Scott, I started tracking down your email cuz I have an article request, but I don't know how you feel about those and I don't know how you like emails to be worded for you to triage them.
Then I realized: maybe your commenters could help, and we could save your time.
> Maybe neuroscientists or psychologists have good reasons for this, but "autism" is the most immensely deranged word in the history of categories--- what utility is a word that crosses absent minded professors and people who can't conceptually distinguish a week from a month insofar as you can wordlessly elicit conceptual understanding from them???? If you worked at the dictionary factory and you tried to slip that word in, you'd be fired immediately. So why do psychologists or neuroscientists get away with this???
I think there's something important here that people aren't talking about, and every time I see an excerpt from Michael lewis' SBF book my skin crawls.
I agree that it is crazy to have a word that means both the absent-minded professor and someone nonverbal who couldn't survive without special care.
And yet there is a continuum between the two, so to make two different words, you would need to make an arbitrary line somewhere. I haven't seen the data, but I suspect that the distribution isn't even bimodal; that there isn't a natural thin place where to cut the curve.
I think (maybe I am wrong here) that the traditional cutting point for "is actually a serious disease" would be something like "is capable of living alone and keeping a job". That seems to involve factors that are not inherently a part of autism, such as whether the person has other qualities (such as high intelligence) that can *compensate* for the weaknesses. An absent-minded professor will probably be more employable than an absent-minded factory worker. Does it mean that stupid aspies are "more autistic" than smart aspies? Do aspies with programming skills become "less autistic" when there is a shortage of programmers, and then become "more autistic" again when a tech bubble bursts and they get laid off? Also, it feels like this would in some sense punish the people in the middle for developing good coping skills (now that they have the skills, we conclude officially that their problem was never real).
I agree that identifying politically with one of your traits (whether a strength or a weakness) is stupid. People are multidimensional. Also, you should be more than the sum of the parts you were born with.
But sometimes the label is pushed on you against your will. Not necessarily a specific diagnosis; just people calling you "weird" when you are young, and telling you that your kids are "weird" when you get older. You choice is not between "weird" and "normal"; it is between "weird" in an unspecified way, and a specific way of being weird. The latter has the advantage that it potentially provides useful information on what to do about it.
That said, I think the label "aspie" also fulfilled this purpose, and caused less confusion.
By the way, under the second article you linked, the most upvoted comment says that vaccinations cause autism. LOL
yeah you're right this is the moderating voice I needed--- cashing out "social model of disability" into labor supply/demand is pretty potent. I also think it matters that we don't know how much effort it costs a given person to learn to "fit in" or whatever, and thanks for reminding me of that.
yes this is just what the doctor ordered, thanks! I especially like the part where he admitted that we're bad at words, but I hadn't fully considered that "autism" is a slightly worse variant of the thing that a bajillion other psychiatric phenomena are subject to.
This thread is old, so I’m writing this out while I am thinking about it and I’ll repost it in the next open thread.
Does anybody have any good breakdowns of sexual partner statistics? Particularly in terms of lifetime sexual partners? Keep in mind that I know nothing about stats and I don’t have the capacity to evaluate whether a given study is good or not. Trusting y’all not to lead me astray.
I think my main question is that it seems odd to me that lifetime sexual partners is a normal distribution, particularly for men.
So, average number in the US is around 6. That doesn’t seem low, I guess, because there is a sizable percentage of the population that has 0-2 lifetime partners.
And I guess it makes sense that women would be a normal distribution. Most women can get laid whenever they want, so intuitively you would expect a bell curve there.
But for men... most men are wired to get laid as much as possible. Some can’t, or choose not to, or get into a serious relationship relatively early. I believe a majority of the population falls into one of those buckets.
But, for guys who can and don’t get locked down.... isn’t 6 a crazy low lifetime number? Wouldn’t you expect some sort of gap between, say, 5 and 20?
For example: average attractiveness guy gets a high school sweetheart (1). Goes to college, has a hookup and then gets in another year long relationship (3). Breaks up, one more hookup and one more relationship in college (5). Breaks up a year after graduating. After a year or two without getting laid, gets another 3 year relationship (6). Breaks up, gets motivated, is now a little more mature and confident, so he hooks up with a few girls over the next year (10). Around 27, meets a girl that becomes his wife (11). Divorced after 8 years, one more hookup and one more marriage that lasts til he dies (13).
That is more than double the lifetime average, and it seems lowwww. This is a guy who spends the majority of his life in committed relationships, never cheats, never goes through a slut phase where he sleeps with 8-10 girls in a year.
Shouldnt there be a somewhat fat tail of guys who sleep with 20 plus?
Also, has anyone found a good way to account for the fact that women probably tend to underreport lifetime partners and men probably tend to overreport?
Seems to me that extremes are easy to imagine but actually not that frequent in real life.
It is easy to imagine a guy who can't get a girl. It is easy to imagine a traditional monogamous man. It is easy to imagine a man who bangs a different girl every night. In physics, this is sometimes expressed as "the only numbers that do not require special explanation are zero, one, and infinity". :D
In real life you probably get a lot of men who either try to be monogamous but their first few relations fall apart for various reasons, and men who try to bang as many women as possible but are less successful than a Hollywood movie might make you believe.
> Shouldnt there be a somewhat fat tail of guys who sleep with 20 plus?
If I had to guess, without seeing any data, I would expect about 5% of men to be in this group. What is your estimate?
> Also, has anyone found a good way to account for the fact that women probably tend to underreport lifetime partners and men probably tend to overreport?
I believe that many women are unlikely to include one-night stands in the reported number. To find out better numbers, you would have to change the questionnaire -- to write it so that it makes it easier to "remember" partners that would otherwise easily be "forgotten".
So if I wrote the questionnaire, instead of directly asking about the number of partners, I would go category by category. "Have you been married? How many times? Did you have a long-term boyfriend you didn't marry? How many? Did you have a boyfriend you had sex with but the relation was short? How many? Did you have a one-night stand? How many times?" and only after all the answers are written down, I would ask about the total number of sexual partners. (Need to ask separately, because there can be overlap between the categories, or partners who were not included in any. Such as: had a one-night stand with someone, then 20 years later they met again and got married.)
Without a good questionnaire, I don't think there could a simple method that works, such as "multiply numbers reported by women by 2, and divide numbers provided by men by 2". First, we need to figure out the exact coefficient empirically. Second, it's not just simple division or multiplication; different parts of the curve probably misreport their numbers differently.
> It is easy to imagine a man who bangs a different girl every night.
hahaha no it isn't! I was roommates with a guy in my early 20's who was near the top end of what I would consider achievable for a non-celebrity (or celebrity equivalent, or guy who organizes his entire life around getting laid like a party promoter or whatever). He was tall, handsome, charming, and absolutely relentless. Hit on girls everywhere - gas station, grocery story - just absolutely fearless and never ever satisfied. I'd guess he averaged about 8-10 new girls a year.
> If I had to guess, without seeing any data, I would expect about 5% of men to be in this group. What is your estimate?
So, I swear I didn't do this for internet points, but in the other comment I made a guess and looked up the stats. Intuitively, I thought there should be a gap/lull between 0-5 and 20 plus for men. My thought process is that there is a significant difference between the number of women that most men are able to sleep with and the number that they would choose to sleep with. At a certain level of attractiveness - my guess was Pareto rule, 80/20 - I thought that men would be able to get lifetime numbers closer to their actual preferences.
Point being, I thought the majority of guys would fall in the 0-5 range, and then there would be a 20% of attractive guys who were 20 plus, with fewer guys falling into that middle range of 6-19.
The differences are fuzzier than I thought, but definitely there. 28.3% of men report 15 plus, compared to 12.5% reporting 10-14. So, the gap is there - question is, do I have the best explanation for that gap?
> I believe that many women are unlikely to include one-night stands in the reported number.
Makes total sense. They do this in real life. Drives me crazy. Not because I care what the number is, but because I know that you are lying to me when you say that it's 6! lolol
It’s pretty common, although I again I don’t have any stats. What do guys who can get laid do after a breakup? Go out and try to get laid. Or, flip side, even they are looking for a relationship, you have false starts along the way. Maybe replace some of those hookups with month and half relationships that didn’t work.
I think the key point I’m trying to make is that because of the way men are wired, I wouldn’t expect a fully normal distribution. Six makes sense to me as an average, no issues with that. But I would expect some sort of gap in lifetime partners between the majority of men (80ish percent) who take what they can get (0-6) and those who can get laid when they want to (15-20 plus).
I mean, it's clearly not a normal distribution, that's not the sort of distribution you expect for a "count of..." anything. I forget all my basic statistics at this point but it's going to be some sort of long tailed distribution with a peak in the low single digits and a very long tail extending into the hundreds.
But my comment isn't to nitpick your grasp of statistics, it's to more deeply criticise your understanding of male psychology. I just don't think that this chad/virgin view of male psychology in which all men are constantly trying to fuck as many women as they possibly can is accurate, it's just a dumb stereotype. Most men have limited (but nonzero) interest in random hookups with random floozies. Maybe they try it a few times and realise it's not appealing. Maybe they get interested in it only under certain circumstances, like when travelling or after a breakup. Maybe they are generally uninterested in it, but hey, if you're really drunk and she's really hot then these things do occasionally happen. But the population of men who constantly bang as many girls as they possibly can is limited (and can be found at both ends of the distribution, but probably not in the middle).
Thanks for clarifying the shape, yeah that's obviously how that should look. But it should still have a gap!
I'm doing a shit job of explaining what I'm intuiting. The chad/virgin thing is lame, and I'm not saying that every guy wants to fuck 1000 women. What I'm trying to get at is that I think there is a reasonable gap between a) the number of women that men actually sleep with and b) the number that they would sleep with if given the chance.
