop, impractical to farm and would’ve been near impossible to traverse in winter, even on horseback. Chicago by comparison has a lot going for it for industrial production, e.g. fertile farmland, access to major waterways for shipping, and easy surrounding terrain for building rail and highway infrastructure.
Anchorage isn’t a good comparison because it actually has a very temperate climate for Alaska (very rainy, more comparable to Seattle than the Alaskan mountain winters you’re probably imagining), and again with its easy ocean access, makes a no-brainer of a staging point for a lot of natural resource extraction.
If you look at other rugged regions like those in the Rockies, you see a similar trend of using them as needed for resource extraction, then eventually transitioning to a more recreation/tourism/2nd-home sort of economy as the resources get used up. Colorado has very low population density outside of the front range, which itself is just on the border of the mountains, not actually in them.
If you made a true apples to apples comparison that captures the confluence of terrain and climate, I think northern New England is probably pretty average.
The mountains play a bigger role than you'd expect. Driving through VT takes longer than the equivalent distances in MA/NY/QC.
Alaska has abundant natural resources; there's a fund that literally pays you for living there. Meanwhile Maine has abundant crab apples for pies. Strangely, most people seem not to value apple pie as much as they value natural gas. (Something is probably wrong with them, but IDK maybe they reason mushy store bought pies are good enough? I mean people eat at McDonalds, maybe they don't eat food for taste, and just want to gain as much weight per sitting as possible)
As for the Canadian buildup, I think the reason is basically national: Canadians are Canadian, and so while they want to live in areas that are further south, and offer the ability to pass easily into the US for employment and trade, they also want to stay in Canada.
The eerie canal opened up the Midwest as the agricultural hub for New York and the east. The north east stops being a major agricultural hub, and population declines.
Plausible!
> just want to gain as much weight per sitting as possible
McDonalds specifically has a very low price menu that appeals to people on very tight budgets. When it became federally mandated for interstate food supplies to include the calorie counts on menus, quite a few people are literally doing the math in their head for what offers the highest calories per dollar.
New England is so rocky that fitting the rocks into mortarless walls is a major thing for farmland. The freeze/thaw cycle keeps pushing rocks up to the surface so it's not like you can just clear a field and be done with it..
It's like tetris with freeform rocks. You collect rocks and you look at them and figure out what will fit where. People dream about their rocks. This is from a book, I haven't done it myself.
Sooooo. I build dry stone walls as part of my work. There is a great book about traditional New England (New Hampshire, precisely) walls, called 'The Granite Kiss', that I can recommend for the layperson, and I've taken several professional workshops through The Stone Trust, in VT. I'm about to go to PA for a week to do another set of classes this fall.
It's much less like Tetris because you want even courses across the face, a slight slope to the inside (what we call 'batter'), and to cross your seams so you don't have running joints that will cause weak areas to form. We also do a lot of shaping to keep the stone sitting squarely on the course below. But you can break the rules if you are skilled enough! Which is super fun when you have the chance to get creative.
The Stone Trust teaches traditional English pasture walls as the basic type, but Kentucky stone fences and New England stone walls are very similar. The history of stone walls is fascinating, beginning with the Acts of Enclosure in England, and the parallel emergence of walls for structures and for livestock in the New World.
I could go on...
I wish I could remember the name of the book I read. I don't think it even mentioned shaping the stones.
Possibly it was for making low walls to get the stones out of the fields.
Yeah, doing more than a little bit of shaping takes fairly specific tools that a farmer or non stone mason is unlikely to have access to, especially in New England where were have really hard granitic rock that really requires carbide to cut well. Most old walls were built but the person who lived on the land, and some of their work was excellent! There are great examples of 200 year old foundations that still support barns and houses despite the lack of mortar. Field walls were not normally structural beyond 'not falling over immediately'.
My great-grandfather and his brother immigrated to New York City from Italy as uneducated teenagers, without their parents, around 1910, and by 1920 they had bought a farm (with a mortgage) in Connecticut. Obviously there's a lot to unpack there regarding immigration and labor and so on, but the fact that two migrant workers could get a mortgage on a hundred-odd acres of abandoned CT farmland speaks to how depopulated the area was a hundred years ago. Everyone had moved west. Before cars and rail lines spread everywhere, you had to be really close to market to make produce or dairy work, and grain production thrives on scale - grain keeps well so you might as well grow it out in the Plains where land is cheap and flat.
Yep. I have a lot of yeoman ancestors or relatives who were in northern NE during the 1700s and who all during the 1800s fled westward, or southward to NYC. They seem to have just walked away from those VT/NH/ME rock farms without a second glance.
That's part why those states today have all significantly reforested, and have significantly more acreage in conservation ownership, compared to 150 years ago.
Can confirm. I was never a landowner there, but the silent eloquence of the old walls with stones fallen beside them, crying out mutely in the returning wilderness for someone to heft them up and put them into place is real.
When I look at the megaliths of our ancestral homelands, I suspect that this sort of thing must truly be in the blood.
Dry stone walls - all kinds of techniques, from simple "pile them on top of one another" to really fancy:
https://www.dswai.ie/what-is-a-dry-stone-wall
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_HGpHiGNVE0
If you're getting a lot of rocks in a field, it's not good land and will take a lot of effort to farm. More suitable for sheep or forestry.
Fedeen walls are my favorite, which I haven't had a chance to build yet, and Wales has done crazy walling styles that make use of the slate that is so abundant there. But Irish walls are pretty cool! I build dry stone walls for work, and we take a lot of classes through The Stone Trust in VT, USA, but they are really an offshoot of the DWSA in Great Britain.
The second link seems to be walls made at least partly of shaped (worked?) stone, which is contrasted with found stones. I think the classic New England wall is entirely made of found stones.
It's interesting to see the variety.
Dagny did some dry stone work when she was away from Taggart Transcontinental, though I think it was a road rather than a wall. This is the only dry stone work I know of from fiction.
Now I'm wondering if you created your user name just to riff on crab apples for pies or if you've been lurking for years waiting for the chance to make and apple pie related comment. - yes, kidding
I was impressed he managed to work apple pie into it. He's been around a while.
My time in the area leaves me with memories of old farmsteads with apple trees gone wild, but not a lot of crab apples.
I stole crab apples going through my hooligan phase as a 12 year old. As close as I ever came to feeling like a big time gangster.
No one ever really cared about their crab apple crop from the single tree in their front yard in my Midwest small town.
The homeowners probably would have laughed their asses off if they knew how our juvenile hearts were racing when we sneaked onto their property to steal a couple sour as hell apples.
Yes, mostly, I think.
Modern Americans think of distance in terms of miles, but a better way to think of distance is in terms of time (at least when thinking of things 200+ years ago). Rome to Alexandria, Egypt was a shorter trip than Rome to whatever the 100AD equivalent of Munich would be.
And American roads (maybe western roads in general) were *terrible* back then. Getting on a boat and going up or down the coast was much faster. Similarly, river travel (or, eventually, artificial rivers in the form of canals) was faster than going over land.
So ... Boston has a wonderful harbor and New York was pretty good and Philadelphia was also quite good. North of Boston near the water you have ... Portland, Maine. Maybe if Portland had been developed before Boston it would have won out as a major harbor, but I doubt it.
So a huge part of the answer is that the roads back then were terrible and north of Boston (in the USA) you didn't have much water access.
Notice, too, that Canada north of New England has the St. Lawrence River, which is nice and navigable. Combine this with wanting to be in Canada and not in the USA and you get ...
I’m guessing Hallifax got the edge over Portland, and Im wondering how wind and currents affect this, because they are significant pre-steam.
Is ethnicity a constant like race which it is often paired with? People can be of multiple races and ethnicities but are the labels used consistently and constant over time?
Absolutely not. See David Bernstein's recent book on this in the American legal context.
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/59916552-classified?from_search=true&from_srp=true&qid=RGLCc6qMU7&rank=1
I don't think "buy and read this entire book" is a valid response to a two line question in a comment section.
I think it's a completely valid response! If the commenter wants to know more about this, Bernstein's book is a great place to go.
Regarding or from recommended book: "The racial categories that the schools use are completely bonkers,..." --goodreads
wow.
Race has genetic markers but ethnicities [def: 'people sharing a common cultural or national heritage and often sharing a common language or religion'] are significantly varied in a moment in time and much more so over time esp. with the advent of modern transportation and communication tech.
Any thoughts on how it is used colloquially? 'I'm Greek" or 'I'm an ethnic Greek' (traditional?)
Ethnic greek means ancestry similar to the majority of the greek population/dating back some certain length of time. Greek can mean born in or long-term resident of Greece as well as being an ethnic greek.
Interesting, thanks!
I was surprised that a "long-term resident" would refer to themselves as such but it fits. There's a portion of Minnesota, USA in Canada that has no US land bridge. Angel Inlet I think. Anyway, during the pandemic it was an issue and long story short, the year-round residents don't distinguish themselves from the northern locals.
That is an interesting bit of geography.
It’s fun to read the history of the creation Northwest Angle. It’s the result of various treaties with France and goes back to Benjamin Franklin as the US negotiator.
In a nutshell, the problem was the area had yet to be surveyed. Initially it was assumed the source of the Mississippi was further north than it actually is. The other problem was determining just where the most northwesterly point of an irregularly shaped lake actually is.
In the end the US gained an exclave with a population of 119 at latest count.
It’s accessible without passing through Canada by boat in the summer or by ice road when the lake ice is thick enough to safely support motor vehicles.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Northwest_Angle
"accessible without passing through Canada...by ice road"
During the pandemic Canada shut their borders and remember reading this!
Why is SF so dirty, dangerous and super-expensive?
Whose fault is it? City govt?
If this is a city of super-smart people, as many claim, and as evidenced by some of the businesses and innovation that exist here, why can't they solve this problem?
Is there a path from what it is now, to a safer city? (Even if it remains dirty and expensive)?
The ideology of many of the people in san francisco has certain beliefs about the causes and effects of crime that don't work in practice.
In addition, there is widespread corruption and graft, and giant armies of bureaucrats and non-profits who are raking in hundreds of millions of dollars to "manage" the problems instead of fix them.
Its a knotty problem. How to solve homelessness without locking up all drug offender and re-institutionalizing the serious mentally ill.
Gavin Newsom has done some thinking about it and come up with a new proposal.
https://www.gov.ca.gov/2023/03/19/governor-newsom-proposes-modernization-of-californias-behavioral-health-system-and-more-mental-health-housing/
Houston has tried some new approaches and has reduce the homeless population significantly.
https://www.governing.com/housing/how-houston-cut-its-homeless-population-by-nearly-two-thirds
There's always building more housing, but that seems to be a strain.
> How to solve homelessness without locking up all drug offender and re-institutionalizing the serious mentally ill.
Has the same vibes as "How to lose weight without eating less or exercising more?"
"Build thousands of new community behavioral health beds in state-of-the-art residential settings to house Californians with mental illness and substance use disorders, which could serve over 10,000 people every year in residential-style settings that have on-site services – not in institutions of the past, but locations where people can truly heal."
