(1) The courtroom sketch artist is *really* bad. I mean, some of the drawings are not one bit at all like anyone. Ouch.
(2) Turns out that sticking to "I don't remember", not answering the questions, and trying to tell the prosecutor how to do their job isn't a great way to present yourself. Double ouch.
I realise his lawyers probably had to put him on the stand, because it would look too bad if he refused to testify, but man. He just talked himself right into jail:
"Bankman-Fried has been jailed since August after Kaplan revoked his bail, having concluded he likely tampered with witnesses. Kaplan blocked Bankman-Fried from calling several proposed expert witnesses, and ruled he could not testify about the involvement of lawyers in FTX decisions at issue in the trial."
Now the fun begins, because I'm sure there are going to be appeals etc. Speaking of prediction markets, were there any on this trial and the likely outcome? Did any hopeful optimist think he'd be acquitted? And it seems that there's a *second* trial on further charges coming up, so triple ouch?
"Bankman-Fried is also set to go on trial on a second set of charges brought by prosecutors earlier this year, including for alleged foreign bribery and bank fraud conspiracies."
I heard somewhere that the maximum penalty for all seven charges was 110 years. Given discretionary ranges on prison sentences, I have no idea what he might actually get from those charges.
Suggests decades. A literal application of the federal sentencing guidelines would result in a life sentence, but if the lawyers knock off say six points (out of 47), you wind up with 27-34 years.
For comparison, Shon McHugh, one of the three who participated in the murder that popularized the "Knockout game" - specifically, the one who stabbed the victim to death after the others had punched him - got 10 years.
The justice system is truly a joke. The underincarceration in this country is sick. All three of them should have been executed or given life in prison. This is a country that gives 30 years to life for white-collar crimes but lets murderers go free on $1,000 bail.
Deep down, using your best most rational empirical outlook, do you think your dataset of two entries is truly representative of the median or average outcome of the tens of millions of criminal convictions which took place over the period of time between 1992 and 2023?
And furthermore, do you think that the form of argument you've taken will be persuasive to a neutral observer who has no strong opinion either way?
CNN says "Judge Kaplan asked prosecutors to decide by February 1 whether that will proceed." They don't explain why the judge thinks that is now a question.
Putting SBF on the stand was a nothing-left-to-lose move -- his attorneys had no one else to call on as a potentially friendly witness who had any direct knowledge of the businesses and actions at the center of the trial. Literally every other FTX/Alameda business partner had flipped on him, the bankruptcy trustee had testified as a hostile witness, etc.
Ok, one more thing about the kidney situation, and this is aimed at everyone who didn't think there anything off with the essay, which maybe was most of you: what's the hold up? You realize what Scott just taught you here: you, yes YOU, could save a life at very little risk and inconvenience to you. So what's stopping you? Whatever that blocker is, it is literally a death sentence for someone out there, as plenty people die on that waiting list. Are you sure you can't find a way around it? Donating a kidney is ultimately safe and not very inconvenient, so why not do it?
For myself, when I contemplate doing this, it just seems so damn extreme, getting an organ ripped out of me and going around for the rest of my life with only one kidney. But hey, it just SEEMS that way, looking at it rationally, it appears to actually not be a big deal. This is a real trial by fire of one's commitment to rationality.
But funnily, a big factor in Scott going through with this seems to have been that he got into a context where this started seeming normal, he started feeling like he had social permission to do that, which you know, interesting way to admit you run on vibes just like a postrat.
I know I don't have much of a commitment to rationality, but I have to say again to those of you that do: what's the holdup? Because it appears there are no rational barriers to you saving a life in this way. Who knows, maybe this pushes someone over the edge: I know my writing once convinced a guy to go back to the Giving What We Can pledge, maybe in this way I can have the assist for saving a life even if donating my own kidney to a stranger is a step I'm unwilling to take.
For me a very convinient excuse is that I live in Russia. Anything I donated here is likely to be net negative in global utility. And leaving the country in my circumstances has certain risks, much more severe than one of an operation.
This, however, doesn't answer the question why didn't I do it before the war started, when it seemed that kidney donation in Russia is net positive. And the answer is - I wasn't really thinking about it. As Scott said, it wasn't a thing normalized enough in my society to be reminded about and so I just went on with my life. I think I did have this vague belief that organ donation is a good and right thing to do. But there was always something distracting me, something postponing the idea and thus I never came to it. And after all there is no hurry. I have only one kidney to donate and it doesn't matter much when will I do it.
Scott's post gave me a bump of motivation. So now it is a thing I'm thinking about. Another reason to escape Russia or made it a better country. A thing to be done in better times.
> which you know, interesting way to admit you run on vibes just like a postrat.
Running on vibes isn't some signature "post-rationalist" thing. If anything, it's a pre-rationalist one. Humans have been running on vibes since the dawn of the species. There are however people who try to do it less. To reason beyond vibes. To encorage vibes, actually corresponding to reality, and discorage vibes that don't. To actually overcome their biases. Imperfectly. A work in progress, instead of actual mastery. It's difficult, because we are not yet gods. But it's the less wrong thing to do and there are people, who are doing it. And you to can do it. Maybe not to a point where you are eager to donate ypur kidney for a stranger. But at least to a point where you are not trying so hard to rationalize your uneagerness to do it.
Actually, I'm coming around to do it, but I have been interned in psych wards 3 times and am currently on antipsychotic medication, which are things that may disqualify me. There is also the issue that this would horrify my family, and I don't want to put them through the wringer. They would be against and I would have to convince them to let me do it, because I really don't want to just override them on this.
I want to give you an advanced tip here: be nice to the part of yourself that is horrified and doesn't want to do the thing. If you feel that you need to shut some part of yourself up, crush it under the weight of guilt and obligations - don't do it yet.
Yes, donating your kidney is a moral and rational thing to do. It's still okay not to do it untill it deeply feels this way on intuitive level. People will still most likely need kidney donations in a year and a year after. Take your time to resolve the inner conflict and bring all parts of yourself in agreement.
Do persuade this part of yourself, but be nice about it. You are not god yet.
A friend suggested I post here: I’m a humanities prof creating an archive of media artifacts from the Russian 1990s. We have an existing website but would like to make improvements to UX with a new designer and developer. This work is paid but it’s the academic humanities so it’s not going to be hugely lucrative. If interested, please write to russian90sproject@gmail.com
I would like to start preparing for emergencies, like the next pandemic, a natural disaster etc. Can you recommend good resources to research how to do this?
The usual response is something along these lines. First, make sure the obvious stuff is covered: physical health (eat well and exercise), mental health (including cultivating resilience against boredom and loneliness), financial security (debt-free and emergency savings).
Second, consider generic risks. Can you handle cuts and burns common in kitchens? Can you handle losing your job for a few months? Can you handle a temporary disability? Do you have food and water? (Consider, re pandemic planning, that my most worthwhile prep was having over a month of food in the basement. We didn't need to go grocery shopping till late April 2020.)
Third, consider specific risks. Hurricane? Wildfire? College students setting couches on fire? For example, my neighborhood has lots of very tall trees. I've thought about whether to get a chainsaw. I don't have a regular need for one, but if a large enough storm came through, the neighborhood would be crippled. Granted, the trees have been there for many years, but storms are getting stronger...
As for resources, I've found theprepared.com and r/preppers to be useful. The former for comprehensive guidance; the latter for oddball questions.
What level of preparedness? You can go full "prepper" and build an underground bunker full of supplies, but most people want to draw a line significantly further back from that.
Buddhism is non-theistic, it's not that easy to group it in with the others. But I mean, maybe it's just an attractor state in the human brain. We like symmetry after all, and this is the ultimate symmetry. This would make all of spirituality a brainfart, but you know, spirtuality luckily thinks the entire world of the senses is a zero to the left, so it doesn't matter.
Hmm, this was supposed to be a reply to someone else, but I think it was you? Buddhism does have the Dharma, which is definitely this ultimate symmetry you should be in alignment with, a pristine path to liberation.
I haven't used it much lately, but it seems very serviceable. It is accurate/correct on addresses far more often than Google Maps. Most people don't use either enough to notice, and both are correct most of the time. I've found maybe half a dozen incorrectly placed addresses on Google, and so far none on Bing.
I've written a post about my home-rolled Crossword constructor computer program. It might be of interest to fans of American style crosswords or computer programmers.
I did use it to create my first submission to the NYT's last week.
Very impressive! Cool intersection of UI design and algorithms. I'm curious how hard it is to find a matching block of words like the 3x5 rectangle you include, and how much the ease-of-use heuristic helps. How often is it just not able to find a valid fill? What was the most interesting part algorithmically? Your description of the human touch for choosing fill words was pretty fun too. Though I'd imagine there's an interplay between choosing words and writing thematic clues for this part that you didn't touch on.
Ease-of-use from frequency seems like a first-order approximation to something that quantifies how many valid fills are left for the intersecting clues. For example, if you were to put some word in as clue 1-across, how many words are possible in 1 through 5 down? I bet multiplying those sizes together would be a pretty good heuristic. However, it's also probably much slower than a simple ranking, especially when the area is relatively unfilled, though you could also approximate with sampling.
I honestly don’t think there is a reasonable process (I live there) but either word of mouth, or contact Columbia or NYU. I can recommend mine if you like.
Has it happened to you that you were so affected by some major event or a controversy, that you found yourself obsessing over whether various public figures opined on it and what they said?
I've noticed that I'm growing obsessed over how people reacted or did not react to the events of October 7 in Israel (I'm Israeli). To the point where e.g. I've memorized the syntax of an advanced date query on Twitter, to be able to quickly look up Oct 7-10 tweets from any nickname I'm looking at.
It's strange because in theory I really, honestly don't think that everyone with a public platform of some kind ought to have said something. In truth, Israel has received an unprecedented wave of sympathy and support from the Western world, and I shouldn't care about whether e.g. some blogger I'm following on Substack or Twitter offered some heartfelt platitude (and I don't mean that sarcastically - responses to events of this sort can't help being platitudes, mostly, but they're still appreciated). In theory, I shouldn't care. But in practice, I find that I really do.
I can't quite resolve this gap. The best explanation I can find for myself is something like: "Sure, I can't really expect outsiders to care about the worst massacre in the history of my people since the Holocaust. It's fine that it was just another day to that person A. But should I really continue caring quite so much about the clever takes A has to offer on some culture war issues, or A's opinions on philosophy, or sex, or technology, or whatever? Suddenly it seems though A inhabits almost a separate universe. Normally when I read A, or B, or C, there's this background hardly-felt sense of imagining myself being A/B/C and thinking about those things that A/B/C are writing about. But A's studied indifference to the tragedy my country is experiencing breaks this illusion; I can't really see myself as A anymore and I'm annoyed at my own automatic attempts to do so."
In reaching for some similar behavior, I'm finding only examples I don't quite like - I wonder if that's how Covid antivaxx people feel, for instance, when they ask obsessively whether people they interact with or some public people "took the jab". I don't like the comparison, but maybe it's apropos.
I'm not someone with a public platform, but if I had one I think I'd feel compelled to say something only if it were relatively novel in the context of my audience (not necessarily a wholly new position, perhaps a different way of phrasing or interpreting something). And presumably many people, particularly in the immediate aftermath of the massacre (before the retaliation made the situation larger and more complex), felt that condemning was no more an addition to any sort of conversation than being against serial killers.
This is different, for me, on a personal scale. I will say "I'm so sorry for your loss" to someone grieving even if they've heard it from a hundred people that day, or "I understand that that must be stressful" to a Jewish friend who is feeling anxiety over the situation. But those are individual, emotional relations, not broadcasts into the cold internet.
Come to think of it, that distinction might be _why_ I don't have a public platform of any significance. Maybe people who want to have such platforms, and do so successfully, don't have this distinction the same way?
It likely really shook up your own sense of identity.
Obviously, with your suddenly finding yourself a Very Serious member of a team playing a Very Serious game, you pretty much *just* care to know whether on matters do-or-die these folk have your back.
It's the same effect that makes people want to know what Immanuel Kant's opinion on slavery is.
I don't know if it has a name, but a convincing explanation is that agreeing with someone over 99 opinion then disagreeing on 1 opinion is psychologically painful, it either implies that (A) the someone is wrong and so are those 99 opinions you previously agreed with on, which you now have to go over one by one and replace/amend them in your web of beliefs (B) you're the one in the wrong, and that 1 opinion you care deeply about and is central to your identity is actually wrong too, which is psychologically disastrous.
Happens to me a lot when I find woke beliefs, which I despise, among an academic or a scifi writer whom I respect. Sometimes I manage to inject enough moral relativism into my web of beliefs to ignore it, and sometimes I can't and the person is "ruined" forever for me in the sense that I can't take them seriously anymore and all opinions that I previously shared with them are automatically weaker and repellant to me towards their opposites. This all has to be weighted by the relative strength of beliefs and their opposites, as in I'm not going to suddenly become religious again because an atheist intellectual I used to respect became a man-hating feminist.
Remember that all opinions are wrong, and the vast majority of our beliefs are attire that we pick for 100 stylistic reasons and 1 practical reason, and you will be comforted.
At this point I believe that most people are crazy, and it just somehow... sometimes... works okay on average, because the people are crazy on some topics and non-crazy on others, so if you keep listening too long to one person you will usually be horrified, but if you let people vote on some narrow technical topic, sometimes the reason wins. But even then, if the supposed side of reason starts discussing other topics, soon the illusion of reason collapses.
Maybe each of us should make hundreds of online identities, one for every belief we hold, and use that identity only to express that belief, at a place where most people already agree with it. That would make internet a much more pleasant experience.
Yes, exactly this, but on a different subject. In retrospect, it was either one of the first signs of PTSD, or under an alternate theory, part of a feedback loop in which I gave myself PTSD. Either way, try to stop doing that? :-(
But to come at this feeling from another angle, do you feel betrayed? Do you feel like a large number of people, whom you trusted to be reasonable, suddenly pulled a mask off and revealed themselves to be only concerned with certain superficial signs of injustice? And in a way that is inimical to your existence? Do you feel like the foundations upon which you built your world view have crumbled? Does thinking about the subject in certain ways produce blinding rage or paralyzing fear?
I visited San Francisco this past weekend, what an interesting place. Things that pleasantly surprised me was how walkable the city was and how clean/safe it felt compared to the reputation it seems to have online. Certainly it's a bit jarring seeing all the toiletries behind plastic covering, and I'm sure I avoided the most problematic areas, but the narrative you hear about the city really doesn't match the experience I had there. Probably the only downside is that the food scene was just ok, most places weren't bad but nothing was that good given the prices. It's also funny to see all the communist/anarchist shops in what must be one of the richest communities in America.
As a regular visitor to SF going back a couple decades, I agree with all of these observations.
The truly-batshit cost of housing prevents my wife and I from seriously considering living there, and the visible homeless problem has increased. But still -- literally every time we're heading to a Bay-area airport for a flight home we have a moment of wanting to not be departing.
And none of my relatives who live there (none of whom are wealthy but they did buy in on houses back before those prices got really insane) have any interest in living anyplace else.
I suspect that most of the pushback is due to the post being a *very* hard sell that the reader donate a kidney to a stranger. It attempts to preemptively counter every rational objection his particular audience might have, and then straightforwardly sprinkles in a bit of guilt here and there.
Had the post's entire copy been, "I've been away donating a kidney to a stranger. It made sense to me and I feel fine now," I suspect there would have been far less criticism.
I feel like there's an unwritten rule where we downplay "good" things about us to avoid seeming like we think we're better than other people, or making other people feel bad for not making the same choices we did. As is played with in the next 20 seconds of this clip from "Mean Girls":
I didn't see any guilt sprinkled in Scott's post at all. It seemed to me like he was explaining what he did and why, but not downplaying it at all. If we look at it, and see persuasive reasons to do something, and feel bad because we aren't, that's on us, and that's what the downplaying would have avoided.
As I commented below (but not sure if you will see):
Scott says, "The ten of you who will listen to this [this argument for donating a kidney] and donate are great. That brings the kidney shortage down from 40,000 to 39,990/year."
The implication being that people who don't donate a kidney aren't "great" and are responsible for the 39,990 deaths a year from kidney shortages.
Nah. A *very* hard sell would be to add another option for Substack subscribers -- Monthly, Annual, Kidney Donor. (See subscriber-only posts: one hidden open thread weekly, occasional AMAs, occasional extras, and a special hidden thread to share photos of scars.)
I didn't notice any attempts to make people feel guilty, with the exception of the people who answer on a survey that they would give a kidney to a stranger but do not. And I think people who lie on surveys (even if they're also lying to themselves!) could use a little guilt.
Scott says, "The ten of you who will listen to this [this argument for donating a kidney] and donate are great. That brings the kidney shortage down from 40,000 to 39,990/year."
The implication being that people who don't donate a kidney aren't "great" and are responsible for the 39,990 deaths a year from kidney shortages.
That's a bit of a stretch. If I said "The ten of you who bought me birthday presents this year are great!" that doesn't mean that everyone who didn't is not great, nor that they had a responsibility to give me a birthday present. Similarly, if someone is honored for their donation to a university by having a building named after them, that doesn't mean that everyone who doesn't have a building named after them is dishonorable or that we all have a responsibility to donate to universities. People can be praised for doing something without implying that everyone has a moral responsibility to do that thing.
I don't know what to tell you - I don't see how anyone could read the two sentences I quoted (plus his entire argument for Why You Should Donate a Kidney) and not understand that Scott believes that people should donate their kidneys, that those who do are "great" and those who don't are, conversely, not great.
I just don't see where the guilt comes in. You don't have an obligation to be great in this respect. This is clearly supererogatory, and I don't see anywhere where Scott tries to make people feel bad for not doing it (with the possible exception of people who say on a survey that they would do it, but don't, and I think a little guilt is justified in that case).
"The study stated: “In women, the predictive features were mean pitch, pitch SD, and RAP jitter, and in men, mean intensity and apq11 shimmer were used. In simple terms, the variation in these features found that women with T2DM reported a slightly lower pitch with less variation, and men with T2DM reported slightly weaker voices with more variation. These differences likely stem from differences in disease symptom manifestations between the sexes.”
Kaufman commented that these differences found via the AI’s signals processing between male and female voices were “surprising”.
The researchers concluded: “Voice analysis shows potential as a pre-screening or monitoring tool for T2DM, particularly when combined with other risk factors associated with the condition.”
"Voice synthesis is a complex process that relies on the combined effects of the respiratory system, the nervous system, and the larynx. Anything that affects these systems can influence the voice, whether it is perceptible audibly or detectable through computer analysis.3 In T2DM, individuals experience sustained periods of high blood glucose. Point-in-time glucose concentrations have been hypothesized to affect the elastic properties of the vocal chords, and long-term elevated glucose can have detrimental effects such as peripheral neuropathy and myopathy (ie, the damage of nerve and muscle fibers, respectively). Myopathy has been shown to correlate with an increased prevalence of voice disorders and dysphagia, potentially because of muscle weakness within the larynx, whereas hoarseness, vocal straining, and aphonia are present in individuals with diabetic neuropathy. Furthermore, T2DM has been linked to an increased prevalence of psychological disorders such as depression, anxiety, eating disorders, and decreasing cognitive function, all of which have been linked to vocal changes."
I do wonder how much this is from the voice, and not from "the associated data we used were predictors of likely diabetes and we just shook the voice data a bit to match it up". But if it's true, then wow, we're going to go back to things in traditional medicine like "looking at the eye can diagnose illnesses" and acupuncture points, except this time SCIENCE! because it's the AI.
If I'd heard "you can diagnose diabetes from the voice", I would have lumped it in with iris reading and the likes. Everything old is new again!
How well? I would not be at all surprised if you could diagnose diabetes from the voice and score much better than a random guess; I /would/ be surprised if you could do it well enough to be useful.
Depends on what kind of errors the AI makes. If it over-diagnoses diabetes, then yes. If it under-diagnoses it, then we would still need to pay attention to people whom the AI said were fine. Not necessarily more than we already do, but then I'm not sure the AI would be super helpful.
Regarding Scott's kidney post, what does everyone think about mandatory organ, blood, and other tissue harvesting of the dead, with an opt-out option for those that don't want it? Seems like that would clear up the waiting list without having to encourage people to sacrifice their own healthy tissue?
There's a good amount of libertarian and libertarian-adjacent people in the comments, and the argument that the government shouldn't control what you can do with your body is fairly standard libertarian.
Multiple countries are opt-out of organ donation and it certainly helps with availability, but doesn't solve it entirely because of* reductions in other forms of mortality which increases the pool of alive, occasionally transplant-wanting people.
Even with opt-out organ donation, the pool of available posthumously donated organs is limited by a very small fraction of deaths resulting in organs suitable for transplant.
Organs aren't viable for transplant unless they're extracted almost immediately after cardiac death, or prior or simultaneous with it in the case of brain-dead donors.
Old age isn't automatically disqualifying for organ donations, but the donated organs need to be healthy, and in general the donor has to be fairly healthy apart from being dead because transplant recipients are inherently immunocompromised especially right after transplant surgery. If you've had any form of cancer that's at risk for coming back, you're generally disqualified as a donor because of the risk of there being an undetected metastasis in one of your organs. And just about any active infection or communicable disease is a no-no. C.f. that episode of Scrubs (based on an actual incident in 2004) where an organ donor had undiagnosed rabies (misdiagnosed as a drug overdose) that was transmitted to the recipients along with her organs.
Ironically, improvements to road and vehicle safety are a major driving (so to speak) factor in reducing the number of potential donors, as probably the biggest cause of "healthy except for being brain dead" is car and motorcycle accidents. And because of this, opt-out donations might go quite a bit further in the US in terms of meeting transplant demand than it does in many other countries, since Americans drive a lot more than just about everyone else in the world and correspondingly have a lot more fatal car accidents.
A side note that is admittedly morbid: We know that when a low-income country transits to a middle-income country, deaths from accidents increase.
This is because people can afford to buy motorcycles and cars before the authorities get sufficient tax money to build better roads. Plus, it takes time to develop a “safe traffic culture”, including installing (and making stick) professional training before someone is allowed to drive a car.
In addition to an increase in traffic accidents you have an increase in construction site accidents, because the ability of people to finance buildings increases fast, while the regulatory and cultural shift toward “safe construction sites” lags behind.
The morbid moral is: If you are looking for places where there are potential donors aplenty, look for poor countries that are experiencing rapid economic growth.
Several years ago there was a question on DSL so good that I'm going to repost it here: Suppose you want to know what the most obscure state is in the USA. How would you go about figuring it out? A poll wouldn't work, because a state that wins a poll couldn't be the most obscure state. So what method might best determine the most obscure state?
Note: An obvious method might be to get a group of people to list all the states they can from memory and take the state least mentioned. But this won't work because for the purposes of this question everyone has continual internet access. Everyone can write down all 50 states if that is the question.
Probably I'd just query e.g. the Weibo API for each of them to see how often they're mentioned. Likewise, if I wanted to know the most obscure Chinese province, I think some English-language social network would be a good data source.
The obvious answer to me is to simply get all Wikipedia articles as a single gigantic text and count every occurence of every US state in a frequency table, sorting this table will yield the most mentioned and the least mentioned state. It's probably safe to proxy "most obscure US state" by "least mentioned US state", it's true in the sense that, if someone were to hypothetically source all of their information about US states from Wikipedia, mentioning the least-mentioned state will get the most surprise from them. Wikipedia can be replaced by any corpus of text.
>But this won't work because for the purposes of this question everyone has continual internet access. Everyone can write down all 50 states if that is the question.
That just means you need to work a little harder on the survey. Conduct the test in a setting where survey-takers can't or at least probably won't look up the results. The ideal would be to do the survey with a pencil and paper in a proctored environment (call it a study on geographical knowledge or something), but that's logistically demanding and runs the risk of accidentally only answering the question from the perspective of bored college students who have nothing better to do than participate in psychological studies.
You could probably get decent results with a telephone survey. There are fairly mature techniques for correcting for response bias from telephone surveys, so that's less of a concern. And "continual internet access" is mostly in the form of smart phones, and I expect people to be much less likely to use their phones to look something up if they're already using their phones for actual telephony. Some people will still look it up, either because they're already sitting in front of a computer or because they're using speaker or headphones to take the call, but you can filter them out by treating anyone who answers all fifty states (at least without signing the "Fifty States and the Capitals" song from Animaniacs or the "Fifty Nifty United States" song taught in many elementary schools) as a non-response.
Another technique would be to instead of asking for as many states as possible to instead ask them to name the first ten states they can think of off the top of their heads.
Per Sporcle, it's Missouri. I don't know how large Jetpunk's sample is, but Sporcle's quiz has over 30 million plays (though a substantial number are probably repeats, by people trying to learn the states).
I feel that a quiz that just asks one to name states without a map to help will offer slightly better results than one that just asks to name states from a map.
I do think it would work, if you just asked people in the street to name as many states as they can. If you're into British quiz shows, there's a fun one called "Pointless", where they do exactly this: the contestants have to try to guess which answer the least number of people got right.
I did this once a long time ago. I was with some friends and suddenly challenged myself to do it (I am Canadian). The last one to come to me was Utah. Hard to imagine.
You'd need actual trolls to cancel the signal from those following the honour system, surely? Those who cheated would list all states and thus only dilute it.
Although, the signal might be pretty weak considering we're us. I don't even live in the 'States and I was able to list 46/50 from memory (missed Montana, Arizona, Missouri and Wisconsin).
The German writer Berthold Brecht, when writing about his play Arturo Ui (re-telling the rise of Adolf Hitler by making him a prohibition era gangster boss) argued that the great political criminals must be exposed, and preferably be exposed to ridicule, as they are not great political criminals, but the perpetrators of great political crimes, which is something completely different.
He was claiming that there is generally a level of reverence and respect for those who kill, from the serial killer to the bloody conqueror, and that this respect must be destroyed. [1]
Looking at the rise of "true crime", I can not help but concur. In my opinion, if you have to put specific serial killer or mass shooter into the media at all, make them the butt of the joke in a late night show or something. Killers generally forfeit what Harry calls the "deontological protection of the innocents", so go wild. Speculate about their penis sizes, whatever.
For terrorist organisations, I feel that the only ones who should take them seriously are the security services tasked with opposing them. While it is sad when terrorists kill someone, the piety which is due to their victims should not rub of on them. The fight of them against western nations is comically hopeless, and their willingness to murder should not cause us to think them Serious.
Of course, it could be argued that ridicule as an aspect of propaganda is yet another old symmetrical weapon. [2] I don't know if that is true. If I find Chaplin's The Great Dictator hilarious and would probably find the antisemitic caricatures in the Stuermer dreadfully predictable, is that purely due to my world view only?
Political satire (e.g. speculation on the penis size) only works within the frameworks of non-war politics, because it depends a lot on how exagerating an argument makes it poisonous to ever bring up in serious discussion circles again. This is probably not too effective against militants arguing with weapons, the physics of bullets won't change because you made fun of them. Furthermore, the particular sub-genre of political satire that is often employed against Trump or Hitler requires an identifiable person with lots of media appearance and a reputation, you will be hard pressed to find someone like that among Hamas-style anons.
What works is military satire, making fun of bullets by boasting that you have airplanes, and making fun of airplanes by boasting that you have AA missiles. More generally, you can make fun of the entire side you're fighting against, culture, people, economy, etc... The economy angle is very heavily used by Israeli and Pro-Israeli advocates in the media for example, those dirty poors are envious of our economical miracle, we will crush them under the wheels of our 400+ Billion GDP. In 4Chan's /pol, skin color is a devastating weapon, and the fighting takes place by posting a darker skinned Israeli/Palestinian, optionally in contrast to a fairer skinned Isareli/Palestinian, and then declaring the self-evident truth that the fairer-skinned people deserve more suppport and anyone supporting the darker skinned a laughable object of mockery. Lots of soft targets in Culture, for Israelis and Pro-Israelis that's the medival islamist rhetorics that often motivates large swathes of Arab and Iranian Anti-Israelis, a big success story is MEMRI TV[1][2], founded by an ex Israeli intelligence official with the very obvious agenda of posting hilarious clips from talk shows and tv programs where Islamist drivel is taken as a self-evident and built upon. Internally, Israelis often make fun of depictions of Palestinian misery [3], with the latest trend being dressing like them on Tiktok and making exagerated facial expressions of pain or injury[4]. From the Arab and Pro-Arab side, west bank settlers have long been an extremly tempting target, with the latest being "If I Don't Steal Your House Somebody Else WIll" Jacob. Internally, the Jew hatred in Islam's Hadith and Quran form a formidable base to build upon.
And so on and so forth. Politicians form a very small section of satire-able surface area in times of war, there is so many other targets to choose from, and so little sympathy for the objects of mockery, that there are much juicier targets.
Still, Ghadaffi and Saddam Hussien were famous objects of mockery (especially the former), there are just no equivalents to them in the mostly anonymous Hamas.
Yup, Brecht was a commie. I think the closest he came to criticizing the East German regime was his comment on a worker strike on Stalinallee: "Would it not be easier if the government dissolved the people and elected new ones."
I will note that while Trump was mocked aplenty, he was also painted as Hitler reborn by the left (see https://slatestarcodex.com/2016/11/16/you-are-still-crying-wolf/ . I think Scott's opinion back then holds up relatively well even considering the 2021-01-06 events. Any halfway competent wannabe dictator would have used covid as an excuse for a power grab.).
I think in the primaries, his MO was to say something outrageous which then riled up the left and got his name in the media a lot.
I will grant you that the mockery was not effective at dissuading people from voting for him, though.
Hitler was mocked, ridiculed, and made fun of by the greatest comic minds of his era over and over again. He was the Donald Trump of the '30s in that respect. Judge for yourself how successful the satirists and comics were at stopping him.
I do not think that Hitler was thriving as much on negative publicity as Trump was from the primaries on. And while Trump was seen as Hitler by the left, I don't think Hitler was seen as Hitler quite as much by his contemporaries. Sure, the left half of Parliament rightfully feared him, but he was certainly not the only anti-democratic threat on the right. (To say nothing of the commies on the left.)
The real problem was that other right-wing parties underestimated him. After all, he had been a mere private in the Great War, and a commoner on top, barely good enough to hold the stirrups to power as a junior coalition partner of the revanchist aristocrats in other right-wing parties. Boy were they wrong.
Hitler was mocked, ridiculed, and made fun of mostly outside of the society that he was ruling over though. Nobody in Germany was making fun of Hitler after 1933 or maybe at the latest 1935.
Not that he didn't care about being ridiculed in the UK or France or the US, he demonstrably did at least a bit, but only at the level of adding one more item to an enemies list he'd been nursing since World War I.
I thought it was widely acknowledged that the outraged media reactions to every one of Trump's comments were largely responsible for giving him the widespread attention needed to win the nomination. In other words, if people had generally responded "wow, what a clown" instead "THIS IS WHY WE LIVE IN A WHITE SUPREMACIST SOCIETY AND ALL DISAGREEMENT MUST BE BANNED!" he may well have never been a real issue at all.
I doubt anything like that would have worked. Trump was too good at convincing people he was a great businessman and on their side and opposed to people who were sneering at them.
Correct, especially the second part. Talking to Trump supporters during 2016 what I heard repeatedly was either of two things:
"those fuckers all hate him, so I'm voting for him"
"so he lies or whatever, so what -- he fights!"
Each of those voter motivations was largely impregnable to information about Trump's personal character and/or Trump being made fun of by comedians or whoever.
Being dismissed as a clown looks a lot less like being hated than does the vitriolic all-caps rant. And it usually stops before the part where anyone talks about how one is fighting.
Also, voters definitely do distinguish between "serious" candidates who can possibly win, and joke candidates who are guaranteed to lose and will only waste your vote. Until 2016, the idea of President Donald Trump was always broadly considered a joke, and that didn't stop the moment he announced his candidacy. It did stop at about the time the media coverage shifted to "Donald Trump is a Serious Threat and we must make sure he doesn't win".
I don’t think they were that successful at satirizing Trump. Alec Baldwin as Trump was funny - but he was funny almost in the same way that Trump is funny. (I don’t mean that Trump is witty, but he is a clown, a bit zany and unpredictable.) And that somehow made the fear of Trump a little ridiculous. Those young people who were saying they were scared to go outside, and were going to wear safety pins as a talisman or something. Until that lugubrious Hallelujah cover, SNL didn’t manage to capture that zeitgeist - I believe they may have even regretted that they didn’t.
I had forgotten the safety pins! Yeah, the amount of "we are now living in Nazi Germany/Occupied France and must be La Résistance" were incredible. Looking back at it, I have to think that the chronically online have a lot of other problems as well, e.g. chronic anxiety, which leads to this kind of over-reaction.
It is true that making fun of something can make people forget it is real. I followed the Brexit process after the referendum and some of the people opposing it seemed to find it so easy to make fun of the supporters that they seemed to forget that Brexit was really happening. (Obviously I am not comparing Brexit to Hamas or anything)
True. It's hard to satirize the already funny. Nobody successfully satirized Michael Jackson.
But they tried.
It was the late, great Norm MacDonald who pointed out while every other comic was trying to "stop Trump by making fun of him" in 2016 that comics tried the same thing with Hitler in the '30s and it didn't work.
You could say there was a lot of Hitler Derangement Syndrome going on then.
As successful as they were at stopping future Charlemagnes.
People don't understand that laughter indicates a lack of danger. Convincing people there's no danger isn't going to make things less dangerous, it's going to make people less prepared to face it.
I think we get the progress we deserve. We have a distinct lack of the gas-mask mustache and babies named "Adolf", and people get suspicious when military uniforms look too snazzy.
But, alas, "kill the Jews" is still being chanted in streets.
I think Hitler deserves the most credit for stopping future Hitlers*. Although we can probably also blame woke-ism on Hitler, as anti-bigotry eventually went way too far. **
*Because nothing fails like failure.
** There's nothing wrong with anti-bigotry, but it has gone too far in the sense that it has been overprioritized at the expense of other values, creating a value imbalance. E.g., we now undervalue virtues such as self-reliance, toughness and dignity.
Somehow Hussein didn't do anything to stop future Husseins!
Honestly, Americans are the world's most ridiculous drama queens.
We went OUT OF OUR WAY to hire really just some guy to be president of the United States because he was black and his middle name was Hussein and we thought it would piss off George W.
And just as soon as he's oit of office he's forgotten and we remake W into one of our Forever Right, Forever Wise, elder statesmen. 🤣
Other countries have vuvuzelas, baby shrieking sound trucks, and politicians throwing animal guts at each other during bunga bunga parties, but we Americans throw random tizzies without warning and mainly out of boredom --- and by the time the rest of the world buys into our bullshit (Covid anyone? 🤣) we're totally over it and frankly rather bored by the subject!