There are a lot of guys who sleep with every woman they can, and that number happens to be in the single digits. Those guys tend to wreck their marriages when they get a cute secretary.
If you want a look at unchained male libido, it looks more like professional athletes, musicians, etc... Many of those guys eventually get wives - some of them get married surprisingly young! And I'm sure a decent percentage are faithful husbands. But in general, you'll see a professional athlete have a wife... and a lot of discrete girlfriends on the road, which the wife ignores. You see that pattern throughout history as well.
So, here's what I'm trying to say. I think there should be some kind of inflection point - maybe an 80/20 thing. At some level of attractiveness, guys are less bound by what they can get, and instead become bound by what they actually desire. I would expect a sizable jump in lifetime partners around that point.
It says 25.8% for 5-9, 12.5% for 10-14, and 28.3% for 15 plus! and the 15+ amount for women is less than half of that. So... I guess the question now is whether my theory is accurate, or there is some better explanation for why it is that way.
I’m looking for an article that I’m 80% sure was written here (or some adjacent Substack) that was a take down of a viral political psychology study. I can’t remember the specific “findings” of the study but it was one of those classic “we proved conservatives are bad” papers that always goes viral in parts of Twitter/Reddit despite having comically terrible methodology. Anyone know what I’m talking about?
My Metaphysical Transit Authority shirt is finally starting to wear out, and I was thinking of ordering another one. But today my kid noticed a problem with it: the original trolley problem mentions five people in the path of the trolley, but the shirt only has four!
I intend to order another shirt whether or not you fix this, but please reply to let me know if you will fix it; this will remind me to place my order.
I'll be noodling around with other coverage but the defence strategy seems to be "Sam is a Good Boy, he's a maths nerd who doesn't drink or party! He was an honest businessman!" and the prosecution right now is going for "here is this list of witnesses gonna tell you that he was a fraud, he knew it was fraud, and he knew he was committing fraud, also it was all him and not them".
Any speaker that gets Democratic support would inherently be suspect by the Republicans, so they'd probably just kick her out again. Plus, it seems unlikely that Cheney would be willing to make a deal with the Democrats. She is a staunch conservative after all, not exactly a moderate.
If the Democrats decide to support a Speaker with the same discipline that they decided to oust McCarthy, the Republicans could only kick that Speaker out if they could get 217 out of 221 Republican house members on board to do so. And we just got an object lesson in how hard it is to get 217 Republican congressmen to agree on anything.
If the Democrats somehow managed to get a member of the Democratic party elected to the Speakership, yes, the GOP would join ranks to evict that person out of principle. But if the Democrats throw their support behind any reasonable Republican speaker, I suspect there would be at least five Republican congressmen who would go along with it.
Then for shits and giggles, the Democrats could withdraw their support two weeks later and wait for her to get kicked out again.
Honestly I'm a bit confused why the standing orders (or whatever they're called) of the US House of Reps allow a speaker to be kicked out without the election of a replacement speaker.
I don't think the moderate Republicans would vote for any Democrat-backed candidate until they've been through numerous rounds of humiliating defeat trying to pass one with only R votes.
Earlier this year, they took 15 rounds to vote over the course of a week and *still* didn't cave. Why would this time be different?
Earlier this year, the Democrats didn't support any Republican candidate for Speaker. In the present (and IMHO unlikely) hypothetical, the Democrats are supporting a Republican candidate. Earlier this year, the only way the GOP could get one of their own in that position, was to achieve nearly total unanimity within their caucus. Which as you note was particularly hard, and made them look weak and foolish. In the present hypothetical, any five GOP congressmen who want can cut through all that nonsense and get a Republican speaker on the first vote.
Well, first vote after the Democrats make this hypothetical offer; I expect they would want to make the Republicans suffer a bit before bailing them out.
Just because here is the only place where I get an understanding ear rather than being booed... 25 minute aboriginal land acknowledgement at the start of a meeting this week. I did time it. And again it included prayers to the Creator.
I am hopeful that here in Australia we've reached the peak of Aborigine-worship and I'm hopeful for a decrease soon. There's a referendum next weekend to enshrine an ill-defined "Indigenous Voice To Parliament" in the Constitution, and polls have shown a massive decline in support for the proposition over the last couple of months, that has all the qualities of a preference cascade. At first the vibe was "if you don't vote yes, you're a racist", but as more and more people have come out as "no" supporters people realised it was safe to do so. As a result, the referendum is headed for a resounding and embarrassing 40-60 defeat.
But it's a lot easier to have the courage to object to something in a secret ballot than to stand up in a meeting and say "Actually why don't we _not_ do this?"
I'd like to, but feels like paying the dane geld. And also, using the term native american is like three levels down on the euphemism treadmill. Considered very offensive these days by all the right thinking people in my office, officially at least. I just point it out for the lols.
This week we take a look back at the ideas of Ted Kaczynski. He was a militant critic of modern industrial society who chose to propagate his ideas using terrorism against scientists. His methods were odious and horrifying, but were there ideas that were worth thinking about? Which ideas are wrong? Which ideas can be salvaged? How much do these ideas exist outside how writings, and how should we deal with them? Do they continue to be dangerous? Should the ideas of a person be erased from discourse because of the awful things they did?
A summary text and podcast audio can be found here:
Why did the Democrats all vote to oust House Speaker McCarthy?
1) Considering the state of the Republican party right now, wasn't he a moderate that could be worked with? Didn't his compromise bill last Saturday to prevent a government shutdown prove that?
2) With McCarthy gone, aren't the odds high that his replacement will be a more extreme Republican who will be harder to work with? Won't that raise the odds of a government shutdown on November 17, which is something the Democrats don't want to happen?
House Dems supported McCarthy on his 45 day continuing resolution. The next day McCarthy went on the Sunday morning talk shows to say the entire cluster fuck was the Dems fault. They just didn't trust the guy.
They weren't willing to play ball with McCarthy any _longer_, because he reneged on previous agreements that the Dems had reached with him.
Also, the GOP's renegades in the House have made it clear that they will continue treating any Speaker who makes any deals with any Dems as a blood enemy. They explicitly promise to continue "burning it all down" (their words) for the sake of punishing any such Speaker, and given the House's rules of operation they can in fact paralyze the place. That removes any motivation for the Dems to enter into any such new agreements.
I think it began dying when the Soviet Union fell. Economic liberalism had a foil to keep it vital, and keep the criticism moored somewhat to reality. Without that foil, a lot of people assumed we were well on our way to Utopia. But while economic liberalism was delivering a lot for developing countries, its benefits were much more subtle in developed countries than they had been in previous generations. Basically, a lot of people, especially in the US, felt promised an ever increasing rate of standard of living improvement, thought that rate was too slow, or even negative, and mood affiliated themselves into believing the standard of living was actually decreasing. While this is easily disprovable, the sentiment is strong and is highly resistant to facts.
It is now unfashionable, and even inviting of mocking scorn to point out simple things like the increase in housing sizes in the US never ceased, that US manufacturing output continues to grow, that the standard of living considered unacceptable today would be luxurious 40 years ago, that the post WW2 economic growth that US workers enjoyed was built largely upon the fact that all of America's industrial competitors were destroyed and had to start over, etc.
The more I think about this, the more I'm convinced that this is a psychological problem and not a wealth or distribution of wealth problem. Humans seem to always evaluate their standing relative to other people, not any objective measure. If you're in the top 1% in your relevant economic comparisons, it seems to have the same effect on how you (and the other 99%) feel about you whether you're a Google Senior Programmer or a 12th century merchant with no electricity using chamberpots).
Objectively, 99.xx% of the population in the US today has a higher standard of living than the 1% living prior to 1000 AD. Kings in England had a life expectancy of about 50 between 1000 and 1600 AD. Because these are kings and not just wealthy could-be-kings, this discounts the normal issues of life expectancy from child mortality - they just didn't live that long and were riddled with medical issues that even the poorest today don't deal with. I can understand a peasant in 980 AD looking at the king and thinking he was high above him - because he was, and that king had significant benefits compared to the peasant. But not compared to people living today.
I think it comes down to power, because power is more zero-sum than wealth, and relative wealth is often a source of power. Nobody really cares if I could pay $50,000 for something in the US today, but that would be a huge sum of money for any society, past or present, where $5/day would hire a laborer for as much backbreaking labor as you would want. Or sex, or to walk around behind you singing your praises. The difference is power. We seem very in tune with relative power differences, which I think is the real argument, not wealth and especially not standard of living.
Exactly. And it makes sense that humans would use relative power as the metric for assessing "how they are doing", because trying to follow some normed absolute scale would be nonsense. "Who cares how I am doing relative to Ottoman Empire peasants, the people I think should not be higher status than I should be look very successful on Instagram, and that depresses/enrages me!!!!!"
Right. There will always be a pecking order. In systems where everybody is economically near-equal, like a high school or a prison, the pecking order is based even harder on something other than economics, and it's usually a lot nastier.
You always hear that German fairy tales are brutal, but I never knew that this extends to universal stories like Cinderella as well. The German variant has the evil stepsisters mutilated, blinded and ostracized as punishment for their abuse, while in the dominant English variant, Cinderella forgives them without a second thought and rewards them by marrying them off to rich noblemen once she's queen. I think if I had kids, I'd definitely read them the German version.
"As punishment for the attempted murder of Snow White, the prince orders the Queen to wear a pair of red-hot iron slippers and to dance in them until she drops dead. With the evil Queen finally defeated and dead, Snow White's wedding to the prince peacefully continues."