Those proposals seem like they will run right into the objections to half-way houses and drug treatment centres and homeless refuges - not here, not in my nice neighbourhood, we don't want criminals and junkies hanging round our kids.
That's not simple NIMBYism, there are real concerns. But good luck finding someplace to build all those "thousands of new beds".
Also I have to laugh at "so we're gonna re-invent asylums but not call them that". Sure, Gavin.
It does beggar belief, doesn’t it?
Most of SF is not particularly dirty or dangerous. You can look at maps of violence crimes, homelessness encampment reports, poop on the streets, etc, and they all tend to highlight a relatively small section of the city. Things can look _really_ bad in those areas, and they get outsized attention, but the vast majority of the city is actually quite nice. Most neighborhoods are getting by just fine, and a few are thriving.
(The only real city-wide epidemic is car break-ins. They're a huge problem, but also mostly avoidable if you exercise the right precautions.)
That's why it's still so expensive. There are lots of nice neighborhoods where you can enjoy top-notch city life with very little downside. And, of course, it's still one of the best collections of tech talent on the globe.
But make no mistake, conditions in those parts of the city are _bad_. And even outside that area, you're still more likely than not to see at least one homeless person taking up a bus shelter, or on occasion yelling at you on the street. A lot of us locals have simply grown inured. Doesn't mean it's acceptable.
A big part of understanding the state of the city is that these things are connected. A lot of the city is bad _because_ it's been so successful in those other ways. For one thing, a booming tech sector let city government enjoy massive tax revenue and pay less attention to street-level problems. And rising cost of living has exacerbated those problems, particularly homelessness.
You have all these powerful trends all meeting in the same place:
1. SF's utter failure to produce housing, which lead to rising rents and a significant homegrown homelessness problem.
2. The city's somewhat tolerant approach of homelessness, and liberal attitudes in general, has meant less aggressive crackdowns in general.
3. Combine that with a national fentanyl crisis, and now SF becomes a magnet for open drug use.
4. Oh, and many cities are currently under an injunction that keeps them from sweeping homeless off the street unless they can offer shelter elsewhere. SF has hugely under-built its shelter network, so it has a hard time removing big camps.
One of the most common and vicious arguments is whether SF's homelessness problem is caused by locals, or by out-of-towners coming in for drug tourism. And there's a ton of data that points to _both_ things being factors. Lots of people want to argue it's one or the other but I think it's not reducible in that way.
Then you have this whole _other_ tangle of big trends which hit SF harder than most:
4. Tech companies were among the strongest to move to remote work in the pandemic, and since SF's economy is so dominated by it, that leads to an empty downtown which makes street problems worse.
5. Most big cities are suffering with poor police recruitment, due to persistent disparities in pay and perceived welcomeness. SF's liberal nature seems to be working against it, as is the local cost of living.
So why can't we fix it?
1. Well, for starters, these are not problems you fix in a day, or even a year. Fixing housing policy and supply will take _years_. Some things are actually moving in the right direction, but not at the speed that social media expects.
2. SF's government has reached comical levels of bureaucracy in a way that seems very very difficult to fix. City hiring is _insanely_ complicated, and the city government has amassed tons of committees & strictures that make it hard to get anything done quickly.
3. Nobody knows how to solve the fentanyl crisis, short of mega-duper-mass incarceration, maybe. SF's drug problems aren't worse than many other places, but in SF the national fentanyl crisis has combined with a local homelessness crisis, making both issues even harder to solve.
4. And while all of SF's problems are very, very real - people also judge it based on social media and reputation, and for many people SF is not a real place with real problems, but rather an avatar of Why Liberals Mean We Can't Have Nice Things. For these people, it will never be clean or safe enough.
So when someone complains about SF, you really need to look hard at what they're saying, and figure out if they're engaging in a good-faith discussion, or partisan axe-grinding.
Thanks for being so even-handed about this. Way too many people just push whatever narrative is best for "their side".
>Most of SF is not particularly dirty or dangerous. You can look at maps of violence crimes, homelessness encampment reports, poop on the streets, etc, and they all tend to highlight a relatively small section of the city.
Huh, I'd never thought about it this way before! The thing is that I almost entirely experience SF along where BART goes, and in my experience the area around every BART stop up to 24th St Mission is pretty gross and sketchy, to a greater or lesser extent. So pretty much every time I'm in SF (especially post-pandemic) I'm like "wow this is incredibly terrible!" But now that you mention it, the times I've ventured further afield (to Golden Gate Park, the Presidio, or Dogpatch), those have all been basically fine and even pleasant or vibrant. The problem is that getting to those places always requires taking a car or walking for multiple hours (I used to take MUNI sometimes but it is SO slow and also kind of confusing and it doesn't feel worth it to me; occasionally I also take buses but figuring out bus schedules in an unfamiliar area is a pain), so I very rarely go to them. My guess is a lot of other people's experience of SF is colored by the same thing — BART is the easiest way to get around, but BART only takes you to the really bad parts.
> The problem is that getting to those places always requires taking a car or walking for multiple hours
Not so! E-bike rental is extremely convenient, and a great way to get around the city. There are docks all over the place. You can also rent electric scooters if you prefer that.
I think the big difference between San Francisco and other North American cities is that a lot of the worst parts of San Francisco are right next to major tourist destinations and there's no attempt to hide this from the visitors. Other West Coast cities have similar problems with homelessness and drug use but put a lot more effort into cordoning off the blight.
Mine is **trying** to cordon off the blight, but not doing a great job. Although they seem to have discovered that intensive street cleaning on a semi-daily basis not only removes the pervasive odor of urine and feces, but also forces encampments to move and prevents new ones from starting, without offending far-left sensibilities. That, and I'm coming to suspect that they're deliberately being less strict about encampments in the far-left part of the city that was home to the worst BLM stuff. In my city, this is a distinct area from the standard tourist destinations, but I get the impression that this isn't the case for other west coast cities?
What I remember is that if you walk up a hill, particularly a steep one, from anywhere, the number of homeless drops off. Presumably it’s a bit of a struggle to move up and down for people who are not so healthy.
Not healthy, or haven't eaten today.
Or just fucking lazy.
I don't know why people are so reticent to admit that people who spend their whole lives living in their own shit taking drugs are probably lacking in a lot of personal virtues.
It’s true. Some of them are just fuck ups plain and simple.
I try to keep in mind that some of them are also struggling with hereditary mental health issues.
And then there are those that caught a series of bad breaks in life and don’t yet have the skills or haven’t had an opportunity to get their lives back on track.
Yeah. "Calories In Calories Out" may not be a perfect model for weight loss, but not having eaten for a few days does have an effect on my judgement of which activities are worthwhile. And that's for intentional fasting, when I know I could eat whatever I want, whenever I want.
"My guess is a lot of other people's experience of SF is colored by the same thing — BART is the easiest way to get around, but BART only takes you to the really bad parts."
Washington DC is similar in this respect. The Mall (grassy strip between the US Capitol Building and the Lincoln Memorial) is the place of choice for sightseers, with its monuments and museums and Greek revival government architecture. Scattered all around it, however, are some very poor neighborhoods, and the local bus system drives through nearly all of them. The local rail (DC Metro) goes under many of them, but not all. Tourists from out of town frequently remark on the ones they pass.
Yep. The Powell & Civic Center stops are right in the rough parts of town. And while the Mission has gone downhill a bit, by far the worst spots are the 16th & 24th plazas, which have turned into mostly-illegal street markets.
What's also bad is that the downtown BART stations themselves attract the homeless, and vandals. They're mostly dirty because they're poorly designed and weren't set up to be easily cleaned, but they're also de facto shelters for the local homeless.
Walk around North Beach, Telegraph, Upper Nob Hill, Wharf, Marina, Presidio, Richmond, GGP, Sunset, Haight, Duboce, Castro, Noe, Hayes Valley, etc., and it's a completely different story. And that's where most of the city lives or goes for recreation.
But if you come into downtown via BART you are absolutely seeing some rough stuff.
https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/book-review-san-fransicko
(I recommend both the book itself and Scott's review of it.)
Everyone I know who's lived there tells me that the dirty & dangerous parts are just a couple of neighborhoods, and the rest of the city is fine. I haven't been in a long time, but I've had like 5 different people tell me this
That's New York. I used to hate all cities because my experience of big cities was colored by dismal, ugly San Fransisco. New York is a giant traffic jam, but it's got culture in a way that San Fransisco really doesn't.
Please. San Francisco has more “culture” than New York in their kombucha jars alone...
I kid, but seriously though, hippy culture still counts as culture, and SF has it in spades. Even if it is mostly a relic of a bygone era.
I know you were only partly serious, but per Poor Stuart https://www.poorstuart.com/nyc-movie-showtimes-citywide-by-arthouse/, here are the films playing at art house movie theaters today ((this is a Tuesday) in SF/Oakland/Berkeley:
26.2 to Life
A Haunting in Venice
A Haunting in Venice
Barbie
Barry Lyndon
Bottoms
Cassandro
Dior and I
Dumb Money
Fremont
Grave Of The Fireflies
Home Is A Hotel
Oppenheimer
Shorts Program
Talk to Me
The Killing
The Visit
Thelma & Louise
Here is what is playing in Manhattan:
26.2 to Life
A Haunting in Venice
All That Jazz
Amerikatsi
Aristotle and Dante Discover the Secrets of the Universe
Barbie
Barry Lyndon
Berlin & Beyond: Piaffe
Blood And Wine
Bottoms
Canary
Cassandro
Contempt (le Mepris)
Dumb Money
El Conde
Fiddler On The Roof
Flora and Son
Fremont
From The Shadows
Go For Grandma
Golda
Hello Dankness
I'm A Negro, I'm An American
Invisible Beauty
It Lives Inside
Jawan
Klute
Le Fort Des Fous
Man On The Run
Oldboy
Once Within A Time
Oppenheimer
Passages
Past Lives
Radical Wolfe
Rebel
Rocky Aur Rani Ki Prem Kahaani
Rotting in the Sun
Saturn Bowling (bowling Saturne)
Something You Said Last Night
The Origin of Evil
The Killing
The Inventor
The Storms Of Jeremy Thomas
The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar
The Nun II
The Mummy
The Plot Against Harry
Theater Camp
Typhoon Club (taif Kurabu)
Uncharitable
What Doesn't Float
Ah, Alan Watts giving talks on KPFA, The Grateful Dead's Jerry Garcia as de facto mayor of The Haight, Owsley Stanley cranking our high quality acid, Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters...
If you remember it, you weren't there ;)
For anyone interested, I wrote some thoughts on how to improve inpatient psychiatric care.
https://open.substack.com/pub/socraticpsychiatrist/p/improving-inpatient-psychiatry?r=44y4c&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web
How much mileage do you get out of these kinds of posts? Do you find they increase traffic to your blog to a noticeable degree?
I have no idea actually, I’ve never spent time checking where my subscribers come from. I guess I could check in a couple days and see.
Apparently there is a "White People at the Function" meme, and a clip of Irish dancing was used for it:
https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/white-people-at-the-function
So the original dancers made their own version:
https://www.tiktok.com/@_cairde/video/7244940207345159467
I'm pleased that they chose coleslaw.