Some of the discussion below got me thinking: isn't one of the big moral questions where exactly we draw the line between valuing type 1 vs type 2 thinking? Civilization is built on type 2 thinking, yet we can't do without raw, blind, primordial intuition either, no? The easy way out of a repugnant conclusion from type 2 thinking is to defer to type 1 when you're in a jam. And Nietzsche basically spent his career using type 2 thinking -- to praise type 1!
So does anyone have a rule-based ethical system which says "If sent here, go with type 1." ?
Before talking about how things should be, we should acknowledge how things are: we actually do use type one in a supermajority of situations. We then, occasionally, use type 2 thinking to justify the already made decision, or to try and convince other people.
Which is not as broken as it sounds. Type 2 is best used when learning new skills - for day to day usage, you use the cached patterns.
It's from one of those famous airport books I haven't read but nearly everyone here knows about. Thinking Fast/Thinking Slow. Thinking Fast, type 1, is your immediate intuition. It's sometimes useful, but prey to all sorts of biases and lacks all thoughtfulness. Type 2, deliberate, careful thinking. Useful in the trades but may not tell you when to run from a stranger.
Gotcha, I’ve heard of thinking fast and slow. I’m kinda autistic and I’ve wondered if thinking fast is one of those things I oughta start trying to do... lol
What's the best non-theistic explanation for why so many of the world's major philosophical and religious traditions have converged on the idea of an entity that is both the supreme law of the Universe and a force calling us towards moral virtue? The most interesting case to me is the Greek revolution, because there it represents a very clear break from the myths of popular tradition; Zeus is king of the gods and sort-of an enforcer of the moral law, but he's neither the original creator-deity nor the true supreme power of the universe, and obeying the Fates (the actual supreme power) doesn't have anything to do with your morality, you just do it because you don't have a choice. It's only once you get into the attempts by philosophers to develop a more rational cosmology that this idea starts becoming important.
Clearly there are significant differences between the conceptions of this entity represented by Platonist Form of the Good, Aristotelian natural law, the Biblical God, the Zoroastrian Ahura Mazda, the Confucian Heaven, the Taoist Dao, and the Buddhist/Hindu law of karma*. But the fact they differ on so many other points just makes their agreement on this core concept seem even stranger.
*(I'm not 100% sure the law of karma is actually an example of what I'm talking about? My knowledge of Indian religions is pretty superficial. If I'm wrong about the emergence of this idea in Indian traditions, it would go along way towards making this feel less mysterious to me.)
Out of curiosity, I tried entering this comment into ChatGPT and got this out:
"The convergence on the concept of a supreme law or entity that governs the universe and calls for moral virtue across various philosophical and religious traditions, despite their many differences, is indeed fascinating. There are several non-theistic explanations for this phenomenon that stem from sociological, psychological, and evolutionary perspectives. Here are a few that may help to elucidate this convergence:
1. Sociopolitical Function: One of the functions of religion and philosophy in society is to provide a framework for social cohesion and moral behavior. A supreme moral law or entity serves as a focal point for unity and a standard for behavior, which is essential for the survival and prosperity of a society. In times of societal crisis, such concepts could be particularly powerful in rallying people together or encouraging pro-social behavior.
2. Cognitive and Psychological Factors: Human cognition seems predisposed to seek patterns, causes, and explanations for phenomena in the world. This has been referred to as a "theory of mind" or "intentionality" — the idea that behind events there are intentions or purposes. This can be extended to the belief in a supreme being or order that has a purpose or goal, especially when it comes to the creation and operation of the universe. The universality of these cognitive tendencies could explain the cross-cultural emergence of similar ideas.
3. Moral Intuition and Natural Law: Many philosophers have argued that humans have an inherent moral intuition. Aristotle's concept of natural law, for example, is derived from the idea that there is a "right" way for humans to live, which is determined by their natural purposes. The convergence on a universal moral order could reflect a shared human intuition about the existence of an objective moral truth or law.
4. Philosophical Reflection and Rationalization: As cultures develop and engage in philosophical reflection, there is a trend toward rationalization and systematization of beliefs. The Greeks, for example, moved from mythological explanations of the cosmos to more abstract, reasoned ones. This rationalization often leads to the concept of a single, underlying principle or entity that explains the order and purpose of the universe, which also encompasses morality.
5. Existential and Psychological Needs: Humans universally face existential questions about life, death, and the purpose of existence. A supreme law or entity provides answers to these questions and a sense of comfort and meaning. It also offers a way to deal with the fear of death and the unknown, providing a framework for hope beyond individual mortality.
6. Cultural Exchange and Syncretism: Ideas about a supreme moral law or entity did not develop in isolation. There was considerable exchange of philosophical and religious concepts between different cultures throughout history. For instance, during the Hellenistic period, Greek and Eastern thought influenced each other, which may have contributed to the development of similar concepts across these traditions.
Regarding the law of karma in Indian religions, it can indeed be seen as an example of this phenomenon, though it is less personalized than the Abrahamic God or Ahura Mazda. Karma is a law-like process that governs moral actions and their consequences. It suggests that the universe has an inherent moral order, and that good deeds tend to lead to good outcomes, both in this life and in future lives (as per the belief in reincarnation). While not a deity, the law of karma functions as a kind of moral force that upholds a just and orderly universe.
In summary, the similarities in these grand concepts across cultures are likely due to a combination of universal human cognitive processes, sociopolitical needs, psychological comfort mechanisms, philosophical rationalization, and cross-cultural interactions. Each of these factors could contribute to the development and acceptance of the idea of a supreme moral law or force in different cultures."
I think current scholarship holds that the Zoroaster probably died a while before the standard dates for the Axial Age, and Judaism probably already had this concept in some form before then. But it's closely related, yes.
I think this is probably the most plausible answer I've gotten so far. But I'm still not totally satisfied with it; the trouble is that it does *too* good a job of explaining *specifically* the Biblical descriptions of God, to the point that it makes it hard to explain why all the other traditions' descriptions have so little in common with them. As a social technology, viewing the supreme power as a ruler who gives clear, explicit commandments and sends disasters to punish those who violate them seems obviously superior to describing it as an impersonal force that pushes us towards goodness in some vague way that only philosophers understand, such as the Tao or the Platonic Form of the Good. So if the unifying factor of these traditions were merely the search for a way to promote cooperation, I'd expect that nearly all of them would converge on the former idea, whereas in reality most of them are closer to the latter.
Well, I dunno. There's probably pros and cons to relying on obedience, as opposed to volition. And I think they can occur in parallel. If you look at The Republic for example, the Platonic Good was supposed to be articulated via Philosopher-King, no?
Some other quick caveats: I think most social phenomena aren't actually prisoner's dilemmas, because there's often multiple equilibria. And when I say "coordinate", what probably comes to your mind is being a good-samaritan to lepers and tax-collectors. But I was thinking more along the lines of asabiyyah. Organized warfare is a form of coordination too.
>But I was thinking more along the lines of asabiyyah. Organized warfare is a form of coordination too.
I agree, but I'm not sure how that affects the point. A military campaign is exactly the sort of scenario where I'd expect clear rules and consequences for disobedience to be *most* important.
Though, reflecting on it more, I suppose one benefit of keeping the details of this kind of cosmology vague is that it makes it hard to falsify. "Desert the army and God will smite you" is a claim that can be easily tested and disproven; "deserting the army will inflict spiritual damage on you by limiting your ability to partake in the Form of the Good", not so much.
Every once in a blue moon, I try to branch out from just Scott to see what else is out there. I happened to come across this essay by Sarah Constantin. Her analysis points in a vaguely similar direction, although it goes much farther than mine.
"quick caveats" was intended as more a post-script than a rebuttal.
> There's probably pros and cons
What I'm trying to get at here is, the behavior is often endogenous. E.g. consider sports. Sports is, in all likelihood, a simulation of warfare. Fans get fanatical because it's fun. Or consider Valhalla. The reward for fighting and dying honorably in combat was: you get to fight even more. Humans are like skroderiders in that we come with a political-module buried in our monkey-brain. Thus flogging, while effective, isn't always needed.
"What's the best non-theistic explanation for why so many of the world's major philosophical and religious traditions have converged on the idea of an entity that is both the supreme law of the Universe and a force calling us towards moral virtue?"
My memory of Greek mythology is admittedly extremely sketchy, but is it really obvious that Zeus is an enforcer of the moral law? He is described as such in the Odyssey, but not really I think, in Greek mythology in general.
There's a really jarring disconnect between reading Euthyrphro and Bullfinch. Plato seems to take it for granted that the man on the street will think of the gods as exceptionally holy. In the latter they come off like a bunch of hooligans nobody could seriously worship.
Possibly the versions preserved in popular culture are not representative of the understanding of the gods that led to reverence and sacrifice, and the connection between creator gods and morality gods goes back further than those myths would suggest.
Or it was just jarring and weird and not easy to reconcile, it's hard to tell.
I've heard a theory that most of what we "know" about the Greek gods is from late period satires, and we don't know what it was like when they were the basis for a serious religion.
That would make sense. It's weird that we talk about cultural or political shifts over spans of just decades, but then we talk about civilizations or religions that lasted 3,000 years as if they could possibly be any coherent single thing.
We're always doing a bit of Spider Paleontology with ancient civilizations aren't we? https://xkcd.com/1747/
I think it depends on which mythology you go to? As I recall, Hesiod leaned more into the "justice" angle of things, as opposed to the Illiad which was more about supernatural squabbles, and the Odyssey which was a little in-between. I've heard the difference described as something like "Homer wrote for warriors, and Hesiod wrote for shepherds".
C. S. Lewis has something to say on this in the introduction of his book "The Problem of Pain". He describes the possible origins of religious belief and how divine beings may have become associated with morality. He starts by describing an experience he calls the Numinous: the feeling you might get if you suspected you were in a haunted house, or a sacred space. This feeling, combined with the almost universal early human belief that the world is full of spirits, may account for the development of the idea of gods in general. He then expands on the moral element:
>All the human beings that history has heard of acknowledge some kind of morality; that is, they feel towards certain proposed actions the experiences expressed by the words “I ought” or “I ought not”. These experiences resemble awe in one respect, namely that they cannot be logically deduced from the environment and physical experiences of the man who undergoes them. You can shuffle “I want” and “I am forced” and “I shall be well advised” and “I dare not” as long as you please without getting out of them the slightest hint of “ought” and “ought not”. ... Morality, like numinous awe, is a jump; in it, man goes beyond anything that can be “given” in the facts of experience. And it has one characteristic too remarkable to be ignored. The moralities accepted among men may differ — though not, at bottom, so widely as is often claimed but they all agree in prescribing a behaviour which their adherents fail to practise. All men alike stand condemned, not by alien codes of ethics, but by their own, and all men therefore are conscious of guilt. The second element in religion is the consciousness not merely of a moral law, but of a moral law at once approved and disobeyed. This consciousness is neither a logical, nor an illogical, inference from the facts of experience; if we did not bring it to our experience we could not find it there. It is either inexplicable illusion, or else revelation.
>The moral experience and the numinous experience are so far from being the same that they may exist for quite long periods without establishing a mutual contact. In many forms of Paganism the worship of the gods and the ethical discussions of the philosophers have very little to do with each other. The third stage in religious development arises when men identify them — when the Numinous Power to which they feel awe is made the guardian of the morality to which they feel obligation. Once again, this may seem to you very “natural”. What can be more natural than for a savage haunted at once by awe and by guilt to think that the power which awes him is also the authority which condemns his guilt? And it is, indeed, natural to humanity. But it is not in the least obvious. The actual behaviour of that universe which the Numinous haunts bears no resemblance to the behaviour which morality demands of us. The one seems wasteful, ruthless, and unjust; the other enjoins upon us the opposite qualities. Nor can the identification of the two be explained as a wish-fulfilment, for it fulfils no one’s wishes. We desire nothing less than to see that Law whose naked authority is already unsupportable armed with the incalculable claims of the Numinous. Of all the jumps, that humanity takes in its religious history this is certainly the most surprising. It is not unnatural that many sections of the human race refused it; nonmoral religion, and non-religious morality, existed and still exist. Perhaps only a single people, as a people, took the new step with perfect decision — I mean the Jews: but great individuals in all times and places have taken it also, and only those who take it are safe from the obscenities and barbarities of unmoralised worship or the cold, sad self righteousness of sheer moralism. Judged by its fruits, this step is a step towards increased health. And though logic does not compel us to take it, it is very hard to resist — even on Paganism and Pantheism morality is always breaking in, and even Stoicism finds itself willy-nilly bowing the knee to God. Once more, it may be madness — a madness congenital to man and oddly fortunate in its results — or it may be revelation. And if revelation, then it is most really and truly in Abraham that all peoples shall be blessed, for it was the Jews who fully and unambiguously identified the awful Presence haunting black mountain-tops and thunderclouds with “the righteous Lord” who “loveth righteousness”
>Nor can the identification of the two be explained as a wish-fulfilment, for it fulfils no one’s wishes. We desire nothing less than to see that Law whose naked authority is already unsupportable armed with the incalculable claims of the Numinous.
Really?
I dunno, this seems like Lewis projecting his own feelings onto the average person. I would guess that for most religious believers, this is absolutely a wish-fulfilment.
I can't help you on the development of the idea, just throwing my tuppence worth in:
"Zeus is king of the gods and sort-of an enforcer of the moral law, but he's neither the original creator-deity nor the true supreme power of the universe"
I think, starting off, you get the gods as powers that "doesn't have anything to do with your morality, you just do it because you don't have a choice". Zeus is the thunder and the lightning and the upper airs, you can't argue with a thunderstorm. So you just try to appease the powers.
As culture develops and you get philosophers looking at these questions, then you get the move towards explanations that are more complex/abstract than "to get the rains in time, you pray and sacrifice to the rain god". (One example of this is Indra, the Zeus-equivalent in Hindu pantheon; he is in charge of sending the rains, and one day out of pique at not being, as he sees it, respected enough by the people on earth he decides to send destructive floods. This is due to the actions of Krishna, who has convinced the local people to worship the mountain instead of Indra. Krishna saves everyone by lifting up the mountain so they can shelter under it, and Indra comes to realise that this isn't a mere village boy but a divine incarnation of Vishnu, so he stops the storms and repents. And so his pride is broken and he is taught to do his dharma - send the rains in time - without expecting worship and sacrifices as 'bribes' or flattery).
That gives us things like the development of the concept of Ananke, who is personified as a goddess of necessity (in a way, the 'laws of nature' that govern the universe). Even Zeus has to obey Necessity, which is why he can't alter certain decisions of Fate either to prevent them or undo them.
For Indian tradition, I think it's more dharma (a complex concept which includes the idea of moral or ethical law, righteousness) than karma (which is the working out of your dharma and if you behaved in accordance with it or not, then you get the fruits of your past actions for good or ill).
Everyone can have a dharma according to their station in life - husband or wife, king or subject, layperson or religious - and it's possible for different dharma to come into conflict. We see this in the "Ramayana" with the two brothers of the demon-king Ravana; Kumbhakarna and Vibhishana. Both of them become convinced that Ravan is in the wrong to seize Sita and fight against Rama, but Vibhishana flees Lanka to join Rama's army and aids in the fight against his brother (including revealing secrets of the city) while Kumbhakarna fights for Ravan and is eventually killed by Rama.
So which of them is right, and which of them is wrong? Well, they're both right, and both wrong. Vibhishana is cursed by Ravan to be known forever as a traitor to his family and country, and indeed you can see it that way - by revealing the secrets of that side (including the secret of Ravana's invulnerability) he is a traitor. But he is acting out of the dharma of righteousness, to fight on the side of the good and against the evil.
So is Kumbharkana wrong? He knows the cause he is fighting for is wrong and is doing evil. But he is acting out of the dharma of loyalty to family and king (Ravan, his elder brother) and to his homeland. So he's in the right there.
That's how two sets of dharma can come into conflict and how there is different karma resulting out of the choices made.
>For Indian tradition, I think it's more dharma (a complex concept which includes the idea of moral or ethical law, righteousness) than karma (which is the working out of your dharma and if you behaved in accordance with it or not, then you get the fruits of your past actions for good or ill).
>"But the fact they differ on so many other points just makes their agreement on this core concept seem even stranger."
If you reflect on this part of your question, you should be able to see that your question is itself rooted in the same cognitive tendency as the religions you are asking about. What you are saying amounts to "Look at all these different things — I realize they might all seem different from each other, but if you ignore the differences, isn't it weird that they are all fundamentally the same thing?"
Grouping phenomena into categories and coming up with explanations for the characteristics of those categories are fundamental cognitive processes by which we make sense of the world. Pursued to the extreme, these processes lead to the kind of monistic explanatory schemes that you are asking about. So one way of rephrasing your question would be "why have people in a wide range of cultures proposed monistic explanatory schemes?" But if there is no universal barrier that prevents people from seeking unifying explanations beyond a certain point of generality, then monistic explanatory schemes are naturally going to arise from time to time in a variety of cultural contexts, just through the normal operation of fundamental cognitive capacities.
Monistic explanatory schemes don't necessarily have to assume that the source of existence cares in any way about human moral codes, though. If anything, it seems more intuitively logical to assume the opposite, for reasons that were well-understood by at least some of these traditions already in ancient times (see The Book of Job or Plato's Euthyphro).
If you posit different explanations for moral and non-moral facts, then you don't have a monistic explanatory scheme any more.
You are right that it is easy to raise objections to monistic schemes, and that we have ancient records of people raising such objections. But this is not what your original question was about: as I understood it, you were asking why monistic schemes would arise and be accepted in the first place.
But by the same argument, a monistic explanatory scheme also requires that the supreme power must be the explanation for all violations of the moral law in addition to the law itself. So the claim that the power is trying to prevent these violations from existing makes it harder, rather than easier, to be properly monistic.
In that case, it sounds like you are wanting an explanation for dualistic explanatory schemes (since you are interested in schemes that offer a unified explanation for cosmology and moral laws, but do not propose the same explanation for violations of the moral laws). But how many of the traditions you named in your post claim that "the power is trying to prevent these violations from existing"?
Platonic Form of the Good: This is a bit tricky, since Plato gave varying accounts of the Forms in different dialogues. A stereotypical Platonic explanation for goodness would be "good things are good because they partake of the Form of the Good" (with the "partake of" relationship somewhat underspecified: this is one of the problems with the theory of Forms that apparently troubled Plato himself). I don't recall any point at which Plato described the Form of the Good as "trying to prevent" violations of goodness.
Aristotelian natural law: The usual reference of this phrase would be to Aristotle's concept of "natural justice" (physikon dikaion), which is an ethical/political concept opposed to "conventional justice" (nomikon dikaion), not a cosmogenic concept like "God" or "Dao." So it doesn't seem to fit your description. (Aristotle didn't really have a concept of "laws of nature" like modern science does; his account of the behaviour of things in natural world was based on the four causes defining their individual natures, not on laws.)
Biblical God: Explaining the existence of evil and/or suffering is a notoriously difficult theological problem for the Abrahamic religions. Solutions to this problem varied, but the presumption of God's omnipotence means that most theologians have rejected descriptions of God as "trying" (but failing) to prevent violations of moral law.
Zoroastrian Ahura Mazda: (My knowledge of Zoroastrianism is very superficial, but I think it might provide the only genuine example of what you think you are seeing, because of the central place it gives to a substantive dualism of good and evil.)
Confucian Heaven: The problem here is that many of the core Chinese philosophical terms, including "Heaven," are highly polysemic. So even if we have a Confucian text at one point using "Heaven" to mean "the supreme law of the Universe," and at another point using the same word to mean "a force calling us towards moral virtue," this doesn't mean we can confidently say the text presupposes a single entity fulfilling both those roles. It could be that there are two separate concepts of Heaven that share a name but are differentiated by context (cf. "sitting on the bank of the river" vs. "depositing your money in the bank"). This may seem odd if you are more familiar with the Greek philosophical tradition, which was deeply troubled by this sort of polysemy and devoted a lot of energy to sorting it out, but the Chinese philosophical tradition tended to clarify polysemy only when it was causing particular difficulties.
Taoist Dao: The Dao of the Daodejing is many things, but it is certainly not "a force calling us towards moral virtue." I'm not sure why you would say that — perhaps you have been misled by the traditional translation of De as "virtue"? This translation was adopted when the older connotation of "virtue" as "capacity to act" was still somewhat familiar to English speakers. (cf. Chaucer's "swich licour / of which vertu engendred is the flour")
Buddhist/Hindu karma: There are many versions of the concept, but the general idea is that good deeds have good consequences for the actor and bad deeds have bad consequences. This isn't "a force calling us towards moral virtue," it's just a description of how the world is. (I don't know of any claim in the Indian tradition that it is "good" or "just" that karma works in this way: the operations of karma are more usually just presented as a brute descriptive fact.)
I agree that you can ignore all these distinctions if you really want to, but that just means either: (a) you have a cognitive preference for broad categories and unifying explanations (in which case you should have a good intuitive understanding of the cognitive tendency that leads towards religious/philosophical monism), or (b) you have specific reasons for adopting broad categories and seeking a unifying explanation in this particular case.
As a general principle, any mapping of a conceptual space, regardless of whether it employs broad or narrow categories, benefits from a clear specification of where the categorical boundaries lie. The approach you have adopted here is to define your categories by examples: Category A is "Things like the Platonist Form of the Good, Aristotelian natural law, the Biblical God, the Zoroastrian Ahura Mazda, the Confucian Heaven, the Taoist Dao, and the Buddhist/Hindu law of karma"; Category B is "Things like Zeus." It isn't clear to me what your motivation is for thinking this is a fruitful way to divide up the conceptual space, or for your implicit assumption that the phenomena in Category A stand in need of special explanation while those in Category B do not.
Simplicity? To paraphrase the Tao Te Ching, from nothing came the One, and from the One came duality (the two, i.e. distinction), and from duality came all the myriad (ten thousand) things of this world.
Or possibly once you get a bunch of smart people trying to systematize a religion or philosophy, it winds up with some sort of ultimate cause. And maybe it's like all those Greek philosophers who speculated about the ultimate nature of the universe and came up with different explanations, and here we are thousands of years later going "look, all these philosophies had the common feature of an explanation, perhaps it's not a coincidence and an explanation exists".
We model the world on the world we first knew, where parents or other grownups were the source of nurture & protection and also the power that judged our behavior good or bad and meted out rewards or punishment.
>What's the best non-theistic explanation for why so many of the world's major philosophical and religious traditions have converged on the idea of an entity that is both the supreme law of the Universe and a force calling us towards moral virtue?
I"ll bite....A powerful need to make sense out of the world once we were cognizant enough to make it necessary, (the way small children have imaginary playmates or stuffed animals that talk) leading to....A powerful need to regulate ourselves in spite of ourselves if we were to live together in any significant numbers. What better way than to come up with a force everyone had to obey (A stand-in for Klaatu.)
The rest is just window dressing. God is god but his/her/their/its laws are manmade, which explains their cultural differences.
How does a need to make sense of the world lend itself to monotheism, inherently? I’m a believer in coincidence even when it seems improbable, but if I were to try to force a pattern to the coincidences I’ve experienced in my life, it seems like the simplest explanation would be multiple gods, with equal power and opposing values, battling it out to exert their will.
Yes. I agree. Monotheism is the part where we have to regulate ourselves in spite of ourselves. The first part of my comment about narratives to make sense out of the world goes to your point about all kinds of gods representing all kinds of different attitudes.
There are at most two independent traditions amongst your examples. Judaism was definitely heavily influenced in its classical-era development by Zoroastrianism, and Aristotle was definitely aware of Zoroastrianism, which we know from him explicitly comparing his philosophy to Zoroastrian ideas in some of his writings. Not sure about Plato, but Classical Greece has extensive contact with Persia, and Aristotle is far from the only one of Plato's students to have written about Zoroastrianism. And Taoism and Confucianism were both influenced by Buddhism.
So the question now is why Zoroastrianism and Buddhism/Hinduism contain some major overlapping themes. It could be a coincidence, or one could be drawing from the other, or both could be drawing on a common source. Persia and Vedic India are bothe products of the Indo-Iranian branch of Indo-European expansion, so they share common roots, and they remained near-neighbors with considerable trade and cultural contact (and the occasional major war, such as the Achaemenid conquest of the Indus Valley which took place over the course 6th-4th centuries BC around the probable time of the Buddha's life as well as towards the tail end of the very wide window of possible dates for Zoroaster's life) thereafter.
Incidentally, assuming arguendo that there's a single original version of this idea from which all the others are descended, I think the most probable candidate for that original version would not be Ahura Mazda but the Ancient Egyptian concept of Ma'at, which pre-dates both Zoroastrianism and Hinduism by centuries.
Even if all of these traditions picked up the idea from Zoroastrianism, I don't think that makes it seem all that much less weird. It just changes the nature of the question from "why is this the one non-trivial idea that all of these philosophical schools converged on?" to "why is this the one non-trivial aspect of Zoroastrianism that all of these philosophical schools converged on preserving?"
I'm not sure it's the only aspect. There are a bunch of common threads between Zoroastrianism and some or all of the other major religions:
1. Moral teachings emphasize a combination of good actions and good intent, with selflessness and compassion being major features of what constitutes "good intent". Details differ (e.g. Catholics believe that Good Works are necessary for salvation, while Lutherans believe that only Faith is essential but proper Faith should inspire you to perform good works), but in broad strokes I think this is pretty close to universal across Christianity, Judaism, Islam, Hinduism, Buddhism, Confucianism, and Taoism.
2. Zoroastrian Dualism tracks pretty closely to the God vs Satan conflict in most Abrahamic religions, as wells as with the conflict between Devas and Asuras in Hinduism and Buddhism (*). The concepts of Yin and Yang in Taoism and Confucianism track less closely but shares some major themes, particularly the division of cosmology into two opposing forces associated with light and darkness and with creation and destruction, with the notable difference that Yin is not seen as inherently evil like Satan or Angra Mainyu.
(*) Although curiously, the Devas, seen as the "good guys" in Hindu and Buddhist theology, have a name which is a cognate of "Daeva" (the bad guys in Zorastrianism). Western religions seem to agree with the Indic religions over the Zoroastrians here, as "Deva" is also a cognate of "Deity", "Deus", and "Zeus". and the similarity to the English word "Devil" appears to be a misleading coincidence as the latter comes from a Classical Greek word meaning "slanderer" or "false accuser".
3. Moderation as a virtue is central to Buddhism and is fairly important in most Abrahamic religions as well as in Taoism. Not sure about Confucianism, and Hinduism has a variety of traditions on whether one should strive for moderation or for as much asceticism as possible.
I expect there are other conserved features of Zoroastrianism, but that's what I've got off the top of my head.
(1) and (3) are pretty weak and trivial resemblances. I doubt Aristotle or Buddha needed to know about the Zoroaster to come up with the idea that acting out of prosocial motives was good, nor the notion that excessive self-indulgence was often harmful.
(2) is more interesting, but to me it looks like more a confusion of language than an actual broad similarity. As you already noted, that Taoism preserves the associations of the two great forces with light and darkness only in the literal sense, dropping the association with good and evil. Christianity does exactly the opposite -- God vs. Satan only consistently corresponds to light vs. dark in the metaphorical sense of good vs. evil; in the literal sense, both of them are more often associated in scripture with light. "Opposing forces" is similarly ambiguous; yin/yang are "opposing" in the sense of "having diametrically opposite qualities", but not in the sense of "working towards conflicting goals", whereas with the Christian God and Satan it's exactly the reverse. So, while you *could* group them all together as "the division of cosmology into two opposing forces associated with light and darkness", that would be more an indication of the ambiguity of language than of an actual convergence. And even then, there's still nothing like this in Judaism (where Satan is not at war with God), and I'm pretty sure there's nothing like it in Greek philosophy either.
>(1) and (3) are pretty weak and trivial resemblances.
You could definitely make that case. But there are a lot of religious traditions that don't put a big emphasis on these, certainly a lot less emphasis than the likes of Buddhism, Taoism, and Christianity put on them. Moderation is absolutely central to Buddhism, for instance, but I don't think it was even on Odin's radar.
It's my opinion that these seem obvious to us because we're products of cultures for which these concepts have been in the water supply for 1500-3000 years. The original similarities you first brought up, those of having a chief deity who was the creator and rightful ruler of the cosmos, and who moreover was the source and enforcer of moral law, seem equally obvious to me for similar reasons. But you rightfully point out that while they're heavily prevalent in most modern major religions and many classical philosophies besides, they don't really seem to be things outside of the sphere of influence of Indo-Iranian religious traditions.
>And even then, there's still nothing like this in Judaism (where Satan is not at war with God)
That's true of most modern flavors of Judaism, and it was true of ancient First Temple Judaism, but Second Temple Judaism (which developed under Achaemenid Persian rule) was heavily influenced by Zoroastrianism in many respects including interpretation of Satan as being a quasi-divine force acting against God. As I understand it, the modern Christian interpretations of Satan are derived most directly from Second Temple Judaism. I think Islamic ideas of Satan are also derived indirectly from Second Temple Judaism (by way of Christianity and of late-antiquity Middle Eastern Judaism) although they probably also got some influence directly from the Zoroastrians.
>I'm pretty sure there's nothing like it in Greek philosophy either.
That's true. At least not without a lot of stretching. Classical and Late-Antique Greek Philosophy mostly conceived Evil as being either the mere absence of Good (emphasized in Neoplatonism) or a product of a flawed human choices made in ignorance of the Good (emphasized in Stoicism), not as an independent force in its own right. In non-moral terms, there is the Stoic concept of Pneuma: a primal substance associated with heat, fire, creation, life, and the spark of the divine within humans. At least superficially, Pneuma seems to track pretty closely with the role of fire in Zoroastrian cosmology, but I don't think the Stoics though of Pneuma in binary terms: rather than Pneuma and Void being opposing force or elements, Pneuma was the main interesting part and Void was merely its absence.
Does anyone here know a good source for average temperature of cities around the world? Wikipedia has an article, but it has only a fraction of the cities I want data for.
There is a Lancet article that finds global deaths from cold much larger than from heat — about seventeen times as large. There is a later Lancet article, with the same lead author, that finds that the temperature increase from climate change, at least for the more rapid variants, increases mortality summed over the rest of this century. That's puzzling, since not only does climate change raise low temperatures as well as high, it raises low temperatures more than high temperatures and raises temperature more in cold regions than in warm. The explanation of the puzzle seems to be that mortality increases much faster with increasing temperature for temperatures above the optimum than it decreases for temperatures below.
The second article makes no allowance for adaptation, assumes that the mortality effect of a given temperature will be the same after almost a century as before, which strikes me as unlikely — Chicago winter temperatures would have a drastic effect in San Jose, not so drastic in Chicago, where people have adapted to them. It occurred to me that the same data used in the articles could be used to estimate the size of the adaption effect. The articles calculate, for each city, its optimal temperature, the temperature resulting in the lowest mortality. Regress that on average temperature and you get a rough measure of how much the inhabitants of a city adapt to higher or lower temperatures. To do that I need average temperatures for the several hundred cities the articles give optimum temperatures for.
Thinking about it in terms of homeostasis - heat will dehydrate (you lose water to lower your core temperature). Cold will starve (you burn calories to maintain your core temperature, until you can't). Dehydration tends to kill much faster than starvation. Not to mention modern cities, specifically, are heat traps - concrete and tarmac retain heat from the day, and you also get ambient heat loss from lighting, heating, and vehicles. You'd be able to hug the walls of buildings (which, even well insulated, will leak out some heat). You'd probably be more likely to die of cold when you're not in an urban environment. (it's not impossible, but rural cold would probably kill a lot quicker - from memory the few cold related homeless deaths I read about happen when the person is asleep, lowering core temp even further).
Whereas the situation is flipped for heat. Buildings are still leaking heat, because compressors for cooling produce heat. All the effects that keep a city warm when it's cold now makes it extra inhospitable. And if you're not able to access shelter, you probably also have poor access to drinking water. That is what kills you.
Cold does not kill you by starving you, it kills you by making you cold. No amount of carb-loading will prevent you from hypothermia if you're out in the cold without insulation of some kind, and you don't die because you run out of calories, you die because your core temperature gets lower than 80 degrees.
It's true that if you don't have sufficient calories in your system then your core temperature will get that low faster, but starvation is still not the cause of death. For that matter, dehydration is rarely the cause of death in heat deaths as well! Heat deaths occur when your core body temperature get's too hot. Dehydration can make that happen faster, but you're still dying of heat, not dehydration.
Doh, you're right! Heat generation and heat loss aren't instant effects, there's a rate which needs to exceed the environmental influence plus clothes. Yes, each of these mechanisms can fail when the body can't keep up with the environment. All the other things (urban environments trap heat) still apply. But acute hypothermia isn't normally starvation, it's just the rate at which heat is generated can't keep up with heat loss. Any way the person is able to keep the heat in, via external methods, will reduce the risk. So no, cold and starvation aren't that close.
Dehydration and heat, however, are much more closely linked. Heat exhaustion is basically too much water and electrolyte lost through sweating, which leads to heat stroke (thermoregulation breaks). Water takes time to absorb even if you drink as fast as you can. It's not enough to simply bring down the victim's body temp - the fluids also need to be replaced!
Regarding the first study, by Gasparrini et al. the big question is obviously the veracity of the models they use. But I also questioned the presentation of their finding, noting previously (https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/open-thread-286/comment/21431867) that:
>Even assuming all the models are perfectly correct, As quoted by Scott, Bressler writes: "For all 23 countries, Gasparrini et al. predict an increase in heat-related excess mortality and a decrease in cold-related excess mortality under climate change scenarios, with most countries experiencing a net increase in mortality."
>However, if you look at Gasparrini's study, under the RCP 2.6 scenario, they predicted increased mortality in 11/23 countries, which is not most countries.
>Even under the RCP 4.5 scenario, they only predicted increased mortality in 12/23 countries, which is the barest possible majority.
>It seems like a much more accurate version of what Gasparrini said about this scenario is that net mortality would increase in about half of countries and decrease in about half of countries.
No source here, but it's easy to contrive explanations for predictions that in a warmer future, heat will be more of a killer than cold currently is. Just predict that it will be hot enough in a large enough area that being outdoors is unsurvivable without something much like a space suit.
FWIW, I recall encountering a plausible prediction of this kind, for a world many millions of years in the future, where all the continents had once again come together into a single mega continent (so most of the land was extremely far from any ocean), and the sun's heat had increased by enough to be significant. I have no reason to disbelieve their prediction of routine outdoor temperatures of 60 degrees Celsius. I don't think unprotected mammals can survive that.