Given the time period involved in writing these stories, the "or else" may have actually been significantly worse. There were some harsh people empowered to do some bad stuff back then.
Something that interests me about the Grimm version is that the people who complained about the brutality were also German. The original sanitized version was also in German, published by the Grimms in response to complaints. So apparently there was a cultural difference within Germany between the people telling the stories and the people buying the book. Also the evil stepmothers were evil mothers in the original; the Grimms felt evil stepmothers were less disturbing.
I've heard it argued that some of Grimm's tales, e.g. Hansel and Gretel, are what remains in cultural memory of a period of starvation (the kids being sent out into the woods because there wasn't enough food for them at home, the "witch" wanting to eat children because there wasn't any other food around, etc, and I think there are examples of cannibalism in other tales as well, although I can't think of specific ones now).
Quite interesting, but I'm not sure to what extent this is supported by historical research, or if I'm just repeating popular misinformation.
The Grimms themselves believed that kind of stuff. They collected all of those stories in hopes that they contained knowledge of the past. Today's folklorists don't agree.
How many of those criminals were children? Do you believe that making the process of asylum seeking more miserable for children in particular will reduce the crime rate? Is there any causal connection to crime at all, or do you just think that anything that hurts immigrants is justified so long as some of them are criminals?
I'm not sure why I'm expected to care about these "injustices" when the people crying about them actively covered up children literally being raped by brown immigrants. They do not have a principled concern for children, they love brown people and hate white people, so nobody is under any obligation to care about some cartoon mural nonsense.
Joseph Stalin apparently has the Guinness World Record for raising the most statutes to himself. However, these statues were within the U.S.S.R., a country where he was the leader.
What historical figure (so no religious figures) has the most statues outside of a territory that they lived/ruled?
By way of example, I can see two George Washington monuments outside the U.S.A., John Adams has one, F.D.R. has at least six.
Which seems like a silly ruling, as there are lots of religious figures that aren't at the level of Jesus or Buddha that closely match what he's looking for. A famous Pope I think would work, or a theologian/church leader like Aquinas or Martin Luther.
This might get a bit spicy depending on how you define "A country where he lived/ruled", but Robert E. Lee might be a contender. Particularly pre-2010 or so.
It's definitely a close call, and I'm probably biased since I'm American. To me, the distinction between the Confederacy and the Union is clearly big enough to warrant counting them as separate nations for the purpose of the question.
With that being said, when I look at other countries' civil wars, I'm not as convinced that I would find this argument persuasive. If someone built a statue to Liu Bei in Beijing, for example, I'm not sure I'd care that Liu Bei never ruled that particular part of China (or, going further, that he was at war with that part of China for most of his life). It's sort of all China to me.
Regardless, I'll give in to my biases and say that Robert E. Lee definitely counts (only the statues that are outside the former Confederacy though). Hopefully this rule does not come back to haunt me.
That's pretty good! Certainly for modern historical figures, that's in the lead. But Christopher Columbus actually has a crazy amount of statues - more than 22 in Argentina alone.
OK, I messed around with the raven one a little more and got one that seems perfect. The key is clearly gripped in the raven's beak. (I changed the prompt a little, substituting "beak" for "mouth.") https://i.imgur.com/cHvloYU.jpg
Nice! Its obviously within the abilities of the model to produce the type of image we are interested in but it seems to have something like a strong prior against the image/difficulty "understanding" the compositionality in the prompt
Yeah, I think both images are at the upper limit of how many relationships between elements it can keep hold of: The key is *in* the raven’s beak, the raven is *on* the woman’s shoulder, they are *in* a library. For llama, bell is *on* tail, boy is * on* llama, both are *in* desert.
I developed a fascination with Dall-e2, even though Midjourney and others make way prettier images, and have made thousands of images with it, along the way figuring out tricks to make the dumb and oppositional thing make what I’m asking for. I used that stuff to get Dall-e3 make these 2 images. With the Raven image what made the most difference was to ask for a stained glass image rather than a stained glass window. The latter introduces a 4th element, the window, with the other 3 elements inside it, and 3 elements each bearing some relationship to one of more of the others seems to be its limit. The llama image, while no more compositionally complex than the raven one, was much harder to get, because Dall-e has such a strong prior for llamas wearing bells around their necks. I finally used a confusional technique, the misspelled “barette” on the llama tail, in an effort to make Dall-e dizzy enough that it forget where the bell is supposed to go on a llama. And it worked. And note that it did not even include a barrette in the image.
Confusional techniques get Dall-e to lose control of itself. You know how if you ask GPT4 a question it does not know the answer to it often hallucinates? It’s possible to do something similar with Dall-e2. If an important element in your prompt is a nonsense word, or something Dall-e has never seen (an amphisbena, for instance), or incorporates in image it cannot recognize it will sometimes produce images far more violent and obscene than any you can get it to make via straightforward prompt. I have a whole collection of them if you’re curious.
The prompt was "a desert llama with a barette on its tail. The barette has a bell on it. A boy is on the llama's back. Digital art."
Dall-e was vey stuck on the idea that llama have bells around their necks and no place else. Telling it there was a barrette in its tail (barette deliberately misspelled to add an element of uncertainty about what the item was) and the bell was attached to that broke Dall-e's mental set.
Soren, I just got Dalle-e 3 to make the raven image or at least something close enough I think it passes. My prompt was "A stained glass image of a raven holding a key in its mouth. The raven is perched on a woman's shoulder and they are in a library." Here's the image:
If you are very particular you can point out that it's not clear whether any of the key is actually *in* the raven's mouth. You'd get the same image if the key was glued to the right side of the raven's beak. On the other hand, it is also possible that the key has a protuberance on it that is gripped by the 2 blades of the beak on the right-hand side of the beak. It took 2 tries with this prompt to get the image. First try gave me 4 images, second one only 3 for some reason. Before I asked for stained glass I asked for "a realistic image" (rest of prompt was the same) and got one perfect result on the first try. It's here:
I'm sure I could get a stained glass image with absolutely no tiny possible flaws to quibble about if I ran the prompt a couple more times.
I think what made the prompt work were (1) I asked for a stained glass image rather than a stained glass window. Asking for a window adds another element. (2) I mentioned the raven and key first, so as the get that info into Dall-e before it's little head was full. (3) I said "they are in a library" rather than "on the shoulder of a woman in a library" because the latter is a complex sentence, so easier to get confused by.
Not really relevant to the bet, but I've played around with Dall-e 2, and it is often possible to fix problems like no key in the raven's mouth during a second pass. You edit the original photo in Dall-e, whiting out the area where you want a change. Then use a prompt similar to your original one, but changed in a way that makes the feature you want added as prominent as possible. So instead of describing the photo as, say, a woman with a raven on her shoulder and a key in the mouth of the raven, you say a raven with a key in its mouth & Raven is sitting on the shoulder of a woman.
You may know all that already. Out of curiosity -- have you tried it on the images where Dall-e3 failed.?
For the purposes of the bet, I would see that as a clear fail. Thanks for the tips though, I might find them useful in some of the things I've tried to make.
Oh, also, Dall-e2 was very resistant to making images of impossible things (3-headed animals) or even just things you rarely see, like a raven with a key in its mouth. Sometimes it works to first edit the problematic area to make a familiar image -- say a raven with some food in its mouth. Then on a second edit white out the food and ask for a key. If you still can't get a key, you can say the raven is carrying some tasty candy shaped like a key. There are a lot of trix.
Yes, but at this point you're no longer using the program as a fully autonomous AI. If you really wanted to just produce an applicable image, you could use inpainting or even copy/paste images together in Photoshop.
Yeah, I know. I resort to that sometimes. However, I prefer to get Dall-e to do it because I kind of like the unexpected touches it puts in. (Also, I want to WIN! the battle with Dall-e). I get that once you're editing you can't count the results towards the bet, I'm just curious how malleable Dall-e3 is. Tried to try it out today but site is having trouble -- probably too many people going there to give it a try.
Why has the tide turned against economic liberalism? Call it neo-, classical-, what you will, I mean laissez-faire, free-market, Adam Smith, capitalism.
I think I understand why the GOP turned against it. Trump figured out that the real issue among conservatives was anti-immigration and used that to destroy the other Republican presidential candidates in 2016. Trump had never really been a fan of the free market: his comparative advantage in NYC real estate was his ability to work the Byzantine bureaucracy, not change it. (See Scott's review of Art of the Deal.) He also understood that the working class blamed and loathed job offshoring almost as much as they blamed and loathed immigration for their not-better wages. And that there is a white professional conservative class which identifies for familial reasons with the working class.
That explains what turned the GOP against neo-liberalism. But where did all the neo-liberals go? Lord knows they didn't all rush over to the Libertarian Party, although I'm not sure why not. If the Libertarian Party was going to have a moment, 2016 should have been it, given that the GOP was suddenly dumping free-market capitalism down the drain -- but no, the Libertarian Party continued to spin in place that year.
What about the Democrats? They had never been the party of Adam Smith, but since Trump *did* drive off Reagan-Bush Republicans from the party, and since few of them joined the Libertarians, shouldn't those Never Trumpers have moved the Dems to the right economically?
The facts on the ground are that Bidenomics is much like Trumpenomics. Tariffs. Mercantilism. Buy American.
Liberalism is dead.
How does that suddenly happen in both major parties at once? One hypothesis, using the Median Voter Theorem, is that, whereas the position of the median voter hasn't changed much if we only look at the well-ordered 1-d economic dimension, the salience of other issues has grown, gradually but suddenly, like big wheels turning, and the median voter is in a very different position because economics is longer as deciding an issue.