Though I'm reminded of the counter-meme that black folk think white food is bland because they only experience it in my school or prison. My coleslaw is spicy and highly sought-after both.
Black people say white food is too bland - and yet McDonalds is always full of them
Is there really a white food? I mean Europe has multiple different culinary traditions.
That depends on what you mean by "white". If you mean "American of European descent", then I guess it'd be something like potato salad or the aforementioned coleslaw. If you mean "person with white skin", then there's no such thing as "white food" because there's no such thing as "culturally white" (in that sense). Just ask a Frenchman what he thinks about Lithuanian food.
This is just an impression, but I think African-American food isn't all that strongly flavored-- you have to go to Latin America and the Caribbean for the strong spices.
Or to Africa.
Have you eaten Indian food (regular Indian, not Indian aimed at white people)
To be fair, (pre)historically speaking, spiciness is inversely proportionate to latitude due to reasons of food spoilage. And if that's what we're talking about, then yes, the homelands of white people used a lot less spice.
In context, it probably means the cuisine of white Americans, whose families have been in America long enough that they don't identify with any particular part of Europe.
What do you spice it with? I've had good coleslaw which included hot peppers.
I suggest mincing jalapenos and adding them to the sauce with the raw garlic the day before. If you're making the mayonnaise yourself or using hollandaise, you can just chuck them in the blender. But that can get too spicy pretty quick. Grated onion kicks it up a notch too.
I am interested in learning more about the sort of *stereotypically* feminine person who is content letting others make decisions, following orders and spending their life caring for others. Any reading recommendations on this subject? Preferably nonfiction.
I think you're making a mistake in assuming that being stereotypically feminine is about letting others make decisions.
A stereotypically feminine person in a traditional relationship makes a lot of decisions. She has near total autonomy over the house and the children, the environment in which she spends her time. (Contrast to her husband, who goes to work where he generally doesn't exercise total control over everything.) She goes along with the decisions that her husband makes about certain things, just as her husband goes along with decisions like what's for dinner. Of course she should take her husband and children's views in mind when making these decisions, but it's up to her.
I mean, you're talking about a different phenomenon than I am. You can be a housewife and still have a strong personality. Not the thing I'm interested in.
Also, see the Heinlein version, in which a very good marriage includes a woman convincing her husband that he came up with doing the thing she wants. Not a bad deal for the husband if she has good judgement about what to do.
Is there a "stereotypically feminine" person who just follows orders from the men in her life? I know that for some Evangelical non-denominations, there's a big thing about Headship and the husband is the head of the house and master of all, but in practice I imagine very few women just unquestioningly go "yes, darling" on every single thing.
I imagine there are people who do need/want that kind of relationship where their partner makes all the decisions, but I tend to think of that as being somehow lacking, and it's got nothing to do with being a 'traditional' woman.
From John Charles Daly, describing I think a very traditional relationship:
""Look there is nothing to it. When we got married, we made a pact. We agreed she would make the small decisions and I would make the big decisions. We never violated that agreement. As a result, we have never had a cross word with one another for twenty years and we are going to go along for twenty more on the same basis [...] Mary decides, for instance, where I work; should we buy a house; where the kids go to school; you know that kind of thing. I make the big decisions, should we recognize Red China? What are we going to do about Nasser?"
At the risk of sounding snarky I'd recommend starting with AlAnon literature and a book on IFS.
It would probably be worth looking into biblical sources. Even if you don't want to read through the Bible to see all that it says about femininity I'm sure that you could Google around to find the appropriate passages.
I haven't read it start to finish but I think a lot of women in the Bible were actually kinda cheeky
I think of the bit of proverbs where it is describing the virtuous woman (for ~900BC Israel from the view of a man, most likely). It contains this: "She considereth a field, and buyeth it: with the fruit of her hands she planteth a vineyard."
And I'm thinking that, yeah, the rest of the thing pretty much has her being nice and obeying her husband and caring for the kids and so on. And also she is expected to go out and make a major real estate transaction on her own :-)
Not cheeky, per-se, but a bit more independent than I might have guessed.
She's a lot busier than that. Read the whole thing.
Proverbs 31:10--31
(10) A woman of valour who can find? For her price is far above rubies. (11) The heart of her husband safely trusts in her, And he has no lack of gain. (12) She does him good and not evil all the days of her life. (13) She seeks wool and flax, And works willingly with her hands. (14) She is like the merchantships; She brings her food from afar. (15) She rises also while it is yet night, And gives food to her household, And a portion to her maidens. (16) She considers a field, and buys it; With the fruit of her hands she plants a vineyard. (17) She girds her loins with strength, And makes strong her arms. (18) She perceives that her merchandise is good; Her lamp goes not out by night. (19) She lays her hands to the distaff, And her hands hold the spindle. (20) She stretches out her hand to the poor; Yea, she reaches forth her hands to the needy. (21) She is not afraid of the snow for her household; For all her household are clothed with scarlet. (22) She makes for herself coverlets; Her clothing is fine linen and purple. (23) Her husband is known in the gates, When he sits among the elders of the land. (24) She makes linen garments and sells them; And delivers girdles unto the merchant. (25) Strength and dignity are her clothing; And she laughs at the time to come. (26) She opens her mouth with wisdom; And the law of kindness is on her tongue. (27) She looks well to the ways of her household, And eats not the bread of idleness. (28) Her children rise up, and call her blessed; Her husband also, and he praises her: (29) ’Many daughters have done valiantly, But you rise above them all.’ (30) Grace is deceitful, and beauty is vain; But a woman that fears the LORD, she shall be praised. (31) Give her of the fruit of her hands; And let her works praise her in the gates.
As far as I know, the idea of the passive upper class woman is Victorian. Medieval upper class women ran what might be best thought of as a medium-sized manufacturing enterprise with many different products.
Yeah, the textile industry hugely changed domestic life in a way that's not really even apparent to most people. Most of us have grown a carrot or a tomato and thought, wow, it'd be a lot of work to feed my family this way, but we mostly all think of fabric as coming from a black box (or Joanne's). But linen production was a major part of subsistence farming in Europe for centuries.
In Europe, even queens worked with textiles! The second wife of Henry VIII got mad at him for still wearing the clothes his first wife made. Thousands of years earlier, Alexander the Great gave some purple thread to the Queen of Persia, and she was insulted by implication that she should work, so then he had to explain that it was a cultural misunderstanding; his own mother would have appreciated the gift.
It might also be a result of 1950s household appliances. Prior to that there was far too much to be done around a household (men's and women's work) for people to be idle. Bored housewives wasn't really a thing before that, and their work was vitally important to the family surviving and thriving.
Related, prior to widespread appliances it was actually more common for the middle class (let alone upper middle class) to employ servants. Think about It's a Wonderful Life, set in the period around WWII, where the main family is constantly considered fairly poor but still has a household servant and didn't consider that any kind of extravagance.
Even in households where the man was clearly the head, women were far from "passive" throughout most of history.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baumol_effect
I once had a conversation with my coworkers (software engineers at a Big Tech company) where I said that people with our kind of money would've had servants back in the day and none of them could believe it. There was a lot of trying to figure out how well-paid professionals would not have servants, because the idea of having servants was unthinkable.
Meanwhile I had read enough 19th century literature to notice that even down-on-their-luck professionals would have a housekeeper.
> Think about It's a Wonderful Life, set in the period around WWII, where the main family is constantly considered fairly poor but still has a household servant and didn't consider that any kind of extravagance.
Or the famous quote from Agatha Christie, that she couldn't imagine being too poor to afford a servant, or being wealthy enough to afford a car.
I agree, but sort of think that it's why it's important. The Bible is imo a big source of ideas about stereotypical feminine virtues, but it paints a more complicated picture than just "listen to your husband and pop out babies."
I guess I'm less interested in reading men lecturing women about how we should be and more interested in the internal experience of being one of these non-assertive "nurturing" women.
Laurel Thatcher Ulrich is known for the quote "Well-behaved women seldom make history", which to her was a critique of historians ignoring most women. You might be interested in her work attempting to correct that.
Thanks, I've read her!
The interesting thing about that quote is that you only need the last four words.
"Non-assertive" is a very broad label. Traditionally it was the man is the breadwinner, sure, but the woman runs the domestic side of things and has the last word there.
They're not "assertive" in the sense of challenging every decision, but they do operate on "this falls within my sphere so I decide on it". Households where the man insists on being in control of every little thing and making all decisions can veer towards the abusive.
Mind you, I can't speak for what American households of that sort are like.
Hiding one's purchases maybe used to be more of a thing. A friend of my grandmother's would buy a piece of furniture and stick it in the attic. Then after an interval, she would "bring it down from the attic" as if it had been there all along.
There's an old joke about a man who says he's in charge--"I decide what to do about Russia and China, and my wife decides where we live and how the money spent."
I think that you're making a mistake assumption about some people in that movement. Here is a charitable article about it:
https://www.womanandhome.com/life/tradwife-definition-alena-petitt-346861/
Secondly, why not just go to your local evangelical church, find a woman who does believe in that role, and talk to them about it? They aren't some extinct breed, you could just ask one to coffee and tell than that you're interested.
Huh. I doubt that such a woman would be willing to talk to me, but admittedly I haven't tried it. I have talked to religious people about their religion, but mostly I was trying to be polite so didn't ask many searching questions.
Naturally I've read the Bible. I remember some ideas about stereotypically feminine virtue, but not much insight.
It might be more helpful to read books written by modern people about their ideas of biblical womanhood, which are perhaps more informed by the last few centuries of theology and western Christian culture rather than the text of the bible. I unfortunately don't have any specific recommendations; I left evangelical Christianity in early adulthood so the only books I know off the top of my head are e.g. Lies Young Women Believe, and Girl Defined, which aren't exactly nuanced philosophical ruminations on the virtues and subtleties of femininity and womanhood. But biblical womanhood, male headship, traditional marriage -- those might be good search terms to find books, if you haven't tried them yet.
I didn't mention this because I thought it might be too obvious, but just to be sure, the other thing would be the "trad wives" stuff. Googling that term (and scrolling) will get you articles by people who believe in the traditional marriage role. I don't know enough about the movement to recommend anything specific though and to note, it's controversial movement so will perhaps be not quite what you are looking for. Once again, I don't know the details, just that it's related. Perhaps another commented can give a more detailed perspective
Any number of memoirs would if still read quickly disabuse one of the notion that women "work harder now than ever" or indeed "work now where they didn't work before" but one I especially enjoyed because it was funny and because it illustrated just how late into the 20th century people were living a 19th century life, is "Little Heathens" by Mildred Armstrong Kalish.
_More Work for Mother_ is a history of housework which argues that the hard physical labor of housework of, say, the 1920's was eliminated by mechanization, but the amount of time required for a socially acceptable home has remained the same. Standards for cleanliness and childcare have gone up a lot.
I've never seen a claim that women work harder than men, just that they're spending more time on housework than men and have much less uninterrupted time.
The middle classes and rich kept their houses really clean in the 19c, but they had servants.