More to the point - you don't need 60 degrees Celsius for heat to become a killer. I don't know where the tipping point would be, that would make heat the larger risk.
A lot depends on living conditions. Air conditioning becomes a necessity at some point, and outdoor work becomes high risk, except possibly at night, or very early/late in the day. . And of course air conditioning fails, just as heating systems fail. Which is more failure prone, and which failure will kill a person faster? (Obviously, that's temperature dependent. Where I live, a heating failure is just an annoyance, but lack of air conditioning is miserable for weeks of every year. But neither is likely to kill me, short of some pre-existing condition.)
The full-blown "you die lol" is at wet-bulb exceeding 35 Celsius; at that point, perspiration no longer cools you because exposed evaporating water is still warmer than your skin, so you cannot shed heat and will immediately die from hyperthermia regardless of other factors. The actual dry-bulb temperature is not amazingly relevant assuming sufficient water supplies and ventilation, at least for healthy adults.
One relevant thing about cold is that there is a long tail of passive measures to mitigate it; hypothermia can be passively thwarted by insulating clothes to a very large extent. I think the actual limit would probably have to do with sufficiently-cold air creating chillblains/frostbite on your lung surfaces. If not that, there's the absolute limit of "below -200 Celsius, any breathable air would condense".
The company had a niche building anything engineerable in cooling and heating.
Swimming pool chillers for a royal in the UAE? You bet. A custom HVAC system for what was then the world’s largest mall? Uh huh that too. Actually that was technically only a VAC system. Even at -25 F no heating was required. Electrical equipment and warm bodies provided enough heat so only AC and ventilation was necessary.
It turned out that even moderate cold can kill-- imagine a person who's underfed doesn't have warm clothes, and damp cold at 50F that doesn't give a chance to warm up. I'm not sure how many days it takes.
> mortality increases much faster with increasing temperature for temperatures above the optimum than it decreases for temperatures below.
Having put no real thought into this before, I can pretty easily tell myself a story where it clearly makes sense. Say people are comfortable somewhere around 70F, or whatever. If you go up just another 50-60F from there, you start reaching temperatures that are absolutely unsurvivable. Even naked and with zero exertion, at some point sweating can't cool you fast enough to prevent heatstroke and death. As humidity rises, this point falls, getting well under 100F at very high humidity.
Meanwhile, the coldest permanently inhabited human settlement (in Siberia) apparently sees _average_ winter temperatures of -58F, which is more than 120F below my rough line for "comfortable". And it obviously gets below that, being the average. Certainly people aren't going outside at the very lowest temperatures, but the technologies necessary for survival in the cold are very old and reliable ones -- clothing, insulated structures, fire. There's no old and reliable technology that will keep you alive for very long at 130 or 140 or 150F. You just die.
I am sympathetic to the argument that we have better adaptations for dealing with extreme cold than extreme heat (easier to light a fire from scratch than to build an ac unit from scratch), but it also seems true that the hottest places on earth are a lot less hot than the coldest places are cold. The highest recorded temperature on Earth was 138 F. That's 40 degrees hotter than normal human body temperature, which is what we're trying to maintain to stay healthy. Meanwhile the coldest temperature ever recorded is -128 F, 226 degrees below normal human body temperature. So it seems to me that the Earth is mostly colder than humans would like.
Of course we humans mostly live in the warmer areas, which makes it more likely that people will be negatively effected by rising temperatures. But think of how much of the Earth's surface is currently inhospitable to human life, but would be if temperatures rose. An entire continent (Antartica) is locked off from human use and habitation due to cold, but even the hottest places on Earth, if not inhabited, have historically been traversable (Sahara Desert, Gobi, etc).
There are permanent bases in Antarctica, and people do live there full-time. It's not especially pleasant or hospitable, but it is survivable, habitable, and inhabited. See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_Antarctica . My impression is that dying of cold is not especially common there in the modern era (it seems to be mostly transportation accidents, similarly to other places, although more of them are aircraft.)
The hottest places on Earth right now are mostly safely traversable, most of the time. It seems like Death Valley in California kills around 1 or 2 people from heat on average every year. During the summer, the National Park Service strongly advises against traversing the hottest part of Death Valley, and advises staying close to your (air conditioned) car if traversing any part of it. This is hard for me to verify, but I suspect there are already periods of time every year when the hottest parts of Death Valley are simply not possible to traverse (without air conditioning) and survive. I don't know whether there's any place on Earth that's absolutely too cold to traverse (although certainly there are some that would be profoundly unpleasant and dangerous to attempt.)
I agree with your suggestion that warming temperatures, ceteris paribus, would probably render more of the Earth _practical_ for habitation than it renders uninhabitable, if considering only the temperature. However, I think any areas rendered uninhabitable by heat would be similar to areas inundated by sea level rise: past a certain point, they would become absolutely uninhabitable, not merely unpleasant. And the mention of sea level rise is a reminder that ceteris is not paribus; warming temperatures would definitely lead to other changes, some of which are hard to predict. And the spectre of runaway positive-feedback warming is very alarming, although I am not a climate scientist and don't have a good mental model of it, beyond "it is at minimum plausible" and "it would be catastrophic."
I'm sympathetic to the argument that we have better adaptation technology for extreme cold than extreme heat. That doesn't change the fact that humans are much better adapted to heat than to cold. While it's true that we can live in Antartica, we really don't because it's too cold. The Sahara Desert has a population density of 0.4 people per square kilometer: Greenland has .028. Inyo County, half of which is located inside Death Valley, has 1.8 people per square mile, while Antartica has .00092 people per square mile.
Humanity just does better in the heat than the cold, and there is no place on Earth so hot that nobody lives there, while there are many places on Earth so cold that nobody lives there.
EDIT: I went and checked in case Inyo County was a bad example: apparently about 300 people live year round in Death Valley proper, which is about 3,000 square miles, so Death Valley, the hottest place on earth, has 0.1 people per square mile to Antartica's .00092 and Greenlands .028.
The theoretical ceiling is based on the only major mammalian processes for maintaining a body temperature lower than the ambient temperature are sweating and panting, both of which rely on evaporative cooling. A sustained wet-bulb temperature above around 100ºF would thus be intractably incompatible with human life. The standard estimate for the maximum wet bulb temperature compatible with life for more than a few hours at a time is 35ºC/95ºF, which leaves a little bit of a temperature gradient for shedding metabolic heat. The practical limit is believed to be a few degrees lower, to allow moderate normal activity and leave some margin for less-than-ideal conditions for evaporative cooling.
With little or no humidity, under ideal conditions for evaporative cooling, people can survive indefinitely at very hot temperatures. Not quite as hot as the wet bulb temperature limit alone would imply, but people can and do live and work in hot desert climates. For example, the average daily high in Riyadh is 110ºF in July and August, and the record high is 121ºF. But it's a dry heat. The technology for coping with hot, dry climates is also pretty straightforward: wear loose, breathable clothes in high-albedo colors when you're in the sun, spend as much time as possible in well-ventilated shade, and drink plenty of water.
The concern is that there's also a lot of hot, humid places where lots of people live, especially in the tropics, which already get pretty close to the 35ºC wet bulb ceiling.
But you should still see the same effect, just at the tails, right? For any threshold of "too hot" you select, that's currently in the tail of the distribution of e.g. "number of days at this temperature", the frequency of events over that threshold will increase as the average temperature increases.(And on a relative basis, you in fact expect it to increase fastest at the tails.) If the distribution of "how hot is it today" is roughly symmetric up and down, but the distribution of "how how is survivable" is not, you would expect "number of days that kill people" to rise much faster with increasing vs decreasing temperatures. I think, if I did that right.
There’s a perception here that daily high temps as record breaking as they were, didn’t tell the story of this past summer; that duration of higher temps in the course of a day - hours at - is worse than in the past.
Anecdotally, I have found it much more bearable to spend time in places that reach 100F/38C for a few hours during the day but cool down to 75F/24C at night than places that stay constantly in the range 82F/28C-90F/32C. However, I'm not sure my experience isn't biased by humidity effects, since the latter kind of place tends to be more humid than the former.
...and also a modestly well received twitter thread about my writing process: https://x.com/dschorno/status/1718735873163042964?s=20. This I think i mention "microhumor" which I believe is a term I picked up from scott at some point but I'm not sure
The essay uses the early internet hoax, "bonzai kittens", as a metaphor for how we are physically and psychologically shaped by pressures and constraints in our environments. It strings together a bunch of connections between ideas like a sort of theme park ride: foot binding, posture, wilhelm reich, taylorism & schools, parenting trends, and some pop culture stuff.
Now that you mention it - I would have hated a car seat, had I ever sat in one. That's a lot of hours being carted around if you have older siblings especially, not to be able to play in the car.
Memory from when I was a baby who had a baby: we had gotten a car seat because they had told us, you won't be permitted to leave without one. Did most people nonetheless hold their one-day-old baby in their arms as they drove home? If they did not, I guess they had one of those car seats that lays out sort of horizontal for a tiny baby. I'm not sure the car seat we bought had that capability but it might have and we just didn't understand how to use it. So we just set it upright like you would for a year old baby. We strapped him in.
That is an interesting idea. The original version of the essay talked about some claims about pre-nazi german parenting I read, but some of them were just so shocking that I feel like I would have needed to track down original sources (which are mostly print-only german books that I cant read lol). Anyway one of the things was about swaddling and leaving babies tightly wrapped "like mummies" for long periods of time, which seems like a more extreme version of this idea
My dad grew up in northern Italy in the 40s and he told me that until a year or so of age babies would be tightly wrapped in fabric and left there to cry while parents worked. That apparently was the standard treatment kids got, the parents had no time to run after them as they had to work in the fields
I. Ould help you with these german books. Anyway, any printed ideas about childcare before 1945 probably had comparatively little impact. Sensible mothers pretty much did as their mothers and grandmothers had done.
hey that is an excellent offer. Im currently switching gears to a different project but if I start tugging at the thread again perhaps I will reach out.
The context was that someone (who I consider to be very smart) was telling me about this field called "psychohistory" which is, I gather, the study of historical attitudes towards child abuse and how those abuses shaped societies of adults raised that way. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychohistory. I would love to get a read on whether these ideas have anything to them or if they're just like radical 50s/60s scholars making things up (either would be pretty interesting).
The specific document with regards to pre-nazi parenting was here: https://psychohistory.com/articles/the-childhood-origins-of-the-holocaust/, would have loved to get around to doing some spot checking of the claims to see if they are real, played-up, or made up: in particular this tight swaddling, stuff about frequent enemas etc.
this passage in particular was going to be a litmus test: "Children regularly had to be dragged violently to school screaming, they were so afraid of the daily batterings that were inflicted there, and childhood suicides were frequent in reaction to beatings or such practices as “cold water bathing” that was often practiced to “harden” them", and the citation was "Katharina Rutschky, Deutsche Kinder-Chronik, p. 93.", but I couldn't find it online. Would love to know what that page says, but no particular pressure at this point
German children's chronicle. Images of desire and horror from four (4) centuries.
rutschky, Katharina:
ISBN 10: 3462015672 / ISBN 13: 9783462015676
Publisher: Cologne: Kiepenheuer and Witsch, 1983
Certainly cold water bathing, beatings at school, and swaddling were not confined to Germany and happened in other countries. I remember from the Chalet School series of children's books one in particular where the new foreign (non-English) girl caused a stir by demanding *hot* water to wash in; the other girls were made of sterner stuff and bathed in cold water because it was deemed healthier and character-forming. Of course, the foreign girl learns to become a model student and lose such fancy ways as expecting hot water:
"Throughout the series, various girls arrive at the school with personal problems, bad attitudes or behavioural issues. As a result of the ministrations of better-behaved classmates and the school mistresses, they tend to discover the error of their ways and become model pupils. This formula of a troublesome new girl who reforms and conforms is most common in the later books."
The linked video is nominally about video games, but it is mostly a Protestant complaining that other Protestants are Protestant-ing incorrectly (and flexing? that he literally went to church with Donald Trump):
I was raised Catholic, so I have no idea how commonplace this inter-Protestant bashing is. My only previous exposure was the kid who lived next to my grandparents claiming that the Methodists were "backsliding." (I think he was a Baptist.) Is this a thing people normally talk about?
American Protestantism is fascinating, since the jibe about Protestantism being fissiparous gets turned up to eleven there. It really is like the Emo Philips joke.
For example, the Rapture. Something I only became aware of due to an 90s movie where it was a major plot point (David Duchovny was in it pre-X Files: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Rapture_(1991_film)). Since I was completely unfamiliar with the doctrine, I had no idea what was meant to be going on.
In America, becomes highly influential due to a particular version of the Bible and thus spreads among the evangelical/fundamentalist/non-denominational churches: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scofield_Reference_Bible
To the point where people unfamiliar with Christianity in general will presume that *all* Christians believe in the Rapture. I've read fiction where even ostensibly Catholic characters will mention 'the Rapture', at which point I have to stamp my foot and cry aloud "No!"
I mean, this is so minor for mainstream and particularly non-American Christianity, I didn't even know *if* we Catholics had a position on this (turns out we're officially amillennialists https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amillennialism) but in America it's presumed to be a mainstream belief.
(I only found out a lot of this due to Fightin' With Calvinists On The Internet and hanging around a lot of Protestant blogs to discuss "so what do Catholics believe, anyway?". I'm still not entirely sure of the finer points of distinction between denominations).
Also, historical and mainstream American Protestantism needn't be the most numerically superior: Episcopalianism, a part of the Anglican Communion, is tiny in numbers and dropping, but historically was the most important American church precisely because of the links to the Church of England, and many of the Great and the Good in American life were Episcopalian.
The mainstream branches are the most liberal, which is why there is a lot of upheaval from time to time with the more conservative members splitting away (or the more liberal split off from the more conservative). Since America has such a large population, even a splinter denomination can rack up the numbers. That's how you get three major Lutheran denominations, for instance, ranging from conservative to liberal (the ELCA, LCMS, and WELS) as well as many minor ones.
Talking about "Baptists" will usually mean the Southern Baptists, the most conservative/traditional; there is also the branch of the American Baptists which are more liberal. That's why you need to be clear which branch you mean - Bill Clinton is a Baptist (American, not Southern) so saying someone is a Baptist may lead to the wrong impression.
Mind you, the 17th century in Great Britain was ripe for a huge number of splinter and non-conformist breakaway sects, so I think this probably carried over to the USA as well and they just carried on:
I am part of the Christian Church wing of the Restoration Movement churches: my joke when trying to explain it is that "Two hundred years ago some people tried to unite all the denominations and ended up making three more."
There's a lot I don't understand about religion in America (having been raised Catholic in Australia).
Like, this guy is a member of the Reformed Church of America. Looking at the map on their website, they have just one hundred churches across the entire country, with not a single one west of Denver. So if you're a good church-going member of the RCA, does this mean you just can't ever move west of the Rocky Mountains?
You can search for an RCA church near you, and apparently there are five in San Francisco? So they did go west of the Rockies, it may just be that their churches don't have the RCA brand (or are 'in full communion with' churches):
They're the descendants of a particular ethnic church, the Dutch Reformed, which is why they're so numerically small. If these American minor denominations were Eastern Orthodox, they'd fit comfortably into the model of ethnic churches (e.g. Greek Orthodox is not Serbian Orthodox is not Russian Orthodox is not Bulgarian etc.) where they were founded by immigrants from a particular country and exist mainly to serve those communities and any immigrants from the home country who arrive, but don't really try to recruit by proselytization of the Westerners.
EDIT: Bah, humbug? This guys says that defining what is a "Christian" game may be difficult, which is fair enough, but then says the answer to "Is LOTR Christian?" is "maybe" but for "Left Behind" it's "yes".
Brother, Tolkien has Elven marriage modelled on Catholic theology. One of these books is Christian, the other is heresy 😁 At least he accepts that "The Divine Comedy" is Christian; yeah, thanks mate, it was only written three hundred and seven years before the ancestors of your denomination got together in New York!
I found the video disappointing: I was hoping for a video-game-centric perspective rather than a Christian-centric one. E.g., *Okami* is a Shinto video game, and it's very good: a bit of comparative religion might have shed some light on why there's no Christian equivalent. Instead we got Calvinist inside baseball.
El Shaddai: Ascent of the Metatron is about as good as it gets, and i think Nier Automata ripped it off some.
christianity though seems to ignore geeky men and men in general are set in approved roles in churches. music, youth pastor, teacher, athlete, father, Inklings addict, etc. Most focus is on women, the amish romance being a big example.
geeky guys get driven out of the church pretty fast. Atheism sort of owes its success to that; the church even now cares so little that they dont even bother making bad christian versions of geek stuff. Go to a christian bookstore and its all romances if you want to read a novel.
In the eighties they tried...stuff like dragonraid as a d and d substitute, or authors like Steven Lawhead trying to write Christian fantasy. Now they just don't try.
I think that's what the "churches in full communion" thing is designed to help with. If you literally can't go to their church, you can attend one of the others on the list.
Yeah, the joke there is the LCMS is more conservative, while the LCA is one of the smaller and more liberal Lutheran splits. Or rather was, Wikipedia tells me it dissolved in 1987:
"The Lutheran Church in America (LCA) was an American and Canadian Lutheran church body that existed from 1962 to 1987. It was headquartered in New York City and its publishing house was Fortress Press.
The LCA's immigrant heritage came mostly from Germany, Sweden, present-day Czech Republic, present-day Slovakia, Denmark, and Finland, and its demographic focus was on the East Coast (centered on Pennsylvania), with large numbers in the Midwest and some presence in the Southern Atlantic states.
Theologically, the LCA was often considered the most liberal and ecumenical branch in American Lutheranism, although there were tendencies toward conservative pietism in some rural and small-town congregations."
I, a Canadian, want to learn about Margaret Thatcher. Normally the thing to do here would be to find a biography, but I hear she is an unusually controversial politician, so I expect that most of the books I could find would be either partisan hit pieces or hagiographies. Can anyone recommend a book or other resource that does what I'm looking for, a just-the-facts history suitable for people with no knowledge of British politics?
One idea is to read her autobiography - it'll probably be biased towards being positive in her, but in a predictable and noticable way, and you can get a lot of information about the kind of person she was just by reading her style. (This is probably less useful to evaluate the outcomes of her specific policies)
FWIW, this feels like a situation where an "adversarial" approach will probably give better results than an "inquisitorial" one - read one or more books by her admirers and one or more books by her critics, rather than assuming that reading a median book and assuming that that means fair.
'The rapid appearance now of practically useful risk predictors for disease is one anticipated consequence of this phase transition. Medicine in well-functioning health care systems will be transformed over the next 5 years or so.'
I think when you see "within five years" used about any kind of new tech, you should expect "this is never going to work, or if it does, it's going to take more like fifty years".
The negative reaction to Scott donating a kidney reminds me of the kind of inverted-morality common among low-conscientiousness, usually but not always low-class people. To these people, stealing from family members, cheating on one's romantic partners, driving drunk, that's all kinda sorta bad. But if someone says they're sorry, they are owed instant forgiveness. And trust, which is an entitlement, not something people earn through trustworthy behavior. The worst sin one can commit is to think you're better than others, to look down on them, to not forgive them. These people almost always make an exception when they are the direct victim, but otherwise, forgiveness man. Jesus said so. I am owed it.
You see an extreme version of anti-morality in prisons. John stabs his cellmate to death? What do I care, none of my business. John reported his cellmate to prison staff? I'm full of righteous indignation, we in the prisoner community must altruistically punish him! Morality becomes inverted. It's easy to see why this happens, if you want to get away with violating rules, anti-morality is rational.
The weird thing about the negative reaction to Scott is that it's coming from ordinary people who pay their rent on time, don't leech off of family members, and never show up to work drunk or high. But the motivation seems to be the same. You have this person who did this thing that seems to indicate they are morally superior to me. I could try to emulate them. Or I could not, acknowledging that, yeah, they probably are morally superior to me. Or I could say, "omg, that's WEIRD, man, and sounds GROSS too! I mean, for a STRANGER no less!"
The act was saintlike, but I expect a saint to teach me things about compassion and the Good, not quote me a bunch of statistics. For fuck's sake, I took the Giving What We Can Pledge, meaning I give 10% of my income to charity, but I was only able to do that because my spiritual principles demand that I do something like that, not because the math was THAT convincing, though the math checking out was helpful, granted.
What can you do about those unenlightened proles anyway? They just don’t respect their betters. Your smugly tone deaf comment might might win over the skeptical though. That’s definitely how social progress is made.
The goals of EA are good, noble, even. True believers have a lot to learn about PR though.
You don’t win any converts by implying people who have yet to sign on are morally defective.
New ideas need to be evaluated and processed. It’s possible to make an effective case without talking down to people.
I ate vegetarian for over a decade and it never occurred to me to tell someone eating a burger that I was better than them, if for no other reason than because I knew I wasn’t.
I had just had an affecting experience having to kill an animal - a fish - before I prepared it for cooking. That was my own experience, no one else’s. So it would have been ridiculous to say something like “Do you ever think about the cow?”
By his world view, he had been granted dominion over the animals of the earth by his Creator.
I'm not actually sure it's a coherent moral opposition and it might just be a kneejerk disgust reflex at this idea of self-multilation.
I feel like I'm cool with it, but Ive been very good friends with someone who only has one kidney (had renal failure in childhood, got a kidney transplant) and they were basically fine at everything, so I believe them when they say that it's pretty low complication if you have good renal function.
That being said, where it gets icky for me is when he brings up paying for kidneys. At the moment, the system runs on altruism and occassional kinship (loved ones donating to get "trades" for someone with renal failure). I'm worried about so many way things can go off the rails the moment profit comes into play. For one, donors do not benefit from being accepted, other than warm fuzzy feelings, so the supply of healthy kidneys would be fairly good. If there's a financial incentive, however, people might be tempted to tamper with the screening process so they could get paid - the donor would be much worse off, and the transplantee might get all kinds of problems. There's extortion issues - would it be completely impossible for an abusive partner, cult leader, or whatever to force someone to donate, in order to receive the tax cut? What would it cost the system to have to add even more safeguards against this?
I really don't think adding free market is going to help here - I think when it comes to health, it pretty much never does.
That being said, non-monetary rewards (like automatic priority for future transplants) is definitely a good one, and probably needs to be publicised more - it sounds like people often only find out when a loved one needs a kidney. You could throw in more things like free parking at the hospital (or extend it to any hospital?). Social clout is a given, so maybe a voluntary public registry of kidney donors (i.e if you choose to, they'll put your name on a website so you can tell everyone you donated a kidney - probably more relevant for a celebrity of some kind). This would also normalise and publicise this sort of thing. Maybe Oprah should do a segment on kidney donation.
Thousands of people die due to lack of kidneys under the current system. If people could buy and sell them, those people would not be dying. It really is that simple.
Is it, though? Is a thousand people living 10 more years worth potential coercion of thousands, potentially more, of other people?
Let's think of another way we could solve the organ donation crisis: by ballot. You randomly select a citizen to donate kidneys, just as you randomly select a citizen to serve on a jury. They screen you to make sure you can do it with no ill effect to yourself. Isn't this obviously worse?
No, I think we should incentivise voluntary donation with non monetary rewards. Yeah, maybe the kidney donors will be like annoying vegans at dinner parties, but that's a risk I'm willing to run. It's also quite actionable - convince someone very high profile and widely liked to do it. To be honest, despite how polarising the vegans are, if as many people committed to kidney donations as to never eating animal products, you could probably entirely solve the demand gap.
Yes, it is. Should we also ban adults from having sex? After all, cult leaders and abusive partners might force people to do it.
What you're advocating is coercion, plain and simple. You want to use the coercive power of the state to prevent the trade of money for organs. The coercion you advocate consigns thousands of people to death. When you advocate something like that, you should have a better argument than you feeling icky about the "market" and the potential coercion in what will be only a very small proportion of organ donation cases.
Biting the bullet on this, being part of a cult or an abusive relationship is a choice. 99% of the time, organ donation will be fully voluntary. We shouldn't stop that, cosigning the people to death, for the sake of a few people who voluntarily make the choice to remain in a coercive relationship or religious movement.
"No, I think we should incentivise voluntary donation with non monetary rewards."
In other words, do the same thing over and over again and expect a different result.
The state uses it's coercive power to make stealing food illegal, consigning people who can't afford food to starvation. The state sends agents to evict people if they can't afford to pay rent, consigning them to homelessness. You could make this argument for anything!
I don't think we've tried hard enough to do the non-monetary rewards and awareness path, which is why Scott's blog post is actually an enormous net positive - it raises the idea and reinforces that this is a thing high status people do. It's also worked before - in 2021, a beloved Bollywood actor died. He had signed up to be a postmortem organ donor, and donated his eyes - this spurred a large increase in people signing up to donate their eyes, because a famous person has done it.
I think we should focus our efforts in convincing at least one very famous beloved person to go through with it and tell all their followers. Imagine if you could convince Kim K or Oprah to donate a kidney to a stranger and document it on her show! It seemed to have worked for veganism - celebrities talking about it has spurred people into considering and doing it.
"The state uses it's coercive power to make stealing food illegal, consigning people who can't afford food to starvation. The state sends agents to evict people if they can't afford to pay rent, consigning them to homelessness."
There's an obvious person who benefits from laws against stealing food: the person who owns the food. Ditto with laws against living in places without paying rent. Both are laws against directly harming people. Compensated organ donation does not harm anyone beyond giving you a bad feeling in your tummy. That's not a good enough reason.
Last I knew China uses kidneys from executed criminals. Interesting possibility. If you're going to take somebody's life anyway, doesn't make it any worse to harvest their organs.
It does open up a lot of opportunity for corruption: bribes to speed up an execution so that the organs will be ready for a rich patient, kickbacks from corrupt transplant doctors to judges to ensure a steady supply of executions, etc.
"You say that death penalty for marijuana is too harsh? My grandma needed a new kidney to survive, and luckily she got one from an executed prisoner. What you suggest is that my grandma should die so that some worthless junkie could continue taking drugs a few years longer before he kills himself anyway. Well, f--- you!"
...is what the political discourse would become like, if organs from executed prisoners became the new basic human right.
I don't quite agree with your anti-morality model. I think most people had a strong emotional reaction to what Scott did, and some here are not accustomed to feeling feelings. And when they come here they are not usually asked to, at least not by Scott. But this time the weres. It gives them a feeling that something dangerous and wrong has been shoved under their noses, in a place where they rarely have that experience. So they cry foul, saying that what Scott did was fucked up.
Well, we had at least one person going "but what if nasty meat-eaters get that organ? no, that would never do!" and thus inviting praise for being so highly ethically superior as to consider this type of question.
I've got to consider that some kind of anti-morality: better to let someone suffer and/or die, than help them, and no I'm not being selfish (or merely squeamish), I'm actually *more* virtuous and *more* moral than the person donating to a stranger.
Well, any fool can donate a kidney, but it takes a truly sophisticated person to compose a clever online argument explaining why good is actually bad, and bad is actually good.
I'm just struck by the glaring blind spot of inventing a cartoonishly simplistic moral framework to assign to others with whom the OP disagrees. All to... accuse them of using a cartoonishly simplistic moral framework w.r.t. Scott's decision.
"Other people bad, but not me" is the most useless boring analysis of any situation, even if very occasionally there's all there is to it, what with the stopped clocks and all.
I think that a lot of basically-good people carry around very different sorts of moral systems. Most of these moral systems basically agree in most everyday circumstances, which leads to an illusion that we're all in agreement on most things. And where moral systems do disagree in everyday circumstances, these get encoded as political differences, which we are at least accustomed to.
But sometimes, unusual circumstances arise in which fundamental moral differences are exposed, and it's shocking. It's like finding your next door neighbour is filled with blue fluid and tentacles.
Ultimately, Scott's decisions show that his moral system is alien to my own. Not necessarily in a bad way, just in a weird way.
Right. Most people don't have a moral system -- I know I don't -- just vague moral intuition. His system goes against my intuition in multiple ways. For one thing, I think Scott's life is worth a lot more to the world than some random person, and I don't like to hear that Scott's life expectancy has been reduced, if only by a few weeks. Not that I believe in doing moral math -- but my intuition is that his few weeks is worth more than an average person's dozen years. I mean, he might do something brilliant in those few weeks -- like donate a kidney!
But maybe you're not taking into account the benefit to Scott of doing a hugely substantial thing he believes is right and wants to do. There have been a few times when I have given substantial things to strangers -- though nothing as big as a kidney -- and I felt very moved by doing it, and had a sort of high from it. It wasn't a proud-of-myself high, it was a feeling of a much closer ongoing connection with the rest of humanity. In fact one reason I have had so much to say on this thread is that I feel bad for Scott, being attacked by so many. For fuck's sake, leave the man alone to finish recovering and to fully experience being the person who actually made that big donation he wanted to make.
I don't have a moral system either, and agree with you that most people don't. I think of a lot of those who don't aren't aware that they don't, though.
I don't think that's it exactly. My visceral (ha) reaction was negative, though not extremely so; and I definitely do think he is more selfless and thus better than myself.
I think my suspicion is rooted in just that, a suspicion that the body is a fine thing which ought to be preserved, not intentionally damaged. But then I don't even like tattoos.
However, while I didn't read his whole long post, I'm well aware that he considered the damage and tradeoffs minor. It's wonderful to think how thrilled someone else is, and their family.
There was a guy at college - older than most of us, since college was a cheap pastime then - but still in his 20s somewhere, and he died of kidney disease and it was said (I didn't know any facts for certain or know him well) that his own mother could have donated a kidney to him but wouldn't. We found that shocking (whether or not true) so maybe this is situational - for a mother *not* to do so, is equally disturbing.
I will say I have lost an organ - it just had to go - and while this didn't seem like it should matter that much, it took me a long time to have much energy again. I was in my mid 30s, not sure how old Scott is.
Not a dealbreaker but might be a consideration if you are very busy in the prime of your career perhaps, or you have small children or whatnot.
But perhaps the circumstances having been illness and not voluntary in excellent health, are completely different.
I remember Larry McMurtry saying after he had heart surgery, that he didn't like to read books anymore. And he had an unusual love of books.
>I remember Larry McMurtry saying after he had heart surgery, that he didn't like to read books anymore. And he had an unusual love of books
Oh, that's disturbing. General anesthesia is somewhat neurotoxic, but the effect isn't very strong except in the elderly. How old was McMurtry when he had his heart surgery?
I'm not a big fan or anything except in the sense that I like that he sorta popularized stuff that I like (even if he thought he was being revisionist). But once I took home from the library a sort of large format book he wrote in those final years, about Custer. I read it and was vexed by the amateurish quality. Sentences, even paragraphs that basically repeated themselves, unedited, that sort of thing. Mistakes and contradictions within the same couple of pages. Distinctive words repeated too close together. I only remember thinking, they didn't think he needed an editor, or else they don't edit anymore.
I feel like he probably exercised the usual sort of writer's precision earlier in his career, and this was a falling-off.
> We found that shocking (whether or not true) so maybe this is situational - for a mother *not* to do so, is equally sickmaking.
This appears to be a changing norm; in Strangers Drowning (2016), Larissa MacFarquhar notes:
> Twenty-five years ago, the philosopher Peter Singer was struck by an article about a woman who had donated one of her kidneys to save the life of her son. He felt that this was an extraordinary sacrifice, and he cited the story in one of his books as an example of extreme unselfishness.
I agree Scott is probably more selfless than both of us. When one of my sons needed a liver transplant, I volunteered without hesitation. While I was checked up, not smoking or drinking over half a year, he got his piece of liver from someone else (this not being feasible any more here, AFAIK). I surely never considered giving a piece of my liver to anyone but with my kid it was no question.
It all reminds me of something I read back in the days when BLM was the biggest thing around, and it was practically a competition to fall to your knees and gratituously show off how much of an ally you were (looking). Well, one woman actually believed all that nonsense (albeit back in 2015), and donated a kidney in inspiration.
The quote "It’s almost as if Dorland believes that Larson, by getting there first, has grabbed some of the best light, leaving nothing for her." seems telling, as though this is a battle between a zero-sum framing of the world versus one that allows for a win-win approach. Did Dorland parlay the exposure from this story into fuel for her own writing career? I sincerely hope she has done so, if only to demonstrate that she has moved beyond zero sum narratives.
In the US is it very easily obtainable on college campuses. Lot of students who do not have ADHD use it to help themselves study and write papers. I don't recommend getting into a pattern of doing that, though. It's an abusable drug. You can get addicted. And if you take some, remember that most people find a dose of ADHD medication quite pleasant. It elevates mood and increases energy. Liking how it feels is *not* evidence that you have ADHD and need the drug.
I believe most ADHD drugs are controlled substances in the UK, so you'll need a prescription if you want to get them legally (disclaimer: IANAL and IANAMD). You have to pay for private prescriptions, though once you've titrated your dose you may be able to get a private psychiatrist to write to your NHS GP and say "SGfrmthe33 needs Drug X for their ADHD, please prescribe it on the NHS." Good luck!
Tyler Cowen was recently a guest on Rick Rubin's podcast Tetragrammaton, and towards the end of the episode, when Rubin asks him if there's anything else he'd like to share, he says that he wishes it was more widely known that Paul McCartney released a second, much improved recording of the song C Moon. He doesn't give many more details, and as someone who isn't too familiar with deep Beatles/McCartney lore, I found it a little difficult to follow up on this. I did find the following version on Youtube, which is billed as a "remaster", but I'm unsure if this is the version that Tyler was referring to:
How did British intelligence decode the Zimmerman Telegram?
I've read the Telegram was enciphered using "Code Book 13040." Did the British have a copy of the Book?
The details of how the Telegram was decoded are not made clear on the internet. If doing so merely meant looking up entries in Code Book 13040 and matching them with the numbers in the Telegram, then the task could have been given to a person with no special skills. Instead, I've read that decoding it required two, talented cryptoanalysts to work for on it for basically a full day.