That economics matters less as an issue might seem counterintuitive, given that the political rhetoric *about* economics has changed so much, but if that *isn't* the case: where did all the neo-liberals go?
I thought the same thing as Chase. You could ask why the world is less into free trade, but that's not economic liberalism. The Inflation Reduction Act passed the House without a single Republican vote, so the GOP was clearly not on board with it, if that's a determining factor.
Regarding free trade, tariffs are higher than recent memory, but still tiny. I'm getting that tariffs now are 3%+, bigger than 2% ish early this century, but way smaller than the 30% I can recall in early US history from my history classes long ago, and I have the impression it sometimes topped 50% in Great Depression times. So is the question, why are they creeping up again?
One reason is our conflict with China. I'm seeing tariffs against China at 7.5% for some consumer goods and 25% for some other things. China's a major trading partner, so I can see how this would pull us up from 2% ish to 3% ish overall.
I don't know all our tariffs, but it looks like we have a trade dispute with one nation -- let's be honest, one man, Chairman Xi -- and we wouldn't be wise to generalize this to both parties opposing free markets.
In 1972, George McGovern ran on a platform that included a guaranteed minimum income of $6,000 per year, equivalent to about $44,000 today. McGovern lost 49 states, resulting in the Democratic retreat to more conservative economic policies. But one election doesn't necessarily settle an issue for all time. Many of today's political actors weren't even alive in 1972. They may have heard about McGovern's historic loss, but they didn't live through it and so it's not a defining political event for them.
The Median Voter Theorem says that the way to win elections is to move to the middle. Leftists have been arguing for years that that is wrong--that you should instead take a position that contrasts sharply with your opponent's; otherwise voters won't see a difference and will vote on other issues. Trump's success suggests that neoliberal economics is to the right of the median voter, so the contending positions are that the Democratic Party should move somewhat to the left on economic issues to capture the median voter, vs. the position that the Democratic Party should move significantly to the left to give working class people a clear and compelling reason to vote for Democrats rather than Republicans. In the Democratic Party, the “median voter” crowd mostly wins these interparty arguments, but the party moves left regardless of which faction wins.
One problem with your logic. The Democrats should move somewhat to the left *of the Republicans* in order to capture the median voter. Saying that neoliberal economics is to the right of the voter doesn't say that the Democrats, who are already on the left, need to go further left. That's possible, given how general the statements are, but unlikely in practice.
As far as historic examples, you can go later than 1972. Reagan so thoroughly captured the political landscape that Clinton essentially ran as a Republican on most topics, but especially economic ones. He was even more muted on abortion than Democrats today ("safe, legal, and rare"), despite that being one of the defining differences between him and Republicans.
Social media is optimized for showing you people doing Things You Don't Like so you'll get angry. A free market basically allows people to do Things You Don't Like with impunity: how are you going to stop them? With government control of the economy, all you have to do is win an election, and boom: suddenly there's a tariff on Imports You Don't Like, licensing requirements for Activities You Don't Like, and prior restraint on Speech You Don't Like.
I hate that this might be true, but I fear that it actually is true. Back when we could self-segregate by community, we weren't exposed to the worst actions of our political enemies like we are today. Now it's easy to see real (and exaggerated or fully fake) excesses of our enemies all day every day.
>"Why has the tide turned against economic liberalism?"
Do you have any evidence to support this claim whatsoever, or is it just vibes? Because none of the rest of what you wrote justifies this and half of it is barely even true, or just requires further evidence.
The evidence is the industrial policy in the bipartisan stamped Inflation Reduction Act and all the Trump tariffs. Do you have reason to believe the Republicans and Democrats are as free trade oriented as they were a decade ago?
Did I fail to cover this in my second sentence above: "Call it neo-, classical-, what you will, I mean laissez-faire, free-market, Adam Smith, capitalism." ?
The Inflation Reduction Act, which I invoked as a specific example, is full of subsidies to targeted industries. That is not free-market economics on a domestic or international level. Much domestic trade policy has international implications and vice-versa.
Pure libertarianism is going to be very unpopular. The best a libertarian party could do would be to run on the popular-ish parts of its platform like reducing housing regulation and opposing student loan forgiveness.
Employees are forbidden from law from quitting their jobs, the punishment being that they are not legally allowed to be employed by anybody. Employers are required by law to give their employees a 40% raise each year. Employers can fire employees at will, who are then free to find another job, at whatever market rate they can get.
Now imagine, for a moment, a deregulatory movement arises, and - the law requiring employers to give employees a raise each year is struck down.
Although the amount of regulation has in theory decreased, and in theory we now have a "more free" economy, it isn't clear that the economy has actually become more free - the law requiring a raise each year wasn't simply stifling economic freedom, it was a check and a balance on the law forbidding employees from quitting, preventing it from becoming too burdensome, and forcing employers to either fork over more and more cash year over year, or to give their employees the opportunity to find a different job.
I think a lot of the last thirty years of market "liberalization" has tended to look a lot more like the situation I described, than the actual market liberalization policy of eliminating both regulations together: A slow erosion of checks and balances, which has consistently favored particular parties over others.
Even straightforward deregulation can be anti-market; consider, for a moment, a regulation that requires power utilities to pay meter prices for solar power. A bunch of people install solar panels. The removal of this regulation might be an improvement, in terms of theoretical economic freedom - but it violates the expectations of a lot of people who made capital investments under the previous scheme. A consistent and predictable legal framework is necessary for a truly free market, and market liberalization efforts have had a tendency to undermine the legal framework under which investments were made.
We live in a society of myriad economic regulations, all of which have figured into individual decisions, investments, plans, preparations. Many of these regulations form delicate balances constructed over long periods of time; removing part of these balances leaves the whole unbalanced. Because "concentrated benefits, diffuse costs", often the deregulation effort to remove on part of a check-and-balance succeeds, and the deregulation effort that would balance it does not.
I think a lot of the erosion of support for free-market economics arises from the consistent failure of efforts to free the market to actually do so, and instead to just create disparities in the regulatory frameworks that advantage some participants over others.
(True free market economics have never been tried!)
More seriously, I think this has it backwards: Coordination is literally the thing market economics excels at, and the point where everything else fails horribly and ends up in a Molochian nightmare.
There are some externalities that don't get priced in, but the correct response is to get them properly priced in, so everything can coordinate on it, rather than try to write rules covering every possible case to avoid that externality happening.
Market is mostly excellent at coordination, but when it fails, it does so spectacularly. Roughly call it 80/20 (yes a big Pareto fan here). 80% is awesome and 20% is a death spiral to the lowest common.
Scott, I started tracking down your email cuz I have an article request, but I don't know how you feel about those and I don't know how you like emails to be worded for you to triage them.
Then I realized: maybe your commenters could help, and we could save your time.
Here's the article request: could you please write the nuanced and charitable version of this rant https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/kq8CZzcPKQtCzbGxg/quinn-s-shortform?commentId=eExTPyKGamWWMikrz ? I'm confident that I'm too strong and overstating certain things, but I honestly don't know exactly which things.
> Maybe neuroscientists or psychologists have good reasons for this, but "autism" is the most immensely deranged word in the history of categories--- what utility is a word that crosses absent minded professors and people who can't conceptually distinguish a week from a month insofar as you can wordlessly elicit conceptual understanding from them???? If you worked at the dictionary factory and you tried to slip that word in, you'd be fired immediately. So why do psychologists or neuroscientists get away with this???
I think there's something important here that people aren't talking about, and every time I see an excerpt from Michael lewis' SBF book my skin crawls.
Not sure whether to respond to you here or on LW.
I agree that it is crazy to have a word that means both the absent-minded professor and someone nonverbal who couldn't survive without special care.
And yet there is a continuum between the two, so to make two different words, you would need to make an arbitrary line somewhere. I haven't seen the data, but I suspect that the distribution isn't even bimodal; that there isn't a natural thin place where to cut the curve.
I think (maybe I am wrong here) that the traditional cutting point for "is actually a serious disease" would be something like "is capable of living alone and keeping a job". That seems to involve factors that are not inherently a part of autism, such as whether the person has other qualities (such as high intelligence) that can *compensate* for the weaknesses. An absent-minded professor will probably be more employable than an absent-minded factory worker. Does it mean that stupid aspies are "more autistic" than smart aspies? Do aspies with programming skills become "less autistic" when there is a shortage of programmers, and then become "more autistic" again when a tech bubble bursts and they get laid off? Also, it feels like this would in some sense punish the people in the middle for developing good coping skills (now that they have the skills, we conclude officially that their problem was never real).
I agree that identifying politically with one of your traits (whether a strength or a weakness) is stupid. People are multidimensional. Also, you should be more than the sum of the parts you were born with.
But sometimes the label is pushed on you against your will. Not necessarily a specific diagnosis; just people calling you "weird" when you are young, and telling you that your kids are "weird" when you get older. You choice is not between "weird" and "normal"; it is between "weird" in an unspecified way, and a specific way of being weird. The latter has the advantage that it potentially provides useful information on what to do about it.
That said, I think the label "aspie" also fulfilled this purpose, and caused less confusion.
By the way, under the second article you linked, the most upvoted comment says that vaccinations cause autism. LOL
yeah you're right this is the moderating voice I needed--- cashing out "social model of disability" into labor supply/demand is pretty potent. I also think it matters that we don't know how much effort it costs a given person to learn to "fit in" or whatever, and thanks for reminding me of that.
He wrote Against Against Autism Cures a while back, is that it?
https://slatestarcodex.com/2015/10/12/against-against-autism-cures/
yes this is just what the doctor ordered, thanks! I especially like the part where he admitted that we're bad at words, but I hadn't fully considered that "autism" is a slightly worse variant of the thing that a bajillion other psychiatric phenomena are subject to.