I thought the strong claim WAS the uninterrupted time - an hour or recreation broken up into little slices doesn't have the same relaxation benefits, leading to a subjective experience of working harder overall.
Thanks!
I recall a book (novel) that is a little bit about that, sort of in the breach - albeit centering on, essentially, a woman of the nobility: "Pavilions of Women" by Pearl Buck. It is surely a forgotten book and I expect it is probably more faithful to the mind of the writer than to that of a Chinese woman, though who knows - still, the very fact that its themes would bewilder readers now, may suggest it is along the lines of renunciation of self, and then, of duty.
Thanks! I haven't read it, but from Google it seems like it is more the opposite story of a traditional woman moving towards independence and self-determination. I'm more interested in the sort of person who is content NOT determining herself.
The heroine of Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park, Fanny Price, is kind of like this, and widely disliked for it too...
In "Pavilions of Women", the traditional woman moving towards independence is contrasted with other women characters NOT doing that and defending their choice not to. It might fit what you are looking for!
Thanks!
May be hard to find. Even Middlemarch, which famously concludes by eulogizing "those who rest in unmarked, graves” or unvisited graves or something, but made the world “not so hard for you and me“ chronicles a very determined and discontented woman. This tends to be the personality of lady writers. It may be a blind spot.
I suspect that most people in the past were like this, regardless of gender. Everyone was a part of a larger system (family, tribe), everyone had a role to play.
It's a modern thing to have enough money to buy (or rent) your own place, and an impersonal legal system that mostly guarantees that people leave you alone.
If you are surrounded by other people, you either do what they tell you, or you spend your life in constant conflict. You only achieve relative peace by playing your role sufficiently well *and* being sufficiently high-status so that people don't bother you anyway for bullshit reasons. (Hell is other people. Modern civilization is the virtual and literal walls between you and them.)
Thanks!
An excellent YouTube channel that delves into the (sub)plots and themes of classic (Foundation, Hyperion) and contemporary (Three Body Problem, Blindsight) science fiction: https://www.youtube.com/@QuinnsIdeas
Oh yes, I enjoyed his Hyperion and Dune video essays quite a bit, will have to check out Blindsight next
Thank you, I'm obsessed with Blindsight, I will definitely check this out
I second this recommendation (assuming seconding is okay here?).
I've never seen an objection to seconding. There's probably a limit. Five agreements? Ten? I don't see people doing that. If you're feeling nervous, mention a favorite video or somesuch.
A lot of people from the US, at least as far as I can see (I don't live in the US) are talking about a terrible downturn in the IT sector, with lots of layoffs and bad experience job-searching. Is this really happening, to an extent that can't be chalked up to typical "frictional unemployment", and if yes, why? I heard ChatGPT thrown around, in the "AI has finally come for your jobs" sense, but I don't believe it - seems too soon.
As someone else said, cheap money is part of the story. If you're growing by high single or even double-digit percents each year and have a supply of money available in low single digit percents, your incentive is to grow like crazy for as long as that position holds.
Growing like that, you're very likely to make a lot of poor hiring decisions (too many, lower skill, unnecessary roles). If your growth-minus-cost stays positive, there's not much reason to slow down to be more careful. As money has gotten more expensive in the last few years, companies have been taking a look and realizing that they've got $millions or $billions on payroll that aren't really producing value. Facebook was looking at declining earnings when they started making cuts. Twitter was also cutting around the same time, which helped set the stage.
If interest rates remain high, or go higher, then we should expect to see the same. Also, executives or financers are looking at places like Facebook and Twitter and realizing that there may be a lot of money to be made by cutting. Let's assume Google has even 10% of its workforce not producing good value (my guess would be much higher, but it's hard to say). Google apparently had 190k employees at the end of 2022 and has an average salary (presumably not including benefits and other costs) of $140k. Factoring in a low estimate of what benefits costs, cutting 10% would likely save well over $3 billion dollars a year. When they're gaining more profit per year, each year, than that 10% costs, then there's not much incentive to weed it out. While you're growing you need more people anyway, not less. It might be a matter of better utilizing, rather than removing. From 2021 to 2022, Google's profit declined by $16 billion. When the cost of a senior VP is about $1 million, that person can justify their salary many times over by pointing out the ability to save a few billion with staff cuts, once the extreme growth slows down enough to open up other priorities.
My non-economist theory, which I haven’t seen anyone more qualified state but to me is intuitively true, is that its the rise in interest rates. VC’s are more willing to be patient waiting for a company to be profitable if there is cheap money to borrow around.
In my experience, ChatGPT helps with productivity, but you still need someone who knows what they’re doing. Though I guess some employers might be trying to get away with fewer code monkeys.
It’s not as bad as the 2001 crash, imho, though kids these days don’t remember that.
The more I've worked with AI tools the more I have come to a similar conclusion to you. They are a tool, a sophisticated one, but they are not yet a replacement for human intelligence. Most of them require a lot of hand holding and direction to produce a useful output, and that requires people to be employed to use them. Over time I think they will reshape the way we work, but I don't think they will lead to mass unemployment in their current form.
Strong agree. I liken current AI forms to Microsoft Office's transformation of middle management and data. As a productivity enhancer, it worked great. Lots of people previously hired as number crunchers or letter writers could be reassigned more effectively. Places that couldn't afford either now had access. All good things, pretty transformative. Not that much different than other productivity enhancers that have come along.
Maybe some future AI will do more, and some people will get a lot more out of this than others (like Excel gurus that go far above what most people can). For most people it will be either no difference or a minor difference, while a significant number will be modestly helped by better efficiency.
I worry that the common use of ai means that there won't be as many people with enough domain knowledge to manage ai.
Do you see that as different from the current generation coming up who always had Google and can look things up at all times?
To me, domain knowledge is still necessary because Google doesn't always have the answers (or at least correct ones) and there's a lot of specific knowledge about how to do things that can't be looked up, like how such and such organization runs things.
That's with current LLMs for sure, and likely more advanced AI as well.
I see a difference because Google doesn't make things up. There are lies, but they're hand-crafted artisanal human lies, not mass-produced lies that are more numerous.
It's like the old joke about computers being able to make arithmetic errors much faster than human beings.
I wonder if it's just a natural correction with supply catching up to demand. Now that 'everyone knows' IT jobs are the really good jobs, whoever can train for such a job is doing so, and the supply of personnel is now getting to the point that employers can be picky about who they hire (instead of taking any warm body). This means not enough jobs for everyone with any kind of qualification and drop in wages. The really highly qualified, talented and experienced will do just fine, everyone else is meeting the reality of what it is like looking for work just like the non-STEM schlubs.
Didn't the same thing happen with law? Becoming a lawyer was supposed to be a good paying, fairly high status job, so the supply outstripped demand with the resultant lack of jobs for all the qualified and salaries, status, etc. going down?
I've thought that any line of work which is widely accepted as a good way to make an above average income will become overcrowded.
This is why recommending the trades might not be great advice. Plumbers make good money because there aren't very many plumbers compared to the demand.
A cool story about extremely competent plumbers.
https://harpers.org/archive/2023/09/man-called-fran/
https://12ft.io/proxy?q=https%3A%2F%2Fharpers.org%2Farchive%2F2023%2F09%2Fman-called-fran%2F
Discussion: https://www.metafilter.com/200788/Whats-an-Enter-Key
It’s impossible to outsource plumbing. That’s huge.
That’s been the case for two decades now. And IT workers have had global competition for decades as well. Yet salaries remain high, although not spectacular outside google etc.
Two decades isn't that long, though, to shift things. "Gradually, then all at once".
The dot com bubble was nearly thirty years ago. The tech sector recovered from that, so a downturn or slowing down around now isn't that strange.
Yeah, and though IT workers have had global competition for decades, the pandemic made remote work the norm around the world. Once companies figured out that their teams could work from rural America, ot was only a matter of time for them to just hire folks in Mumbai instead.
No that’s what happened. Outsourcing has been around long before Covid and in fact companies are eager to bring people back to the office, not work from home - with resistance from workers.
If anything the highest point of outsourcing is over - Russia and China are not going to be sources of outsourcing labour anymore.
I realize this is a one-data-point anonymous anecdote, but I just got laid off along with ~5% of my company and everyone who was asked to leave was in the US or UK, after a big round of hiring in India and Costa Rica in early summer. I do think companies want certain people back in the office, but I think there are other roles that they just want done and don't care if they ever see you.
(And I already have another job lined up, so no worries for me).
It's an inflated perspective that focuses almost entirely on Big Tech, Inc. The tech industry at large is doing really freaking phenomenal: https://www.comptia.org/newsroom/press-releases/tech-sector-employment-growth-a-positive-amid-pull-back-in-overall-tech-occupations-comptia-analysis-shows
Most of the new jobs are normal companies that are expanding their IT footprint and becoming more digital-centric. The people who can't find jobs are either too niche, non-competitive (skills are out of date or under developed), or are too used to getting 350k+ salaries and won't come back down to Earth.
Likely no one cries for the "350+ and won't come down to earth", but it is a genuinely unenviable position to find yourself in: typically, even if you don't absolutely need to stay at that level to pay your bills (as many SV people probably do), you are likely to be rejected as "overqualified, will jump ship the first chance he gets" when trying out for "down to earth" work.
I'm not in a sector (and I think a lot of commenters are), but I think it is more a correction from the pandemic era. i.e. the pandemic/WFH era was a tremendous boom time for Silicon valley, and a lot of IT companies assumed this was going to be a `new normal' and engaged in a huge amount of hiring. Then the pandemic/WFH era ended and things returned to something more like the 2019 norm, leaving those firms hugely overstaffed. Hence the apparent downturn. (i.e. not really a downturn relative to 2019, but a huge downturn relative to 2021).
How good is science in “the master and his emissary?” What’s Ian McGilchrist’s reputation among academics?
I read the book in an online reading group some years back, and I thought it was just neurowoo. But I'm not a professional in this area. I also looked up reviews of it, and the closer the reviewer to neuroscience, the more damning the review. In an interview here (https://web.archive.org/web/20180711192147/http://frontierpsychiatrist.co.uk/interview-with-iain-mcgilchrist/), when asked "Is your right/left brain conflict best viewed as a metaphor or something more ‘real’?" he says that even if the neuroscience doesn't pan out, the thesis of his book can stand without it. That says all I need to know to pay the book no further attention.
He went deeper into his thesis in The Matter With Things. I mean, there sure were a lot of citations in there as to the different effects of left-hemisphere and right-hemisphere dysfunction, but most of it is philosophy. It definitely made a compelling case that philosophy of science is rather important, as the naïve reductionism many scientists adopt may in fact be an error.
A while back on SSC there was a post about understanding Friston on Free Energy, but it's been years and now I would like to make my own attempt. I've been looking through the sources Scott pulled from, and (might) have a start on the basic idea, but the math and how the math could relate to the actual neurons is escaping me and I want more perspectives. Does anyone have recommendations for books/papers/posts on the subject that would be good for someone who is also trying to teach themselves about variational Bayes? More recent than 2018 would be extra cool. (or if you just have an opinion about free energy or predictive processing feel free to share.)