I vaguely recalled hearing about this in a podcast, I'm sure there are better academic sources but this has some key details (I recommend the whole podcast if you are interested in the topic). I found the transcript here: https://historyofthegreatwar.com/episodes/2017/132/
"So the message had been sent, but it was encrypted, and the Americans could not break the encryption that was being used by the Germans at this point, so how did they find out what was in the message? Well that is where the British enter our story. The British had been able to break both the German and American diplomatic ciphers for pretty much the entire war. In fact in 1917 they had been reading every single message sent on the American trans-Atlantic cables for 2 years. However, at this specific moment the Germans had introduced a new cipher, called 0075, that while the British could read some of, they had not been able to fully crack. The most talented people that Room 40 had were soon put on the Zimmermann Telegram, here is Nigel de Gray the initial analyst “We could at once read enough groups for Knox to see that the telegram was important. Together he and I worked solidly all the morning upon it. With our crude methods and lack of staff no elaborate indexing of groups had been developed–only constantly recurring groups were noted in the working copies of the code as our fancy dictated. Work therefore was slow and laborious but by about mid-day we had got a skeleton version, sweating with excitement as we went on because neither of us doubted the importance of what we had in our hands” When a partially decrypted message was given to the head of Room 40 he would tell Grey that “This is a case where standing orders must be suspended. All copies of this message, both those in cypher and your own transcripts, are to be brought straight to me. Nothing is to be put on the files. This may be a very big thing, possibly the biggest thing of the war. For the present not a soul outisde this room is to be told anything at all.” Intercepting a message, figuring out what was in it was all well and good, but there was one very sticky wicket. In Room 40 and the military informed the British Foreign office of the telegram they would be bound to share it with the Americans. At that point the British would have been in a tough spot. They would have had to tell he Americans were they got the message from, and that meant telling the Americans that they were reading everything on their cables, and that they had been for some time. This would have made the Americans none too happy, so some other method had to be found. The solution was found within the message itself. The British knew that the message was going to be forwarded to Mexico and they hoped that at that point it could be obtained by a British official in Mexico City. This was completed when the message was sent and the contents were forwarded to New York City and then to London. This message was also encrypted with an older cipher, which was the only one that the German embassy in Mexico had, and that let the British double check their copy of the original message and it gave them the ability to claim that they had never seen it before when they shortly handed it over to the Americans."
So, it was easy to decode the telegram that was forwarded from Washington to Mexico, as this was encoded in 13040. But what the British cryptographers were working hard to decode was the message to Washington from Germany that was encrypted via 0075, a relatively new and not fully deciphered code. They then used info from that to intercept the forwarded telegram in Mexico City, confirmed the full text by deciphering from 13040, and leaked it to the Americans (while lying about how they got it).
My understanding is these books were one-time pads, with each letter translated differently according to the book. Of course, these books were used more than once, so weren't really one-time pads, which allowed them to be cracked with the Enigma machine to assist.
How can you tell if the advice your doctor gives you (be it to get a test done or no recommedation of any test) is in your interest versus in his or her own interest?You have no way of telling what his financial incentives are. His contract with the insurance company is not visible to you.
Contracts between a doctor and an insurance company are typically private affairs: you could ask to look at it, but you don't have any legal right to see it.
If your doctor owns his own practice then it is almost always in his financial interest to do more tests or procedures, regardless of any contracts he has signed with insurance. Physicians get paid by insurance based on the procedures they provide to insured clients, so more procedures means more money for the doctor. Not to say that your average doctor would advice tests, appointments, or procedures that are unneccesary, but that is where their financial interest lies. And there is a big gap between "unneccesary procedure" and "possibly unnecessary procedure", and a doctor might be biased to lean on the side of "lets do it just to be safe" since he makes more money that way.
However, if the tests he recommend are done by a third party company like LabCorp, then he probably isn't making any money off those tests. If the testing company is attached to his business, then he probably is.
Doctors who don't own their own practice might have different compensations structures: they could be on salary and get paid the same regardless of procedures performed, or on commission, or any number of arrangements.
As a psychologist I have a contracts with insurance companies, and all I commit to in them is to agree that for anyone I see who has the company's insurance, I bill the company for their care, rather than asking them to pay directly, and I commit to accepting the company's payment and not asking the patient to pay some extra on top of the amount the company has set as the allowable charge for the procedure. I doubt that doctor's contracts are different. All procedures are identified buy 5-digit codes, and you can usually look online to find out how much the doctor is paid for each procedure. If doctors' choice of treatment is motivated by their insurance contract, the way that would play out would be that the doctor administers the procedure that pays best, rather than the one that is best for the patient. My guess is that in practice, few doctors actually administer a more expensive but less effective procedure. The cheating would take the form of claiming that had done something more complex than the one they had done. For instance when I see people with OCD I get paid less for talking with them than I do for doing a session of exposure therapy, I could claim to be doing exposure at every session and make more money. (In fact, though, I do not do that.)
My advice is to ask your doctor these questions explicitly. If she is unwilling to answer these questions, or she takes them as an attack, she should find another line of work, and you should find another doctor.
I guess I assume the best of them by default. It can be complicated for them when the insurance company puts pressure on them. This is all so complicated.
A math teacher I know recently posted on FB a nice set of four puzzles that look harder than they are. In each case, it looks like there isn't enough data in the problem to find a definite solution, and there can be many possibilities - but once you think about it carefully, it turns out that there's only one way it can work. Here they are, roughly in the ascending order of difficulty (translated from Russian). They can all be solved without pen and paper, but if you do need to write things down, there ain't no shame in it.
1. I bought a lottery ticket with a five-digit number, and the sum of its digits turned out to be equal to the age of my neighbor. Find out my ticket number, taking into account the fact that my neighbor was easily able to do that.
2. Ten children stood in a line, each carrying some nuts. Each child gave a nut to every child to their right (careful: not just to their right neighbor). After that, the girls all together had 25 more nuts than at the beginning. How many girls were in the line?
3. The sum of the three different smallest divisors of some number A is 8. How many zeroes are at the end of A, as it's written in decimal?
4. Five married couples met and exchanged some handshakes. Nobody shook hand with themselves or their spouse. One husband asked everyone else, including his wife, how many hands they shook, and it turned out that all 9 answers were different. What was the number his wife said?
At various points math relies upon conventions, which are usually chosen so as to make other parts of math fall out well. Like I said, it's been a long time and I don't recall how factorization dealt with negative numbers. But it seems to me as though the simplest way is to have a single -1 be part of it. Otherwise there's no reason to prefer (-2,7) to (2,-7), and (-1,-2,-7) works too, and as I mentioned elsewhere, it's possible to pull an infinite number of (-1,-1) pairs out of any number.
Nobody said you had to choose a set of devicers that multiply to A. So the devisors of 12 are (1,2,3,4,6,12) those of y are (1,7) but if you allow for negative devisors the devisors of seven will be (-7, -1, 1 , 7)
Great puzzles! Just the right amount of difficulty. I'll give my answers in ROT-13 (https://rot13.com/) to preserve the spoilers for those who want to work through it themselves:
1: Gur ahzore "Avar" svir gvzrf, fvapr gur havdhrarff erdhverzrag zrnaf lbh arrq rvgure bs gur gjb zbfg rkgerzr inyhrf (rvgure nyy znk be nyy zva), naq nyy zva jbhyq yrnq gb fbzrbar jub'f 0 lrnef byq, fb vg zhfg or fbzrbar jub'f sbhegl-svir lrnef byq.
2: Svir tveyf, jvgu svir oblf gb gurve yrsg. Rnpu bs gur 5 oblf unaq rnpu bs gur tveyf n ahg, fb 25 ahgf ner genafsreerq va nyy.
3: Bar mreb. Ng svefg vg ybbxf yvxr lbh pna eha jvgu rvgure "Bar, Gjb, Svir" be "Bar, Guerr, Sbhe" nf gur qvivfbef... ohg lbh erzrzore gur havdhrarff erdhverzrag, ybbx pybfre ng gur gjb frgf bs qvivfbef ntnva, naq erzrzore gung Sbhe vf qvivfvoyr ol Gjb, fb "Bar, Guerr, Sbhe" fubhyq npghnyyl or "Bar, Gjb, Guerr", juvpu qbrfa'g nqq hc gb 8. Fb gur qvivfbe frg zhfg or "Bar, Gjb, Svir", juvpu unir gur Yrnfg Pbzzba Zhygvcyvre bs Gra.
Ng guvf cbvag vg frrzf yvxr *nal* zhygvcyr bs Gra jbhyq gurersber jbex, vapyhqvat zhygvcyrf bs Bar Uhaqerq naq Bar Gubhfnaq, ohg lbh erzrzore gur havdhrarff erdhverzrag naq ybbx pybfre. Bar Uhaqerq vf qvivfvoyr ol Sbhe, fnzr jvgu nal zhygvcyr bs vg. Bar Gubhfnaq vf nyfb qvivfvoyr ol Sbhe, naq fnzr jvgu nal zhygvcyr bs vg. Vs vg jnf bar bs gubfr, gura gur fznyyrfg qvivfbef frg jbhyq or "Bar, Gjb, Sbhe", abg "Bar, Gjb, Svir".
Fb vg unf gb or *whfg* n zhygvcyr bs 10, juvpu zrnaf bayl n fvatyr Mreb ng gur raq. Ohg bgurejvfr, vg pna or nal zhygvcyr bs 10 gung vfa'g qvivfvoyr ol Guerr be Sbhe, yvxr Svsgl, Friragl, Bar-Uhaqerq naq Gra, rgp.
4: Sbhe. Gur znkvzhzhz ahzore bs unaqf nalbar pbhyq funxr vf Rvtug, fvapr gurer ner gra crbcyr gurer naq gjb crbcyr lbh pna'g funxr jvgu (lbhefrys naq lbhe fcbhfr). Gur zvavzhz vf bs pbhefr Mreb. Fvapr gurer ner Avar havdhr nafjref, gung zrnaf rnpu crefba nfxrq svg vagb bar bs gur avar fcbgf orgjrra Mreb naq Rvtug: Mreb, Bar, Gjb, Guerr, Sbhe, Svir, Fvk, Frira, Rvtug.
If that were the answer i dont think it would qualify as a trick. My assumption here was that these would follow the most common lottery ticket conventions (not sure if posting those would be too much of a hint).
I would love to see a solution to 1, as it strikes me as impossible, thanks. The rest were comparatively straightforward. In fact, you can give the exact position of the girls in 2, beyond just their total number.
I got stalled on 1 by initially assuming it was like lottery tickets I am familiar with in which every digit is unique. Then I relaxed that assumption.
I made the same mistake. I first parsed it as the *adding* was easy, which... tells us the neighbor is at least 6 or so. But we're meant to read it as the narrator *already knows* the neighbor's age, and the neighbor is able to easily invert back to the lottery number based only on its sum.
Gur pehpvny guvat vf gung lbhe arvtuobe vf abg nqqvat hc gur ahzoref ba gur gvpxrg gb svaq gurve bja ntr. Lbhe arvtuobe xabjf gurve ntr nyernql, naq vf hfvat gung gb svther bhg gur ahzoref ba gur gvpxrg.
Heavy hint (don't know how to do a light hint here): Abeznyyl lbh'q rkcrpg gurer jbhyqa'g or n havdhr nafjre gb guvf dhrfgvba, orpnhfr jungrire vg vf, lbh pbhyq crezhgr gur qvtvgf. Gur snpg gung gur arvtuobe jnf rnfvyl noyr gb fbyir vg gryyf lbh gung crezhgvat gur qvtvgf qvqa'g tvir uvz nqqvgvbany nafjref.
If I interpret "the three different smallest divisors" to imply there are no duplicates in the number's prime factorization, then the solution is unambiguous, but that's not a natural reading for me. Normally if you're asked to list the divisors of a number you don't repeat numbers that appear twice, so the three smallest divisors would be the same whether it was divisible by 10 or 10000.
Something else, I've been thinking about regarding superintelligence: can sufficient intelligence truly melt down any barrier? Sure, Yudkowsky says you can bet on a chess engine winning, even if you don't know how it will do it, but has anyone bothered to find an amount of handicap such that the human player always wins, even against the best chess engine? The same could be done to AlphaGo: there has to be a handicap there that makes it so AlphaGo can't win against professional go players.
Perhaps it would allay some fears if it is established that there are problems that no amount of intelligence can solve (other than stuff like the halting problem or the incompleteness theorems, I guess).
This general question has been examined a bunch before. Quoting Yudkowsky, "The theoretical limit [on how much you can deduce about the outside world] is that every time you see 1 additional bit, it cannot be expected to eliminate more than half of the remaining hypotheses (half the remaining probability mass, rather). And that a redundant message, cannot convey more information than the compressed version of itself. Nor can a bit convey any information about a quantity, with which it has correlation exactly zero, across the probable worlds you imagine." ( https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/5wMcKNAwB6X4mp9og/that-alien-message )
In actions, there are similar levels of limitations: You can optimise among the number of various possible choices you can make, but not beyond that. In chess, that's about 10^60, with rather limited variation in outcomes. In life, everything is so much larger and complex and chaotic that thinking of hard limits won't really get you anywhere at all. In practice, things look a lot more like https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q9Figerh89g , where even at human intelligence, you can drop a bunch of squishy helpless entities on a harsh and hostile planet, armed with just a bunch of squishy fingers and no more, and they'll be going to the moon and manipulating DNA and setting off nuclear explosions pretty much instantly (on the timescales which previously mattered).
It's almost certainly really, really easy to devise problem no amount of intelligence will be able to solve before the end of the universe - there are a whole bunch of NP-complete things of this form that are used as cryptographic primitives.
For example, if I generate a square matrix M with a few thousand rows and columns, sampled from a suitable distribution, and then show you M and y=Mx+e where x is an integer vector and e is chosen uniformly at random from a sphere whose radius is the length of the shortest vector in the lattice spanned by the columns of M, then x,e are uniquely determined by y, but it's very, very likely that no sequence of calculations that recovers them with non-trivial probability in practical time exists, and so no matter how smart you are you probably can't find them.
Modern cryptography is based on much smaller (but harder to describe) problems, with hundreds to tens of thousands rather than millions of unknowns, but again. most of it is probably not breakable before the end of the universe.
The slight catch is that being /totally certain/ that a particular problem is hard is hard. It's easier to write down a list of 100 fundamentally-different problems of which 99 are genuinely hard than it is to get 100/100 or to spot the one where an efficient solution algorithm exists. But a lot of expertise has been put into this, much of it on the "Keep it simple, stupid" principle.
The issue of Superintelligence isn't that if there's any single specific hard problems, all of humanity will be protected, but that of all problems that would be decisive to solve, are all of them hard?
It doesn't matter if RSA or elliptical curve cryptography is not reversible, if an AI can just use iPhone cameras to look at power buttons and read the secret key directly. Similarly it doesn't matter if nuclear silos are well protected if you can engineer several plagues, or ice-9 human proteins with prions in livestock.
Can't wait for someone to call all of the examples provided science fiction.
But the point is that far too many AI doomers confuse "intelligence" with "magic superpowers".
Take the "talking your way out of the box" example. Even if there does exist a form of words that will persuade a human to let you out, the assumption that a "sufficiently intelligent" being will be able to deduce them in practical time is a very, very questionable one.
No matter how smart your AI is, it's still capped at, say, 2^35 operations per thread per second, which means it will only ever be able to solve problems for which a circuit solving that problem in a practical number of operations exists, and that's a very small subset of problems.
I'm extremely confused at calling the AI Box experiment as an "example" as if several actual humans haven't successfully talked themselves out of the box. And no, it wasn't the "greater good" lie that people keep trying to speculate, since it worked on a skeptical CS undergraduate who had no previous contact with Eliezer, and Ron Garrett, who did not unbox, has said that even though it didn't work, that his estimation of charisma actually working went up. Assuming you didn't know this before, does that change your mind at all your intuitions on what is or isn't possible? Because the opposite of thinking of intelligence as magic powers is to often deny the reality of things that have actually happened!
Like, this entire approach of trying to "mathematically" prove superintelligence is impossible is just an entire dead end, since it often also proves that World War 2 couldn't have happened (who could be charismatic enough to embroil all of Europe in war, in living memory of the last war that people called "the war to end all wars"?) or that somehow random drift of proteins has optimization power that is physically not realizable, on top of being more powerful than actual directed design. Or ignoring that often these problems involve constraints that just aren't relevant, like, the traveling salesman problem is NP hard, but that's only when you require the optimal solution! You can have fairly good heuristics to generate fairly-close-to-but-not-optimal results in polynomial time, or just use an algo with a worse worst case runtime but much faster average runtime.
The fact that people have talked their ways out of boxes doesn't really change my views much, for the same reason that learning that people sometimes kick through walls makes me think that it's impossible to build a wall that's hard to kick through.
(Actually, that's a slightly unfair analogy. I am arguing against the strong claim (which may be a weakman, but is definitely not a strawman) that AI will definitely be able to talk its way out of any box, but keeping my own claim weak and not making a confident counter-prediction that building boxes it won't be able to talk its way out of will be hard).
Similarly, I'm absolutely not claiming that "superintelligence" is impossible - I /am/ claiming that it's not well-defined, but I think that lots of things that definitely fit deserve to be called /will/ be possible.
But I /am/ claiming that a) even those superintelligences will be /limited/, sometimes in obvious ways and sometimes in surprising ones and b) a lot of the people making the most dramatic predictions about AI don't seem to appreciate that, and are consequently overconfident in their optimism/pessimism.
At this point, I think it is reasonable to predict with moderate confidence that within 100 years AI will be able to do pretty much anything a human mind can do, and some other things, but /not/ reasonable to make predictions that are simultaneously confident and extreme about how far those other things will go. And I do think it's easy to confidently identify a lot of things it /won't/ be able to do.
I think that Gwern's claim that complexity classes alone don't tell you much, and that you need to look at the actual numbers under those classes, is absolutely correct; but for lots of problems people have looked at those numbers in considerable detail, and in some cases the answers are not pretty.
It's weirdly revisionist to say "there doesn't exist a sequence of words to persuade a (implied: any) human in finite time" and then claim you were talking about a specific human and a specific boxing circumstance. Because if you were, I gather you would have said "every". This is exactly my point! The claim "there exists at least one circumstance in which my point is valid" is substantially weaker than "there are no circumstances under which my point is wrong". I just do not believe intuitions about what is possible are good or reliable guides when they predictably end up way too pessimistic.
Also saying that "people have looked at the numbers and found them wanting" is a cop out. I've seen that line used many times, and every time they decide to elaborate, either the example they give is just straight up false, or they are unable to name even one example. Surely, you can name three that aren't cryptographic algorithms, which suffer from all the side channel problems I was talking about earlier.
(You don't have any obligation to respond, but I am quite cross with people repeatedly waggling their eyebrows and saying "well *I* certainly don't have an argument, but it exists somewhere out there that I cannot name" when it comes to AI risk)
This isn't the type of answer you're looking for, but: it depends on how good the human player is. Given sufficiently (astoundingly) bad human play, the AI could still win with the bare minimum of just a king and a pawn.
That sounds implausible, but I know a youngster (7ish) who knows all the rules, but doesn't like taking pieces, because it's too mean. Given sufficient table-talk about fairness, I might be able to pull something like this off. I wouldn't, because it would be too mean.
To repeat my comment from below (since Substack doesn't notify posters of a parent comment on responses to response comments):
With queen odds, even an amateur can beat a strong engine. So the material handicap necessary for a top human to be able to crush a computer is significantly less than a queen.
Knight for pawn odds would seem to be a significantly stronger handicap, (although officially this is a 2-point material deficit, the knight is much stronger than three pawns in the opening, as the pawns impede piece activity).
With knight for pawn odds, Nakamura drew Komodo and Vachier-Lagrave lost - still far from a crushing advantage for top humans: https://www.davidsmerdon.com/?p=2122.
As another comment noted, with knight odds, very strong humans consistently, but not universally beat engines. In 2020, Smerdon beat Komodo 5-1 with knight odds and in 2022, Finegold beat a newer version of Komodo 4-2 with knight odds: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iOWZlVmfzEs.
The top humans might be able to very consistently win with knight odds, but would still probably occasionally draw or even lose.
So the handicap needed for top players to have a crushing advantage over a computer is probably around a knight or a little more, but much less than a queen.
Incidentally, AlphaZero is not the top engine. Stockfish has won every Top Chess Engine Championship since mid-2020, and the large majority since 2014. AlphaZero was very successful with publicity, but not as successful with chess. It has not been maintained over the years.
Even Leela Chess Zero which it inspired and has been maintained over the years is weaker than Stockfish, and only won the engine championship twice; most recently, two and half years ago.
> With queen odds, even an amateur can beat a strong engine. So the material handicap necessary for a top human to be able to crush a computer is significantly less than a queen
I wonder if this is just because the computer isn't well trained for the situation (which never occurs in normal play) where it has everything except a Queen? Instead of relying on its well-worn opening tables it needs to improvise, and then by the time the distribution of pieces becomes a bit more normal it may have got itself into a weird position.
What I'm wondering is whether you could easily throw a bit of extra training in missing-queen situations at the chess engine and make it unbeatable again.
I don't think so. While it's true, that typical engines aren't trained for beating humans in odds games (Stockfish, for example, is optimized for performance against itself), I think a queen is much more than enough of a handicap, for top humans to beat any engine. In fact, the version of Komodo that Feingold beat was optimized for beating humans in odds games, and knight odds were still enough for Feingold to win, even though he was probably not even a top 1000 player, at the time.
While that Komodo probably had less training than other engines, the difference in strength of the engines, is probably not as large as the difference in queen odds vs. knight odds. Thus, it seems very unlikely to me that any engine - even a literally perfect one (cf. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Endgame_tablebase) that solved chess *and* was trained with algorithms to navigate the game tree towards branches where humans are likely to blunder, could be a match for the top human players.
I think your attempted refutation from Nakamura fails for 2 reasons.
First:
>when a human has already done so
Is not accurate, as there is a huge difference between queen odds and a queen sacrifice.
Second:
>when a human has already done so against much better players
Seems to probably misunderstood what I said. While I did note that amateur players can beat top engines with queen odds, I *didn't* say that amateurs could beat top *players* with queen odds, and I certainly didn't say that amateurs could beat optimally designed engines with queen odds.
I said that I didn't think that an optimal engine could beat *the top humans* with queen odds.
Nakamura's opponents (who as already noted, weren't facing queen odds) were very much *not* the top humans. Of the videos I saw at the end of his run, his opponents were mostly sub-2400 and exclusively sub-2500 Chesscom (not Elo).
That would probably place them around the top 10,000 players in the world, (with significant variance).
Such players may be "much better players" than amateurs, but they aren't "much better players" than "the top humans," whom my claim related to.
I don't see anything dispositive in Gwern's comment, either. We all already know that an engine specifically trained for odds games will be much stronger than a regular engine, and I made that point in the comment to which you are responding.
The question is how much of a difference that would make. Obviously, there are limits, and it's inconceivable that any engine would ever be able to hold a draw against top players in e.g. a K vs. K + Q endgame.
We know that regular engines get crushed by humans with queen odds, and that even Komodo modified for odds games got decisively defeated with knight odds.
Does anything in Gwern's comment demonstrate that optimally trained engines which would be much stronger than that Komodo variant would be not just much stronger, but *so much* stronger that they would go from losing with knight odds to winning with queen odds? Not that I see.
> Is not accurate, as there is a huge difference between queen odds and a queen sacrifice.
I see, I mostly checked near the beginning of the playlist, where he did play the gambit (I.e. blundering the queen) as opposed to near the end, where it looks like he's still relying on the queen for a couple of turns to defend and the like. I believe I was substantially wrong about this being comparable to queen's odds, but I still think it's (slight) evidence against, would you have made the prediction this would be possible by any entity up to this elo level, assuming you didn't know about this before?
> explanation of why I misunderstood
Apologies, claim retracted. My comment was aimed at the claim that queens odds victories would be maintained even for trained engines. I will defend myself slightly by saying that the post I was replying to made no acknowledgement that engines were substantially hobbled by their current training regime, but that is absolutely no excuse for reading positions that you didn't espouse.
I think you're probably just right about queen's odds vs top humans, just because it's hard to imagine a solved version of chess that doesn't involve the winner using the queen, but I think that's more a statement about the boundedness of chess rather than the boundedness of engines. Considering that stock fish has gained 800 elo in the last 10 years, I would guess that even if elo gains continue for 10 years (or perhaps partially equivalently, a computer 128 times faster than what chess.com uses) is more around positional play and longer term play rather than being much stronger at being down.
Well, even the best chess computer wouldn't be able to win if it was handicapped down to only a king. Or only a king and a rook. Heck, it wouldn't be able to beat a ten year old with that, no matter the computing power.
I have thought about the same. Right now we think intelligence is very important because it is a tight constraint, the same way raw man power was a taut constraint in earlier ages when it came to building things. Nowadays we could easily make cranes or excavators a lot more powerful than the ones we have, but we don't, because raw power is not the taut constraint anymore.
With queen odds, even an amateur can beat a strong engine. So the material handicap necessary for a top human to be able to crush a computer is significantly less than a queen.
Knight for pawn odds would seem to be a significantly stronger handicap, (although officially this is a 2-point material deficit, the knight is much stronger than three pawns in the opening, as the pawns impede piece activity).
With knight for pawn odds, Nakamura drew Komodo and Vachier-Lagrave lost - still far from a crushing advantage for top humans: https://www.davidsmerdon.com/?p=2122.
As another comment noted, with knight odds, very strong humans consistently, but not universally beat engines. In 2020, Smerdon beat Komodo 5-1 with knight odds and in 2022, Finegold beat a newer version of Komodo 4-2 with knight odds: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iOWZlVmfzEs.
The top humans might be able to very consistently win with knight odds, but would still probably occasionally draw or even lose.
So the handicap needed for top players to have a crushing advantage over a computer is probably around a knight or a little more, but much less than a queen.
Incidentally, AlphaZero is not the top engine. Stockfish has won every Top Chess Engine Championship since mid-2020, and the large majority since 2014. AlphaZero was very successful with publicity, but not as successful with chess.
It has not been maintained over the years. Even Leela Chess Zero which it inspired and has been maintained over the years is weaker than Stockfish, and only won the engine championship twice; most recently, two and half years ago.
When people talk about pawn odds, doesn't it matter which pawn? It feels like losing an f2 pawn should be much worse than say, the A2 pawn (which comes with the advantage of an open file)
Your intuition is probably correct. Looking at the engine evaluation of different pawn handicaps (which wouldn't necessarily exactly match human win probability, but gives an idea), the largest handicap for Black is losing the f7 pawn (+3), while the smallest handicap is losing the a pawn (+1.3).
Even the f pawn isn't enough for a human to win consistently, or even necessarily to win at all, though, as Nakamura played a bunch of 2 pawn odds games with different pawn combinations including the b & f pawns and c & f pawns, and he drew all the games, except for one of his games with odds of the c & g pawns, which he lost: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_0MKFyd_578.
So we can roughly infer that with 1 pawn odds (even the f pawn) the engine would be much better than a top human, with 2 pawn odds (including the f pawn), a computer is about equal with a human, with odds of 2 pawns not including the f pawn, the engine may be a little better, while with knight odds, a top human would be much better than an engine (engine evaluates the knight odds as +6 for White, for what it's worth).
That blocking any specific fossil fuel producing or transportation project (What I sort of unfairly call McKibbin-ism, although I’ve even seen John Quiggins defend it in the much larger context of exporting coal from Australia.) will, because of substitution, result in very little CO2 emission avoided but at the cost of the lost project benefits and political costs to the Democratic Administration that goes along, why is this such a popular “activist” tactic? [Disclosure: I hope top use answers to improve a Substack post on this issue.]
Because it's politically an easy win. Blocking production of fossil fuels is both very obviously the right position [for them, not talking in general] and at the moment, very easy due to sympathetic courts and a legal system which may have overcorrected slightly - no, it was absolutely terrible that PG&E could explode an entire Bay Area suburb and basically get away with it, it was awful that companies can operate leaky crude pipelines and never actually come and fix the cracks, it's absolutely horrendous that Deepwater Horizon happened given that it was avoidable - but they're entrenched and way too hard to shut down now, so activists (I do genuinely think they believe they're doing good) go after easier wins.
I'm pretty frustrated with the current state of environmentalism. Due to overcorrection from decades of genuinely way too lax regulation, it's really easy to block, and very hard to build. There will be an energy crisis, because nothing is getting built. Not new fossil fuels (which is probably good) but terrifyingly, not new other energy generation either (nuclear, solar, wind - yes smallscale solar and wind is happening but that will not be enough). The carbon zero options are being blocked with the same overcorrected laws that are blocking oil pipelines. It's indiscriminate, and it really scares me.
(I'm not 100% against blocking new fossil fuels as long as new energy generation is being built to replace the lost energy, because that makes it so that FF can't just outcompete zero or low carbon energy sources while continuing to emit. But blocking both is going to kill so many people)
I think that at least in some cases the activism may not be strictly groundroots, and may be intended to preserve significant reserve capacity for strategic defense purposes while giving the government cover against popular pushback.
FYI Scott, your Lorien Psychiatry page at https://lorienpsych.com/ currently pops up a big screen saying your plan has expired and the site is going offline soon. I assume this is unintentional, unless you’re actually planning on taking your practice’s site offline. (If I’m wrong, please preserve the writing somewhere?)
I remember some buzz about this a few months back, seemed like a good idea, but I wasn't in an actionable spot. Now I'm looking at potentially some serious hiring and expansion in 2024-2025, taking a more serious look at it, and while I like the idea...their youtube and twitter feels more like entertainment than serious professionalism. But maybe I'm misreading it. I'd really appreciate anybody who could share some feedback from working with them, good or bad. Thanks!
Has anyone been able to leverage self-hypnosis into observable positive outcomes in their life?
I have a good meditation routine that has obvious quality of life benefits. I thought perhaps the Reveri app could approach some stubborn issues from a different angle, but I can't find a use for it.
How much precaution do you all take when preparing and eating cooked rice, using ric leftovers?
I use a lot of leftover rice to make new dishes. It sits out at least for the course of dinner. I recently learned about a pathogen that doesn't die even with heat, or its toxin doesn't denature, and rice seems to need a treatment as careful as raw meat with regards to refrigeration?
Thank you everyone for the experiences! I think I won't psych myself out too much but might be more precipitous in refrigerating it, and might not keep old rice quite as much as I do, preferring to make less, as far as I am able. (My pressure cooker won't do a good job with less than 1.5 cups of raw rice, and our family doesn't finish that much.)
The vinegar idea is also good, but it doesn't always work taste -wise with what I'm cooking.
Well, YMMV - my grandparents, who live in a tropical climate, make a pot of rice every morning, leave it on warm, and eat it for the whole day. They're in their late 80s now and it has never been an issue for them. Me, on the other hand - I got good poisoning from overnight rice (left in the cooker) in a dry temperate climate, so idk.
What I do now is the rice cooker is switched off as soon as dinner starts. When it's cooled, it goes straight into the fridge. If I forget, the next morning I will make fried rice - making sure to use a high smoke point vegetable oil and cook the rice again with egg and frozen veggies and other stuff I have on hand. So far this has served me well. The fried rice, of course, needs to be browned, ideally slightly crispy - this means Maillard reaction, which both makes it tasty and is a surefire indicator that it's reached over 140°C - whereas water methods of reheating rice (including microwave), putting it in soup, making congee, etc will only reach 100°C unless you burn it.
You could probably also bake it. But yeah, overnight unrefrigerated rice should be heated high enough to brown/crisp it.
"B. cereus [ha!] grows best in a temperature range of 39°F (4°C) to 118°F (48°C). Optimal growth occurs within the narrower temperature range of 82°F (28°C) to 95°F (35°C) and a pH range of 4.9 to 9.3."
Given that white vinegar has a pH of 2.4, addition of 1-2% vinegar to the cooking water should be enough to drop the pH well below 5. If the rice is intended primarily as an ingredient in later recipes, a shift in flavor from a little vinegar would probably be all but undectable.
Just some food for thought. But please, no one die from keeping out lukewarm rice indefinitely.
That vinegar piece is interesting. Rice used in sushi and other similar dishes often has vinegar (and sugar and other seasoning) added and the rice is served at room temp. I wonder what came first, the vinegar as preservative or the vinegar as flavoring.
I make about three cups of rice at a time, eat about a cup of it, and leave the rest in the rice cooker on the counter for a couple of days, until I pull another portion out and throw it in the microwave. It's fine unrefrigerated for about three days. The main danger I've found with rice is that early mold is white and can be hard to see.
I boil about three servings worth of brown rice [generally with some garlic and onions], eat one, leave the rest on the shelf to cool for an hour or so, then put it in the fridge. Generally I will heat up the two remaining servings about three or four days apart, so the last one will be at least a week old. Thus far there have been no adverse consequences. Over the years I have become increasingly blase about how long I leave stuff before and/or after cooking...
We eat rice almost every day. The leftovers sit out in the rice cooker, and in winter we'll keep using these until the third day, either cold from the pot or recooked/stir fried. In the summer we usually give to the chickens after day 2. We've been doing this for literally decades. I recently heard about this pathogen, and discussed it with my partner; we agreed that our experience plus that of billions of Asians over many years suggested it was a risk we need not be concerned with. If it matters, I'm a public health epidemiologist, and my partner is Asian.
My understanding is that the toxin is produced in hazardous quantities when rice is reheated, but not much. That is, warming rice without cooking it lets the bacteria multiply without killing it. Then after a while the bacteria have created enough toxin to be hazardous. We never heat old rice without really cooking it (because why?).
Ideally, yes, though it's also fine to keep the rice above 65C/150F (as the better class of rice cookers do), and it's probably not too bad (though still in contravention of health codes) to leave it out at room temperature for a day or two. The thing to avoid is keeping rice above 20C/70F but below 65C/150F for an extended period, as those are the ideal conditions for microbial growth.
I'm saying the opposite. We recook our rice all the time, as stir fry and in soup. Just be sure you get it hot enough that any bacteria die, if you are concerned about toxins.
I don't think I'm getting it hot enough at all. That would sort of require boiling the sauce or soup or stirfry or whatever it was going to enhance. Which wouldn't be ideal. I think I'll just make afresh each time.
Tossing it in hot soup maybe won't get it very hot, but adding it to a stir-fry certainly should. Unless you cook a stir-fry, plate it up, and then add cold rice? That would be very strange. But even with the soup, you're eating it straight away, right? There's not much time for significant bacterial growth.
My family has routinely used leftover rice, including in ways that have a number of hours sitting out (e.g. plain rice sitting out for an hour or two during one dinner, then sitting in the fridge for a week, then making it into fried rice, it sitting out during dinner for another hour or two, then another week in the fridge). We’ve never noticed any ill effects of this.
I found some articles/studies showing a pretty strange correlation between elevation and rates of neurological issues and autism. All these studies seem pretty old, but the correlation they found is pretty shocking:
“for every 328-foot increase in altitude, there was a corresponding 2 percent increased risk of developmental delays.” (For reference, New Mexico is 5,700 feet, LA is at 310 feet, while Boston is 46 feet, which means New Mexico children are at about 35% more risk than Boston children... wow!)