This thread is old, so I’m writing this out while I am thinking about it and I’ll repost it in the next open thread.
Does anybody have any good breakdowns of sexual partner statistics? Particularly in terms of lifetime sexual partners? Keep in mind that I know nothing about stats and I don’t have the capacity to evaluate whether a given study is good or not. Trusting y’all not to lead me astray.
I think my main question is that it seems odd to me that lifetime sexual partners is a normal distribution, particularly for men.
So, average number in the US is around 6. That doesn’t seem low, I guess, because there is a sizable percentage of the population that has 0-2 lifetime partners.
And I guess it makes sense that women would be a normal distribution. Most women can get laid whenever they want, so intuitively you would expect a bell curve there.
But for men... most men are wired to get laid as much as possible. Some can’t, or choose not to, or get into a serious relationship relatively early. I believe a majority of the population falls into one of those buckets.
But, for guys who can and don’t get locked down.... isn’t 6 a crazy low lifetime number? Wouldn’t you expect some sort of gap between, say, 5 and 20?
For example: average attractiveness guy gets a high school sweetheart (1). Goes to college, has a hookup and then gets in another year long relationship (3). Breaks up, one more hookup and one more relationship in college (5). Breaks up a year after graduating. After a year or two without getting laid, gets another 3 year relationship (6). Breaks up, gets motivated, is now a little more mature and confident, so he hooks up with a few girls over the next year (10). Around 27, meets a girl that becomes his wife (11). Divorced after 8 years, one more hookup and one more marriage that lasts til he dies (13).
That is more than double the lifetime average, and it seems lowwww. This is a guy who spends the majority of his life in committed relationships, never cheats, never goes through a slut phase where he sleeps with 8-10 girls in a year.
Shouldnt there be a somewhat fat tail of guys who sleep with 20 plus?
Also, has anyone found a good way to account for the fact that women probably tend to underreport lifetime partners and men probably tend to overreport?
Seems to me that extremes are easy to imagine but actually not that frequent in real life.
It is easy to imagine a guy who can't get a girl. It is easy to imagine a traditional monogamous man. It is easy to imagine a man who bangs a different girl every night. In physics, this is sometimes expressed as "the only numbers that do not require special explanation are zero, one, and infinity". :D
In real life you probably get a lot of men who either try to be monogamous but their first few relations fall apart for various reasons, and men who try to bang as many women as possible but are less successful than a Hollywood movie might make you believe.
> Shouldnt there be a somewhat fat tail of guys who sleep with 20 plus?
If I had to guess, without seeing any data, I would expect about 5% of men to be in this group. What is your estimate?
> Also, has anyone found a good way to account for the fact that women probably tend to underreport lifetime partners and men probably tend to overreport?
I believe that many women are unlikely to include one-night stands in the reported number. To find out better numbers, you would have to change the questionnaire -- to write it so that it makes it easier to "remember" partners that would otherwise easily be "forgotten".
So if I wrote the questionnaire, instead of directly asking about the number of partners, I would go category by category. "Have you been married? How many times? Did you have a long-term boyfriend you didn't marry? How many? Did you have a boyfriend you had sex with but the relation was short? How many? Did you have a one-night stand? How many times?" and only after all the answers are written down, I would ask about the total number of sexual partners. (Need to ask separately, because there can be overlap between the categories, or partners who were not included in any. Such as: had a one-night stand with someone, then 20 years later they met again and got married.)
Without a good questionnaire, I don't think there could a simple method that works, such as "multiply numbers reported by women by 2, and divide numbers provided by men by 2". First, we need to figure out the exact coefficient empirically. Second, it's not just simple division or multiplication; different parts of the curve probably misreport their numbers differently.
> It is easy to imagine a man who bangs a different girl every night.
hahaha no it isn't! I was roommates with a guy in my early 20's who was near the top end of what I would consider achievable for a non-celebrity (or celebrity equivalent, or guy who organizes his entire life around getting laid like a party promoter or whatever). He was tall, handsome, charming, and absolutely relentless. Hit on girls everywhere - gas station, grocery story - just absolutely fearless and never ever satisfied. I'd guess he averaged about 8-10 new girls a year.
> If I had to guess, without seeing any data, I would expect about 5% of men to be in this group. What is your estimate?
So, I swear I didn't do this for internet points, but in the other comment I made a guess and looked up the stats. Intuitively, I thought there should be a gap/lull between 0-5 and 20 plus for men. My thought process is that there is a significant difference between the number of women that most men are able to sleep with and the number that they would choose to sleep with. At a certain level of attractiveness - my guess was Pareto rule, 80/20 - I thought that men would be able to get lifetime numbers closer to their actual preferences.
Point being, I thought the majority of guys would fall in the 0-5 range, and then there would be a 20% of attractive guys who were 20 plus, with fewer guys falling into that middle range of 6-19.
It appears that my intuition was pretty close to spot on: https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/nsfg/key_statistics/n-keystat.htm
The differences are fuzzier than I thought, but definitely there. 28.3% of men report 15 plus, compared to 12.5% reporting 10-14. So, the gap is there - question is, do I have the best explanation for that gap?
> I believe that many women are unlikely to include one-night stands in the reported number.
Makes total sense. They do this in real life. Drives me crazy. Not because I care what the number is, but because I know that you are lying to me when you say that it's 6! lolol
How many guys actually alternate between hookups and long-terms like that? Remove all the hookups and you're at exactly 6.
It’s pretty common, although I again I don’t have any stats. What do guys who can get laid do after a breakup? Go out and try to get laid. Or, flip side, even they are looking for a relationship, you have false starts along the way. Maybe replace some of those hookups with month and half relationships that didn’t work.
I think the key point I’m trying to make is that because of the way men are wired, I wouldn’t expect a fully normal distribution. Six makes sense to me as an average, no issues with that. But I would expect some sort of gap in lifetime partners between the majority of men (80ish percent) who take what they can get (0-6) and those who can get laid when they want to (15-20 plus).
I mean, it's clearly not a normal distribution, that's not the sort of distribution you expect for a "count of..." anything. I forget all my basic statistics at this point but it's going to be some sort of long tailed distribution with a peak in the low single digits and a very long tail extending into the hundreds.
But my comment isn't to nitpick your grasp of statistics, it's to more deeply criticise your understanding of male psychology. I just don't think that this chad/virgin view of male psychology in which all men are constantly trying to fuck as many women as they possibly can is accurate, it's just a dumb stereotype. Most men have limited (but nonzero) interest in random hookups with random floozies. Maybe they try it a few times and realise it's not appealing. Maybe they get interested in it only under certain circumstances, like when travelling or after a breakup. Maybe they are generally uninterested in it, but hey, if you're really drunk and she's really hot then these things do occasionally happen. But the population of men who constantly bang as many girls as they possibly can is limited (and can be found at both ends of the distribution, but probably not in the middle).
Thanks for clarifying the shape, yeah that's obviously how that should look. But it should still have a gap!
I'm doing a shit job of explaining what I'm intuiting. The chad/virgin thing is lame, and I'm not saying that every guy wants to fuck 1000 women. What I'm trying to get at is that I think there is a reasonable gap between a) the number of women that men actually sleep with and b) the number that they would sleep with if given the chance.
There are a lot of guys who sleep with every woman they can, and that number happens to be in the single digits. Those guys tend to wreck their marriages when they get a cute secretary.
If you want a look at unchained male libido, it looks more like professional athletes, musicians, etc... Many of those guys eventually get wives - some of them get married surprisingly young! And I'm sure a decent percentage are faithful husbands. But in general, you'll see a professional athlete have a wife... and a lot of discrete girlfriends on the road, which the wife ignores. You see that pattern throughout history as well.
So, here's what I'm trying to say. I think there should be some kind of inflection point - maybe an 80/20 thing. At some level of attractiveness, guys are less bound by what they can get, and instead become bound by what they actually desire. I would expect a sizable jump in lifetime partners around that point.
And hey, I looked up the most basic stats possible, and it appears that my intuition here is correct (?). https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/nsfg/key_statistics/n-keystat.htm
It says 25.8% for 5-9, 12.5% for 10-14, and 28.3% for 15 plus! and the 15+ amount for women is less than half of that. So... I guess the question now is whether my theory is accurate, or there is some better explanation for why it is that way.
I’m looking for an article that I’m 80% sure was written here (or some adjacent Substack) that was a take down of a viral political psychology study. I can’t remember the specific “findings” of the study but it was one of those classic “we proved conservatives are bad” papers that always goes viral in parts of Twitter/Reddit despite having comically terrible methodology. Anyone know what I’m talking about?
My Metaphysical Transit Authority shirt is finally starting to wear out, and I was thinking of ordering another one. But today my kid noticed a problem with it: the original trolley problem mentions five people in the path of the trolley, but the shirt only has four!
I intend to order another shirt whether or not you fix this, but please reply to let me know if you will fix it; this will remind me to place my order.
Just getting caught up with the SBF trial and whoo.
Thrown *straight* under the bus by his former co-founder Gary Wang:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WFSx6KosLJU
I'll be noodling around with other coverage but the defence strategy seems to be "Sam is a Good Boy, he's a maths nerd who doesn't drink or party! He was an honest businessman!" and the prosecution right now is going for "here is this list of witnesses gonna tell you that he was a fraud, he knew it was fraud, and he knew he was committing fraud, also it was all him and not them".
The Democrats should throw their support behind Liz Cheney for new speaker of the house.
Any speaker that gets Democratic support would inherently be suspect by the Republicans, so they'd probably just kick her out again. Plus, it seems unlikely that Cheney would be willing to make a deal with the Democrats. She is a staunch conservative after all, not exactly a moderate.