See the syllabus here: https://jaredtumiel.github.io/blog/2020/10/14/spinning-up-in-ai.html and also https://github.com/BerenMillidge/FEP_Active_Inference_Papers
If you need more then check Beren Millidge's writings, https://arxiv.org/abs/2107.00140 but also consider https://www.beren.io/2023-03-30-Thoughts-on-future-of-PC/
Here's a textbook on Active Inference from 2022: https://tinyurl.com/4387awe2 . Friston is a co-author and it was written under his supervision but the writing is by someone else, so it's more clear than his typical paper.
The URL does not work. Do you mean this book? https://mitpress.mit.edu/9780262045353/active-inference/
"Active Inference: The Free Energy Principle in Mind, Brain, and Behavior"
by Thomas Parr, Giovanni Pezzulo and Karl J. Friston
That's correct, thank you.
The model seems like a rabbit hole to me. I’ve started seeing the “predictive processing” pattern in all kinds of human systems. Not saying this means anything about the math or the accuracy of this model, but rather than I think it has a ton of implications which people haven’t fully unpacked.
Fairly odd recommendation I know, but I recently happened to stumble across the Wikipedia article on Paraguay (specifically its history) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paraguay#History. Turns out it's actually very weird and lurid, definitely not what I expected. I recommend reading without spoilers, but if you need convincing then we've got:
A country ruled directly by the Jesuits
A utopian idealist totalitarian state with mandatory interracial marriage.
A war that kills half the total population, and even more of the adult male population.
A postwar Nazi hideout (I guess most people know this bit though).
El Supremo! I love it, thanks.
Not to mention he one part of the world where a significant number of people with European ancestry speak an indigenous language of the americas.
Not what I expected to read today.
I am somewhat late to this, but since I’ve noticed some Polish people here, what is your take on relatively recent (September 6) decision if Polish central bank to cut interest rates?
Main take from international sources, which are tradionally quite hostile to current Polish government, seems to be that this is politically motivated to help the government win the upcoming elections. That seems... odd?
Like, I get a generalized mechanism “central bank lowers interest rates to boost incomes and employment in the short term, which is popular, but it leads to long-term instability”, but in this case, since the elections are on October 15, there doesn’t seem to be enough time for the boost to materialize?
So, main effect visible to voters, unless Polish households owe huge amount of floating rate debt, seems to be very conspicouos fall in the value of Polish currency (2.7 % in last 30 days; admittedly, this isn’t so bad, but looking on the chart makes it obvious to everyone that it was caused by “something” which happened on September 6: https://www.xe.com/currencycharts/?from=PLN&to=EUR&view=1M).
On the other hand, alternative hypothesis, that the central bank is reacting appropriately to current conditions, also has problems. Annual inflation in August, although decreasing, was in August still above 10 % (https://tradingeconomics.com/poland/inflation-cpi0), while unemployment rate is lowest it has been in 25 years (https://tradingeconomics.com/poland/unemployment-rate]).
It is as Faza says, the immediate political significance here is for mortgage payments. (The importance of which is downstream from an all-around housing crisis.)
But I guess it's also worth noting that inflation is, in fact, expected to continue going significantly down due to (largely planned, and therefore foreseeable) reduction of energy prices.
> unless Polish households owe huge amount of floating rate debt
Bingo!
There's a lot of floating-rate mortages out there, and rising interest rates led to significant increases in monthly payments, on top of inflation everywhere else. Even new fixed-rate loans, combined with persistently high housing prices, are seen as too expensive for the typical household.
So, the effect on mortgage payments is likely to be the most visible to the typical voter.
Apparently Fox News now crowdsources predictions on political questions, complete with Briar scoring for participants.
https://www.foxnews.com/americapredicts
The Biden question has an insanely low quality prediction. 35% chance he's still a Presidential candidate on Jan 31? He's not *that* old. That's four months away. 90+% chance, easy.
The selection bias here seems like it's going to do a lot of damage to accuracy until they get the bad predictors out by weighting on Brier scores.
It's been at 81-86% on manifold, so meaningfully lower than your >90%, fwiw. I'm team NO there at those prices, with probably a 70-75% estimate on it. I'm lower for a few reasons, e.g., because of the tremendous amount of signalling from the media and many within the party regarding Biden's suitability. OTOH the most obvious alternative candidates are not great options either...
No, the equivalent question on Manifold is at 94%: https://manifold.markets/FoxBot/will-president-biden-still-be-a-can
I think he will still be running because he must have died or feel that he should step down, neither of which is super likely. He cannot even have lost a primary (which, against Marianne Williamson and RFK Jr is unlikely), because the first primary happens on Feb 4. All the the signaling he should step down is not paired with any meaningful possible person he could step down for.
I think the idea might be "cognitive decline is real, he steps down to give Kamala the nomination" or something of that nature, rather than "he'll drop dead before then".
It's a problem for both sides, if they say "your candidate is too old/too unhealthy", well, so is your guy.
I think that you're a little overconfident here. If the economy crashes it will be much harder for him to run, his age plus whatever chances you assign to the Hunter Biden corruption stuff, plus just something random and bad happening seem like over 10% to me. Probably not 65% though
Maybe QAnon and the secret army be controls will take him out?
Too bad it's not a betting market :(
Right. There's no point to crowdsourced predictions _unless_ they're a betting market, because otherwise stuff like this happens (through wishful thinking or whatever) and there's no mechanism for correcting it.
It's kind of fascinating to compare the relatively-neutral wording of the questions, with the titles of the articles that they're "from".
I recently got pissed off by yet another online "expert" telling me I needed to excersise an hour daily, with another expert telling me I needed to meditate for 30 minutes daily, have a morning ritual etc etc.
I get the impression most of these online experts are 22 year old kids with no family or demanding jobs. Wrote a post about it:
The Attack of the Online "Productivity" "Experts":
https://new.pythonforengineers.com/blog/the-attack-of-the-25-year-old-productivity-experts/
My very first boss once remarked that there were around a dozen things, each of which managers were recommended to spend 10% of their time on.
https://clickhole.com/why-are-you-not-already-doing-this-41-things-you-need-to-be-doing-every-day-to-avoid-burnout/
Just 41? I’m sure I could add another 10 to the list 😂
"I recently got pissed off by yet another online "expert" telling me I needed to excersise an hour daily, with another expert telling me I needed to meditate for 30 minutes daily, have a morning ritual etc etc."
You can keep going. The exercise experts will disagree massively among themselves about what to do, how to do it and how often to do it. I expect the same for the meditation folks.
So don't worry about it too much.
MUCH of the benefit of all of these is obtained by "enough" that is "good enough."
Going to the gym three times a week and doing something moderately intense is much better than doing nothing (going for a 30 minute walk daily is also better than doing nothing). More might be better, but the big win is getting in some basic exercise regularly. 3 times a week vs 6? Not nearly as important as 3 times vs zero.
"Best" exercise mix versus okay/fine/good enough is not nearly as important as exercise or not.
So let the experts go off an make recommendations that will not be followed by almost anyone.
Reformation is just a cousin of the demigod Change. Only True Believers promote Change. Everything must Change, because we've become so spiritually advanced we just can't contain ourselves. Green hair and face piercings are markers of piety, and if one throws in sexual disorientation, a full house.
It's hard to be humble when you're perfect. Two beers a month should do it.
Strong agree. Even doing some basic stretches a few times a day is huge compared to none.
100 times yes to this.
The major problem is that all these 'experts' are working in isolation. It's like teachers giving homework; everyone tells you to do X amount, but they are not co-ordinating, so if you really did it all it would take several hours a night.
Each expert is going on their field, so the exercise guy will tell you do so many hours a week/day, the spirituality/wellness guy will talk about mediation and journaling and the rest of it, and so on. In reality you couldn't do all this unless you were independently wealthy, could hire a cook to do the two hours from scratch home-cooked meals and have people to deep clean the bathroom and do the weeding and mind the kids while you did the mediation, journaling, exercise, and the rest of it.
Besides, it's all content generation. They need to come up with new articles every so often, so then it's "Why you should stand on your head for fifteen minutes every four hours" stuff.
And how many of the "recommendations" have passes RCT's? :)
I've been talking about the teacher and homework problem for a while.
Great points, esp about the content generation. Especially with most social media channels promoting regular posting, people have to post something,.
Publish or perish for the 21st century! :-)
In what context is this engagement happening - arguing with someone on social media, paying for a consulting service, a lifestyle article you chose to read with citations, youtube personality, or websites that shill products?
I don't think most of these cases can be mistaken for one where you're dealing with experts.
Possibly of interest-- a man describes getting a lot of good out of the Five Tibetans (a cross between yoga and calisthenics) while just putting in a few minutes on a lot of days.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5vTj9h1gNFM&ab_channel=Timvandervliet
A version of how to do the Tibetans:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LEYIr4TJOm8&ab_channel=Timvandervliet
Sorry, can't resist this:
"I am 51 years old but my body (and mind!) is less than 30 years old."
My friend, have you got any mirrors in your house? Because you do not look 30, I regret to inform you.
Besides, I'm about as inactive as a tree sloth and I recently got complimented on looking much younger (about 15 years or so) than my actual age. Fat is the answer here: facial fat means no wrinkles 😁 Also the person was a lot younger, and young people think all old people are the same age.
He may not be including his face as part of his body.
So his body is thirty but his face is sixty because that's where the shaved-off years went?
The original book where these appeared, Peter Kelder's "The Eye of Revelation", can be found on the web: https://templodoyoga.files.wordpress.com/2020/01/the_eye_of_revelation_by_peter_kelder_edited_by_c_witt.pdf
There is more in it than just the five exercises (actually six, but most modern presentations leave out the sixth).
Something I discovered by chance some years ago when trying to google for the origins of T5T is the existence of one Victor A. Croley, who in the early 1940's was smacked down more than once by the American Medical Association for selling medical advice by mail without a licence. I gather (without having seen it) that Croley was selling a description of the Tibetan Rites, presented as direct advice, instead of being cloaked in fiction. Croley and his business partner, Charles B. Roth, put it out as a booklet written as by one Emile Raux. They distributed it by mail, through small ads. I could discover nothing of Emile Raux at the time, but I see a book purporting to be based on his book is now available on Amazon. The Emile Raux pseudonym might be based on Pierre-Paul Emile Roux, a doctor of lung diseases that a Victor A. Croley (the same one?) wrote an obituary of in the "Journal of Outdoor Life" in 1935. In another article, Croley writes about Roux's work on tuberculosis, which Croley had suffered from as a child.
Kelder's book had a copyright date of 1939 (supposedly — are there any original copies in existence?). If true, why did Croley take the risk of presenting it as direct advice? I have to wonder if Croley himself wrote the book after having been prevented from distributing the Emile Raux version, backdating its copyright date to avoid the connection with himself.
But if so, where did Croley get the exercises? Whatever their origin, they have existed since the 1940's at least.