“children living above 8,530 feet were twice as likely to be at risk of experiencing delays in their mental development as those living at or below 2,625 feet.”
Does anyone who knows more about this field know if this is accurate, or was the methodology flawed here? If so, why is it that I can find so little modern data on this?
No idea about autism, but babies born at high altitudes also have lower birth weights on average (at least in the US people who live at higher altitudes also have lower adult weights even when controlling for confounding factors. people who move to high altitudes tend to lose weight as well).
I don't unfortunately. I forget the original source for this, but our first child was born while we lived at altitude (about 5000 ft) so it must have come up during preparations for that. The OB/GYN also confirmed low birth weight.
As for the body mass of adults, I can't remember either. I believe it was in a news paper article about obesity, but it was probably 10 years ago when I first read it.
Oxygen supply to the brain (and/or developing brain in utero)?
Part of living at elevation is reduced atmospheric pressure and lessened blood oxygen saturation:
"The effects of high altitude on humans are mostly the consequences of reduced partial pressure of oxygen in the atmosphere. The medical problems that are direct consequence of high altitude are caused by the low inspired partial pressure of oxygen, which is caused by the reduced atmospheric pressure, and the constant gas fraction of oxygen in atmospheric air over the range in which humans can survive.
The other major effect of altitude is due to lower ambient temperature."
I would have thought that for significant effects you'd need to be living pretty high up, but what do I know about the sensitivity of infant brains to oxygen?
Hmm... I thought that too (the effect seems too big to be true), but here is what their methodology says:
Data from a unique study of normal infant neurodevelopment in five South American countries are used. The sample includes 2,116 infants 3–24 months of age who were evaluated for neurodevelopmental problems by study physicians during their routine well-child visits at 31 pediatric practices. We employ regression models with country fixed-effects that compare the neurodevelopment of children born at different altitudes within the same country to avoid confounding. The regressions adjust for several socioeconomic and demographic factors. We also evaluate altitude effects stratifying by sex, age, and household wealth. Infant neurodevelopment was evaluated by physicians using the Bayley Infant Neurodevelopment Screener (BINS). The primary outcome is an indicator for whether the infant is at high risk for neurodevelopmental problems based on the BINS norms.
I think they controlled for the main things that I could think of that would influence this. What else do you think might be causing the effect?
Air pollution maybe? High-altitude cities tend to be surrounded by even higher mountains that trap air pollution over the city.
I'd like to see an attempted replication in the US (or any other country with a lot of people living at both high and low altitudes and reliable medical data, which is pretty much just the US and Canada.
I can't say anything about the methodology, but, if the claim is true, several plausible reasons for it come to my mind. An example would be different micronutrient content of soil in various geographical regions, e.g. iodine, which plays a crucial role in brain development and is on average present in higher concentration in soils near the coast.
Interesting theory-- it does seem plausible, especially because the study was done in South America, where I am guessing agriculture is more local. I thought the reason was something like: children get less oxygen because the air is thinner higher up?
It seems plausible, but I still think there is something more happening.
For example, in this US screening (just a preliminary study) they found a similar effect... https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/1087054715577137 And since the US uses Iodine salts (and eats a lot of salt) I doubt this is all due to Iodine.
Would a public tagging system be a good idea for ACX? I'm thinking about a crowd-sourced method of noting substantial discussions, like the recent one about getting into experimental treatment trials or the current one that's shaping up about integration and differentiation.
I was thinking especially about threads because I think that's where it's most likely for good stuff to be lost, but I wouldn't mind tags for posts as well.
Unfortunately, if tagging is to be publicly sourced, it would also need some moderatiion.
AI doom is one thing, but AI saving the world? Destruction is much simpler than creation: how does an AI solve the favelas? Israel-Palestine? The CCP? North Korea? Is there really something even a superintelligent AI can do about these things? I'm not sure if we end up in these messes due to a lack of intelligence...
Are there any major world issues that don't reduce down to poverty being bad, as your examples do? If so, AI might not be able to solve those. But AI can definitely solve the poverty problem.
I had the same thought as you a year ago which is why I wrote down a handy list of 10 steps an AI should follow to save the world. I don't share it much because an AI should have no problem coming across it given how much data they train on, but I'll leave a link here in case you have any opinions on it https://elsewhereunbound.com/the-plan/ There's also a story that goes into more detail.
Sure. Kill everyone. No more favelas, Israel-Palestine, CCP, North Korea.
But assuming you meant to include "and don't kill everyone, or anyone, and don't stop new people from being born, and don't [ad infinitium]"...
Classically, one of the attributes of a super-intelligent AI is supposed to be superhuman persuasiveness. (The whole "AI boxing" thought experiment.) If such an AI gets to spend enough time manipulating ("talking with") enough people, it could solve all those problems. It might not seem to be much different than talking with some super-charismatic cult leader and suddenly realizing what the root of all your problems is. (Usually, it's "not being a member of the cult".)
> Hello! Favelas are a type of working-class neighborhood in Brazil. They are often associated with poverty and inequality 1. Favelas are typically formed when squatters occupy vacant land at the edge of the city and construct shanties of salvaged or stolen materials 2. The people who live in favelas are known as favelados 1.
> It’s important to note that favelas are not inherently bad or good. They are a result of the unequal distribution of wealth in Brazil 1. While some favelas have high crime rates, others have low crime rates and a strong sense of community 1.
> In summary, favelas are a complex issue that cannot be easily categorized as “good” or “bad”. They are a reflection of the social and economic conditions in Brazil 12.
So perhaps the RLHF mealy-mouthedness is doing for the AI what it does for humans, which is to keep it from saying something with unfortunate implications when dealing with a complicated situation.
I'm not sure this is meaningful to think about, if it is assumed to be aligned. If it is, then it will magically (mechanically?) come up with solutions to all of those, and then some. But what we think is aligned may not be actually aligned until it does something intelligent people judge to be bad.
Will it really? Do you really think we have these problems because we're not smart enough to solve them? That there exists an amount of intelligence you could throw at this and find a solution?
Yes, I think so. I'm no superintelligence, but here are some solutions that may or may not work:
Favelas: Build good housing for everyone, somewhere else at first then raze existing favelas and you can build more. This is really a question of poverty.
Israel-Palestine: Those in Gaza can remain, free from Israeli attacks. They may govern themselves for internal affairs, as long as it doesn't conflict with AI rules and rulings. Same with Israel. They don't get to make rules for each other.
CCP: They prefer Communism, so they may have it, administered by AI judges that rule infallibly. Chinese affairs concern the Chinese. Trade continues under AI guidance.
North Korea: War-mongering leaders are deposed. Koreans govern themselves, subject to AI rules. Probably commerce between north and south Korea.
Given your assumption that we have an aligned AI, yes, all these things must be possible.
Thinking about favelas, if we're looking at a very wealthy future, it might be possible to improve favelas without tearing them down. This has some advantages of being less disruptive.
The theory seems to be that AI will unlock unlimited wealth and therefore there will no longer be concerns about resources - since we will all have as much as we want.
Israel-Palestine is a good counter-example, since what they want is an exclusive good of a certain piece of land.
I think most of the actual *warfare* is driven by material conditions - that is, living under the Gaza blockade is bad enough that people are willing to sign on with Hamas's plan of "launch suicidal attacks with little military impact and hope it gets enough international attention to change something."
If Israel and Palestine are still arguing over access to the Temple Mount, but they're doing so from the comfort of their fully automated luxury arcologies instead of shooting each other, I'd count that as "good enough."
That's possible. Going by what people on both sides of the issue have been saying for 75 years, the land is a significant goal in itself. Given how crummy a lot of that land is - poor farming, lack of resources - it doesn't appear to be a matter of material wealth.
Of course, that might be a minority opinion on either side, and generous wealth might just calm the whole situation down. I'm not counting on that. Otherwise, the aid packages to the Palestinians over the years should have done something to calm it down, but it doesn't appear to be so.
Scott donating his kidney didn't sit right with me. There was even a guy who unsubscribed because of this. I think I pinpointed why: he was telling us about this very extreme act in his usual subdued tone, when I think it called for something like Radicalizing the Romanceless. And it is radical: someone pointed out that a friend of hers died during the surgery to remove her kidney (to give to her dying husband). A procedure that invasive will always be risky, even eliding the fact you have mutilated yourself. And to do it for a stranger? Cold altruism? As my brother said when discussing this: if you can sell this as reasonable, you can sell literally anything as reasonable. Myself, I'll keep reading, but it definitely gives a different tenor to that 30% chance of AI destroying the world that Scott gave...
I share your concerns Carlos though (presumably like yourself) my preference is to err in Scott's favor.
If he were being entirely mathematical he could probably save more lives, more effectively, by simply donating everything beyond his (family's) sparest living expenses to charity.
He did it for all sorts of basic human reasons, including, as he explains in detail, self-righteous anger at being told that he couldn't!
Of course his main reason was likely that not only do people need kidneys and he happens to have a spare, but that his field of influence multiplies and magnifies the likelihood of more than one life being saved via stranger-donation.
And that furthermore, as this gets normalized and people regard strangers (even when they're not on the news!) as worthy of their concern, we will find better solutions to the kidney crisis and other social ills because "we are all in it together".
I can absolutely understand the fear that some high iq cultish eggheads might begin to *require* us to give one of our kidneys into their kidney bank but I don't see that coming from Scott's donation any time too soon.
That said, I can understand the reticence.
The degree to which a small group of hysterical women and sci-fi soaked men managed to inflate the power of the government and to cow the majority of the citizenry during the past few years is worthy of examination.
Insisting that everyone remain indoors for years, and double masked when they dare to venture outside, and to compromise their own bodily integrity against their wishes by taking a shot of something or other (even when the shot administrators agreed that for a specific individual in question it was not likely to be salutary) has, and ought to have, a deleterious effect on the trust granted to those at the cutting edge of mathematics-based-morality.
>He did it for all sorts of basic human reasons, including, as he explains in detail, self-righteous anger at being told that he couldn't!
Doing something quite dangerous out of spite for people that are (very charitably) trying to protect you or (more realistically) covering their own institutional asses might be human, but it's not *rational*, and that's one of the main aspects that I find off-putting. In almost any other context, we'd call that reaction childish. It's a weird, altruistic analogue to "if all your friends jumped off a bridge, would you do it too?"
It is a very good thing to do. Saintly, even. Superogatory to quite an extreme degree. But it's another example of a certain tension or obfuscation when Scott gets into the charitable writings. Like when he posts about "EA as a tower of assumptions," and getting people to buy into this structure (that might lead to eggheads demanding your kidney for inclusion), right after writing about how no matter how good the math is in What We Owe The Future he couldn't shake the feeling that if the math leads somewhere nonsensical, you nip it in the bud instead.
Serving as a soldier in Afghanistan probably had a higher death rate than donating a kidney. I have met many people who have done so describing their decision just as calmly as Scott did his.
The chance of death from the surgery is the same as two months of background mortality risk at my age. It's comparable to the chance of death from an older person deciding not to wear a face mask when going outside for a year.
Thanks for replying. You know this probably pinpoints like a laser what the big clash I have with rationalists consists of: I say math should not make you rip out one of your organs. But perhaps a rationalist (okay an effective altruist) would say, if you are going to rip out one of your organs, math should be precisely the thing that makes you do it.
It all feels very High Modernist, cold rationality driving big bold decisions.
Do you really feel like there wasn't a lot of fire making you do this?
I think I explained my emotional reasoning in the original post.
Think of it as like flying to Rome. You do it because you want to see Rome. Then there's math showing that planes rarely crash and are very safe. If the math said planes crashed all the time, you wouldn't go. But you're not doing it because of the math.
See, but there was remarkably little emotion in that essay. Here's the thing: you did something saintlike here. I was literally reading in a book on Tibetan Buddhism the other day a story about a lama who upon learning that a man had a terrible illness that could only be healed by eating human flesh (weird story), grabbed a knife and cut off a strip of flesh from his thigh to feed him and heal him. The story was summarized like this:
> Guru Dharmarakshita, who realized the nature of emptiness by meditating on love and compassion even to the point of giving away his own flesh.
Extrapolating from the act, one would think you have some major things to teach about love and compassion now, as you gave away your flesh. Hell, doing this is called Bodhisattva activity. Yet, have you learned anything about emptiness, love and compassion? What do you see now that you are in Rome?
You realize that it kinda sounds like you should be teaching Daniel Ingram about spirituality. I mean, if he hasn't donated a kidney, he should do so in a hurry, because what does it matter, to an enlightened being? But then, re-reading your essay, you did say you don't think you modified yourself into a saint, it's more like giving a kidney started seeming as normal. Hmm. I did read somewhere once that enlightenment should be understood as something an entire community can accomplish, not so much an individual. Something to think about in my own spirituality.
But you know what, you're an atheist right, you can turn that same skepticism to Buddhism, you can totally ask if anyone can get away with claiming enlightenment if they haven't or won't donate a kidney. I realize this is perhaps too confrontational for you, but you were joking you wanted to get a beef going some time ago.
To reinforce this, as Eremolalos points out down the thread, different death odds have different relationships to relevant hidden information that should change how you should evaluate the meaning of the statistic. Kidney donations are probably more like plane crash statistics than they are like an equivalently invasive procedure done to a random human.
> But perhaps a rationalist (okay an effective altruist) would say, if you are going to rip out one of your organs, math should be precisely the thing that makes you do it.
Yes, they would say that, and they would be right to. If you are going to remove one of your organs that could only possibly be a reasonable course of action if you know that: 1. the risk to you is minimal and 2. doing so will very likely save a life. There is no possible way to determine those things without using math (specifically probability).
I don't think Scott donated a kidney *soley* based on math. There are other values that play into it. He clearly values human life a great deal and cares about living by his principles.
The argument that he shouldn't of considered the math is fundamentally very bizarre. Would it had been a more responsible decision if he understood the risk to himself less?
He didn't talk about how much a human life means to him. He really makes it sound like the main thing is that he was in a context where giving away a kidney was normalized.
The entire article was about how much a human life means to him. He spends a lot of time comparing the risk to himself versus the benefit to another persons life (and then donating a kidney) because he is very invested in saving lives. None of the math he does would make any sense at all in the absence of a strong value toward saving lives.
The problem with you criticism isn't just that its wrong in a factual way. Its that it doesn't make any sense. You are treating the math and the values like they are opposite when in reality they inform one another. There is no point to doing a deep dive on the risk if you do not care about saving lives. And you can't live up to your values if you can't understand the consequences of your actions.
It's funny how people can be so used to dishonest behaviour that when they meet someone actually acting on their beliefs it is some shocking revelation, possibly even making them to perceive the honest person in the worse light.
Alao,many ideologies as are for show, and but to be acted on. The Marxist who actually wanta to start a revolution is rather worryng. It's a social concern as well as an indivudual one.
But you already knew that Scott supported EA causes and seen him calmly talk about it. Likewise, with 30% AI risk. Scott has probably resolved most of his relevant cognitive dissonance long time ago
So the reason that you are shocked now and not then is that it's your cognitive dissonance that wasn't resolved. And it has to do something with the fact, that at the time you, probably subconsciously, assumed that Scott "doesn't really mean it". And now as it turns out that he definitely did, this defensive mechanism of your psyche is no more.
This sounds exactly like being used to people being disingenuous to the point of being offended by someone's honesty.
I don't think Carlos was judging Scott disingenious. Scott's a fairly impressive fellow and I assume Carlos shares that impression.
As for Scott's tone, I liked it.
I am also selling something radical.
But just just because it is radical doesn't mean that I need to change my tone.
LIVING is radical. It is a game for keeps. There are no rules. The future is not written.
Just because someone has a view different from the prevalent one doesn't mean that they are required to sacrifice their sense of humor or to proclaim their position as radical and to shout it from the rooftops or to refrain from discussing it other than in the environs of copious sackcloth and ashes.
And it definitely OUGHTN'T mean that they should hide their self doubt or their Simple Human Smallness.
Life is too serious to take seriously. And being as There Are No Authorities, it's fair for Scott to trod down and proclaim his own path without having to pen a thesis defending his beliefs and actions which run counter to the mainstream.
That said, Ape, I am pretty sure that Carlos isn't taking issue with Scott's honesty, just with whether he "has the right" to proclaim something so radical without a preamble along the lines of The American DOI explaining in serious and somber detail why he is parting ways with prevalent assumptions by doing and encouraging such acts of charity.
This act is really not that extreme. People often take risks greater than the one he took as part of recreational activities, for god’s sake — downhill skiing for example. Scott sounded calm, but It wasn’t hard to recognize there was some deep emotion involved. In fact he actually wrote about some of the feelings, things having to do with personal angst, and the desire to be a good person. Yes, he sounded calm, that’s his style, but he didn’t sound robotic. (Irritating parenthetical note: you know who sounds robotic to me? Hard core Effective Altruists)
You know, I generally object to use of the term “triggered,” but it does seem to me that what Scott did really triggered some people. What I mean is that some people here sound sort of diffusely upset, as though the idea of Scott lying on the operating table really freaks them out — but then they’re taking their upset feeling as evidence that he’s a bit crazy, or has made a really disillusioningly bad decision. Maybe some of you people are in fact mostly shaken at the idea of him dying, disturbed by the grisliness of surgery, guilty because you would never be willing to donate this way, creeped out by the idea that he struggles with self-esteem issues like everyone else does . . .
I can only speak for myself, but when my PTSD is triggered, the emotions I get are about as far as possible from utilitarian benevolence. Once upon a time, I tried to integrate them with my normal self, but over the last few years I've started talking about "me" and "my PTSD", and that really seems like a safer way to frame things. Possibly, people who aren't faced with such a stark choice, may not have to take such a radical stance, and might wind up trying to justify the existence of their emotions using what seems to other people to be extraordinarily flimsy reasoning?
Why do you think it is so extreme? It seems a few people is having a very strong reaction to this due to something like bodily sanctity, is that it?
Personally I think it is of course a large step to do surgery for something like this, and I'm not sure I would do that myself. For me that is mainly due to the effort and discomfort of going through surgery, not due to the fact that I would be a kidney down. I'm convinced that the risk is in fact low, though I'm not sure if I could convince myself to feel like there is low risk emotionally. All in all I don't think I would do that for a stranger. A family member or friend would be a different story.
Still, I think I find it far less extreme than some here. What makes this very different from say removing your tonsils or appendix?
I had a similar reaction to the post. What didn't sit right with me was the use of statistics. Something feels wrong about ignoring strong intuition against invasive procedures in favor of a "1 over large number" chance of dying. There are always unforeseeable complications.
Edit: I have updated my position, see discussion below.
This seems a general argument against ever undergoing surgery, for any reason. Even if you are in dire need on an open-heart intervention right now, it's never going to sound intuitively appealing. That's what reasoning and calculations are *for* -- situations in which intuition is insufficient or outright wrong.
I’ve explained how I’ve updated my understanding of this in my below conversation with Eremolalos (thread continues, and I rephrase my statement) and in a reply to Scott above.
I think what I should have said above was “unnecessary invasive procedure”. When I was six, I broke my arm, and my doctor explained I needed a specific surgery for it to repair normally, and going along with it felt intuitively the right thing to do.
You guys realise you don’t have to be a math nerd to understand the probability or danger of things? It’s not asking too much of people educated even to just high school level to do this.
When your intuition is saying one thing and the data is saying the opposite, according to your intuition, trusting the data feels like a mistake. Likewise, according to the data, mistake is following through with your intuition.
The question is: What is *actually* a mistake? Not what *feels as* a mistake? Is your intuition calibrated so well to predict real world outcomes better than scientific process? Or not?
The advantage my intuition/emotional reaction/gut reaction has to scientific process is that it was the system that let my ancestors survive since living things had nervous systems. It also seems to be integrating sense data/memories that I don’t have conscious access to. It can’t make clerical errors (at least, not in the way science can).
The advantage the scientific process has to intuition is that it updates much faster, and isn’t maladapted to the modern world (our intuition or primal instinct weren’t primed in the same way to accommodate modern abstractions).
The point about intuition not making critical failures is arguably wrong, but generally a well done summary!
So now the question reduces to whether general adaptation against organ removal in the ancestral environment better fits modern kidney donation surgery than decades of accumulated scientific data about this surgery in particular. When framed like this, the answer seems quite obvious, doesn't it?
Thanks! I agree with what you’re saying. The context, medically and statistically, of kidney donation is also different than any random surgery done on any random person, and much safer, and this is a place where my intuitive reaction doesn’t show a complete picture.
I don’t think intuition can’t be wrong or can’t make catastrophic errors (especially since its present form is maladapted to the world), but that its errors are usually different than scientific process errors.
I have a conservative outlook, so I get where you're coming from, but...
Statistics are unnatural but very useful. As people living outside of our natural (evolved) circumstances, we need to be able to think about when our natural responses help us and when they hurt us. Something like seeing video from a terrorist attack on TV will affect us deeply, but we need to be able to step back and analyze if it really means what we feel it means.
I wouldn't give a kidney to a stranger, but I appreciate someone trying to understand a situation where the natural feeling is wrong and act against it.
The chances of dying are 3.1 per 10,000 donors. I don't know the chance of major complications -- I doubt that it's high. The chance of minor complications, such as a UTI, is not low at all, and no doubt Scott knew that and accepted the risk of them. And I'm sure the risks of what he did are lower than those people take for other experiences they value and other things that want to accomplish: backpacking alone, downhill skiing, travel in 3rd world countries, and the many careers that entail unavoidable risk. I think he fucking felt like donating a kidney, and good for him for doing what he wanted to.
There are a lot of people on here talking about the way the idea of giving a kidney feels wrong to them. Fine, you don't feel like doing it, in fact you're alarmed and repelled by the thought? Don't do it. But why are you interpreting your revulsion as a deep insight into the wrongness of what Scott did -- it's a violation of the purity and integrity of the body, it's self-destructive, etc. Sounds to me like you just have a particularly strong case of the disgust and anxiety most people feel about surgery and the removal of something from the body. Why are you trying to elevate that into an insight about the misguidedness of Scott's decision? It reminds me of a tone some people have when they object to gay marriage or make the case that homosexuality is a mental illness. You can tell that they are just very very squicked out by the idea of 2 men going at it sexually. EWWWWWWW! But they're presenting that reaction as an insight about ethics and sanity.
Even the tiny possibility of that sort of thing happening is why I made damn sure there was no possible way I could fall out of my harness.
Also, it's probably a good thing that surgery failures and near misses aren't recorded and up on youtube. But I think it does make the comparison a bit misleading?
It looks at the beginning of the video like the woman changed her mind and was trying to push herself and her host back into the plane. He’s resisting this (wtf? why?) and finally kind of wrestles her out the door. But that introduces spin into their descent, really fast spin too, and that probably put forces on the harness from angles it’s not designed to resist as well. Ugh, fact that host refused to honor her wish to change her mind is enuf to put me off skydiving forever. Fuck that guy!
I wasn’t squicked out by the kidney stuff, I was squicked out by the number stuff. I wasn’t playing my reaction off as insight into ethics or sanity. As Arrk says, these kinds of reports aren’t very detailed information, and I don’t take very much meaning from them. Even so, I still understand Scott’s actions as rational given his preferences, which he makes clear in the post.
I really don’t appreciate your tone. You’re using the same emotional affect you’re accusing me of having and reading things into what I said that aren’t there.
You said "Something feels wrong about ignoring strong intuition against invasive procedures in favor of a "1 over large number" chance of dying. ." If you'd said something *is* wrong with making a decision on that basis, and said what it was, that would be different. Then I might or might not agree, but I would see your thought process as reasonable. But you are saying it *feels* wrong, and it does seems to me you're implying that your feeling is something more than free-floating personal distress -- it's some intuition of the wrongness of Scott's decision. Also, you begin your post by saying your reaction was similar to previous poster Carlos Ramirez's, who said that the donation was not a reasonable thing to do, and that he now trusts Scott's judgment less. So altogether your post does seem to me to be saying not that you're squicked out by the number stuff, but that you take the creeply feeling as an indication there was something wrong with Scott's decision.
As for your objecting to my openly annoyed tone: Openly showing emotion, which we are both doing, is not what I object to. I object to your presenting your creeped out feeling as support for the idea that Scott did something wrong. I'm not presenting my annoyance as evidence you did something wrong -- I'm sounding openly annoyed while I explain what I think you're doing wrong.
I think I see where you’re coming from and I will be more careful about word choices in the future. I should not have said my reaction was similar to Carlos’s - that implies more than “my emotional reaction to the post was discomfort”. I would like to rephrase what I mean and wanted to say without certain words:
I don’t like the way Scott used odds of dying in his post (with the exception of the MRI one, which was a good use of odds). These odds don’t express some important information and aren’t always meaningful. It’s unlike coin tosses or roulette where the odds reflect a very simple system. Humans are complex, specific complications are weird, and “chances of death” can’t tell you what went wrong and where. A general statistic like “50% of marriages end in divorce” doesn’t apply to all socioeconomic classes or types of marriages. Medical statistics are different than divorce statistics, but suffer from generalizing across very different kinds of things. For this reason, the post made me uncomfortable.
I don’t think you’re right about medical statistics not being an appropriate or reasonable guide when it comes to Scott’s decision. Yes, you are right, people are complex and there any many paths by which something can go wrong. The doctors can’t check in advance for every conceivable glitch in somebody’s functioning which could turn lethal under the stress of surgery. People might have a very rare, very severe allergy to anesthesia or some other drug used, a rare heart condition that can’t be spotted in the workup they give potential donors, etc. However, despite the great diversity of things that can go wrong, there is a great paucity of things that actually do, as evidenced by the statistic I quoted, which is based on 80,000 kidney donation. That shows that the criteria used in OK-ing people as candidates for kidney donation are adequate to keep the chance of death very low, despite the fact that there are many ways that the surgery could kill somebody. Apparently the workup they do in selecting people does a good job in eliminating practically everybody who could be die from the surgery in one of dozens of possible ways, including some ways the doctors working them up may never even have thought of. The proof of the pudding is in the eating.
There certainly are some situations where stats are not appropriate as a basis for decision-making. Getting married is one. The 50% divorce rate is not terribly relevant. For one thing, people don’t get married because they have researchd the odds and believe the odds are great that they will stay together. They get. married because the love each other and want to form a partnership and believe their bond can withstand life’s stresses. Also, once you’re married there are lots of things you can do to minimize the chance you’re one of the couples who gets divorced.
Medical statistics are not useful if they are based on a small sample, or a sample of people who are unlike you. They also are not good if there is a lot of variation among different subgroups of the large group the stat in question came from. But apparently the group of people who are permitted to donate kidneys is quite homogeneous when it comes to risk of death. The doctors have removed in advance practically all the people whose chance of death varies from the 0% the doctors are aiming for: older people, people with heart conditions, bleeding disorders, kidney problems, etc. We don’t just know that they tried to do it, we know they succeeded extremely well at doing it, because only 3 people in 10,000 die. It’s possible those who die all belong to some not-yet-identified group that should be eliminated from the pool. But if they do, it’s a group with very few members in the population — at most 3 in 10,000.
Agreed. I, personally, am squicked by the idea of donating a body part that doesn't grow back (unlike blood, which I donate regularly). I view Scott's donation as a courageous and noble act. He is a better person than I am.
I agreed with you until a certain point. Agreement: if you think donating a kidney is a poor decision, stick with your decision and let others make theirs, unless you have a good reason you can back up why it is a bad idea for absolutely everyone.
But objecting to gay marriage is not the same as outlawing gay sex. This is missing the point about marriage (having been) well-defined for society, with mother and father having roles in the raising of children. I'm not going into the facts of whether a man and a woman are best for raising children, since I don't have any facts regarding it. But I do object to redefining marriage.
Redefining marriage raises questions that have never been addressed, as far as I can see. Are brothers (or sisters) allowed to marry each other? Why not, if gay marriage is allowed? Can fathers marry sons if of legal age? What is to prevent three or more men marrying? I bet some of these might actually be desirable from a purely legal standpoint, such as to avoid inheritance taxes.
About gay marriage, outlawing gay sex or whatever. I'm not arguing for or against either of those. And I understand that there are some reasonable grounds for objecting to gay marriage, considering homosexuality an illness, etc. My point was only that *some* people's arguments against gay-friendly points of view & social policies seem to me to come down to "EWWWW! Homosexuality grosses me out." And I think those people are mistaking a personal aversion for a deep insight into the profound wrongness of homosexuality.
I don't know of one, but I don't know much about evolutionary psychology. A lot of our non-sexual aversions clearly lead to us avoiding things that are likelier than most to harm us -- aversions for things that have the smell of bacterial decay, aversions to foods that taste odd to us, to people who look or act unusual, to heights. But se do seem especially prone to sexual aversions. Why?
Here's a weird, gross theory I just came up with: It seems as though some of our health and safety aversions would have given us an aversion to sex: Before it was easy and expected to bathe regularly, most people's bodies must have had quite a strong smell of bacterial decay. And people act unusual during sex. And both parties are very vulnerable to being injured by the other. So maybe our default feeling about sexual intercourse would have been aversion, but nature had to build in an exception to the usual aversion cues so that we would procreate. But it's a very *narrow* exception: It makes us crave vaginal intercourse and enjoy it, but other things that are in fact very similar seem repellent to us.
Pervasiveness or not. While I'm not sure that there are any historical societies that consider homosexuality completely normal, some modern societies seem to make an unusually big deal of being against it.
What about using statistics is wrong in that case? A large number of kidney surgeries are performed, so it seems to me like the actual observed rate is pretty strictly a more informative source of information than e.g. intuition (assuming you don’t think you have higher risk than the general population)
I suspect, as usual with statistics, that you would have to look more closely at them to determine useful information. In the cases where something went wrong, WHY did they go wrong? Surgeon error? Undisclosed donor medical condition? Unknown medical condition? Unforeseen problem that is now unlikely to recur?
Also, take the specific patient into account. Are they in good physical shape to be undergoing a major medical procedure? Do they think they are?
I know that one person doesn't count for much, but just to get it out there, my vote has flipped on the question of next year's review contest. I initially voted to keep it to books, but the idea of opening it to a broader set of essays has started to appeal to me recently.
Seems like most winners use the books as a framing device for conveying an ideology anyway, might as well canonize it.
I like the book reviews because I like learning what books I would never read are about. Most non-fiction books don't deserve to be read in full; those who condense them for us are doing The Lord's work.
"US Constitution is a living document"(TM)(R). Large collection of related head-scratchers (for those new to the subject) to choose from, e.g. Wickard v Filburn.
That is, "Ah, you say you were treated unconstitutionally? Try complaining to one of our judges. Didn't like the verdict? Here are some pre-vetted candidates for you to vote for and pretend that it will make a difference. Pretense of participatory politics and multi-party rule wearing thin? Here's some provocateurs that will totally help you pull a coup. Hope you like this new prison uniform" etc
The 4th amendment was thrown out by the USG in a de facto sense decades ago. Driving around with thousands of dollars in cash? That belongs to the government now. Renters growing pot in the backyard of your rental property? Your property belongs to the government now. Driving lawfully? Well, we have a mandatory check point. You're going to have to get out of your car and give us a sobriety test.
I'm not a lawyer, but the problem seems to be the wording "unreasonable *under the law*". The Constitution is supposed to protect us from unreasonable laws, but the 4th amendment doesn't seem to do that *by definition*, rendering the amendment toothless. Maybe it meant something once.
The fourth amendment, like much of the rest of the Bill of Rights, has it's historical roots in specific grievances against George III and his ministers. In this case, efforts to enforce the collection of taxes on the sugar and molasses trades against American smugglers. One of the things that raised quite a bit of ire was the use of a legal mechanism called "general warrants" or "writs of assistance", where the King personally authorized certain specified officials (customs agents in this case) to conduct searches and seizures in the pursuit of their duties and to requisition assistance from local law enforcement in executing these powers. Americans in general and Bostonians in particular (Boston being a major hub for shipping in general and molasses smuggling in particular) rather aggressively challenged the legality and legitimacy of these general warrants on multiple occasions.
The fourth amendment's core purpose is to permanently abolish general warrants as a matter of American law, while still allowing the uncontroversial specific warrants that would be issued by judges to authorize one-off searches and seizures. That's why the second half of the amendment reads "and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized."
The exact text of the amendment is based on prohibitions on general warrants codified in Virginia in 1776:
>That general warrants, whereby any officer or messenger may be commanded to search suspected places without evidence of a fact committed, or to seize any person or persons not named, or whose offense is not particularly described and supported by evidence, are grievous and oppressive and ought not to be granted.
And in Massachussett's 1780 state constitution:
>Every subject has a right to be secure from all unreasonable searches, and seizures of his person, his houses, his papers, and all his possessions. All warrants, therefore, are contrary to this right, if the cause or foundation of them be not previously supported by oath or affirmation; and if the order in the warrant to a civil officer, to make search in suspected places, or to arrest one or more suspected persons, or to seize their property, be not accompanied with a special designation of the persons or objects of search, arrest, or seizure: and no warrant ought to be issued but in cases, and with the formalities, prescribed by the laws.
The core of modern controversies over the legality of searches and seizures comes from an issue that wasn't even on the radar at the time, where it's now assumed that law enforcement and regulatory agencies can perform some level of "reasonable" searching and seizing without a warrant of any kind, general or specific. Courts of the late 19th and early 20th centuries allowed the erosion and eventual abolition of conventional remedies of police and officials being personally civilly and criminally liable forcibly searching and seizing without a warrant (i.e. without a warrant, you have no more right to push your way in, break open locks, and carry stuff off than a private citizen would). Then the Warren Court noticed that something was missing and make the tactical error of trying to adjudicate what was reasonable or not and to introduce new remedies (specifically the exclusionary rule) instead of restoring the old ones. The exclusionary rule is a lot better than nothing, but it has two major shortcomings: it only directly protects guilty people with innocent people protected only indirectly by a reduced incentive for police to engage in unwarranted searches, and even when evidence is excluded police and prosecutors are generally no worse of than they would have been had they not done the search. So police are apt to roll the dice in marginal cases and hope the courts will rule in their favor, public support for rigorous enforcement of the fourth amendment is weak because it's mostly seen as allowing criminals to "get off on a technicality", and there's often no recourse for invasions of your privacy by law enforcement if they don't result in excludable evidence against you.
Since 9/11, courts require metal detection and inspection, and not even pocket knives are allowed. This requirement is still in-place even after all of these years, and no incidents prompting it. And one does not necessarily have the option both fight an injustice and not to go to court.