If the Democrats decide to support a Speaker with the same discipline that they decided to oust McCarthy, the Republicans could only kick that Speaker out if they could get 217 out of 221 Republican house members on board to do so. And we just got an object lesson in how hard it is to get 217 Republican congressmen to agree on anything.
If the Democrats somehow managed to get a member of the Democratic party elected to the Speakership, yes, the GOP would join ranks to evict that person out of principle. But if the Democrats throw their support behind any reasonable Republican speaker, I suspect there would be at least five Republican congressmen who would go along with it.
Then for shits and giggles, the Democrats could withdraw their support two weeks later and wait for her to get kicked out again.
Honestly I'm a bit confused why the standing orders (or whatever they're called) of the US House of Reps allow a speaker to be kicked out without the election of a replacement speaker.
I don't think the moderate Republicans would vote for any Democrat-backed candidate until they've been through numerous rounds of humiliating defeat trying to pass one with only R votes.
Earlier this year, they took 15 rounds to vote over the course of a week and *still* didn't cave. Why would this time be different?
Earlier this year, the Democrats didn't support any Republican candidate for Speaker. In the present (and IMHO unlikely) hypothetical, the Democrats are supporting a Republican candidate. Earlier this year, the only way the GOP could get one of their own in that position, was to achieve nearly total unanimity within their caucus. Which as you note was particularly hard, and made them look weak and foolish. In the present hypothetical, any five GOP congressmen who want can cut through all that nonsense and get a Republican speaker on the first vote.
Well, first vote after the Democrats make this hypothetical offer; I expect they would want to make the Republicans suffer a bit before bailing them out.
Anyone know whether she wants the job?
Just because here is the only place where I get an understanding ear rather than being booed... 25 minute aboriginal land acknowledgement at the start of a meeting this week. I did time it. And again it included prayers to the Creator.
That's awful, which country?
I am hopeful that here in Australia we've reached the peak of Aborigine-worship and I'm hopeful for a decrease soon. There's a referendum next weekend to enshrine an ill-defined "Indigenous Voice To Parliament" in the Constitution, and polls have shown a massive decline in support for the proposition over the last couple of months, that has all the qualities of a preference cascade. At first the vibe was "if you don't vote yes, you're a racist", but as more and more people have come out as "no" supporters people realised it was safe to do so. As a result, the referendum is headed for a resounding and embarrassing 40-60 defeat.
But it's a lot easier to have the courage to object to something in a secret ballot than to stand up in a meeting and say "Actually why don't we _not_ do this?"
Wow, I'm glad I've never had to sit through anything like that.
I'd like to, but feels like paying the dane geld. And also, using the term native american is like three levels down on the euphemism treadmill. Considered very offensive these days by all the right thinking people in my office, officially at least. I just point it out for the lols.
OC ACXLW Unabomber manifesto 10/7/23
https://docs.google.com/document/d/12NE6POwSv8W2VdPZfCyPLcD_U7bkNdsoISNjRIm8P2I/edit?usp=sharing
Hello Folks!
We are excited to announce the 45th 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, Oct 7, 2023
Time: 2 PM
Conversation Starters :
This week we take a look back at the ideas of Ted Kaczynski. He was a militant critic of modern industrial society who chose to propagate his ideas using terrorism against scientists. His methods were odious and horrifying, but were there ideas that were worth thinking about? Which ideas are wrong? Which ideas can be salvaged? How much do these ideas exist outside how writings, and how should we deal with them? Do they continue to be dangerous? Should the ideas of a person be erased from discourse because of the awful things they did?
A summary text and podcast audio can be found here:
https://kadavy.net/blog/posts/industrial-society-and-its-future-summary/
ChatGPT and Claude summarize
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1OXHvIaIJXXtOkVsfHbIbJzl-cTjAiUS3s_DILmiuxzk/edit?usp=sharing
The full text can be found here:
Industrial Society and Its Future
https://web.cs.ucdavis.edu/~rogaway/classes/188/materials/Industrial%20Society%20and%20Its%20Future.pdf
Audio version of the full text:
https://archive.org/details/TheodoreJohnKaczynskiIndustrialSocietyAndItsFuture1995www.MP3Fiber.com
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.
Why did the Democrats all vote to oust House Speaker McCarthy?
1) Considering the state of the Republican party right now, wasn't he a moderate that could be worked with? Didn't his compromise bill last Saturday to prevent a government shutdown prove that?
2) With McCarthy gone, aren't the odds high that his replacement will be a more extreme Republican who will be harder to work with? Won't that raise the odds of a government shutdown on November 17, which is something the Democrats don't want to happen?
McCarthy already had to appease FC. Maybe dems were thinking they might lose leverage now that they've fired their only shot.
House Dems supported McCarthy on his 45 day continuing resolution. The next day McCarthy went on the Sunday morning talk shows to say the entire cluster fuck was the Dems fault. They just didn't trust the guy.
They weren't willing to play ball with McCarthy any _longer_, because he reneged on previous agreements that the Dems had reached with him.
Also, the GOP's renegades in the House have made it clear that they will continue treating any Speaker who makes any deals with any Dems as a blood enemy. They explicitly promise to continue "burning it all down" (their words) for the sake of punishing any such Speaker, and given the House's rules of operation they can in fact paralyze the place. That removes any motivation for the Dems to enter into any such new agreements.
True. McCarthy seems to have assumed that the Dems would lose their nerve at the prospect of a new Speaker who is beholden to the burn-it-down group.
Just a nice article I wanted to share.
https://www.zmescience.com/feature-post/history-and-humanities/people/albert-einstein-letter-marie-curie/
I think it began dying when the Soviet Union fell. Economic liberalism had a foil to keep it vital, and keep the criticism moored somewhat to reality. Without that foil, a lot of people assumed we were well on our way to Utopia. But while economic liberalism was delivering a lot for developing countries, its benefits were much more subtle in developed countries than they had been in previous generations. Basically, a lot of people, especially in the US, felt promised an ever increasing rate of standard of living improvement, thought that rate was too slow, or even negative, and mood affiliated themselves into believing the standard of living was actually decreasing. While this is easily disprovable, the sentiment is strong and is highly resistant to facts.
It is now unfashionable, and even inviting of mocking scorn to point out simple things like the increase in housing sizes in the US never ceased, that US manufacturing output continues to grow, that the standard of living considered unacceptable today would be luxurious 40 years ago, that the post WW2 economic growth that US workers enjoyed was built largely upon the fact that all of America's industrial competitors were destroyed and had to start over, etc.
The more I think about this, the more I'm convinced that this is a psychological problem and not a wealth or distribution of wealth problem. Humans seem to always evaluate their standing relative to other people, not any objective measure. If you're in the top 1% in your relevant economic comparisons, it seems to have the same effect on how you (and the other 99%) feel about you whether you're a Google Senior Programmer or a 12th century merchant with no electricity using chamberpots).
Objectively, 99.xx% of the population in the US today has a higher standard of living than the 1% living prior to 1000 AD. Kings in England had a life expectancy of about 50 between 1000 and 1600 AD. Because these are kings and not just wealthy could-be-kings, this discounts the normal issues of life expectancy from child mortality - they just didn't live that long and were riddled with medical issues that even the poorest today don't deal with. I can understand a peasant in 980 AD looking at the king and thinking he was high above him - because he was, and that king had significant benefits compared to the peasant. But not compared to people living today.
I think it comes down to power, because power is more zero-sum than wealth, and relative wealth is often a source of power. Nobody really cares if I could pay $50,000 for something in the US today, but that would be a huge sum of money for any society, past or present, where $5/day would hire a laborer for as much backbreaking labor as you would want. Or sex, or to walk around behind you singing your praises. The difference is power. We seem very in tune with relative power differences, which I think is the real argument, not wealth and especially not standard of living.
Exactly. And it makes sense that humans would use relative power as the metric for assessing "how they are doing", because trying to follow some normed absolute scale would be nonsense. "Who cares how I am doing relative to Ottoman Empire peasants, the people I think should not be higher status than I should be look very successful on Instagram, and that depresses/enrages me!!!!!"
Right. There will always be a pecking order. In systems where everybody is economically near-equal, like a high school or a prison, the pecking order is based even harder on something other than economics, and it's usually a lot nastier.
I don't know statues, but postage stamps are easier to access.
In that case QEII is a runaway winner, but you could disqualify her for reigning (not ruling).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cinderella#Literary_versions
You always hear that German fairy tales are brutal, but I never knew that this extends to universal stories like Cinderella as well. The German variant has the evil stepsisters mutilated, blinded and ostracized as punishment for their abuse, while in the dominant English variant, Cinderella forgives them without a second thought and rewards them by marrying them off to rich noblemen once she's queen. I think if I had kids, I'd definitely read them the German version.
Yeah, all the Disney versions are toned down. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Snow_White
"As punishment for the attempted murder of Snow White, the prince orders the Queen to wear a pair of red-hot iron slippers and to dance in them until she drops dead. With the evil Queen finally defeated and dead, Snow White's wedding to the prince peacefully continues."
"Dance while wearing these red-hot iron slippers until you drop dead... or else!!!"
Given the time period involved in writing these stories, the "or else" may have actually been significantly worse. There were some harsh people empowered to do some bad stuff back then.
I still laughed at your post.
Something that interests me about the Grimm version is that the people who complained about the brutality were also German. The original sanitized version was also in German, published by the Grimms in response to complaints. So apparently there was a cultural difference within Germany between the people telling the stories and the people buying the book. Also the evil stepmothers were evil mothers in the original; the Grimms felt evil stepmothers were less disturbing.