Here's a completely speculative story. Someone — Croley or someone else — travels in India or Tibet in the early part of the 20th century, encounters exercises like these, practises them, and finds them valuable. He returns to the West and wants to teach them. He begins by putting out the Emile Raux version, but falls foul of the AMA. So he rewrites it as fiction. Or perhaps "Peter Kelder" does publish the original story in 1939 and Croley tries to rip this off. "Kelder" is fictionalising his own synthesis of what he has learned , in order to dress it up in the clothes that readers of the time would expect, ancient knowledge from secret masters in hidden monasteries.
But that's assuming that the Kelder book and the Raux book actually existed. The legal record shows that something by Raux existed, but was it these exercises? I wonder if the Library of Congress has actual, physical copies? It does have catalogue entries for three copies of "Ancient secret of the fountain of youth", but these are (or purport to be) revised editions of "The Eye" with publication dates no earlier than 1985.
DO NOT buy the Raux book on Amazon. I bought the Kindle version out of curiosity, and immediately left a 1-star review (on amazon.co.uk, but it hasn't appeared there yet).
Carolinda Witt's _T5T_ has an excellent selection of adaptations for different body types. It's the most thorough book of directions for exercise I've seen.
Oh, look, the LoC has two copies of the Raux book "Hindu secrets of virility and rejuvenation": https://lccn.loc.gov/39011384. Does anyone live nearby who could pop in and take a look?
Forgot to say, I do these exercises, and find them useful. Mind you, I do a lot of other stuff as well, so I'm not trying to minimise the time spent.
I don't think it's necessary done deliberately, but it succeeds partly because 'impossible' advice is unfalsifiable: you can't do it, so you can't complain it doesn't work. All you can do is feel bad that you didn't live up to their standards (since they seem to do it in their videos!). Same as other unattainable lifestyle goals marketed.
Achievable productivity advice usually comes off sounding boring, obvious common sense, or is immediately falsifiable from experience. So what thrives is the unattainable stuff.
Thats a very great and deep point-- give impossible advice, and when no one succeeds you can just blame them.
In a way, that's what "Get-rich-online" type Gurus do as well, right? Have a complicated formula, and if you fail to get rich its because "Gee, you didn't follow the formula right"
I was at a gathering of insurance agency owners and the speaker was a best-selling author on building a business with streamlined and repeatable processes. Basically about being able to remove yourself from the business and let it run itself. (Sorry can't remember his name at the moment.) During Q&A one of the owners asked a geniunely thoughtful question regarding the challenges faced and how they've tried to do this but it just doesn't seem to work giving examples. The speaker's answer was something like: "You're not doing it right. You need to enroll in special 3-day followup course we're running for your group this upcoming week."
ha! Thats a standard "Business Guru" advice-- if you need me "real" secrets you gotta signup for my $10,000 weekend course.
Thats another problem with many "experts"-- I dont talk about it, but the Duped podcast I link to spend a lot fo time on it.
And you are right-- these experts wont (or can't?) answer even basic questions about the field they are teaching
"Nothing is as important as you think it is when your'e thinking about it" and experts spend all day thinking about one thing. At length: http://hopefullyintersting.blogspot.com/2021/10/experts-and-focusing-illusion.html
With the exception of things that are? China and India's economic reforms for instance, brought massive improvement to the lives of literally billions of people. Would you say those don't qualify?
great article, thanks! To your examples, I would add: Movie critics watch dozens of movies every week, and so they like those weird indie arty-farty (read: boring) movies, and have nothing but contempt for "commercial" cinema.
I watch maybe 1-2 movies a month (in cinema), and love the brainless "superhero beats up villain" Marvel types, which critics tell me are causing the decline of civilisation :)
Is that really a good example? There seem to be far less of those coming out now, and people talk about being burned out on them post-Endgame. (This was my own impression after watching a few - the Campbellian trick works once or twice, if the ground is fallow, but then the fourth time you're watching some grand dramatic arc with droning Hans Zimmer soundtrack and weightless special effects everywhere, you quickly get bored no matter how big the CGI explosions are.)
Actually, people do still talk about how every movie is a superhero movie (demonstrably false) and how creativity is dying (which sounds a lot like ‘damn kids get off my lawn’ 😀). Including a few times here in the comments.
I mentioned this because every few days I hear someone complain about how Disney/Marvel are destroying art/cinema, and I’m like ‘But I love them!😎)
To be fair, I think most of the decline-pilled critics hold up the Marvel movies as a symptom, not a cause.
I'm likewise deeply annoyed by various "experts" offering laughably time-consuming and/or occasionally wildly unrealistic advice, particularly when it comes to domestic tasks.
In addition to the hour of exercise and 30 minutes of meditation and 15-30 minutes of journaling and two hours of organic, from-scratching cooking every day plus clean-up, you should also be examining/dusting every houseplant every day, looking over all your finances daily, flossing AND waterpicking, and your "weekly" tasks should include deep-cleaning your washing machine, refrigerator, dishwasher, shower(s)/sink(s)/toilet(s), car(s), trash cans, coffee maker and/or kettle, vacuuming your upholstery, curtains, and mattress(es), and and and and AND AND AND.
Then there's the laughably insurmountable random advice:
Counterfeit honey is a thing - so develop a relationship with a local beekeeper and source your honey from their apiary!
Have jewelry? Take it all to a jeweler once a year for prong and clasp checks!
Vague medical symptom? Just get your doctor to deeply investigate it!
And so on.
About *everything.*
I *suppose* all of this might be possible in a family where one of the adults is a permanent, stay-at-home "homemaker," but also no way.
Wanted to write the same comment. Yes, exercise is an important thing (by the way, you should do strength exercise *and* cardio *and* stretching; are you sure 1 hour is enough for all of that?), but so is meditation, and taking care of your finances (both classical and crypto), and cooking healthy meals, and socializing, and gratitude journaling, and writing your to-do lists, and practicing space repetition, and learning new things, and listening to motivational speeches, and cleaning up your room... and you should also get 8 hours of sleep, and keep a full-time job. Even without kids, impossible. With kids, doubly so.
Hypothetically, with flawless division of labor and no kids, only one partner having the full-time job, the other staying at home and doing the healthy meals and clean rooms and finances... yeah, maybe. If they are both like robots all day long. Definitely no time for hobbies or internet. (So maybe it's your comment that is unfalsifiable -- no person who follows the advice precisely has enough free time to come to ACX and contradict you!)
ha! Yes, I forgot all the other "advice" of what we are supposed to do. The big one from your list is financial planning, where you log every expense and then track your spending/saving. One of those things that sounds great in theory.
>Vague medical symptom? Just get your doctor to deeply investigate it!
This really pisses me off. Dont know how it is in other countries, but here in the UK its impossible to get a doctors appointment unless its an emergency (and sometimes, not even then). And so when an app tells me to "Check with my doctor" I just delete it.
>> I *suppose* all of this might be possible in a family where one of the adults is a permanent, stay-at-home "homemaker," but also no way.
My wife is a stay-at-home mom, and no, she doesn't have time for any of it!
Whenever I've read comments mentioning that it's basically impossible to get a doctor's appointment, it's almost always referring to the UK. The UK seems to have a rather subpar healthcare system. There isn't often much pushback against it, probably because the vast majority of commenters are from English-speaking countries like the UK and the US. (And the US isn't much better on that front it seems - and clearly much worse when it comes to other aspects of healthcare.)
My country is supposedly plagued by a shabby healthcare system and a severe lack of doctors and nurses, but when I compare how long it takes me to get an appointment for just about anything to other countries, it appears to be quite impressive. (For any non-emergency, it typically takes 1 to 4 weeks, on average it would be 10 days.) So, in my case, checking with my doctor would be a helpful piece of advice because I absolutely forget to do that all the time.
My favorite part of literally *every* diet/exercise article/video segment is "talk to your doctor before starting." I know they have to say that to avoid liability issues, but LOLOLOLOLOL. If people actually took that advice no doctor would be able to see anyone for anything else.
I'm in the U.S. on a not-great but not-terrible HMO (one company is both healthcare provider and insurer; so you can only see providers within the company. Insurance won't cover specialists etc outside of the company, and the company doesn't necessarily attract the top physicians or deeply granular specialties. Access is thus pretty limited! Probably the closest experience to what you have in the UK). This past year I've had many, many appointments with both my primary doc and specialists which were booked 8-10+ weeks get canceled a day or two before the appointment, and when I call to reschedule the next opening is 8-10 weeks away. It's become such a regular thing that I've started preemptively booking two week "follow-up" appointments with my regular ones, so that when the regular one gets canceled, at least I only have to wait two weeks.
But anyway. In an HMO, specialists are gatekept by one's primary care doctor, so advice like, "have your dermatologist do an annual skin check" is laughable.
In fairness, the one piece of advice that I think actually is practical more often than not is "check with a lawyer." It's not cheap, of course, but if you've gotten into a situation where the advice is "check with a lawyer," it might indeed be *incredibly* helpful to spend the money to check with a lawyer, even if it only buys you peace of mind about your contract/property line/speeding ticket/etc.
I've thought about it from a different angle-- how much is your doctor likely to know about any particular exercise project?
Well, of *course* they're going to research all the literature on it and get back to you!
Isn't it amazing that you can get an appointment with a lawyer at the drop of a hat and not with a physician? Maybe it's because you go to a lawyer with a check/cash/card and to a doctor with a secondary payer than may or may not pay at all. And people's solution is always to make it less free market.
Lawyers would be less likely to have a client who needs more time than was scheduled.
Google tells me there are about 1.3 million lawyers in the United States of America, 75% of which are in private practice/general law. Google tells me there are just over 1 million licenses doctors in the United States and only 113,000 of them are general practitioners, the rest break down into various specialties. I speculate that a lot of people in this country will go through life without needing a lawyer more than five or 10 times. I don’t want to guess at how many people in the course of their life will need to see doctors and how many times, but I’ve got to believe it’s a lot more than five or 10. Based on these numbers, I don’t think your question is hard to answer. .
That's part of it. Another part of the problem is that in the 90s, health care policy analysts decided that we were training too many doctors and that this was going to drive up health care costs somehow (*). The solution was to cap the number of Medicare residency slots at an unreasonably low level., which Congress implemented in the mid 90s and has been policy ever since.
(*) The uncharitable take is that they thought supply and demand worked backwards from the way it normally does. The charitable take is that the concern was a combination of "wasting resources training too many providers" and "surplus doctors will make work for themselves by recommending unnecessary procedures".
This is very, very true. I recently strong-armed my mother into joining a concierge medical practice and boy-howdy is her experience different from mine.
Telling you in particular, or just their audience?
Basically everyone who succeeds in life sleeps 6 hours or less each night, either naturally or by using coke. So the recipe for succeeding is "be born with a body that naturally doesn't sleep".
The lack of sleep to be successful and healthy idea contradicts findings about how much sleep most people need. Those guys on LinkedIn getting 5 hours sleep and hitting the gym are losing on the roundabouts what they gain on the swings.
I quite objectively succeeded in life (happy marriage, professor position at good university, happy with my social life), but I need 9 hours sleep per night. If I only get 8 or less, I will have at least mild headache throughout the day.
It's a disadvantage, but not impossible to overcome.
If by "succeed" do you mean "runs a billion dollar company or a major country". Pretty sure your average happily married doctor or engineer sleeps a full night.