Technically, it's called the Border Search Exemption or something like that. Basically, the border patrol can do whatever the heck it wants at ports of entry as long as it's got the 'contraband or border security' fig leaf. And that's *very* liberally defined (ie up to 100 miles inland, and includes all international airports, which is most of them these days).
Originally, it had to do with the fact that *actual* border searches (including inspecting cargo ships) were considered a power of the government--no one had a right to bring stuff over the borders without paying the tax/being inspected. And that didn't require warrants at all. It got drastically expanded when airports came into play and security theater kicked into high gear.
Basically, it's the judiciary making up stuff so as not to cause too many waves or get accused of helping terrorists/smugglers.
You have freedom to travel. You can drive, or take a bus or train, without any inspections at all. The majority of interstate travel is done that way.
Also, airliners could not possibly have been used as weapons? So it was physically impossible to hijack a plane, fly it into a building, and kill people with it?
The physics of the individual crashes, that is each of the 4 allegedly hijacked airliners totally disappearing upon crashing, like POOF, somebody borrowed Harry Potter's wand ? . . . or something ?
In the case of any real airliner crashing into a wall such as at the WTC or Pentagon, the Plane would have had a minimum of 60 milliseconds between initial contact with the wall and when the wings could have touched the wall, the fact is that the plane would have been subject to asymmetrical forces and given that, the plane would have broken to bits before having any opportunity to make the whole plane disappear inside the building.
Does anyone else become peeved by noticing people being hypocritical in their accusations of hypocrisy? This is something I've been thinking about for a long time (actually, since I was a tiny little kid).
Let me give you the classic example: free speech debates. As far as I can tell, factions on both the left and right have shut down or tried to shut down legitimate speech in recent years. (I'm not going to debate which one "is worse"; let's just agree that neither are blameless.) And people on both sides know this. So whenever some kind of free-speech-disrespectin' goes on, there's always someone on the opposing side who smugly notes something along the lines of, "Wow! I can't believe [INSERT PEOPLE YOU DON'T VOTE FOR] hates free speech? I thought that they were the protectors of free speech! Guess that's not trueeeeeee!" And then they secretly admire their profound philosophical genius.
But if you look at things from a broader perspective, you see that not only do both sides sometimes go against free speech, but they both accuse the other side of hypocrisy - while themselves being hypocritical.
I've seen this a little bit with the Israel-Palestine situation, as well. I've seen rightists downplay the wrongs of Israel while focusing only on the evil of Hamas, while also complaining that leftists are hypocrites for downplaying Hamas and only focusing on Israel's wrongs. And I've seen leftists do the opposite.
It's like a distorted version of The Emperor's New Clothes in which everyone is running around in various states of undress, all while calling each other out on their nudity.
There is always motivated reasoning. Another factor, I think, is that acting according to your whims in the moment is usually a right reserved for the powerful, so acting inconsistently is an attempt to signal social status.
Yes, as the old proverb says, when you point a finger accusing someone, 3 of your fingers are pointing right back at you.
However, it's not always hypocritical. If there is ample evidence that the accuser also doesn't like the current situation, then what they're doing is just opening the eyes of the accused to the consequences of their own tactics. For example, if someone is scolding a pro-censorship woke leftist, pointing at the current censorship of pro-Palestinian [1][2][3][4] is a valid way of saying "look what you spent the last decade supporting", and if the scolder is on the record saying that not even his/her worst enemies deserve censorship, then you don't have anything against them.
What I noticed, though, is the much more fearful realization that people don't **want** to behave consistently. They fully realize they're being "hypocrite", they just don't think the charge holds any water. Imagine you're fighting, and when you scream in pain when the enemy hits you, someone calls you a hypocrite because you yourself was firing back at them just minutes ago. That's, presumably, what it feels for them to be accused of hypocrisy. It's an actively foreign way of thinking for them to take the outside view in a fight they're embroiled in, neutrality and open-minded debate of the kind argued for in [5] is just alien nonsense, or "Sophistry", to quote the meatspace friend who told me that when I was arguing against Hamas recently.
Another kind of people try to argue for asymmetric behaviour during the fight using the very claims disputed in the fight itself. Two examples stand out in memory :
- Arguing for Freedom of Speech for atheists with my Muslim circle (completely undercover of course), I say "Why not let atheists in Muslim-majority countries speak their minds, so atheist-majority or secular-majority countries let diaspora Muslims speak their minds as well ?", simple, effective, tit-for-tat. I get back "Muslims should be allowed to speak their minds, they're right, atheists should shut up because they're wrong". The guy wasn't stupid, he certainly knew Competitive Programming enough to make me feel stupid, he just failed to see the logical circularity of letting Islam's supposed superiority, the very topic under debate, dictate the terms and protocols for debate.
- When I argue with wokesters, and point out that (e.g.) feminsts' vitriolic hate for Men tends to mirror misogynistic men's vitriolic hatred for women. I get back "Yes, but men aren't systematically oppressed, there is a difference between punching up and punching down", the very theology of Progressivism, the thing we're disagreeing on in the first place, is being implicitly assumed and used as self-evident to dictate the terms of the debate.
To be a little fair, it's really difficult for a large group of people to avoid hypocrisy. More people means more opinions, more opinions means more contradictory stances. Meanwhile, politicians stand in the middle of it all, trying to represent the broadest set of the population that they can.
Being a true servant of the people makes you as two-faced as the population is willing to tolerate, unfortunately. And wouldn't you know it, we're less willing to tolerate hypocrisy when the other team is doing it. Which lands us here. A bunch of hypocrites, currying favor by accusing the other team of hypocrisy.
At least the parties hold each other to account, though. It would be nicer to have them self-modulate, but history shows that that's a bit of a pipe dream.
Yeah. The part that gets to me the most is when people use the other side's hypocrisy to justify the behavior itself. "You're a hypocrite and don't actually care about free speech, so there's nothing wrong in censoring **you**." It's like a double-helix spiral race to the bottom.
Tit-for-tat is a great strategy, but only in proportion to the completeness and accuracy of one's information. :-/
I tend to think hypocrisy is overrated as a vice. It's relatively easy to think about whether people's words match their actions, and harder to pay attention to the actions and the effects of the actions.
Also, hypocrisy is the tribute vice pays to virtue. I think it's worse when vice completely takes the brakes off.
To quote The Big Lebowski, "dude, at least it's an **ethos**."
Part of what I dislike about all the charges is that, on a personal level, gently pointing out an instance of hypocrisy can be a good way to convince a friendly person to improve. But we're losing that.
I almost feel as though there should be two words, one for "a failure to uphold one's own standards that one feels guilty about and wishes on some level to change", and one for "blatantly holding two conflicting standards and justifying it as the righteous thing to do".
I'm not sure if that's hypocrisy, or just (willful?) blindness. But it isn't limited to free speech, it goes for any thing people are getting behind. The bible quotes JC as saying something about the mote in someone else's eye, vs. the beam in one's own, and that's a really valid observation.
In the past few months I have suddenly started showing symptoms of OCD, ADHD( minus hyperactivity), anxiety attacks usually in the evenings, brain fog and mental fatigue, sudden spasms in muscles, pseudobulbar or maybe google is just making me a hypochondriac.
Sleep, appetite is normal, no sudden changes in lifestyle or stressful events. Blood tests indicate no health issues. My hypothyroidism is under control for years with medication.
I tried Vit D, magnesium supplements - no effect. L-theanine has a minor calming effect but doesn’t help in other areas. I ended up taking Nicotine 1mg logenze occasionally in the evenings which make me feel slightly better. 5-htp gave me giggling fits so I stopped using it. I don’t drink, smoke. Have decent diet and exercise routine.
Any suggestions ?I can’t get psychiatrist appointment for few months. Therapy was useless .
If nicotine helps, you might try alpha-GPC. It converts to the endogenous ligand acetylcholine, which activates both sympathetic and parasympathetic nervous system, unlike nicotine which primarily affects the sympathetic receptors (so much so that they are called "nicotinic").
I am not a doctor, this is not medical advice, etc...
The muscle spasms -- have you had them before? What are they like? Are they those cramps people get in their legs or feet while sleeping or sitting still for a long time?
The anxiety attacks -- are you talking about classic panic attacks? Those have been described as orgasms of anxiety. They're a whoosh of intense fear, usually set off by a vague sense of not feeling right, then there's a kind of take-off into panic triggered by some idea like "maybe I'm having a stroke." Whole thing lasts 5 mins or less, though people often feel quite shaken by it for quite a while after. Is that what you're having? Or if the experience you're calling anxiety attacks something different from that?
What's the OCD like?
Feel free not to answer some or all of these. I'm a psychologist -- willing to make some suggestions, but need a bit more info.
Muscle spasms happen just when I lie down to sleep. It’s for few seconds . It started out feeling like I am slipping on a wet surface though I am lying. About 1-2 times a week. Then that stopped and I got a jerky feeling in muscles near my hips. That reduced and then I got spasms in my shoulders. When these spasms started the leg slipping feeling stopped.
One of my OCD symptoms - when I leave my house or before sleeping. I keep checking if my balcony door is closed, my fridge is shut and all the knobs in my stove are off. i keep looping checking these things and sometimes spend over 5 mins before I can break out of it. earlier I would just check once and leave.
i can play minesweeper game for hours because I find the number pattern comforting. i also like reciting lists whether names, fruits, words alphabetically.
anxiety attack has my pulse riding, I start panting and feel there is a weight on my shoulders. it subsides within few mins but leaves me fatigued and very pessimistic. this usually happens in the evening if I get the attack. if I start giggling uncontrollably its usually between 3 pm to 8 pm maybe a couple of times of month. about 30 sec accompanied by such things like gently smacking my head or thigh
Hmm. That’s a lot of new symptoms all at once, and you haven’t had any major life changes that would justify laying this to difficulty coping with life’s demands. It’s an odd cluster of symptoms, too. I don’t think the case for this being Long Covid is strong. The most common presentation of Long Covid involves physical symptoms. It’s true that there are people who only have odd psychiatric and neurological symptoms, as you do, but it’s not common. Plus the most persuasive recent research I’ve seen about LC is that 4 or 5% of people get it, and that of those more than half stop having symptoms within — I think it’s 6 months. And having a severe case of covid makes you more likely to get LC, and your case was asymptomatic.
I think you should see a neurologist. What you’re having certainly does not sound like any dread neurological disease I know of, but enough of what you describe sounds more neurological than psychiatric that I think you should rule out neurological causes. If you need to get a referral from an internist to see one, emphasize the most neurological symptoms: muscle spasms, giggling fits, difficulty concentrating, brain fog. In fact, for the sake of being taken seriously it might make sense *not* to tell your internist about anxiety and OCD, because the presence of psychiatric symptoms sometimes leads internists to discount other things you say.
I don’t think seeing a psychiatrist is a great idea. What they’re best at is medications, and your cluster of symptoms is not one that any medication I know of addresses. You’d need to be on 4 or so, each addressing one or 2 of your set of symptoms, and they’d counteract each other and curdle. If you want to try therapy again, I’d recommend finding someone who focuses on self-management, rather than talk-about-your-feelings-and-childhood. Those are usually psychologists and people with degrees in social work. You can find people that match this description by searching Psychology Today.
Is there something major in your life that recently changed or became worse?
I have subclinical versions of a bunch of these disorders, and when my life was fine, I managed to compensate and even get some synergy from them to make me more productive. This was all at a background level that I'd stopped paying attention to. Then bad shit happened, my coping mechanisms stopped working, and all of a sudden I started getting a lot of symptoms that I'd never seen before.
No major changes in my life. But I am feeling maybe I was just managing stuff with workarounds and now my brain just can’t cope. I was always absent minded, had to maintain lists to remember stuff and can’t multitask. History of depression when I was young
In that case, yeah, some sort of low-grade background illness might be causing it? Something where you don't notice any distinct effects, but everything just gets a bit harder, and you're a bit weaker and tireder?
I'm no doctor, but yeah, you should definitely get checked out. I hesitate to mention the following possibility because you said you have OCD and anxiety, but, well, perhaps take a look at this:
I tried some of the stuff myself, to see if it would help with a slightly-pre-covid digestive problem I picked up somehow. It didn't help, but there were no side effects either, so whatever's going on with my gut isn't something targeted by that remedy.
As the previous comment, this does sound like a post viral thing like long Covid. I'm three years into this and have had a whole range of changing symptoms over that time. The ones that are hardest to manage are the neurological ones.
By far the most useful intervention though has been a s meditation practice that reached 3 times daily when I was really struggling.
The resultant changes in brain blood flows seems to help with the cognitive fatigue and memory issues to a degree.
Interesting that you mention nicotine as there is currently a renegade research program under way that includes rounds of nicotine patches as a potential way to alleviate some of the symptoms.
Have a rummage for the nicotine test and see if this makes any sense to you.
FWIW, that sounds a bit like one of the (multitudinous different) collections of symptoms that are "long COVID", and not everyone who gets long COVID has a history of ever having the disease. The guess is this is because the majority of cases are asymptomatic. AFAIK, nobody yet knows what causes long COVID, so it's probably some sort of immune system overreaction.
OK, I'm already guessing, and anything further is a Wild Ass Guess. But strengthening you immune system might be the opposite of what you want to do. Or maybe it needs to be diverted to a different target. (Well, fat chance that THAT's the right answer. It's not a single purpose tool. But there HAVE been cases [not AFAIK involving COVID] where that actually worked.) Since I'm guessing you don't want to strengthen your immune system, antioxidants might be a good choice. At least there are a lot of them that you can safely try. And blueberries are tasty.
Yes, I realize that all questions of the form "Was X technology a net negative" all have certain things in common, including the obvious problem that many techs become virtually inevitable once the science, infrastructure, and economic incentives are there. But I'm looking at the increase in anxiety and general mental illness which characterizes individuals born after the Internet came on the scene. Millennials and Gen Z are addicted to their phones, struggle with relationships, and seem to spend a lot of time freaking out about AGI or AI girlfriends (https://www.freyaindia.co.uk/p/we-cant-compete-with-ai-girlfriends).
For me the Internet was an amazing, unmitigated good, a light that went on and pulled me out of a gloomy, intellectual cul-de-sac. But for everybody else... I mean I look around and people just seem so much more miserable than when I was growing up.
"The Internet", was the opposite of a mistake. It was brilliant, transformative, and valuable beyond expectation. The same goes for what we retroactively call "Web 1.0" (remember, the internet predates www).
Algorithmic social media (as opposed to "Alice, Bob, and Carol are my chosen Facebook friends so I see all and only their posts"), was a mistake in every sense except that it made a few founders and venture capitalists very rich. And getting rich by peddling algorithmic social media should be viewed in about the same way as getting rich by selling cigarettes or coal.
Where to draw the line between the two, is fuzzy. At some point, we ran out of low-hanging fruit in terms of broadly good things to do with the internet, and while some people started climbing the tree other went after the low-hanging rotten fruit. But a lot of the good stuff we created is still there and still good, and there's some new good stuff every year.
One must not blame the tool for how it is used. If people find their lives are worse, as you describe, for using the internet, then they ought to change how they use it.
Of course, not everyone even recognizes how miserable they are, or how to fix it. Maybe we need a campaign like we had against smoking. We are actually doing some of that now.
I noticed perhaps 10 years ago that Facebook. which I used multiple times a day, was better when I used it less. I carried this to the natural conclusion and find, yes, not using Facebook is better than using it. But I still have a Linked-In account, which I use in a professional manner, not really as a social platform.
I agree anecdotally, but w/r/t Gen Z and all the phone concerns by Haidt etc, I think earlymid 90s teen suicide rates (when I grew up) are mostly the same as now right?
I think the internet just gave the forces in society much more power. While in the past, there were limitations to how much companies, politicians, information, peers, friends, etc. could reach us, now that is no longer the case. For example, while one could always just look away from a billboard, now there are no limits to how much space ads can take up. Or while social interactions have always dictated aspects of our lives, now there are no limits to how far these extend and there are third parties that are involved in these social interactions which can manipulate all aspects of them and create asymmetries. Our entire online world has the possibility to be changed: there are no natural limits.
While there is the possibility for this to be truly wonderful (like you mentioned it was for you), there is also the possibility to go horrifically wrong.
I think, in America, we have failed to regulate and protect our people from the new dangers. This is the root of our issues, not the internet itself-- the internet just highlighted these deficiencies.
Some examples:
- No good data protection in the US.
- General prioritization of profit of companies over the health effects on people.
- Awful anti-trust laws --> massive monopolies + lack of small business protection.
- Lack of regulation of consumer goods before they are placed on the market (this is specifically a US issue... not the case in the EU).
- Educational inequality --> misinformation + lack of critical thought.
These issues are true far beyond the internet, but the internet did highlight this issue and give it room to fester. So, yeah, the internet was a net negative... but only because US regulation is so awful.
The internet was no more a mistake than highways or trains were in terms of moving stuff large distances.
However not many people drive on highways 24/7
I think it's s matter of overload that is the thing that needs to be brought under individual control with app or site blocking schedules to avoid burnout.
The addiction that started with the Crackberry has now become ubiquitous and it's really a matter of individual self-control that is needed.
Personally, I blame ad-driven social media. It causes people to sort themselves in buckets, and filters for an extremely biased view of the world, and actively encourages exaggeration and misrepresentation. We see all the good stuff "our side" does, and all the bad stuff the "other side" does, and the bits that rise to the top are the most biased and inflammatory.
The Internet, or smartphones? Would the Internet have been more tolerable if it required larger devices to access? Or if access had more gatekeeping for technical savvy? Or required a non-trivial expenditure of wealth, not on the level of a car, but something where a lot of people would say "a game console is cheaper and would make me happier"?
My guess would be that the "objective" effects are net positive, but that the felt net effects are probably negative due to the greatly increased exposure to both the many, many occurrences of bad things happening to people worldwide and the, often artificially inflated, successes broadcast by peers.
I think to answer this question, you'd need to know all the positive effects of the internet as well - increased connection for some people, unrestricted information for people in authoritarian states, speed of communication that allows charitable efforts to respond more quickly than they could in the past, etc.
Apologies if this comes of as too obvious of a comment, I just thought that it was worth pointing out. I have a suspicion that how you lead questions about technology has a large effect on what people will end up agreeing on: ask whether technology is good because of the things I mentioned above, and people will agree tech is overall good. Ask whether tech is bad because of the important things you mentioned, and people will agree that tech is overall bad. So it's important to start the conversation with info from both perspectives.
The internet was a “mistake” in the same sense that the printing press was a mistake: opening up the capacity of people to spread ideas means more low quality ideas will spread. Roman Catholic theology based upon Aristotelian/thomistic philosophy gave way to simplistic literal interpretations of the Bible, because of the printing press. As a true believer, though, I think this is all by design: the internet has made it possible for people who really love the truth to find more of it than ever. Just look at this community! It couldn’t exist without the internet. I see all of the unhappiness and misery you are describing, and ascribe it not merely to the internet, but as an inevitable result of the decline of religiousity. Being anxious and nervous is only reasonable if you think the essence of being is some mindless machine that appeared for no reason and then somehow, after a bunch of violent natural selection, somehow produced sentient apes. This perspective is the same as that which produces Moloch: the idea that the world came from chaos and we are but accidents, subject to powerful forces that are mostly indifferent to us, but if we make the right kind of sacrifices maybe we’ll get eaten last. The idea that God made the world out of love for us and that humanity has a special place in the cosmos is, I think, a recipe for basic human happiness. People who told themselves they rejected religion 100 years ago still benefited from herd immunity to existential nihilism. That’s now wearing off.
To add a counterpoint, as someone from an atheist family within a largely atheist country, seeing the universe and life as amazing beautiful complexity emerging from a few basic physical law, makes me feel awe and wonder, certainly not anxiety!
I agree. I have never wanted for profound beauty in the natural world. That the oceans, mountains and stars timelessly abide without reference to my human concerns is comforting, not nihilistic. It's religion that has always seemed to me--with no disrespect intended to the religious, whose experience I fundamentally don't understand--as an anxious and paranoid worldview.
In my opinion, an atheist who sees the complexity of the universe with awe and wonder has a healthier relationship with the true essence of being, than does a theist who is terrified of being punished after death with eternal suffering.
Good points, but I have a different theory. It is the amplitude of Angst over the life course that has shifted with the decline in religion, not the average.
Young people get more worked up, while older people relax more, when religion declines. In the old days, religion provided comfort in youth, when fear of death is at its highest (n=1, but knowledge that I would one day have to die reached peak fear at 12).
When you age, and probably for evolutionary reasons, you relax more at the thought that highly likely Nothing awaits you. Compare that to the old days, when fear that you might end up in the Wrong Place probably increased with age . Hence the widespread tendency to bequest stuff to the Church.
In the end it’s an empirical question, of course. “Some do and some don’t”, to quote the first law of sociology.
In lieu of systematic empirical studies, anecdotal evidence can be worth looking at. Here is a link to a recent interview with the philosopher Robert Stern (b. 1962), who at the end of the interview shares his reflections on life and death since being diagnosed with cancer in the brain. It is a worthwhile read for those who are interested in how to live with the knowledge we all share, that death is inevitable. The relevant part of the interview starts here:
Interviewer: I think about death at least once a day. Are you scared of death?
Stern: This turns out to be a particularly topical question! In the new year I was diagnosed with a type of brain cancer with a short life expectancy, though some people do much better than others. Obviously, this puts things into perspective, making the possibility of death a bit more vivid than it usually is in ordinary life.
This may of course depend on when you grew up, and I believe I'm older than the median around here, but -- I doubt very much that US young adults today are collectively more anxious or mentally ill than when I was one. They are _differently_ so in some ways, and also more public about it than my cohort was. But neither of those things is actually a net increase, and if anything I suspect that the overall net is a decrease.
All the research on this question suggests otherwise, to a degree that makes me think it's very unlikely that it's *all* spurious--that it's *all* a result of today's young adults just being more open about the anxiety they're feeling or whatever.
Yeah, I agree. Most "material metrics," like teen suicides for example, have increased by a lot over the past 20 or so years. There have been some metrics (like violent crime in youths) that have dropped, but that is mostly just because we are inside on our phones all the time.
Digging into this a bit, looking at CDC data as reported by Pew and others, I find that:
-- teen suicide has not been increasing for twenty years but rather just during the past ten. It was at about 8.0 per 100,000 in 1999, the same for 2004, and about 8.3 for 2011, 2012, and 2013. Then its real rise began with 2014, peaking at 11.8 for 2017. It has since drifted back down a little but is still at about 11.
-- that increase has been not at all evenly distributed across the U.S. "The five highest-ranking states for teenage suicide, according to the latest CDC data, are Colorado (21.2 deaths per 100,000 youths), New Mexico (21.9), Montana (30.3), South Dakota (33.6), and finally Alaska, topping all 50 states with 39.8 deaths per 100,000 youths....From 2015 to 2019, urban suburbs and big cities had the lowest youth suicide rates. The community types with the most youth suicides tended to be more geographically scattered, relatively isolated groups, such as Native Americans, members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, strongholds of evangelical Christian practice, and farmlands in the Great Plains."
And regarding the influence of social media on that, I wonder, are some of those named groups living in isolated communities online differently than teens in suburbs and big cities? Less so, or more so?
Remember the selection effect. These are states that young people net migrate from. Those who migrate (mainly to big cities I assume) are likely to be a select group of more resource-rich youth, and therefore lower suicide risk. Increasing the percentage of suicides among those who remain.
Add to this the "death of despair" effect that Angus and Anne Deaton has written about. Young Caucasian men in middle America are particularly at risk here.
I don't think the data supports the idea that the internet, or social media, or smartphones, or any other recent trend, has resulted in an increase in youth suicide.
On Georgism - if there is the Black Death round 2 and suddenly much less people and (likely) less demand for land, would governments be more or less robust if they were solely dependent on LVT?
More or less compared to what? Currently, the US government relies heavily in income taxes (including Social Security payroll withholding) while European ones rely, I believe, on consumption taxes. Anything that causes there to be many fewer people will cause there to be less tax revenue; presumably it also causes there to be less demand for government services. Funding sources and tax rates can be shifted with relative ease (although revenue as a portion of GDP is uncorrelated with these factors; see https://www.mercatus.org/research/data-visualizations/tax-rates-vs-tax-revenues). To try to answer your question, land values in high-demand places would probably be impacted dramatically, while those in places that are already in low-demand would be impacted very little. So how much revenue is lost depends on how much your government depends on taxes from the latter (although the point of and LVT is to reduce the insane prices in those places, so maybe it wouldn't actually matter).
However, the extent to which states are robust to a sudden large drop in population probably has more to do with how much they spend, what they spend it on, the extent to which they can change those things, how that spending is impacted by the population decline, etc. For example, a lot of spread-out infrastructure like roads and sewage systems might make sense for the current population/density, but not if those numbers dropped by 50%, and that's not easy to quickly reduce spending on. On the other hand, the largest cost of US federal government spending is social security (especially if Medicare is included); presumably, beneficiaries of these programs would be disproportionately impacted by a plague--but if not, reducing spending on these programs is politically impossible. Overall, people would probably have to get used to a lower standard of living than they were used to (fewer people = less specialization = poorer) and handling this fact might be the most important thing you can do.
Sweden has rather high consumption taxes (a 25% VAT and probably higher sin taxes than any other EU country), so I'd expect other high-tax countries to be even more tilted toward income taxes but broadly similar. I wouldn't be too surprised if the lower-tax countries of Eastern Europe turned out to be more tilted toward taxes on consumption, though.
Page 2 has exactly what we're looking for (although for OECD, not Europe specifically).
For income (including social security and payroll but excluding corporate income) we have
US: 66% of tax revenue
OECD: 52%
66/52 = about 13% more.
For VAT + goods and services we have
US: 17%
OECD: 32%
32/17 = about 88% more.
So you're right that what I originally wrote is wrong (assuming the non-European OECD countries don't affect the data much), but my corrected statement about relative reliance looks good.
LVT only gives you the base on which the tax is computed. You still have to multiply that by the tax rate, which can vary from year to year. (e.g. become higher when a war is waged).
In your black death situation, all the bases on which taxes are computed would be affected downwards : revenue, corporate profit, traditional land tax, sales, etc.
Well, in theory, LVT should always be equal to 100% of the unimproved value. Taxing less than that is typically viewed as a compromise, or something you have along the way as you slowly increase the rate.
Really? I thought that "100%" was mostly a number used for thought experiments, and that in practice the LVT would be set to whatever percentage would bring in the needed amount of revenue. (Which might actually be more than 100%, in which case you'd better improve the heck out of your land!)
I thought the theoretical arguments indicated more was better (up to 100%), and this was the stretch goal. Is there any guarantee that even 100% LVT would actually pay for all of what modern governments do?
I have no idea! Mostly, I'm sold on the basic premise that an LVT is a better tax than pretty much all other taxes, with the exception of "sin taxes" like alcohol taxes and carbon taxes.
The general problem is that if you tax something, you get less of it, and you distort the market around it. So the typical solution is sin taxes, where those are the effects you want. But the LVT seems like a clever way of taxing something where you can't get less of it (and the distortion is, again, something you want).
> Conservative estimates show that we can entirely pay for any one of Defense, Social Security, or Medicare + Medicaid using land rents alone. And optimistic estimates suggest that we're within striking distance of the Single Tax–replacing all labor and capital taxes with taxes on land rents (on the federal level, at least).
So I would say "probably not" but it could substantially lower other taxes (although spending would probably just increase instead).
How much does children's vaccine response vary year-to-year / with age? I'm asking because my 4.5-year-old used to shrug off vaccines (including claiming that the pediatric COVID vaccine didn't hurt at all, either during the shot or afterwards), but this year his flu shot brought several days of a painful, itchy, warm-to-the-touch rash. From what I understand, this is still within the range of normal (if on the more annoying side of it), but I'm concerned about the dynamics: does this mean he'll now get reactions to all shots, and will the reactions continue to get worse over time? And if yes, what can we do about it?
IIUC, the reaction to a vaccine is strongly dependent on how much your immune system changes. If it goes into immediate attack mode, you have a strong reaction, and also a strong immunity. If it takes it awhile, you have a weak reaction...and you have to test to determine the actual immunity.
This being the case, if you've already been exposed to the thing being vaccinated against, you'll have a stronger reaction. The current flu vaccine is a mixture of strains (as is usual).
N.B.: This is just a VERY general rule. There are lots of special cases and exceptions. But it's a decent rule of thumb.
It can vary by age and by vaccine! The contents of the flu vaccine (antigen-wise) change year over year depending on the strains that are predicted to circulate. There's no particular reason to believe this most recent shot is going to begin a pattern of a pattern of worse and worse reactions
I posted about looking for a job in the last classifieds thread. I'm happy to report that, as a consequence, I did in fact get a job which I will be starting this week! I thought that others might be interested in this fact as a data point on how useful that thread is.
Yes; I had two people reach out to me and specifically mention my post (one in reply to it, actually). I interviewed with both companies and accepted a job offer from one of them.
I'm looking for a nuanced and intelligent place to be able to talk about or read about changing definitions in autism diagnosis, and more broadly the movement of self-diagnosis among adults. In general I'm skeptical of this.
My therapist thinks I might be autistic. In a lot of ways it fits thinking about behavior as a kid that would be called stimming now Etc. And whether or not I'm think the diagnosis is important, having that theory of mind for myself has been really helpful in understanding my own behavior. And a lot of it feels reaching because I don't know that I have struggled more than the average person with relationships or communication. Ie. Where is the line between masking and having good communication skills that take into account what someone else's experiencing? I would love to see nuanced discussion on this and I'm not finding anything.
What you are describing is quite relatable. When my girlfriend started self diagnosing herself, scoring high values in all kind of online tests for autism I thought that it didn't mean anything because I scored high in them as well. Am I autistic too, now? Took me some time to figure out that the answer to this question, as a matter of fact, is yes.
I live in a country where its virtually impossible to get diagnosed as an adult. So self diagnosing is the only option. I suppose it also makes the stigma of self-diagnosis to be less severe. I think your current stance - noticing how the framework of being autistic is relatable and what explanation power it has, without wholeheartedly committing to the label - is good. It's your journey of self discovery, first of all, not an exercise in identity politics. Even if your autistic-like symptoms are below some kind of threshold that needs to be passed, it doesn't really matter if you learn useful skills in the process of figuring it out.
In general I think what we call autism is a multidimensional thingy. The category we use probably doesn't carve the reality too well. So just keep it in mind and see what works or doesn't work for you. In my observation, there is a huge difference between autists traumatized into being socially conscious, and autists who had supportive and acceptive environment, thus managed reaching adulthood, preserving the "don't care what other think of me" attitude.
My personal hugest quality of life improvement was figuring out that I can be sensory overwhelmed. Previously I just thought that I occasionally feel bad for no reason, especially on sunny days. No I just wear dark glasses all the time and can notice other stressing factors.
It's worth noting that the claim that autistics (all) lack a theory of mind is AFAIK complete rubbish. It's possible autistic children gain this ability later than non-autistic children, at least on average. But every person on the spectrum I know can reason about what other people might intend by their behaviour, what they might know that others don't (and vice versa) etc. etc.
The other thing worth noting is that the metaphor of an autistic spectrum isn't a great one. People tend to think "rainbow" and look for each individual's position on the rainbow, with a sense of "more" or "less" autistic. That's not how it works. There's a decent article about this on the net, which says this better than I can; if I can find it again I'll either add the URL to this message or put it in a comment.
Also, you might find more nuanced discussion in groups made by autistic, for autistics. There's a certain amount of identity politics - we're human too - but some of us have autism as a "special interest" and research it in depth.
It seems to me that the "theory of the theory of mind" is a confusion of two different things.
1) Yes, for autistic people, the predictable objects are somewhat more interesting to observe, and other humans are somewhat less interesting to observe, and as a consequence they develop the theory of mind later (and the theory of trains or computers sooner).
2) But also, our theories of humans start with "what would *I* do in the same situation", so it is easier to predict someone similar to you, and difficult to predict someone very different. And this is true whether you are autistic or not, except that autistic people are judged by how well they predict non-autistic (i.e. different) people, while non-autistic people are judged by how well they predict non-autistic (i.e. similar) people, which is an unfair comparison.
In other words, we judge autistic people for failing to correctly model non-autistic people. But when non-autistic people fail to correctly model autistic people, that it excused because "of course it is difficult to model *weird* people -- that doesn't mean that you don't have the theory of mind, it only means that they are weird". I mean, I know that I have a problem understanding other people, but I also know that other people have a problem understanding me (they told me so themselves), and yet somehow *both* of that is my fault? Rather than both sides having the same kind of problem understanding someone truly different?
Also, let's not forget that the non-autistic people made the social *norms* where some things cannot be communicated explicitly and must be figured out by observing other people and disentangling their webs of lies. (Everyone says X, but everyone actually does Y. To be successful, you also need to learn saying X and doing Y.) If we instead had a social norm of calling things exactly what they are, perhaps the autists could learn the theory of mind the same way they learn math.
My resentment about claims that autistics lack "theory of mind" would be a lot less if the so-called experts defined it the way you do. Sure, autistics aren't as good at predicting non-autistics, on average. Non-autistics seem to average even worse than that at predicting autistics, so that's hardly a unique problem.
Instead we're told that autistics are incapable of predicting _people_, or even conceiving that they should. Meanwhile, non-autistics who are particularly bad at dealing with autistics are lauded to the skies for their brilliant social skills.
When I first encountered this, I got to chose between meanings for praise of a person who routinely made me uncomfortable. I was told she was, unlike me, particularly good at making people comfortable. Was the person who told me this wrong? Were they lying? Or was this social skills expert intentionally using her real skills _in reverse_ so as to make me uncomfortable. (I didn't consider that perhaps I was not in fact included in the set referred to as "people", which, in retrospect, is the most likely explanation - not as a rejection and de-humanization of me per se, but as a shared theory of mind that agreed that no person like me could possibly exist.)
Theory of mind, as described by those who claim autistics don't have it, makes no distinction such that you did above. It claims understanding _of people_. Not of people-most-like-you. Sometimes it's so blatant that it plainly demonstrates the author's lack of a remotely accurate theory of any autistic mind.
It is possible that the expert was doing some X that many people perceived as comfortable and you as uncomfortable.
Again, we have 2 possible meanings of people skills. First, it could be that someone is good at observing people, and can figure out what makes a specific impact on each individual. Second, it could be that someone has a standard set of actions that make the desired impact on maybe 80% of people, and has practiced those actions to perfection. From outside, it could even seem quite similar -- each of them tries to achieve something and gets a 80% success rate. But the 20% failure of the latter is caused by lack of flexibility; trying the same thing, whether it works or not. (And the 20% failure of the former could be a lack of practice; figures out the right thing to do, tries to do it, not always succeeds.)