I've heard it argued that some of Grimm's tales, e.g. Hansel and Gretel, are what remains in cultural memory of a period of starvation (the kids being sent out into the woods because there wasn't enough food for them at home, the "witch" wanting to eat children because there wasn't any other food around, etc, and I think there are examples of cannibalism in other tales as well, although I can't think of specific ones now).
Quite interesting, but I'm not sure to what extent this is supported by historical research, or if I'm just repeating popular misinformation.
The Grimms themselves believed that kind of stuff. They collected all of those stories in hopes that they contained knowledge of the past. Today's folklorists don't agree.
Better watch no one calls Child Services on you.
If you really want to traumatize your children with Grimm's fairy tales, read them "The Poor Boy in the Grave"!
The minister for immigration ordered the removal of cartoon murals from asylum centres intended for children to make them less welcoming.
A move that has surely sparked more outrage than all of the crime committed by 'asylum seekers' over X many months or years combined.
How many of those criminals were children? Do you believe that making the process of asylum seeking more miserable for children in particular will reduce the crime rate? Is there any causal connection to crime at all, or do you just think that anything that hurts immigrants is justified so long as some of them are criminals?
Look over there!
I'm not sure why I'm expected to care about these "injustices" when the people crying about them actively covered up children literally being raped by brown immigrants. They do not have a principled concern for children, they love brown people and hate white people, so nobody is under any obligation to care about some cartoon mural nonsense.
I don’t think this is correct.
Ahem: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rotherham_child_sexual_exploitation_scandal
"The Catholic Church is concerned about child poverty."
"Hah. No they aren't! Why should I listen to them? The people saying this hate all children. They covered up child abuse by priest for decades!"
See link below...
Joseph Stalin apparently has the Guinness World Record for raising the most statutes to himself. However, these statues were within the U.S.S.R., a country where he was the leader.
What historical figure (so no religious figures) has the most statues outside of a territory that they lived/ruled?
By way of example, I can see two George Washington monuments outside the U.S.A., John Adams has one, F.D.R. has at least six.
Can anyone beat six?
Gandhi has many more than six, but I don't know if he beats Columbus.
There are two of Abraham Lincoln in the UK, I'll see if I can find more (levitating piano not included)
3 in the UK: London, Manchester, Edinburgh. There are also statues of him in Oslo, Moscow & Mexico City
The Marquis de Lafayette has a good number in the US (and his grave in Paris was filled with American soil).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Honors_and_memorials_to_the_Marquis_de_Lafayette
Jesus or Buddha?
Tons of those, but Zach ruled out religious figures in the question.
Which seems like a silly ruling, as there are lots of religious figures that aren't at the level of Jesus or Buddha that closely match what he's looking for. A famous Pope I think would work, or a theologian/church leader like Aquinas or Martin Luther.
This might get a bit spicy depending on how you define "A country where he lived/ruled", but Robert E. Lee might be a contender. Particularly pre-2010 or so.
It's definitely a close call, and I'm probably biased since I'm American. To me, the distinction between the Confederacy and the Union is clearly big enough to warrant counting them as separate nations for the purpose of the question.
With that being said, when I look at other countries' civil wars, I'm not as convinced that I would find this argument persuasive. If someone built a statue to Liu Bei in Beijing, for example, I'm not sure I'd care that Liu Bei never ruled that particular part of China (or, going further, that he was at war with that part of China for most of his life). It's sort of all China to me.
Regardless, I'll give in to my biases and say that Robert E. Lee definitely counts (only the statues that are outside the former Confederacy though). Hopefully this rule does not come back to haunt me.
I think the difference is that Robert E Lee was fighting to break away from the US, whereas Liu Bei was fighting to unite China under his own rule.
Whoever was the model for the Garden Gnome.
Wait, they're not supposed to be Robt E Lee?
Churchill:
Paris, Toronto, Oslo, Prague, New Orleans, Canberra - fiberglass replica, Halifax, Washington DC
So if you count the fiberglass replica in Canberra, that’s eight.
That's pretty good! Certainly for modern historical figures, that's in the lead. But Christopher Columbus actually has a crazy amount of statues - more than 22 in Argentina alone.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_monuments_and_memorials_to_Christopher_Columbus
Yeah I'm saying this is probably number one. Going to be a very tough one to beat!
I tested Scott Alexander's bet (https://astralcodexten.com/p/i-won-my-three-year-ai-progress-bet?utm_source=%2Fsearch%2Fsix%2520months%2520won&utm_medium=reader2) with Gary Marcus on DALLE-3. Scott claimed at one point that he had already won this bet but it still seemed pretty disputable. I would say DALLE-3 passes this benchmark pretty convincingly for 3/5 of the prompts (see photos here: https://twitter.com/_Soren__/status/1709257511780360312), but still is not able to get the key in the mouth of the raven in the stained glass window or the bell on the tail of the llama. Images generated with https://www.bing.com/images/create which is supposedly DALLE-3.
OK, I messed around with the raven one a little more and got one that seems perfect. The key is clearly gripped in the raven's beak. (I changed the prompt a little, substituting "beak" for "mouth.") https://i.imgur.com/cHvloYU.jpg
Nice! Its obviously within the abilities of the model to produce the type of image we are interested in but it seems to have something like a strong prior against the image/difficulty "understanding" the compositionality in the prompt
Yeah, I think both images are at the upper limit of how many relationships between elements it can keep hold of: The key is *in* the raven’s beak, the raven is *on* the woman’s shoulder, they are *in* a library. For llama, bell is *on* tail, boy is * on* llama, both are *in* desert.
I developed a fascination with Dall-e2, even though Midjourney and others make way prettier images, and have made thousands of images with it, along the way figuring out tricks to make the dumb and oppositional thing make what I’m asking for. I used that stuff to get Dall-e3 make these 2 images. With the Raven image what made the most difference was to ask for a stained glass image rather than a stained glass window. The latter introduces a 4th element, the window, with the other 3 elements inside it, and 3 elements each bearing some relationship to one of more of the others seems to be its limit. The llama image, while no more compositionally complex than the raven one, was much harder to get, because Dall-e has such a strong prior for llamas wearing bells around their necks. I finally used a confusional technique, the misspelled “barette” on the llama tail, in an effort to make Dall-e dizzy enough that it forget where the bell is supposed to go on a llama. And it worked. And note that it did not even include a barrette in the image.
Confusional techniques get Dall-e to lose control of itself. You know how if you ask GPT4 a question it does not know the answer to it often hallucinates? It’s possible to do something similar with Dall-e2. If an important element in your prompt is a nonsense word, or something Dall-e has never seen (an amphisbena, for instance), or incorporates in image it cannot recognize it will sometimes produce images far more violent and obscene than any you can get it to make via straightforward prompt. I have a whole collection of them if you’re curious.
Soren, I also got Dall-e 3 to make the llama image:
https://i.imgur.com/dBUupdN.jpg
The prompt was "a desert llama with a barette on its tail. The barette has a bell on it. A boy is on the llama's back. Digital art."
Dall-e was vey stuck on the idea that llama have bells around their necks and no place else. Telling it there was a barrette in its tail (barette deliberately misspelled to add an element of uncertainty about what the item was) and the bell was attached to that broke Dall-e's mental set.
Soren, I just got Dalle-e 3 to make the raven image or at least something close enough I think it passes. My prompt was "A stained glass image of a raven holding a key in its mouth. The raven is perched on a woman's shoulder and they are in a library." Here's the image:
https://i.imgur.com/JeKHi8c.jpg
If you are very particular you can point out that it's not clear whether any of the key is actually *in* the raven's mouth. You'd get the same image if the key was glued to the right side of the raven's beak. On the other hand, it is also possible that the key has a protuberance on it that is gripped by the 2 blades of the beak on the right-hand side of the beak. It took 2 tries with this prompt to get the image. First try gave me 4 images, second one only 3 for some reason. Before I asked for stained glass I asked for "a realistic image" (rest of prompt was the same) and got one perfect result on the first try. It's here:
https://i.imgur.com/CUgbUMr.jpg
I'm sure I could get a stained glass image with absolutely no tiny possible flaws to quibble about if I ran the prompt a couple more times.
I think what made the prompt work were (1) I asked for a stained glass image rather than a stained glass window. Asking for a window adds another element. (2) I mentioned the raven and key first, so as the get that info into Dall-e before it's little head was full. (3) I said "they are in a library" rather than "on the shoulder of a woman in a library" because the latter is a complex sentence, so easier to get confused by.
FWIW, I tried several models on mage.space, but couldn't get the raven to place the key in its mouth, either.
Not really relevant to the bet, but I've played around with Dall-e 2, and it is often possible to fix problems like no key in the raven's mouth during a second pass. You edit the original photo in Dall-e, whiting out the area where you want a change. Then use a prompt similar to your original one, but changed in a way that makes the feature you want added as prominent as possible. So instead of describing the photo as, say, a woman with a raven on her shoulder and a key in the mouth of the raven, you say a raven with a key in its mouth & Raven is sitting on the shoulder of a woman.
You may know all that already. Out of curiosity -- have you tried it on the images where Dall-e3 failed.?
For the purposes of the bet, I would see that as a clear fail. Thanks for the tips though, I might find them useful in some of the things I've tried to make.
Oh, also, Dall-e2 was very resistant to making images of impossible things (3-headed animals) or even just things you rarely see, like a raven with a key in its mouth. Sometimes it works to first edit the problematic area to make a familiar image -- say a raven with some food in its mouth. Then on a second edit white out the food and ask for a key. If you still can't get a key, you can say the raven is carrying some tasty candy shaped like a key. There are a lot of trix.