I'm not average but as a happily married engineer in my 6 years in engineering I have rarely gotten a full night sleep and wow I wish I could do it more
Right, I was thinking of the kind of rolemodel that people go to for advice. Thankfully the upper-middle-class is a nice place to be too.
I dont like Coke, will Pepsi do? :)
Also, the type of people who sleep 6 hours are also the type who don't care about family/friends etc, so they aren't really a role model for me
I don't disagree with your thesis, but regular excercise is objectively good for humans and we should probably do more to organize society and culture around increasing it a bit.
Also, you've already stated it: they're still effectively kids, figuring out their place in the world and trying dumb things. Maybe they need constructive encouragement with an encounter from different perspectives which challenge their views.
I'm over 70 years old and have always made time for exercise, even during the most career-intensive and child-raising years of my life. Now retired, I can look back and evaluate that practice.
It seems to me that if I'd taken less exercise and devoted that extra time to a career-focused routine, I could have made. more money. On the other hand, I did well-enough in my career to enjoy a comfortable retirement, and for all I know, being attractively fit contributed whatever success I had working in television, journalism, and finally in healthcare administration.
Similarly, my wife has also been a lifelong regular exerciser, and probably could have earned more if she didn't deliberately choose a career that would allow her an hour a day, four days a week to exercise. Neither of us is particularly athletic in build, and we are not into competitive sports.
We currently have no chronic health issues, take no medications except for my wife's osteoporosis pill, and remain fit and active. I look forward to each day, and feel pretty good about everything. I feel like a goddam 26-year-old.
If I could, would I go back in time and exchange the inconvenience and effort of regular exercise for more money? Not on your life. Money is great, but it's utility begins to break down when your health breaks down.
My advice to young people is to make fitness a part of your identity. Internalize the statement, "I am the sort of person who exercises frequently" or the statement "I am not the sort of person who lets himself get out of shape". Commit yourself to regular cardio. Don't drink (you can really see the difference between those who do and don't by their late sixties. I quit about age 50.). I've been a vegetarian for 40 years, and never regretted it., although I can't say for sure what role that has played in my health.
tl;dr: I'm in my seventies, and looking back, I can say with firm conviction that the time and effort I invested in regular exercise has been well worth it.
im 39, 100% agree. regular exercise, good nutrition and proper sleep are the most important things you can do for yourself. feeling good has infinitely more value than money.
Ummm, when did I say regular excercise is bad?
Im saying for most adults, at least those of us with kids, taking out 45-60 minutes for excercise isnt always possible. In which case, doing anything, even 10 minutes of walking, is better than doing nothing.
> Im saying for most adults, at least those of us with kids, taking out 45-60 minutes for excercise isnt always possible.
That is not what you had said. Notwithstanding, it's generally possible for parents to set aside a block of time to exercise a few times a week, if not every day. Evening leisure time is there, it's just spent on other things. I'm a parent of an infant/toddler, and I'm fairly tired in the evening. I won't exercise *a lot* but there's no legitimate "expert" opinion out there, should you seek it, that will pull a hard number like 60 min per day and suggest it is a necessity.
60 minute a day is not a prescription I see cited in the wild or lifestyle websites. Usually it's 4-5 hours a week of moderate intensity, and that's for highly "optimal" cardiovascular health. Doing 20-30 minutes, on top of walking, is certainly not a wasted effort. I think
Yeah, I think when you have young kids, life gets insane in a way that few people who don’t have young kids can grasp. The perpetuation of the species depends on people being willing and able to either sacrifice their health and sanity for a while, or make sacrifices in their kids health and sanity, or some combination of those two.
Are you having fun? What could be done to make this game of life more fun and interesting? I'm not having much fun, but I think it's largely because of skill issues. How do you "get good"?
Life is inherently fun and trippy, but you have to look at it from a different angle. You might want to start taking spirituality seriously, as the rewards of "getting it" are seriously major.
Become really, really good at lifting weights.
Friends. Honestly having work friends, people to hang out with and do things with, and someone to come home to are all big factors in my life
Yeah, Epicurus basically figured it out. Then Alain de Botton packaged it in YouTube form with footage of discarded taxis, Mediterranean peasants, and a convincing British accent. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=irornIAQzQY&t=420s
A combination of strategy and self-knowledge. Notice the small things that make a big difference, then optimize. For example, a boring thing can be less boring when you do it with a friend. You can literally improve your mood by pressing a button, if that button turns on a CD player with your favorite songs. Small improvements, done repeatedly, can make a big change on the scale of months. It always helps to have smart friends who care about you.
My experience is that the more I think about and refine the concept “what truly matters to me”, and love accordingly, the happier I am and thus, in part, the more fun I have. Right now I have young kids which means what I really want more of is sleep and time where nobody expects anything from me.
Find some area where the common opinion is that it is boring, and become an expert in it.
Why? 1) when you become an expert in something, it seizes to be boring. 2) Because the common perception is that it is boring, fewer others go into it, hence the competition is less intense & it is easier to maintain a sane work-life balance.
I think you have to find some way to tolerate being bad at things so you have a chance to get good at them.
One way is to find something you love so much that you're fascinated, even at the early stages.
The other is to somehow have a way to shut down the feeling that it's bad to need to learn.
If you're consistently miserable, have you considered moving (or doing some other major life change)?
Moving always helps me. When I’m doing the hokey pokey and turning myself around? That’s what it’s all about...
In all the discussions about AI Doom, there is a lot of variability about what "doom" means. (Thus the confusion between AI not-kill-everyonism vs AI not-racist).
I've never found a classifications of the levels of success/failure we're trying to work with.
So here's, humbly, my classification of terrible AI scenarios from worst to best:
1) An AI that is not quite fully general accidentally kills all life on earth, then shuts off because it doesn't know how to keep itself working. Life doesn't come back. It so happens that earth was the only life in the universe. The end.
2) Same but aliens come some time later and discover the great works of humans and celebrate our dead civilisation.
3) After the first human civilisation disappears, a new intelligent species rises and builds it own civilisation.
4) An AI accidentally kills all life on earth, and then keeps running until the sun dies.
5) An AI voluntarilly kills all life on earth and fullfills its internal goal (whatever it was)
6) An AI decides to pave the universe with computronium / paperclips / whatever, but is not smart enough to get out of the solar system.
7) An AI decides to pave the universe with computronium / paperclips / whatever, and succeeds.
8) An AI decides to pave the universe with computronium / paperclips / whatever. In the process of doing so, it discovers a lot of knowledge about physics, mathematics, engineering, even philosophy.
9) An AI decides to pave the universe with "meaningful" computronium. I.e. computronium that we would recognise as having qualias.
10) An AI decides to pave the universe with "meaningful" computronium. That computronium makes works of art, has feelings.
11) Same but there's a memetic relationship between the new art and the works of humans.
12) The AI-God decides to keep the human race in a zoo while it conquers the universe
13) The AI-God decides to keep all the humans that were alive at the time of its birth in a zoo where they can live forever.
14) The human zoo is so well endowed that humans can create great works of art, and achieve the apogee of what the human race can do.
15) Humans manage to fuse together with the AI, or upload their consciousness, so that they have the intellectual power to meaningfully contribute to the future of the AI civilisation.
16) It turns out that the rules of the universe make it impossible for an AI to work without humans overseeing it. The resulting civilisation looks like Star Wars / Foundation / Dune.
17) The god of the bible exists and has/will ensure that none of the doom scenarios occur.
I had most trouble on the last part of this classification : what would constitute for you a perfect success vis-à-vis AI ?
> I had most trouble on the last part of this classification : what would constitute for you a perfect success vis-à-vis AI ?
I think it's fun to imagine science-fictional scenarios; certainly, something like the Culture (arguably #14 on your list) would be interesting to explore. But then, so would the world of Harry Potter, or even Battletech (minus all the Succession Wars). But what is our goal here -- to imagine the most interesting scenario, or a scenario that is actually likely to come to pass in our Boring But Practical (tm) physical reality ?
If it's the latter, then IMO the best we can hope for with AI is that humanity somehow gets its act together, and uses AI tools for good rather than, you know, what usually happens. So, we get automatic real-time machine translation, art generation, complex system modeling, etc.; but no automated spam, endless piles of repetitive content, automated incarceration, total surveillance, etc. In reality, of course, I think the opposite will happen -- but hey, a man can dream...
How is #17 different from e.g. #12, in practice ?
On a somewhat (but not very) less dramatic note:
What do people here think are the odds that LLMs/AGI(???) overshadow the (usa) presidential race next year? I think that it is a long shot, but might barely happen if there is a lot of progress in solving hallucinations over the next 13 months.
( A Trump/Biden/GPT5 debate would be fun to watch. )
And for 2028 - maybe 50:50 odds???
Overshadow them how ? I have a feeling that ChatGPT would already make a better President than either one of our actual candidates; but then, so would Eliza...
The metric I had in mind is to have more searches (or more news stories) about AI than about the candidates.
Hmm... Eliza as President would be interesting... Might be a touch indecisive... "So how do incoming nuclear warheads make you feel?"
I stand by my assessment :-(
That Eliza would be a better President than either of the plausible candidates? Could be...
I will always remember Trump as the President who recommended investigating whether Covid could be treated by injecting disinfectant. As far as I know, that was a unique statement for a United States President to make. I'm reasonably sure Eliza wouldn't have done that...
I'm 80/20 on there being at least one question of the presidential debate on AI ; but that's conditional on 40/60 that Biden even accepts to debate the previous president.
If there were primaries that would be a perfect opportunity for a one-issue candidate to raise hell about this, but it doesn't look like any of the parties is interrested in plurality.
But no, AI being the major topic of 2024 : 8/92.
Has the actually-left Left (i.e AOC/Bernie) taken a position on AI stealing our jobs ?
Those odds sound plausible. I haven't bumped into any statements from AOC or Bernie about AI, but I haven't been looking for them.
What would overshadowing the presidential race mean?
One possible signature: If searches for AGI or GPT became more common than for Biden or Trump in Goggle Trends.
Another possible signature (harder to quantify) would be if the number of AI-related top stories exceeded the number about the presidential race or the candidates. Presumably something similar could happen on social media, but this gets even fuzzier...
In terms of plausible stories: Novel applications being reported and human layoffs being reported.
Trump vs. AI: the true John Henry story for our modern time.
If that contest were held today (_including_ chatGPT's hallucinations) ... well, there isn't anything in the legend of John Henry about both sides accidentally _dropping_ their hammers, while with Trump vs. chatGPT this is probably par for the course... :-)
I, personally, would be happy with any from (8) to (15)
I do not think our species has adapted well to the kinds of tech that substitute electronically-delivered input from and about other members of our species for in-person interaction. Television increased loneliness and alienation, social media on the internet worsened them and greatly increased anger between people and low mood as a result of being chronically angry and often attacked. So I'm inclined to think that even AI that never tries to take over, make everything into paperclips, etc. will nevertheless result in a great worsening of our quality of life. I think there will be much more depression and addiction, more deaths of despair, more weird and destructive social trends like wacko cults, more online crime, more and realer forms of porn, more and realer forms of snuff films.