And again, what is the "theory of mind"? A theory of *average* mind, like a list of actions that statistically work on most people? Or having a lot of experience with minds in general, so that the person can figure out what works on you (i.e. can learn from feedback)?
Archetypes: a psychoanalyst or a salesman. (The former can figure out anything about anyone, but it would take a lot of time and individual attention. The latter has practiced a simple routine that works on a typical person, and can do it efficiently.)
I tend to regard a person whose "theory of mind" is "everyone reacts just as I would" as having a deficient theory of mind.
They are still ahead of someone who thinks that everyone else knows and feels exactly what they do, in spite of different experiences - i.e. if they know where the candy is located, so does everyone else. (That person doesn't really know that other minds exist, seperate from their own.)
Next up would be someone with a theory of average mind, who doesn't know it's average - they believe that it applies to everyone, and aren't aware of its frequent failures. If they also happen to have a mind that matches the average they believe in, they are probably just a lucky example of the same deficiency as the first one.
To have a real "theory of mind", if the term means what I've regularly seen it claimed to mean, you'd have to understand that people are different - it's not just that they have different knowledge and experiences.
A person with an actual theory of mind might be more or less competent at hypothesizing what might be going on in other people's heads, and how those other people might react to their behaviour. The salesperson/robot with a script might even do better than them _on average_. (Though I've never seen anyone this inept.) But they have a far better chance of learning.
I wouldn't count someone as having "good soft skills" unless they understood that people were different, and could deal reasonably with most people regardless of those differences. Certainly the sales-robot has lousy soft skills, even if its programmed patter regularly tricks its targeted personality type into buying things they don't actually want or need.
I agree with your hierarchy. Also that people who talk about "theory of mind" way overestimate the abilities of non-autists -- they talk as if non-autists have the "real theory of mind", i.e. can understand different people, while most of them probably can only understand similar people with similar experience, and are just lucky that their mind/experience is typical.
That said, I suspect that the "robotic" skills are quite powerful in real life. In the sense as reflexes are way faster than thinking. Like, if you see someone do something really fast, it is a result of training, not thinking (although thinking may have preceded the training). Similarly, if you see someone extremely socially successful -- like, sells lots of expensive stuff, gets lots of votes, etc. -- you are more likely to see a robot in action (though it can be a person with the true theory of mind, who figured out the stuff that works on most people, and then practiced it a lot).
What I mean by this is that people with the best "real theory of mind" will probably not be famous for it. It is a skill that makes the greatest difference in individual interaction with different people (while the famous people are good at interaction with lots of people at the same time). Possible exception: someone who is famous for successfully negotiating e.g. with terrorists (interactions with different people, 1:1, high probability of success required).
Thank you. I will look at both, if I'm able. The identity politics in the sphere are definitely confusing to me, and some of it seems... just factually incorrect.
Could you make a basic thesis, or maybe provide a link to a blogpost explaning the idea how people with severe autism can be harmed by the existence of hype around autism as less severe autism cases are revealed to be quite common?
My intuition is that it can be the case when the resources to treat for autistic people is in fixied supply, an this supply starts to dwindle as people who need these resources less get access to them. But this really doesn't seem to be true for market economy, where increased demand naturally leads to increase in supply and lower prices due to economy of scale.
Thank you, Freddie. From the title of the book (Chasing the Intact Mind: How the Severely Autistic and Intellectually Disabled Were Excluded from the Debates That Affect Them Most) and from what you have written (that I've read) about serious mental illness, this is indeed part of what I care about and am concerned about.
And at the same time, I think if I had had, as a child, an understanding of my sensory needs I could have spent my teenage years using a compression vest, for example, or knowing how to recognize overwhelm and isolate and avoided years of intense self-harm. And in that way an autism label would have been helpful.
I really like her book (n.b.: have a distant personal connection to Amy Lutz/have met her) but I think it would only be of limited use in understanding your position. It mostly covers the history of severe autism and how such individuals are perceived, and only touches on high-functioning autistics insofar as they are opposed to functioning labels.
I don't have any concrete suggestion, but I'd like some clarification to your question.
Autism vs non-autism is almost certainly some sort of continuum ... being autistic or not is not like having type-O blood or not.
We (society, individuals, doctors) draw a cut-line somewhere in the continuum and say, "On this side one is autistic, on the other one is not." The line is fuzzy, but still.
Are you hoping for a nuanced discussion of where one should draw the (moderately arbitrary) line? Or something else?
yes, I am looking for and thinking about where to draw the line. The element of difficulty with function in (modern) society is one place, though still somewhat vague. In general I agree with the basic premise I've seen Freddie deBoer put forth about distinguishing serious mental illness from ...not as serious possible mental illness or maybe just normal humanness. Not having read Amy Lutz book that he mentioned--Chasing the Intact Mind: How the Severely Autistic and Intellectually Disabled Were Excluded from the Debates That Affect Them Most--the title seems to imply a similar message.
I am, for example, technically visually impaired. With glasses I have less than 20/20 vision. However, I am clearly not on the "spectrum" of blindness. I am not at all impeded by my vision. But if I lived in a society where visual aides were only given to people who experienced something that we consider to be on the spectrum of blindness, and therefore I had no glasses as a mildly impaired person, my condition would be a lot worse... In the reading I've been doing some people do suggest there is a clear distinction between autistic and not, though those who are autistic will be on a spectrum within that. Like, we are all on a visual ability spectrum and within that is a distinct and separate blindness spectrum (I'm sorry if this is ableist as a metaphor or otherwise offensive to compare the two, I was looking for something that all people have a version of and that has a distinct set within that not all people belong to).
Anyway, yes politically and socially we decide the definition of things and I am concerned about over generalizing with the label autism. I'm definitely confused by the people naming themselves autistic and then saying that the idea that autism is defined by trouble reading other people, or trouble with communication is outdated and wrong (mostly see this in the late-diagnosed women high functioning group). This seems explicitly counter to what the DSM5 says as diagnostic criteria, and what the foundation of autism is (of course I know the DSM is a social and political tool and product but still--also, I didn't read the DSM just a summary elsewhere). This is also the subgroup of people naming themselves as autistic who are making a case that autism is what has otherwise been called "highly sensitive person or empath."
I fit the criteria of this group much more closely than parts of DSM, AND I am highly skeptical of this group, and what I have read there I so far don't put much stock in. And YET, I think if I had had, as a child, an understanding of my sensory needs I could have spent my teenage years using a compression vest, for example, or knowing how to recognize overwhelm and isolate, etc and I could have avoided years of intense self-harm. And in that way an autism label would have been helpful.
So I'm looking for a place to talk about or read about this kind of nuance, or a place that has a basic rational level of precise language use and self-awareness.
I recall some book with a name like "Shadow Syndromes" that basically promoted the idea that various (mental) disabilities remained in the gene pool because it was good for human groups to have some members that tended in that direction, but not too far. And also good for the individuals concerned.
So a person with a little bit of schizophrenia might have a richer-than-normal spirituality, and make a great priest or shaman, but not be out of their mind, crazy, or unable to function in normal society. A person with more schizophrenia might be able to function as clergy, but be otherwise impaired. Still more, and they're just stark raving mad. (Contrived example mine, not from this barely remembered book. And yes, I'm using a stereotypical soundbite version of schizophrenia here. This example is not to be taken seriously.)
That book didn't discuss the autistic spectrum - and in fact it predated the term "autistic spectrum disorder". But one could imagine those "highly sensitive people" (lacking other autistic attributes intense enough to notice) as being perhaps an example of a desirable "shadow syndrome" version of ASD.
And there, I think, is the problem. I believe it's not *A* continuum, but several. (At least as the term is used. Perhaps there's some medical definition that's more precise.)
I think of it as a network of filters and amplifiers, with different filters tuned differently. The network has both lots of feedback and feedforward connections. Autism (as commonly used) can result when any of several of the filters are maladjusted, or when the associated amplifier doesn't work properly.
(Note that there are lots of different tunings that are considered normal. Only a small subset of misconfigurations are called autism. Othere tunings can yield other collections of symptoms with names like paranoia, schizophrenia, etc. And there can be multiple causes of the misconfiguration.)
This isn't a very useful model, as it lacks sufficient detail to be applied. Generally we work with things that adjust global variable setting. But it's better in that it avoids the assumption that you're going to find everyone along a one dimensional line. Things don't work that way.
Not a problem per-se as I have no strong opinions here. But *you* seem interested in discussing/exploring the model (or model-space). I don't know if this is what Jordan19 wants to do. Thus my question.
Happy 300th Open Thread everyone! Recently I made a temporary commitment, neither related to my professional life nor a personal obligation to anyone else, that had me doing an estimated 3000-4000 miles of driving in my car alone (I get a little over 40 miles to the gallon). Does anyone have any idea where and how I should go about offsetting this carbon footprint, and how best to calculate roughly how much money that would cost?
Climeworks offers the option of paying money for carbon capture; according to Wikipedia, the captured carbon then gets handed over to Carbfix for injection underground where it will mineralize (so, actually captured). They operate on a subscription model (I assume you can cancel the subscription), and the going rate seems to be $28 / 20kg of CO2 (where one gallon of gasoline produces ~20lbs CO2, per NASA Science Kids). Taking all this at face value, an upper bound on the money involved is 100 gallons * 10kg / gallon * $28 / 20kg = $1400. My understanding is that direct carbon capture is one of the most expensive methods of CO2 reduction, but also the most certain of actually reducing CO2.
Burning fuel involves, very roughly speaking, taking an atom of carbon from the fuel, adding 2 atoms of oxygen from the atmosphere, and getting a molecule of CO2 as a result. There are also other atoms in the fuel so the net weight increase isn't just the straight added weight of the oxygen atoms, but the basic answer is "the combustion product should weigh more than the input fuel because burning is taking stuff, usually oxygen, from the atmosphere".
Gasoline is a hydrocarbon, thus mostly carbon by weight (since hydrogen atoms are much lighter than carbon). CO2 is mostly oxygen by weight, since it has two oxygen atoms per atom of carbon.
Gasoline has ~0 oxygen in it, being pretty much a pure hydrocarbon. Every molecule of CO2 has 32 atomic units of oxygen to 12 of carbon. Thus, you get much more (by mass) CO2 than fuel burned because the extra mass comes out of the air that must be supplied.
I suppose, then, that they mean mass instead of weight, as CO2 is a gas and despite the extra mass weighs less than the gasoline, which is more compact, being a liquid.
Still, to capture the carbon would mean releasing the oxygen. I'm not sure this is the correct solution for the world, as oxygen is abundant in the atmosphere, and everything needs carbon; plants get it from CO2 and release the oxygen.
The CO2 gas has more bouyancy than the fuel, but I don't think the bouyant force counts as part of the weight (maybe coloquially, but not technically), so the volume increase doesn't affect the weight, which is still just proportional to the mass as usual in a pretty much fixed gravitational field.
I recently purchased an app called Stellarium. You can use it to view in real time the constellations and planets by pointing your phone at the sky (or even the ground, to see the view from the other side of the earth).
Absolutely love playing with this and highly recommend it to anyone who looks up at the night sky and wishes they knew what a certain star, constellation or planet was.
*I have no affiliation with this app or anyone who worked on it
It's a lot of fun, absolutely. Stellarium even has axial procession; try going back in time 2000 years and looking at the Southern Cross from Athens, Greece.
Another website that seems related, is SelfDecode which claims it will provide personalized medical advice based on your genome: https://selfdecode.com/en/about/.
Lol, I am an MD, and could have a go, but diagnosis over the internet is not widely considered Best Practice. I presume you’ve been to a series of doctors and specialists in real life already?
Indeed, probably north of a 50 over the years. The problem is: most are either GPs with only superficial knowledge or specialists that do their 2 standard tests and then discharge you.
My issues are mostly related to my digestion and inflammation. I now have a new functional medicine doctor that seems to have some relevant knowledge, but it's hard to tell what is legit and what is just pseudo-science.
If it makes you feel better it really doesn’t matter how sound the scientific basis is. Have you ended up with a diagnosis of IBS from the mainstream medical establishment? That’s what seems to happen to most people with generalised digestive issues
I am not a doctor, but I work in a relatively related field and I think I have good experience with a small but not insignificant number of pathologies. On the off chance that yours falls within the ones I know, feel free to MP me.
As Metamed is apparently no longer a thing, you might want to try a concierge doctor. These are primary care medical practices which take a lot fewer patients than the standard model so they can give each patient a lot more time and attention, but they charge you an annual membership fee of a few hundred to several thousand dollars. A lot of these especially on the high end overlap with direct-pay primary care, where they don't bill insurance and your membership includes a certain number of office visits and in-house labwork.
In my experience, concierge doctors even at the lower end of the scale (e.g. OneMedical, which I'm with now) tend to be more responsive to patient concerns and a lot less likely to brush off difficult-to-diagnose symptoms with a PRATFO, and you get more 1:1 time with the doctor than most traditional practices.
That's what metamed tried to do, but they didn't work out. You could probably still hire Zvi to do it, he has an hourly rate for general work, but 10k would buy you like 10-20 hours at it and no guarantees he'd find anything.
Agree with someone's suggestion of Sarah Constatin. I don't think Zvi is a great choice. I'm sure he could do excellent research, but you need someone who has more background knowledge in biology and medicine.
Hello fellow rationalists and compassionate souls,
I am reaching out to this insightful community following my inspiring read on Scott's altruistic kidney donation. Life has a poetic way of intertwining our stories, and today, I find myself reaching out on behalf of my father who's in dire need of a kidney transplant.
My father, a 68-year-old dedicated radiologist, has been extending his expertise and care to a marginalized community in the rural southeast of Turkey, near the Syrian border. His relentless service continued even as he battled Polycystic Kidney Disease (PKD), a condition I inherited from him and him from my grandpa whom we lost after a couple of years of hemodialysis in 1996. However, the relentless march of time and disease has cornered him into a four-year-long ordeal with periton dialysis. His medical indicators are not painting a promising picture and the waiting list for a transplant seems to stretch beyond the horizon.
His life is a testament to the positive ripple effects a single individual can generate within a community. Now, as his health deteriorates, I am compelled to seek a beacon of hope that could promise him more years of service and love to his family and community.
I have been encouraged by Scott to share our situation here, with the hope that among you lies a potential donor, or someone with the information that could lead us to one. While age might be a factor of consideration, the spirit to give and save lives transcends numerical boundaries. We are willing to travel wherever necessary to make this transplant a reality.
It's a long shot, but a shot nonetheless. In a realm of rational thinkers, I find my plea swimming against the tide of statistics and medical advisories. Yet, within the logical fabric of this community, threads of compassion run deep. It’s a test of altruism, spurred by Scott’s own journey, nudging the world, one kidney at a time.
The rationalist and EA community's endeavours always echo with logic entwined with empathy, and today, I seek that blend in saving a life that has saved and enriched many.
Should you wish to discuss this further or need more information, feel free to reach out to me at emdincerext@gmail.com.
Thank you for your time and consideration. Your thoughts, prayers, and any leads are immensely valued.
At one point there was a donor pool , set up I believe by some tech person who wrote software for making the best set of matches been members of a donor group and members of the recipient group: Everyone in the pool had found someone who was willing to donate a kidney, but was not a match for them. Then their donor gave to whoever in the pool was a good match, and the person who brought the donor into the pool received a kidney from some other donor in the pool. If that still exists, it seems like a great idea.
Now we started exploring avenues for a transplant in Iran, which is interestingly the only country with a legal and state regulated free market for kidneys. I hope that works. Otherwise we'll see about the donor pools.
I read a book by someone who had helped his cousin get a kidney in China. Cousin got advanced medical care, and a kidney from a criminal who had been executed. Book was written at least 10 years ago, though: Larry's Kidney, by Daniel Asa Rose. It's not a practical how-to, more a loving and funny memoir, but you do pick up a lot of info about how one gets a kidney. It's s great read, by the way.
I've come to the idea, perhaps not conclusion but close, that our civilization took a long detour to the notion that we could re-program human beings to behave in very different ways. In that detour we not only lost the thread of our culture but also the thread of our species' evolution. To what degree does human evolution impact our behavior? Rob Henderson in a recent substack post wrote this:
"To be sure, there are socio-cultural influences involved here.
But environmental factors do not operate on blank slates. To understand young men and young women, you have to take into account not only the cultural context but also evolved sex differences."
My question is has the fairly new study of evolutionary behavior brought us full circle to an appreciation of human nature that was once foundational to western culture? I tried to make that argument here: https://falsechoices.substack.com/p/the-human-heart. Would be interested to know what this group thinks???
I'd suggest that human nature is always there, but it's more of a pressure. And that the re-programming can work on some levels (look at religions, cults, and political movements), but there's always the pressure underneath, an undertow pulling people back into the ocean of raw human nature. Lasting religions take this into account.
A lot of the top-down "re-programming" feels like it comes from a line of kings, philosophers, and merchants, who were used to applying their favorite tool and getting results, and who were used to viewing large numbers of people as uniform undifferentiated "masses".
The piece was well-written and somewhat poetic in tone. I enjoyed that.
As for the idea, there may be an interesting perspective there. I’m not sure. I don’t think you explored it deeply enough to make me truly interested, convince me that there’s anything there, or give me a perspective I might come back to later. If there is a there there, maybe you relied too much on people’s knowledge about the thinkers you reference? I suspect some more specifics, examples and your own interpretations – maybe an acknowledgment of the value of the thinkers’ contributions, rather than framing it only as a “detour” – would have gone a long way toward convincing me the idea has real legs. (It would probably be a challenge to pull off that style of writing in a deeper exploration, though.)
I hope you end up writing that version of your idea. I think I would enjoy reading it.
"Human nature" is an annoying half truth. People, I suppose because they're human, both over-and under-estimate its effect. More specifically, people may claim that their ideal society will comport with "human nature". They're probably wrong.
For example, there seem to be differences on the average between men and women, but some men want the quiet life and some women are ambitious. Neither are unnatural, and my ideal society would have room for both.
That is to say, I'm probably going against human nature because people are naturally cruel and censorious.
I'm less on your side than you might think. I probably haven't been aggressive enough to make that clear.
Here's a big change in human nature. Most people, or at least most people in places where I hang out, think they have an innate moral revulsion against owning slaves. I'm reasonably sure this the result of a long propaganda campaign.
Looking at human history, slave-owning was pretty normal. The extraordinary thing was a middling-successful campaign against slave-taking and then slave-owning. I was surprised to find out that outlawing slavery in western Africa was a motivation for colonialism because there were African empires who were *very* fond of owning slaves and fought back against threats to take their slaves away.
I consider it possible that cultures that didn't want to own slaves were wiped out or conquered.
I also think it's possible that a least one person reading this owns a slave, and the slave is someone with no or uncertain right of residence who's trapped into domestic labor.
The very existence of racism is what I'd call a big change in human nature-- I think the natural unit of trust is ethnicity. I'm not sure what it covers, but at least similar language and accent. It can include skin color, but it's definitely finer grained than a sketchy similarity of appearance.
The thing is, human nature is somewhat malleable, the question is how much rather than yes or no.
I’ve seemingly developed a bad bout of tinnitus in the last month or so. My noticing of it lined up with a particular bad upper respiratory illness, but I’m long since recovered and still struggling with the tinnitus. I do go to loud music shows but I wear earplugs and I’d be surprised if the 1-2 shows I went to in the last month were the tipping point, but fear I may have to accept that reality.
Anyways, it’s really disturbing my meditation ritual. As I try to relax and just notice sensations, it quickly becomes the loudest and dominant wavelength in my consciousness. Does anyone have any advice or know of others who have had similar struggles?
I had some amount of tinnitus since my thirties. Ok, I once slept a bit in a large loudspeaker and went to some loud music shows. Over the years I got accustomed to the tinnitus and it doesn't really mess up my meditation.
That’s encouraging, thank you for sharing. Did you approach the tinnitus (specifically during meditation) with any particular focus? Or was getting used to it less intentional
Definitely not intentional. I had enough worse nuisances to take care of. Just speculating, maybe the sometimes intense pain in group zazen during the first years helped, too.
I had this same problem with tinnitus and meditation.
I mostly relieved this problem via a special kind of meditation I stumbled upon while I was meditating.
It essentially involved keeping the body extremely still and relaxed for a long time, and meditating on releasing the desire for the tinnitus to go away.
Not sure if this explaination was sufficient, but it worked very well and the experience was life changing
Thank you for sharing, that makes a lot of sense to me. In fact, I’ve had similar ideas, and it seems quite supportive of the direction I’d like to take my practice anyways (not assigning good or bad quality to any experience). Not quite there yet, but your example is encouraging!
There are lots of ways of getting tinnitus without noise exposure - for instance, your respiratory illness might have caused too much pressure in the ear when it can't equalize properly (pollen allergies are a known cause of tinnitus for the same reason).
Your bout of upper respiratory illness may have something to do with this by, e.g., causing Eustachian tube blockage. If possible, a visit to an ear-nose-throat specialist may be useful. For a low-risk intervention, you may try heat around the area and, to exclude the easy-to-treat external blockage as a contributing factor, use an ear wash kit to flush out ear wax. Like this one: https://www.walgreens.com/store/c/walgreens-ear-wax-removal-kit/ID=prod6214109-product
Thank you for sharing, that is interesting and helpful. I had a bit of a theory myself that a particular practitioner of myofascial release might be able to help me under a presumably similar mechanism.
Try opening the NIOSH app or another sound meter in one of your shows. Almost certainly you will find that earplugs alone are insufficient to render the amount of noise “safe” if you measure correctly; the NRR of the hearing protection (unfortunately, deceptively, stupidly) does not reduce your exposure linearly by that amount of decibels. 100 dB concert wearing NRR 33 ear pro (some of the best available without doubling up) only reduces exposure to 87 dB which is still in the damage range. And many concerts sustain well over 100 dB.
I know this because I go to an indoor range quite often these days and after taking some basic measurements with a NIOSH meter I realized I have to double up on ear pro. Anybody in there with anything less than foam + over-ear is certainly getting damaged and on a busy day, probably severely.
Most pop music concerts are going to be much worse for this. The discrete peaks aren’t as bad as gun peaks, but the sustained volume is way higher than the range (where between shots it’s as quiet as any empty room), and will very quickly take you over recommended exposure levels even with good ear pro if you’re close to the sound system.
It's annoying when the last half an inch or so of shampoo in a bottle won't flow to the nozzle and thus can't be used. It isn't miserly to want to use the whole bottle, but a commendable wish to avoid waste. But fear not, I have a solution!
Just add some water to the empty bottle and shake, I hear you say. But it isn't as simple as that, because watery shampoo is very likely to pour straight down one's face and into one's eyes. And it isn't worth using the last drop if you end up looking like a red and blinky eyed Nosferatu for hours afterwards!
No, the trick is to put aside the nearly empty bottle and start using a new one. Then when the new bottle is around three quarters full, pour the diluted remains of the previous bottle into it and shake. The result will be slightly less viscous shampoo, no more likely than the original to flow freely, and a completely used previous bottle!
If a half-inch of shampoo cannot easily be shaken out of the bottom of a bottle, either your preferred shampoo is inordinately viscous, or there is not really half an inch left, but just a thin layer clinging to the walls!
I haven't tried your method, but for accessing the last drops shampoo as well as toothpaste, moisturizer etc. I highly reccomend the method of cutting the container in two near the top. Use the top part as a makeshift lid. I'm often suprised at the amount actually left in the container.
"Unrelated but related: You can open any hard to open jar by stabbing the lid to let the pressure equalize."
I have a protocol question. Are you supposed to say something like: 'Hello, my name is Inigo Montoya. You killed my father. Prepare to die.' before stabbing the jar?
This does require having more than one bottle of shampoo handy. I just shake the bottle in an arc motion so that the centrifugal force makes all the leftovers collect inside the cap.
I just rediscovered Rainmeter - a piece of software that allows you to create your own custom widgest for Windows and I've been having tons of fun costumising myy desktop. It's way cooler than it sounds and the community is quite big with tons of people creating skins and widgets that you can use
I've taken the MSG-pill and have become enlightened. Started adding a bit of MSG to my pasta sauces and it's an instant and highly effective flavor enhancer. Would recommend that my fellow readers also try it.
A hypothesis. While I don't think MSG itself is directly unhealthy, I think it's possible that by adding MSG to foods we increase the chances that we pick up unhealthy habits like overeating. It basically makes food so much tastier that it becomes easier to keep eating. I haven't seen this exact dimension of health impact explored very much when MSG discussions come up and I would appreciate any thoughts.
I heartily recommend Trader Joe's Mushroom & Company multipurpose Umami seasoning blend. It does what it says: make everything umami, even your finger when you sample the stuff. All natural ingredients but based on postings here, sounds like plenty of natural MSG.
An unrelated thing I learned: after the US retreated from Vietnam, Vietnam invaded Cambodia and occupied it for a decade. I never heard about that until recently (I tried asking some people and none of them had heard about it either).
The morality of this is complicated since, in fairness, the government Vietnam replaced was the Khmer Rouge, probably the most evil government in history. But it doesn't seem like Vietnam was super great either.
I think the reason this got so thoroughly memory-holed is that it showed the domino theory (and thus America's reason for being in Vietnam in the first place) wasn't actually totally wrong. The Vietnam war is super discredited in modern culture, so no one wants to mention the negative (or controversial) effects abandoning it had.
Yes, that and the war Vietnam fought with China around that time is not much discussed in the states. When I was in high school the last thing history classes would cover was US involvement in Vietnam before they ran out of time. I'd count those events as a strike against domino theory (communist movements/countries had rivalries with one another) but I gained a lot more sympathy for the domino theory and anticommunist policy making in that period after I read Maoism: A Global History. There were revolutionary movements all over the world and especially in southeast Asia working quite closely with Mao in that period.
The domino theory is about communism spreading. How is one communist government overthrowing another communist government evidence supporting domino theory?
Was it necessarily about it spreading by influence rather than conquest? Laos also went communist at around that time (and iirc Vietnam backed communist guerillas in Thailand as well), so it does seem like there was contagion.
The rise of the Khmer Rouge in the first place is a better data point in favor of the domino theory. KR was heavily supported by the Viet Cong and the North Vietnamese Army during the Cambodian Civil War, and it sounds like KR's final offensive to secure power was roughly simultaneous with North Vietnam's final conquest of South Vietnam.
The subsequent Vietnamese-Cambodian war seems more in the nature of a falling-out between victorious allies once their common enemies were out of the picture, or perhaps a suzerain suppressing an unruly vassal state.
While Vietnam may have provided some support to the Khmer Rouge, their chief benefactor was China. This is one of the key dynamics underlying the eventual Vietnamese invasion - Vietnam was Soviet-aligned and the Khmer Rouge was China-aligned, and this was the era of the Sino-Soviet split.
Also, the Khmer Rouge instigated the conflict when they conducted multiple failed attacks on Vietnamese territory.
Yeah, that's what I thought. Any use of "communist" that implies that two communist countries are on the "same side", stopped being meaningful at that point, but discourse still hasn't caught up.
In fact in its final years, the Khmer Rouge's main sponsor was none other than the good old USA.
And under the leadership of the very same Vietnamese-installed government, Cambodia is now rapidly becoming a Chinese vassal state. The more things change...
I mean, both? You convince some people, enough to start an insurgency, that insurgency turns into a civil war, and then you send along troops to help out the Communists in the civil war. That's how it spread from Russia to China, to Korea, to Vietnam, etc. Get the job started with propaganda and finish it with troops.
In the sense that no one I talked to had ever heard about it despite it being a pretty big deal. I'm sure actual historians of the area have lots of opinions about it, but most normal well-educated people have just never heard of it.
While I don't think MSG is in itself harmful, I try to steer away from using the purified stuff and instead just get ingredients that contain lots of it (tomatoes, mushrooms, kombu, fermented stuff like Vegemite), plus it's close relative inositic acid (sardines, seafood). One reason is culinary - I find straight MSG a bit flat, and most things that contain MSG bring more layered flavours, which avoids the artificial chicken flavour taste common to instant noodles and chips. Second is because I recently learned that there's a lot in food, chemically speaking, that is still a mystery - if you ran a gas chromatograph mass spec on basically any kind of plant based food, tomato, carrot, anything, the vast majority of the peaks would be an unidentifiable compound. I'm worried that we crave MSG because it usually occurs with some specific micronutrient (which we haven't discovered yet) and using purified MSG might trick my system into not craving/ getting enough of it.
So my suggested substitute is freeze dried mushroom (you can break them into bits, rehydrate, and cook, or you can simply powder them straight into the sauce), Vegemite/Marmite, and perhaps an anchovy or two. You could look up what ingredients contain a lot of glutamic acid (the ionic form of MSG)
You are correct in thinking we enjoy MSG because it is associated with an important nutrient. It is however not a micro nutrient, it is protein. Glutamic acid is an important part of protein synthesis.
Yes, it makes food taste better. I understand the reason for that is the taste interpreters in the brain keep firing and firing, and get overstimulated and then die. To be safe, I try to avoid MSG.
So some excitotoxins apparently aren't as harmful as I thought. Killing brain cells doesn't sound like a good idea, but it apparently isn't always widespread enough to do significant damage, the brain cells get replaced, or other factors are at work. Capsaicin is so widespread I can't believe it is significantly harmful.
Nonetheless, a relative of mine has what I consider an allergic reaction to MSG, and has as long as I can remember. I withdraw my blanket statement that everyone ought to avoid MSG, but my family still will.
I'm a bit addicted to balsamic vinegar, and I use it in much the same way as you to spice up pasta sauces among other things. The most expensive balsamic vinegar has a thick dark consistency, almost like molasses but not as viscous.
Despite its name. it doesn't taste acidic. But that could be because sugar or something is added to disguise a vinegary taste. So it could be every bit as acidic as normal vinegar, and I sometimes worry that if I overdo its use then my teeth will start falling out and I'll get stomach ulcers!
Does someone have a link to a nice primer on how various things in history are dated? Here are types of questions I would like to know answer to.
(i) Websites are full of estimates for Euclid's date, but I couldn't find what the "hard" upper and lower bounds are, what the "confidence intervals" or "epistemic status" of these datings are etc.
(ii) Say some prehistoric population has made cave art or pottery (e.g., Chinese pottery from apparently 20000 years ago), an ancient king has got letters scratched into a rock or a pillar, or there is a copper plate from a medieval king recording some grant. I guess these can mostly not be carbon dated. How are they dated then, and how reliable are the estimates?
Why does wikipedia typically not give "hard" upper and lower bounds for various dates?
When dating historical events during written history, it depends on what we have in writing and how well we can connect it with other known dates.
For instance, if someone wrote that an event happened during the reign of some king, and we know when that king reigned, then we can at least date the event to a range. This range is generally considered very set, since the dates of kings was often well known and written about. If we have additional dates, we can hedge it in further. For instance, if the record includes the names of people who were alive at the time, and we know when they died, then we can further narrow our search. If Mary was alive from until 855AD, and Tom was alive until 847AD, and an event happened while Mary was alive but Tom was not, that tells us the event happened between 847 and 855. And sometimes sources just tell us what year it is, either in whatever calendar system they used at the time, or in reference to something - "In the fourth year of the reign of King Harry IV."
The problem with "hard" upper and lower bounds is that there's a level where we're not very confident in what we have, especially if we have to relate it to something else. This is especially true the further back in time and the fewer sources we have. We often have a secondary source that's our only remaining source (Homer in the Iliad, Herodotus) for something that *probably* happened, but maybe not the way it's told or with the details that are included. And if this secondary source wrote dozens or hundreds of years after the events it depicts, then we're counting on them being right about the events and also trying to work backwards from what they describe to try to get a date. It's not unusual for some writing or reference to be the only source we have about a person or event. Some king may only exist as a reference in a secondary source writing about something completely unrelated and to an audience who was just assumed to know who the writer was talking about.
Thank you very much. Implicit in the question about "hard" upper or lower bounds is the question of whether existence is known at all. The uncertainties of the sort you mention are typically acknowledged in some standard reference, but a lot of other references simply seem to give "estimates" that are much more optimistic than "hard" bounds, and for any given person it seems often difficult to make out the "epistemic status".
Yes, a lot of the hedging has to do with lack of confidence in our source(s) for a particular person or date. It's often a "if this source is accurate, then the date should be between X and Y" but not really knowing if the source is all that dependable. Herodotus, for instance, is one of the major sources for our knowledge of lots of events from the ancient Mediterranean, and also includes various supernatural events and details that are extremely unlikely to be true. The Persians attacking Greece with a million man army comes to mind - logistically that is almost certainly not possible with their level of technology. So do you cut out our only source, that's probably got a lot of good and accurate information? No, but you hedge pretty hard on the epistemic status.
Thank you. My problem is precisely that I don't see enough hedging; epistemic status is so systematically erased in most writing, that the odds of finding epistemic status on searching any given document seem low (e.g., how many randomly chosen "historical" writings on Euclid does one have to see before seeing one with epistemic status?). Hence the question of whether one can do such a thing as an epistemic status search.
That also bothers me a lot. You will see concrete non-hedging descriptions of ancient peoples, customs, whatever, and think that we must have a lot of evidence about it. If you dig further, we might have found a few pieces of pottery in a dig site or a bone that looks like it was shaped into a tool, and that's about it.
Maybe academia doesn't allow people to admit we don't know (won't get published saying that) and so we don't see people admit it.
(i) Dates of historical figures are based on written historical sources. Trace back the footnotes in secondary sources and you will eventually get to the primary sources. (If you don't get there, find better sources.) "Confidence intervals" aren't really meaningful for this sort of thing; "epistemic status" comes down to how much you trust the sources you are relying on.
(ii) Any introductory archaeology textbook will cover this. Here's one you can read online:
As mentioned on that page, ceramics can be often be approximately dated using thermoluminescence methods. (Note that this wasn't what was used for the 20,000-year-old pottery sherds from Xianrendong — those were dated stratigraphically by radiocarbon dates of associated materials.)
I don't know if there is any good physical dating method for copper, but some metal objects can be dated by radioisotopic methods. The age of objects made from gold, for example, can be estimated using uranium-thorium-helium dating. But as far as I know, this isn't super reliable: I think it is mostly used to distinguish genuine ancient objects from modern forgeries. The archaeological context will usually provide better clues to the actual date.