Yes, but at this point you're no longer using the program as a fully autonomous AI. If you really wanted to just produce an applicable image, you could use inpainting or even copy/paste images together in Photoshop.
Yeah, I know. I resort to that sometimes. However, I prefer to get Dall-e to do it because I kind of like the unexpected touches it puts in. (Also, I want to WIN! the battle with Dall-e). I get that once you're editing you can't count the results towards the bet, I'm just curious how malleable Dall-e3 is. Tried to try it out today but site is having trouble -- probably too many people going there to give it a try.
Tom Hanks calls out a dental ad featuring AI generated Tom Hanks.
https://www.engadget.com/tom-hanks-calls-out-dental-ad-for-using-ai-likeness-of-him-161548459.html
How do I know it's not AI generated Tom Hanks calling out a dental ad featuring real Tom Hanks?
Ahhh, good one.
Why has the tide turned against economic liberalism? Call it neo-, classical-, what you will, I mean laissez-faire, free-market, Adam Smith, capitalism.
I think I understand why the GOP turned against it. Trump figured out that the real issue among conservatives was anti-immigration and used that to destroy the other Republican presidential candidates in 2016. Trump had never really been a fan of the free market: his comparative advantage in NYC real estate was his ability to work the Byzantine bureaucracy, not change it. (See Scott's review of Art of the Deal.) He also understood that the working class blamed and loathed job offshoring almost as much as they blamed and loathed immigration for their not-better wages. And that there is a white professional conservative class which identifies for familial reasons with the working class.
That explains what turned the GOP against neo-liberalism. But where did all the neo-liberals go? Lord knows they didn't all rush over to the Libertarian Party, although I'm not sure why not. If the Libertarian Party was going to have a moment, 2016 should have been it, given that the GOP was suddenly dumping free-market capitalism down the drain -- but no, the Libertarian Party continued to spin in place that year.
What about the Democrats? They had never been the party of Adam Smith, but since Trump *did* drive off Reagan-Bush Republicans from the party, and since few of them joined the Libertarians, shouldn't those Never Trumpers have moved the Dems to the right economically?
The facts on the ground are that Bidenomics is much like Trumpenomics. Tariffs. Mercantilism. Buy American.
Liberalism is dead.
How does that suddenly happen in both major parties at once? One hypothesis, using the Median Voter Theorem, is that, whereas the position of the median voter hasn't changed much if we only look at the well-ordered 1-d economic dimension, the salience of other issues has grown, gradually but suddenly, like big wheels turning, and the median voter is in a very different position because economics is longer as deciding an issue.
That economics matters less as an issue might seem counterintuitive, given that the political rhetoric *about* economics has changed so much, but if that *isn't* the case: where did all the neo-liberals go?
The broader economic liberalism spreads, the greater the payoff for defecting.
I thought the same thing as Chase. You could ask why the world is less into free trade, but that's not economic liberalism. The Inflation Reduction Act passed the House without a single Republican vote, so the GOP was clearly not on board with it, if that's a determining factor.
Regarding free trade, tariffs are higher than recent memory, but still tiny. I'm getting that tariffs now are 3%+, bigger than 2% ish early this century, but way smaller than the 30% I can recall in early US history from my history classes long ago, and I have the impression it sometimes topped 50% in Great Depression times. So is the question, why are they creeping up again?
One reason is our conflict with China. I'm seeing tariffs against China at 7.5% for some consumer goods and 25% for some other things. China's a major trading partner, so I can see how this would pull us up from 2% ish to 3% ish overall.
I don't know all our tariffs, but it looks like we have a trade dispute with one nation -- let's be honest, one man, Chairman Xi -- and we wouldn't be wise to generalize this to both parties opposing free markets.
In 1972, George McGovern ran on a platform that included a guaranteed minimum income of $6,000 per year, equivalent to about $44,000 today. McGovern lost 49 states, resulting in the Democratic retreat to more conservative economic policies. But one election doesn't necessarily settle an issue for all time. Many of today's political actors weren't even alive in 1972. They may have heard about McGovern's historic loss, but they didn't live through it and so it's not a defining political event for them.
The Median Voter Theorem says that the way to win elections is to move to the middle. Leftists have been arguing for years that that is wrong--that you should instead take a position that contrasts sharply with your opponent's; otherwise voters won't see a difference and will vote on other issues. Trump's success suggests that neoliberal economics is to the right of the median voter, so the contending positions are that the Democratic Party should move somewhat to the left on economic issues to capture the median voter, vs. the position that the Democratic Party should move significantly to the left to give working class people a clear and compelling reason to vote for Democrats rather than Republicans. In the Democratic Party, the “median voter” crowd mostly wins these interparty arguments, but the party moves left regardless of which faction wins.
One problem with your logic. The Democrats should move somewhat to the left *of the Republicans* in order to capture the median voter. Saying that neoliberal economics is to the right of the voter doesn't say that the Democrats, who are already on the left, need to go further left. That's possible, given how general the statements are, but unlikely in practice.
As far as historic examples, you can go later than 1972. Reagan so thoroughly captured the political landscape that Clinton essentially ran as a Republican on most topics, but especially economic ones. He was even more muted on abortion than Democrats today ("safe, legal, and rare"), despite that being one of the defining differences between him and Republicans.
Social media is optimized for showing you people doing Things You Don't Like so you'll get angry. A free market basically allows people to do Things You Don't Like with impunity: how are you going to stop them? With government control of the economy, all you have to do is win an election, and boom: suddenly there's a tariff on Imports You Don't Like, licensing requirements for Activities You Don't Like, and prior restraint on Speech You Don't Like.
TL:DR: Twitter -> "There oughta be a law."
I hate that this might be true, but I fear that it actually is true. Back when we could self-segregate by community, we weren't exposed to the worst actions of our political enemies like we are today. Now it's easy to see real (and exaggerated or fully fake) excesses of our enemies all day every day.
>"Why has the tide turned against economic liberalism?"
Do you have any evidence to support this claim whatsoever, or is it just vibes? Because none of the rest of what you wrote justifies this and half of it is barely even true, or just requires further evidence.
The evidence is the industrial policy in the bipartisan stamped Inflation Reduction Act and all the Trump tariffs. Do you have reason to believe the Republicans and Democrats are as free trade oriented as they were a decade ago?
If you mean free trade, then say free trade. That's just one component of economic liberalism.
Did I fail to cover this in my second sentence above: "Call it neo-, classical-, what you will, I mean laissez-faire, free-market, Adam Smith, capitalism." ?
Yes, because your only actual policy example to support the sweeping claim seems to be international trade.
The Inflation Reduction Act, which I invoked as a specific example, is full of subsidies to targeted industries. That is not free-market economics on a domestic or international level. Much domestic trade policy has international implications and vice-versa.
Pure libertarianism is going to be very unpopular. The best a libertarian party could do would be to run on the popular-ish parts of its platform like reducing housing regulation and opposing student loan forgiveness.
"Reforming social security" isn't happening.
Imagine, for a moment, the following situation:
Employees are forbidden from law from quitting their jobs, the punishment being that they are not legally allowed to be employed by anybody. Employers are required by law to give their employees a 40% raise each year. Employers can fire employees at will, who are then free to find another job, at whatever market rate they can get.
Now imagine, for a moment, a deregulatory movement arises, and - the law requiring employers to give employees a raise each year is struck down.
Although the amount of regulation has in theory decreased, and in theory we now have a "more free" economy, it isn't clear that the economy has actually become more free - the law requiring a raise each year wasn't simply stifling economic freedom, it was a check and a balance on the law forbidding employees from quitting, preventing it from becoming too burdensome, and forcing employers to either fork over more and more cash year over year, or to give their employees the opportunity to find a different job.
I think a lot of the last thirty years of market "liberalization" has tended to look a lot more like the situation I described, than the actual market liberalization policy of eliminating both regulations together: A slow erosion of checks and balances, which has consistently favored particular parties over others.
Even straightforward deregulation can be anti-market; consider, for a moment, a regulation that requires power utilities to pay meter prices for solar power. A bunch of people install solar panels. The removal of this regulation might be an improvement, in terms of theoretical economic freedom - but it violates the expectations of a lot of people who made capital investments under the previous scheme. A consistent and predictable legal framework is necessary for a truly free market, and market liberalization efforts have had a tendency to undermine the legal framework under which investments were made.
We live in a society of myriad economic regulations, all of which have figured into individual decisions, investments, plans, preparations. Many of these regulations form delicate balances constructed over long periods of time; removing part of these balances leaves the whole unbalanced. Because "concentrated benefits, diffuse costs", often the deregulation effort to remove on part of a check-and-balance succeeds, and the deregulation effort that would balance it does not.
I think a lot of the erosion of support for free-market economics arises from the consistent failure of efforts to free the market to actually do so, and instead to just create disparities in the regulatory frameworks that advantage some participants over others.
(True free market economics have never been tried!)
I think the biggest problem librarians fail to address is coordination. As usual, our gracious host has a great piece on that: https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/07/30/meditations-on-moloch/
More seriously, I think this has it backwards: Coordination is literally the thing market economics excels at, and the point where everything else fails horribly and ends up in a Molochian nightmare.
There are some externalities that don't get priced in, but the correct response is to get them properly priced in, so everything can coordinate on it, rather than try to write rules covering every possible case to avoid that externality happening.
Market is mostly excellent at coordination, but when it fails, it does so spectacularly. Roughly call it 80/20 (yes a big Pareto fan here). 80% is awesome and 20% is a death spiral to the lowest common.
That's what the Dewey Decimal System is for
I’ve been waiting for someone to comment on this but it seems that no one appreciates a good joke about an autocorrect typo anymore.