So I see 2 paths to decent outcomes:
(1) Stop developing AI now, except for AI in the form of specialized tools for specific tasks.
(2) Find or develop a group of people who can function as intermediaries linking AGI or ASI to the rest of our species. These people would need to be resilient to the stresses and weird demands the come with lots of interaction with an electronic semi-fake of a semi-person, but also empathic and social enough to do well in their communications with other human beings. Perhaps such people already exist, and we need to figure out how to identify them. Or maybe they would need to have special training when they are young. Or maybe it would take genetic engineering to produce one.
What if we view 9) as what we should be shooting for ourselves, i.e. if the ultimate moral goal per utilitarianism is to bring about the greatest pleasure for the greatest number possible, then either us or AI should be turning the universe into as many minds as possible experiencing maximum pleasure? In that case it would be a success condition for civilization/technological progress, not a doom scenario.
That's a lot more detailed than my classificstion:
Doom means we are all, or very nearly all, dead.
Catastrophe means a lot of us are dead.
Dystopia means we are alive, but unhappy and/or lose control of the planet.
Types of Doom
Foom Doom. The first recursively self-improving AI becomes a sovereign, defeating rival AI's and killing or dominating humans.
Multipolar Doom: Powerful AIs kill humans as a result of fighting each other, and/or preventing humans from building further AIs.
Types of Dystopia
Foom Dystopia. The first recursively self-improving AI becomes a sovereign, defeating rival AI's and enslaving humans.
Hot war Dystopia: Humans retain control of powerful multipolar AIs, use them to wage war.
Cold war Dystopia: Humans retain control of powerful multipolar AIs, don't use them to wage war, but sink huge resources into developing them just in case.
Utopia Dystopia: AIs take control and follow human instructions to improve human wellbeing in unintended ways, eg. putting everyone on a dopamine drip. AIs do what we say but not what mean.
Human Zoo Dystopia AKA benevolent dictatorship. AIs take control, do not kill or harm humans, but humans no longer have control over themselves or AI.
Economic Dystopia: Humans retain control of many AIs, capitalism retains control of humans, AIs do most of the work, mass unemployment ensues, nobody implements UBI.
"Economic Dystopia: Humans retain control of many AIs, capitalism retains control of humans, AIs do most of the work, mass unemployment ensues, nobody implements UBI."
Yup. Note that this _only_ requires AGI, not ASI. I think of it as AI becoming essentially a competing species, but cheaper to maintain than humans - perhaps with a small variation where humans gradually lose control of many AIs, but capitalism (or any analogous competitive structure) retains control of the AIs.
And this is distinct from all of Florent's scenarios, all but the last of which require ASI.
The e/acc guys make a big deal of the idea that if we're getting replaced, but there is some way that we can call the new AI "our children", that's not a doom scenario.
I tend to agree with them on that judgement, and this is why I included the distinction between 10) and 11). I just don't believe it's at all likely given current course.
> The e/acc guys make a big deal of the idea that if we're getting replaced, but there is some way that we can call the new AI "our children", that's not a doom scenario.
Would you be happy if you knew that a serial killer is going to kill you tomorrow, but in your honor he will continue posting ACX comments in your style using your account? Why is there a difference if the killer happens to be a robot?
In your scenario, I have no causal relationship with my killer. The comparison is more like : I have biological children, I take a risk that might cause my death but will ensure their survival, and I die proud of what I brought into the world.
Unless you're an AI engineer, you have no causal relationship with a prospective AI either
So in other words, the mindset of every woman before pre-modern times, and most men who went to war to defend their families. I can see the appeal, but I'm not a pre-modern woman whose life goal is to have as many children as possible, the risk to myself be damned. Even if I was, I had no role in creating the robots, so in no way are they *my* children. A better comparison is if another tribe is so fertile that they built a huge army and slaughtered my entire tribe. Their women might be proud of their sons, but why would I be happy with the result?
Why the ordering of 6 and 7? If there’s other intelligent life out there 7 seems like a bad outcome.
That's not the worst switch, check out 3 and 4, man. I think he was more ordering them in treewise fashion as he thought of them
I was assuming that either we were alone, or that all civilisations trying to make AGI end up with the same scenario. So it's a comparison between : each civilation paves it's own solar system with computronium and goes no further or at least one civilation 'conquers' the galaxy.
The ideal scenario would result in something unexpected and interesting without being too harmful. It would result in a reality that is more fun than what we currently have.
My wife and I have big problems with reoccurring miscarriage in the early stages. We are pretty desperate. We checked a lot of stuff and identified some possible, but not sure, problems and somehow managed them. However we are again in an unsuccessful pregnancy. Still in the early stages, but before any miscarriage the doctors diagnosed a non-progressing pregnancy, and advise us to remove it as it might cause infection.
We are thinking about IVF as some sort of solution. Does anybody have any similar experience or some kind of expert advice in this situation?
I am so sorry to hear you are in this situation.
I have a relative who was in the same situation. She is a medical professional herself, from a family of medical professionals. They never figured out what was wrong - she had to hire a surrogate to carry her baby to term.
I am also guessing IVF would not solve your problem, because it doesn't change much about your situation - if there's something that prevents the pregnancies from working out, it would probably still be there. But IVF might speed up the process of either getting a pregnancy that sticks or finding out that none of them will, though, since you can produce and implant many embryos at once.
Now, here is something that's important to know about IVF, if you do decide to go that way. Anecdotally, and according to some studies, frozen embryos may work much better than fresh embryos in older women (over 35 years or so). (Looking at the literature, they also work better for women with certain medical issues.) Presumably, the woman's body is better prepared for pregnancy by the frozen cycle. Also, you might be able to get your frozen embryos screened for abnormalities. If you decide to go the IVF way, it may be a better bet to do a frozen cycle. IVF is no picnic, though, and there is no guarantee of anything.
It's possible your wife has the M2 haplotype, which increases your risk of early pregnancy loss by about 4x. About 15% of women have it.
I know Genomic Prediction offers a test for this, and I don't believe it's particularly expensive (I recall it being a few hundred dollars but I might be misremembering). https://www.lifeview.com/tests_m2.html
If she has it, you can bring your odds of miscarriage back down to approximately normal levels with L2 heparin injections during pregnancy.
How many are we talking about? And how early? I lost three and then had two healthy live births. No issue found or corrected- just a run of bad luck. If you are trying, you are probably taking pregnancy tests early. Most reported miscarriage rates are based on known pregnancies and a lot of people are farther in before finding out so many miscarriage happen and the woman doesn’t even know she was pregnant. Estimates for loss are as high as 50% on conceptions. My point is, given that, the odds of a run of losses aren’t all that low.
But, worth talking to a specialist. Fetal maternal medicine is what you want. You might consider genetic testing. There are various things that can make certain combinations the two of you might have incompatible. Ivf may be able to help screen those out.
I'm not a medical professional, but know a number of people who have had IVF. Based on what I know, IVF does not seem like it addresses the problem. IVF helps with becoming pregnant, not with sustaining the pregnancy. Seems like you need to find out why the early miscarriages are happening. Are the embryos abnormal? If so, why? If the embryos are normal, what is causing your wife to miscarry? You need to see a specialist.
I believe that in IVF, the doctor selects healthy looking embryos from a sample, and implants the best candidates.
So if the issue is a high rate of nonviable embryos, IVF might help. However it's expensive and taxing so definitely see a specialist first.
Getting a whole genome sequence is pretty cheap these days (about $300) and can reveal any potential genetic causes.
I'd also want to check the fetal tissue for aneuploidy. How old is your wife?
Keep in mind, only about 30% of fertilized eggs make it to term (though most failures occur before they're noticeable).
Sorry to hear this, and not a solution but just well wishes from a stranger on the internet who wishes you weren’t suffering from this. I’m so sorry you are dealing with this.
Had she been checked for a certain kind of blood clotting disorder? A friend of mine had to be on blood thinners before she's could get a successful pregnancy going because of this issue.
Have you seen an OB subspecialist in “maternal-fetal medicine” yet? Not intuitive from their name, but their area of expertise relates to high risk pregnancy - including, explicitly, working up repeat miscarriages.
For sure your wife’s OB has tested her for this, but just in case: Antiphospholipid Syndrome is a common cause of repetetition miscarriages and can be diagnosed through blood testing. But its something an OB surely has in mind when managing a patient with several miscarriges. Anyway, if you have been trying unsuccessfully to get pregnant for more than 6 months you shoud be referred to a gynecology reproduction unit or check with a reproduction specialist.
We had some test for this, she was somewhat negative, but then after more digging we discovered that she has MTHFR heterozygous mutation. This time when we discovered the pregnancy we managed to get prescription for Lovenox shots (and it was a struggle to get it, OB here in France are not very many and very helpful, but we pushed and we got it).
This is the first time we have a problem that seems at least superficially different than the just outright miscarriage. So it was very stressful when they told us it is not progressing and that we need to get it out (5-6 weeks, no cardiac activity).
However since the doctors are very few and we have to go to the emergency room at midnight when they are tired and sleepy to get a examination, we are skeptical if they are thinking about our case sufficiently.
Would it possibly make sense to go to another country where medical care is better? I have known of cases where people had good outcomes from "medical tourism" to various asian countries. Treatments there are not covered by insurance, of course, but are much less expensive than in the US -- don't know how they compare to France.
That's a really tough situation to be in Ludi. I really hope you are successful. I'm sorry I don't have something more practical but I wanted to add that I think you should twin track this with some investment in your mental health. Not being able to have children is a hard form of grief, society hasn't adequately adapted to supporting an absence without a definitive event and nor even have you. It's a hard thing to process. I hope you don't have to but I guess I'm saying, maybe it's worth trying to limit the downside a little even as you fight for what you deserve.
My wife had some undiagnosed thyroid problems and autoantibodies which needed correction before two successful pregnancies. Worth checking!
She had some basic stuff checked but without aiming at anything specific. Could you give me more details or medical terms about your experience?
Sorry if the question is intrusive.
Not at all intrusive. Regular thyroid function tests were normal but we had a motivated and thorough endocrinologist (not easy to come by in the UK NHS sometimes) who suggested an autoantibody screen. I'm sorry, but I can't recall what prompted this test in particular. It was a relatively simple blood test which unearthed a subclinical autoimmune thyroiditis, managed conservatively during the pregnancy. My wife took aspirin 75mg as a result of this finding (haven't looked into the physiology etc) but then had no further miscarriages to date and we now have two healthy boys.
I am medically trained but way over my skis with the nuances of endocrinology.
I understand that there are many screening services around the globe that can help identify common fertility problems, but this may actually be a part of the usual IVF workup which I don't really have any experience with.
I wish you and your wife all the best - if you have any other questions I'm more than happy to try and answer them.
I've read about the usual cheap thyroid tests just checking for the amount of hormone in the blood, but there there are problems, you also need to check for whether the hormone is being absorbed.
I second this, I've heard an endocrinologist talk vehemently about this same issue too.
Anyway, I wish the best to Ludi and wife.
Two times with the old technology and the last one Pfizer. Me the same