Carbon dating is a subset of radiometric dating. Carbon isn't the only radioactive isotope! I'm no expert on such things, but can say that because radioactive isotopes decay predictably into other atoms, some of which are also radioactive, you can look at the proportions of other radioactive atoms and, knowing their half-lives, make a reasonable estimate of how long it took to decay to the current state.
(This said in hopes that a clearly expressed preference might help you remember things you want to remember, not in an attempt to put pressure on you.)
In the UK, the Shadow Chancellor Rachel Reeves just published a book, she is a smart economist having worked at the Bank of England a successful parliamentarian and she was a top chess player in her youth.
Her book has whole paragraphs copied and pasted from Wikipedia, the Financial Times found 20 instances in the book of plagiarism.
How common is this kind of thing? Are politicians and economists regularly doing this but no one notices? Is there anyone who does plagiarism checks on books? This case was just spotted by the FT book reviewer.
But it probably only counts as indirect evidence, because she's fictional and the whole book is an extended joke. Except that part of the humor is that it's taking a normal thing and exaggerating it, so...
I don’t know this case in particular but there are similar ones from other countries. (Where theses are plagiarized for example)
My personal opinion about this kind of thing in general is that many ambitious people in high positions are not particularly conscientious and they are more willing than the average person to take on tasks that they are not qualified for and to try to gain qualifications by doing a shoddy job. Like getting phd’s by doing a minimal amount of work or delegating it to other people.
Not an answer, but my guess is that this is what happens when you have a high profile full time job or two and two kids, decide to write another book in the side, and put in copied chunks of text making the same basic point you want to make and that "you'll get around to reworking and/or referencing properly later" and... probably just forget you did that.
From memory, I don't think any of the passages taken were particularly distinctive/interesting/valuable text, they were fairly bland summaries of historical points. To paraphrase the saying, never attribute to malice what can be explained by carelessness or laziness. (She is, clearly, not stupid.)
My guess is she hired someone to write it for her, and that someone was lazy. Maybe the person hired decided to outsource his own job to a college freshmen for 50$ and a 12 pack of beer.
Well the burden of proof is on you here, on your claim that was a “lucky spot based on serendipity. “. I am not sure what that means exactly. What was serendipitous.
Recently Scott made a post speculating that more building activity and less strict zoning laws (YIMBY) might actually *in*crease housing prices. He got a lot of push-back, especially from economists, and updated accordingly.
An important example was Tokyo, where housing is cheap. This was mostly attributed to high building activity. Now Tyler Cohen has argued that this is attribution may be wrong, and that the main factor is not (only) building activity, but rather peculiarities of Japan which makes Tokyo unattractive for new residents. He doesn't go so far to share Scott's original interpretation (that building more houses mean larger prices), but he does propose a weaker version: that some informal "housing restrictions" may decrease housing cost.
I was sympathetic to Scott's original argument, and updated together with him when the push-back came. But after reading Tyler's arguments, I think that perhaps I updated too much.
Isn't Japan losing population while having very high restrictions on immigration? I wouldn't have updated too much on Japan either way, since it's not like SF (the example Scott was looking at the most), and the trends are in reverse.
I thought Scott was wrong and pushed back at the time - what he's noticing is true, but isn't based on city size or population, but how many people want to live there but don't now. Detroit seemed to me the clearest refutation of his point. Lots of population loss and a tremendous drop in land values, despite still having a fairly large population.
> An important example was Tokyo, where housing is cheap
I thought housing was cheap in Japan generally because what with regular earthquakes, and possibly termites not helping, houses are not long-term assets but have a rough (quoting from memory) expected lifespan of little more than fifty years. So they build mostly in wood, and their houses start going downhill from the outset, whereas for example my house was built in 1756 out of stone, and is still as good as new (apart from some pointing, which needs redoing!) But if housing in Japan is cheap, I also thought land there was expensive!
Scott’s arguments are to small amounts of construction relative to the housing stock in desirable areas. A nice city that has plenty of amenities but bad housing, or housing too far away from where people want to work or live.
Build more housing there, where people want to live, and prices for these desirable houses will be expensive pushing up average prices. This is possibly true at the margins.
I mean, unless I am missing something, Tyler Cowen this just says that formal and informal immigration restrictions decrease housing prices for domestic population? Which, duh. It doesn't actually in any way refute an argument that housing prices are also decreased by allowing more construction.
I think Cowen is also saying/implying that there are formal and informal systems in place that act as de facto rent control, though it was a bit unclear what those are.
Regardless, if you propose “Yimby = lower rent, just look at Tokyo” then all alternative explanations for Tokyos supposedly lower rent are relevant, even if they don’t entirely refute the argument. It’s enough that they complicate the picture.
(For the record, I’m skeptical of Scott’s original argument, but would also be surprised if demand for housing didn’t have feedback loops that made it at least partially self-reinforcing.)
I realize that I am splitting hairs, but I just find Cowen's style of engagement with YIMBY argument somewhat, um, unconstructive. Like, various other than construction factors are everywhere? I hear there is a lot of crime in San Francisco, which surely lowers rents compared to where they would be had SF had same level of crime as Tokyo. Whole YIMBY argument is based on the fact that other factors being constant, rents would be lower with more construction. Of course we all know that housing isn't like oil, with almost single price set on the international market, amount of construction being the only thing causing prices to diverge in different locations. This doesn't mean that an example of successful urbanization policy from a foreign country should be ignored on the grounds that Japan is somewhat different from.... US or EU (where I live), or Canada or wherever.
I think we might generally agree. I guess I got the impression you were being overly dismissive of TC’s argument, which (even if it doesn’t work great as a stand-alone argument in the overall YIMBY/NIMBY debate), seemed particularly relevant in context of debating Scott’s original theory. But I may have read too much dismissiveness into your first comment.
Does anyone have an intuitive explanation of why integration is generally so much harder than differentiation?
I get the kind of practical reasons – the need to cancel terms that would appear when differentiating back again, the fact that there's an infinite number of possible antiderivatives, etc. And I have a hand-wavy sense that you're going "up a dimension" and this implies that the antiderivative encodes more information.
But I haven't seen a clear conceptual reason why finding a derivative is essentially an algorithmic process, while integration often requires a lot more creativity and strategy, and is frequently not possible at all except numerically.
There's already good answers ITT by people more erudite than I. But the way I've answered this question for myself is: differentiation "loses information" in the specific sense that it subtracts the bulk of the height away from any given coordinate. Whereas integration from a to b "adds information" in the sense that it sums the heights of coordinates over the entire history of the interval a to b.
Instead of thinking of a graph as a squiggly curve, it's better to think of a graph as a bar chart. For any given x_i, f'(x_i) represents the height of a bar of f(x_i), minus the height of the bar f(x_i - h) to its left. Differentiation then represents compression in that it deletes the height-information that gets repeated between any two neighboring points. You can see this directly encoded in f'(x) = lim (f(x) - f(x-h)) / h.
For integration, thinking in terms of barcharts is already made more explicit in the form of Riemann-sums. int{f(x)} represents taking all bars over an interval, and stacking them together in a single bar. Instead of deletion, this results in duplication. Because a single bar in the original function shows up not just in a single bar in the integral, but in several bars in the integral. It's like a convolution in the sense that it smears history.
And so if you think of an algebraic expression as a tree, differentiation results in deletion of nodes, whereas integration results in duplication of nodes. Wrestling with a bigger tree is obviously harder than wrestling with a smaller tree, ceteris paribus.
edit: I messed up the formatting of the subscripts e.g. f(x_i) being f(x)_i.
There's an old Shtetl Optimized post where Aaronson mentions in passing that in highschool, he found a pattern: the differences between consecutive integers is 1, the difference of the difference between consecutive perfect squares is 2, the difference of the difference of the difference between consecutive perfect cubes is 6, etc. And then he speculates in hindsight that this was probably similar to Newton's train of thought while inventing Calculus. Several of the commenters said they had a similar experience too.
I too had a similar experience. Which for me, was born out of a lazy desire to find a shortcut to graphing parabolas. More specifically, I observed that the difference between consecutive perfect-squares was always 1, 3, 5, 7, etc (assuming a = 1) and then attempted to generalize to higher powers of x. This observation seems trivial with the hindsight of calculus, since f(x) = x^2 entails f'(x) = 2x. But it sure didn't feel that way when I was busying calculating with pencil and paper "which non-zero constant does x^5 recursively diff to? (assuming x is set of consecutive natural numbers)" in the middle of precalc class (or was it trig? I can't remember).
So while I don't have the etymology on hand, I wouldn't be surprised if "differentiation" was named so because it involves taking the differences in height between consecutive bars. And similarly, "integration" was probably named so because it "integrates" a bunch of bars in the original graph into each bar in the output graph. And I get the feeling that "differentiation/integration finds the slope/area of a curve" is an abstract explanation that only makes sense in hindsight. During the process of inventing calculus, the process probably had a more numerical flavor.
In any case, try to solve the x^5 question without resorting to calc. It might give you a better feel for what differentiation is actually doing (and maybe why factorials show up in taylor series, etc).
They're often presented this way, but I wouldn't think of differentiation and integration as inverses. Rather, the fundamental theorem of calculus relates the two as follows: integrating the derivative of a function over a region is the same as integrating the function over the boundary of the region. IMO it follows that the proper way to think about differentiation is as a sort of boundary-taking that can transform the function instead of the region, and integration is not the inverse but a distinct operator that performs continuous summation.
In that frame, there's no reason to think that differentiation and integration should be comparable in difficulty. Differentiation and boundary-taking are algorithmic for many functions and regions likely to be of interest. Integration involves lots of numerical computation unless you're clever and/or lucky enough to be able to use the fundamental theorem to shift the integration into a lower-dimensional space. If you are, you still must integrate but you might have an easier time with it (in the 1-D case, the boundary of a 1-D region is a signed pair of points, over which integration becomes taking the difference, which is obviously a win).
I don't know if this is a good explanation, but... All functions are integrable, but not all functions are differentiable. So maybe when we start with an arbitrary function and integrate it repeatedly, we are climbing up a ladder of complexity, and the reverse process tends to be easier.
[Edit: reading on, this looks like a rough intuitive version of some of the answers given.]
Taking it a stage further, solving a first order ordinary differential equation (ODE) can be thought of as a problem of implicit integration, and finding a symbolic general solution amounts to manipulating it into a form where the integrand is an explicit function of an independent variable.
Even if the success of this symbolic manipulation is elusive or (perhaps in some cases?) impossible, every ODE should have a numerical solution in the form of a family of curves parametrized by as many constants as the order of the equation i.e. the highest order derivative occurring in it (besides singular solutions, which sort of span the entire family in a suitable way).
But partial differential equations (PDEs) are generally vastly harder to solve than even ODEs, because the latter relate only a single variable to one other independent variable, whereas for a PDE more than two variables interact and there may be whole classes of solutions above and beyond simple equations in terms of explicit functions with a few constants thrown in.
The general solutions of some PDEs, where these are known, can involve literally "any function(s) you like", subject to the boundary conditions of the problem, e.g. (off the top of my head) something like f(x + y) + f(y + z) + f(z + x) = 0 where "f" could be anything!
A while back I had the chance to meet Martin Hairer, who has made huge inroads into that field. I had to produce a layman's description of his major work, for the general public. When I sent it to him he said, "Congratulations. It seems you have learnt enough mathematics to say things that are definitively false, not simply meaningless."
> it starts with the effects and then calculates the causes
Subtraction is harder than addition (not by much, but it's not just counting up), Division is harder than multiplication. Roots and logarithms are harder than powers and exponents. Integration is harder than differentiation. Solving an equation is harder than substituting a number in it. Proving a theorem is generally harder than checking if the proof is right. P is probably much less than NP.
Quite often solving an inverse problem consists of repeatedly applying the forward problem (long division is one of the first examples students encounter), and in general one has to search a much larger space of possibilities.
Try thinking up forward problems and their inverses, and you may notice the reasons why inverse problems are harder.
yes, although "easy" differentiation is conceptually an extension of "hard" division. And "hard" integration is conceptually an extension of "easy" multiplication. So I'm not sure whether this is the most useful framework of answering the question. Or at least, it lacks an explanation for this paradox.
The way integration is usually defined is, in contrast to those other examples (with the partial exception of logarithms) not simply as the inverse of the more basic operations, but it gets its own definition (Riemann or Lebesgue style), with a theorem to prove that integration and differentiation are to some extent inverses. Looking at it this way, the definitions of integration are still much more complicated than differentiation though. With differentiation defined as lim (f(x+h)-f(x))/h, there are reasonably simple algebraic reasons for the chain rule, product rule etc. but with the more complicated definition of integration, whether that's as the Riemann integral, Lebesgue integral, antiderivative or any other variants (of which there are probably many), it's not too surprising that a complicated definition yields a complicated result.
A mildly related fun fact: there's a version of differentiation which is defined as sort of the inverse of an integral, the Radon-Nikodym derivative.
Differentiation is a local operation. Assume you want to compute f'(x_0) for some value x_0. Then it suffices to know how f looks in a neighbourhood of x_0. If you have another function g that coincides with f in a small interval around x_0, then they will have the same derivative at x_0. More important, if you have a function g that looks "roughly" like f on this interval, then f and g also have the same derivative at x_0. I don't want to go into detail for what "roughly" means, but there are tons of ways to make this precise, and I hope you already have some intuitive (or rigorous) understanding.
Integration is not a local operation because it always has a reference point. The inverse derivative F(x_0) of a function f is "integral from 0 to x_0 over f(x)". Even if a function g is identical (or similar) to x close to x_0, their inverse derivatives F(x_0) and G(x_0) will not coincide. For that, we would need f and g to coincide in the whole interval from 0 to x_0.
If you would define integration as a local operation, which only describes the part of the integral around x_0 (something like lim_{\eps \to 0} \integral from x_0-\eps to x_0+\eps f(x)), this is again a local and very simple operation. In fact, it is too simple: it just gives you back the function f if we scale it properly. That's the main theorem of integration and differentiation. We don't consider this "local integral" because it doesn't give us anything really new.
Now, the real reason why differentiation is easy: (almost) all functions that we ever consider are locally really easy. Locally, they always look "roughly" like a straight line. (That's pretty much the same as saying that they are differentiable.)
This also explains why we have something like the product rule: for a product like f_1 * f_2, in order to compute the derivative at x_0, you only need to know the two functions close to x_0. Since f_1 and f_2 look locally like a straight line, you only need to compute the derivative for the product of straight lines. If you work that out, that's the product rule.
Same for the chain rule: to compute the derivative of f_1(f_2(x)) at x_0, you only need to understand f_2 in a small interval around x_0, and to understand f_1 in a small interval around f_2(x_0). (Assuming that the functions are nice and continuous and smooth.) Since both look locally like a line, we only need to compute the derivative for the case that f_1 and f_2 are a line. This gives you the chain rule.
So in a nutshell: local operations are easy, non-local operations are hard. This is not just true for differentiation and integration, but extends to almost all of math.
By the way: if you are familiar with a bit more math, there is a scenario where you do consider integration in a close environment of a point x_0: if you can write f as a power series around x_0, then integration of this power series is really easy, and (with a bit of luck) you get a true formula in some environment around x_0. For that to work, you usually need the power series expansion *around x_0*, so you force the problem into a local framework.
Do you mean like when a Taylor series expands to higher powers and "hugs" more of the function it's approximating, you can integrate easily over a wide range?
Yes, kind of. I meant that if we have a Taylor series expansion, we can easily integrate it term by term. For example,
exp(x) = \sum_{n=0}^\infty x^n/n!
The inverse derivative of x^n/n! is x^{n+1}/(n+1)!, so an inverse derivative of exp is
\sum_{n=0}^\infty x^{n+1}/{n+1}!
which is again just the exponential function, shifted by an additive constant.
I think the explanation is pretty much what you say. By adding more terms, we are locally much closer to the original function, so our approximation is really good. Sometimes it's so good that it extends not just to the close neighbourhood of x_0, but beyond that. For example, for exp the approximation happens to converge super-good, and the integration formula extends to all real numbers. For the function log(1+x), the Taylor series converges moderately well, and the formula for the integral works for |x|<1. And for some functions the convergence is poor and it doesn't work at all.
There is a whole theory on how far exactly it extends, called "complex analysis".
It's still more complicated than differentiation (and doesn't always work), because we need a much better approximation of the original function f to make it work. For differentiation, approximation with linear functions is good enough. For integrations, we need the whole Taylor series, so we need to approximate it by polynomials with larger and larger degrees to even have a chance.
This is always a fun question! See https://mathoverflow.net/a/66381 for one good perspective, which I'll try and expand upon here:
Really, when people ask this question what they mean is "why are **elementary functions** expressed as formulae easy to symbolically integrate and hard to symbolically differentiate?", where elementary functions are those which are constructed by composing some familiar operations: +-*/ exp and log.
These are easy to symbolically differentiate because they are closed under the operation of differentiation and things like the chain rule allow an easy algorithmic construction of the derivative.
These are harder to symbolically integrate because they are not closed under the operation of integration: some things integrate to non-elementary functions. In fact, in an appropriate sense almost all elementary functions have non-elementary integrals. (For example, to any f(x) which happens to have an elementary integral, add c*g(x) where g(x) does not. Now only the special c=0 case has an elementary integral. All the rest do not.)
Since almost no elementary function has an elementary integral, any approach to finding one when it does exist must depend very sensitively on the details of the function. Therefore it's no surprise that basically the approaches to integrating symbolically amount to "try and see if it fits a special case you understand" - because only some special cases can possibly be integrated at all!
(But is there an algorithm to compute the symbolic integral if it is elementary or else tell you there isn't one? There is in fact a (semi-)algorithm called Risch's algorithm, which is a true algorithm IF you can always tell whether certain expressions that comes up in the process is identically zero - no general algorithm for this subproblem is known, but in many practical cases this may not matter. But it's complex and very fiddly to implement so AFAIK nobody uses it in its full generality.)
I'll add also that as soon as you start considering functions not defined by formulae, or otherwise going outside of the elementary functions, it's a different ball game, which also helps give a different perspective on things. If I define a special function like the Riemann zeta function, in what sense is it "easier to differentiate than integrate?" I don't think this really has a useful meaning.
I would say that even when the integral involves elementary functions, it still tends to be much harder than the equivalent differentiation. For instance, beyond the simplest cases trigonometric substitution seems to me to be a bit of an art form, or at least involve some educated guesswork. But maybe I'm just not experienced enough at them.
Absolutely, it is harder (though with Risch's procedure technically it can be made mechanical - but still excessively complicated). I'm suggesting that's intuitively because
- any given algorithmic technique which actually tries to construct the elementary integral can only work in very specific cases (because in 'most' cases we know it will fail)
- it's easy to construct arbitrarily complicated functions which CAN be integrated to something elementary (just pick a horrible elementary function and differentiate it)
- therefore there's a need for either a huge number of simple techniques which almost always fail (how we teach the subject practically) OR a single forbiddingly complicated technique (Risch's 'algorithm').
Yes – I'm surely being obtuse here but... the very fact that it's easy to "just pick a horrible function and differentiate it" compared to the opposite, even in those (as you've explained proportionally few) cases where the opposite is possible, is the thing I'm still struggling with. Why does it follow from these cases being proportionally small in number that even most of these cases depend very sensitively on details of the function, rather than being easily generalisable in the way that the reverse chain rule and integration by parts are?
The key change of perspective I think might be helpful here can be seen by reflecting on your statement that "even most of these cases depend very sensitively on details of the function". What I'm saying is that if you let me tweak functions in any elementary way, then I can ALWAYS "slightly" tweak the function to make it not have an elementary integral. For example,
sqrt(1-x^2)
can be integrated using arcsin etc. (elementary, can be found with a trig substitution trick), but
sqrt(1-x^2.0001)
can only be written in terms of hypergeometric functions (not elementary, none of your tricks work).
(I won't try and formalise "slightly" here. This is only an intuitive argument to try and make things seem more natural, after all. But as I said before, I can always add a tiny multiple of a badly behaved function to your well behaved one and thereby break things.)
On the other hand, it's true that if you restrict the space of functions you're trying to integrate very heavily (more than to elementary functions), e.g. to polynomials, then we might find the integral is in fact always elementary. Indeed, however I tweak a polynomial, the function can always be differentiated and integrated equally easily.
Not a mathematician, just a lowly engineer with a long standing obsession with mathematics.
I think the difficulty of integration as compared to differentiation is a persistent illusion generated by 2 facts :
1- Integration is not closed on the set of elementary functions. Elementary functions are just a made-up set that people sometimes don't even agree on its exact membership, I think the minimal one can be defined recursively as :
[base case] I- The set of all functions of the form : x^a where a is any real number, sin(x), a^x where a is any real number, and log(x) are elementary functions.
[recursive step] II- Every addition, subtraction, multiplication, division, and composition of 2 elementary functions is itself an elementary function.
There is no real reason why this set of function is special. You can perhaps argue that its base case feature extensively in physical laws, but its not the **only** one that does. Why do Green functions, which feature extensively in Physics as far as I'm aware, not included ? Why not the litany of other special functions that Physicists like to call after funny German/French/English names ? It's just an arbitrary set. The (II) clause of the definition is even more arbitrary, the 4 "natural" arithemtic operations are not natural at all when extended to functions instead of bare numbers, addition and subtraction can sorta kinda look natural when you look at them through the plot of the 2 functions they act on, multiplication less so, division and composition contort the plots in outright demonic ways. Furthermore, other very natural operations, like the max and min operations, are extremly natural on graphical plots, but they're not included in the operations listed in (II).
For some reason, might be a deeper mathematical reason that I'm not aware of, it turns out that this arbitrary set is closed under differentiation : start with an elementary function, differentiate till the cows come home, and you will end up with an elementary function. For yet another reason, also not sure if it's deeper than coincidence, this set is not closed under Integration.
That's it, really. People are simply taught to look at functions a very specific way. Mathematics says that functions are arbitrary black boxes that takes something and give you back another thing. They aren't even restricted to numbers, but mathematical *curriculum*, after paying lip service to the set-theoretic general definition, almost exclusively focus on the made-up set defined by (I) and (II). As a result of the 2 curious facts about the closedness of this set under differentiation and integration, the latter "seems" harder than the former.
But if you adopt a more open-minded view towards functions, say you view them as programs (still a lie, some functions can't be expressed as programs), Integration is actually vastly more straightforward than differentiation. All it requires is repeated evaluation of the program and accumulation of the result it gives back. Yes, differentiation also becomes just 2 evaluations of the program in this view, but that's not because it's "easier", that's because it gives you inherently less information than integration, an integration is a summary statistic that digests all the values of a function, while differentiation is just... a differe-nce between 2 of its values, preferably close together. Differentiation is hard in Floating Point, which the way the vast majority of computers today try to represent real numbers, because it involves subtraction and division and those are hard in Floating Point. There is something called Automatic Differentiation (alternatively, Differential Programming) but this re-imposes the constraint that your program has to be composed out of elementary-function-like instructions, and introduces a whole bunch of headaches and complexities of its own.
2- The algorithm for differentiation of elementary functions fits on a postcard in mathematical notation. Translated into a pseudocode right now, a text file 237 bytes in size, roughly 50 words of English assuming the average English word is 5 letters. Meanwhile, the algorithm for integrating elementary functions [1] is described in more than 100 pages, presumably in the mix of English and math notations used in math papers that tends to be substantially shorter than the equivalent programs in whatever real programming language you choose to translate them into.
I think this is much more interesting than (1), (1) is just a random factoid about some made-up set, but this is a Computational Complexity thing, there is some hidden structure in differentiation of elementary functions that makes it extremly easy, and there is some hidden devilishness in their integration that makes it extremly hard. The "algorithm" in [1] is not even a proper algorithm, meaning it always halts with the correct answer, it's a so-called "Semi-Algorithm", meaning it can hang forever for some inputs, neither outputting a yes or a no.
For all I know, (2) might be just a consequence or a corollary of (1), or both of them might be completely unrelated factoid with no deeper reason, but (2) appears much more interesting to me, possibly because I'm biased.
In all cases, the "harder" perception is a fully self-inflicted one, only because you're biased to think of elementary closed-form formulas as the only functions that matter. Integration is easier (though more expensive) numerically, and purely mathematically it's actually a more "lenient" operation than differentiation : its conditions are less strict, more functions are integrable than differentiable. Using Fourier Analysis, the difference between those 2 operations melts away, they become multiplication and division of the same factor.
Imagine you're an alien who thinks that only positive numbers are true numbers and your brain hates elementary Algebra so much that it requires more than 100 page to explain to you, you will hate Subtraction more than death. Not only is the result of the Subtraction not gauranteed to be a true number, but the algorithm for obtaining it is so utterly convoluted and alien.
I disagree that the difference comes from our definition of elementary functions. That is arbitrary to some degree, yes. But the point is that differentiation is closed under multiplication and concatenation. If you start with a different set of "elementary" functions, and take products and concatenation of those, then you get into the same trouble.
I just wanted to point out that Green’s functions are not really eligible for inclusion in the canonical list of “elementary functions.” This is because they are not a class of mathematical function (like e^x, the Riemann Zeta function, etc.) but rather a class of physical functions which are solutions to differential equations. What makes a function a Green’s function is that it gives the response of a physical system (expressed as a system of diff eqs) to an impulse (delta-function) input. Lots of Green’s functions are elementary functions like sin(x); many are not.
My first instinct was to answer "I guess it's a bit like how factorizing a polynomial is harder than expanding a product of polynomials: expanding a product of polynomials is always straightforward, but there is famously no algorithm for factorizing quintic or higher-order polynomials."
After a little googling, I came across something called "Differential Galois Theory," which apparently allows the analogy to be stated more precisely:
In general, math is full of instances where calculating some function f is easier than calculating its inverse:
* integer multiplication vs division in base 10, as learned in elementary school
* evaluating a real function g for some x versus finding x so that g(x)=0
* squaring numbers versus calculating square roots
* evaluating boolean formulas vs finding booleans so that the formula becomes true (SAT, famously NP-complete)
* matrix-vector multiplication versus Gaussian elimination
If you sit in school and the teacher introduces some operation which seems straight-forward, "the inverse operation will probably be harder" is not an unreasonable heuristic.
I think that's trivially true, to the extent that which function is identified as "inverse" is somewhat arbitrary and you'll learn (or discover) the easier direction first.
I would argue that it is in some cases not arbitrary. Addition, Multiplication, squaring and exponentials all seam neater to me than there inverse operation. (It might be possible to define square roots and logarithms without squares and exponentials, but just in the same way as it is possible to walk through a wall rather than a doorway.)
Of course, if you asked my guts (which do not have training in real analysis) if calculating the slope of a function or the area beneath it should be more difficult, they would be completely lost.
But if you told them that one operation is the inverse of the other and asked them if both should be equally hard, they would probably opine that often, one direction happens to be much harder.
I don't know if there's any intuitive reason to expect it to be so. It's not that integration is unreasonably hard, it's just that differentiation happens to be unreasonably easy.
Two things make differentiation unreasonably easy: the product rule and the chain rule. These two rules between them give a simple analytic form for the derivative of pretty much any function that you can possibly compose out of other functions. There is no direct equivalent for integrals, nor is there any intuitive reason to suspect that there might be. Indeed, there's reasonably simple analytic functions that do not have an analytic integral.
The point I want to emphasise is that there's no intuitive reason to think that differentiation should be easy; it's only because the product rule and the chain rule just happen to pop out once you sit down and start doing the maths that it's easy at all.
There are direct equivalents – there's the reverse chain rule, and integration by parts is essentially a reformulation of the product rule. They just seem to be very limited in their applicability. There must be a reason why.
"You see a ball moving towards you, you can take a pretty good guess how fast it's going, and where it will land, but working out where it came from has many more possibilities"
The fundamental difficulty with working out its history is to do with gathering all the information. So maybe my "hand-wavy sense that you're going up a dimension so need to encode more information" is along the right lines...
What are the best ways to make a bet on AI being a 'big deal'? Most ppl in the world seem to underestimate how drastically it could change everything (good or bad) so there must be lots of financial low hanging fruit, right??
I've been told to buy stock in NVIDIA (already very highly priced because everyone has the same idea, unfortunately) and other companies in the semiconductor chain. If anyone has better ideas, let me know!
Could you tell me a story of how stock in NVIDIA could plausibly be a good investment? I mean, here are the scenarios I see over any significant timeframe:
1) Uncontrolled singleton. Ur ded.
2) Controlled singleton. Singleton seizes the means of production; your shares are worth nothing. Or singleton kills you (humans are capable of genocide too, y'know).
3) Butlerian Jihad. NVIDIA's stock price craters (as do all the AI companies'), and you still care about money.
4) AI not such a big deal after all (scaling hits a wall?). Investment in AI slows down, NVIDIA's stock price goes down (though not cratered), and you still care about money.
I mean, I guess it might continue to go up in the extreme near-term before it goes down in scenario #3 or #4, but to actually, really make money off that you need to sell before the collapse to a Greater Fool. Do you have a good idea of what sort of events are likely to cause such a collapse conditional on scenarios #3/#4, so you can sell before them? Do you trust yourself not to HODL out of FOMO and to instead sell while the price is going up? And for that matter, isn't one of those events in like 2 days (the AI safety summit in Britain)?
This is a problem with AI evangelists. Three of those options are very very low probability.
4 isn’t the only option if we aren’t doomed or become luddites. AI can still scale up or hit a wall. If it continues to scale up then nividia might be worth a punt. If not it don’t be.
Most people fall in the middle: they think AI is going to boost productivity, but it's still going to be very limited. For those people, nvidia is a good choice because they have a quasi-monopoly on AI hardware because the most popular AI packages use CUDA (though that may change now with pytorch supporting AMD ROCm).
Gwern's review of the MIT media lab [0] is what informs my worldview in this. The basic summary is that timing things is really difficult because you only earn the upside when you predict success correctly. However the earliest success is going to happen right after the last big bottleneck is solved, which means that's exactly at the point where solving the problem is the most difficult and unpredictable, and so even if you are directionally correct and even have good enough timing to get within, say, a year of timing your investments correctly, you are still likely to go bust in one of the failed run ups to the successful product!
This is not including more outside view argument, like how technology forecasting has almost always been a crapshoot, and there is no highly liquid market betting on new technology success or failure.
Skimming it, one high level takeaway is that getting in early matters a lot more than getting in precisely correctly, because of how the US treats long term cs short term capital gains.
You could buy property in New Zealand and remote Pacific islands on the basis that lots of rich people will start fleeing there when it goes out of control?
Hard to say. If it's a big deal in the "good" direction, you'd hope that everything benefits (e.g. the general stock market skyrockets - not individual stocks, necessarily). If it's a big deal in the "bad" direction then the general market would tank.
So the question about low-hanging fruit is less concerned about the bigness of the deal, and more about the direction of the change.
Yes, such a bet would be called a 'strangle' strategy in options markets.
Essentially, suppose the stock price of A is currently at £100, and suppose you believe that the price of A will be either above £120 or below £90 within the next 6 months. You can purchase both a call option (betting the price will go above £120) and a put option (betting the price will go below £90). If the price goes outside of the range £90-£120 you make a profit.
(In reality you also have to consider the cost of both options contracts in your calculations, but you get the gist of it)
The inverse of this (where you bet that the price of A will stay between £90 and £120 for a given period. Is called a 'Iron Condor' strategy.
Often this kind of thing is priced in, for example if a newly formed pharmaceutical company is releasing the efficacy results of a trial of its sole drug/product, its pretty clear that the price will skyrocket or plummit depending on if the drug passes its trial. Hence the options market will sell these contracta at a higher premium to account for this.
I think generally there are derivatives which trade based on volatility (or predicted volatility - like VVIX) - but I don't think there's an AI specific volatility index.
I wouldn't be surprised if some funds have their own internal composites based on prices of NVIDIA + other companies along the semiconductor chain + the tech companies working in the space
I don't have the link for it but at one point read "The Library of Scott Alexandria"--curated essay collection from SSC that I could download to kindle, for a much more accessible reading experience.
One side benefit of the trans rights movement is that this isn't an issue anymore. Anyone can have a non-legal preferred name recognized in all but the most formal of contexts, and nobody bats an eye. I knew a fundamentalist Christian woman who goes by Amadaia because she thinks her legal name of Brandy was too associated with immoral actions.
Over at Themotte.org people discuss culture war issues. If you are looking for discussion with people that you ideologically disagree with on a reddit style forum you might find it interesting.
It is descended from slatestarcodex via the slatestarcodex subreddit culture war thread which was discontinued and moved to another subreddit called themotte, and then there was some worrying levels of reddit censorship so themotte moved off of reddit entirely.
Warning: there are people you disagree with there. And often not just light disagreement. Like full on "our world views are incompatible" disagreement.
Hi ACXers. Last week I asked for your thoughts on Marc Andreessen's Techno-Optimist manifesto.
Over the week I've compiled everyone's responses on Substack. I've also added a few thoughts of my own - more pragmatic than rational - but I'd appreciate your thoughts and comments.
The more I think about "techno-optimism", the more I think it's quite parochial and probably not worth a manifesto. Tools and technology literally defines homo sapiens capability. So the interesting thing isn't about being optimistic about it really - we're going to build stuff because that's just what we do.
I'd like to talk with someone who lives at the Rationalist group houses in the Bay Area, or ideally several such someones. I'm looking for on-the-ground information about their locations and disaster preparedness; essentially, I'm concerned for your safety in case of either WWIII or US civil war.
Replying to me here would work. If you want some degree of privacy you can email me (same handle @gmail.com). You have my word I'm not out to do anything untoward; I'm just trying to help.
I'm curious why you're concerned about them in particular. Do you suspect that they are less prepared than most? care particularly much about them being prepared? think that you are particularly likely to be able to make a difference to them?
Regarding #2, I'd rather have Rats differentially survive a nuclear war than differentially die in one; gives us a better chance of pulling off an AI stop, among other "raising the sanity waterline is good" things.
Regarding #3, in a situation where order breaks down, an intentional community that preps is much safer than anyone else who preps (in particular, a food stash is not all that useful without the ability to defend it, and numbers and ingroup loyalty help a lot with that), improving the EV of prepping. Also, my read is that Rats have far-weaker absurdity heuristics than normal and are thus more likely to actually listen to me.
(To be clear, I spent the last election cycle here in Oz trying to single-issue vote on civil defence - I failed, because all parties' policy was the empty string, but I tried. The amount I'm trying to reduce casualties in general is significantly above zero. But yes, I am putting in some amount of Rat-specific effort.)
I have a sense that the conversation in Western countries around the Middle East is gradually changing to the point where most unbiased observers agree that Hamas is an awful terrorist hive of scum and villainy and eradicating them would be for the benefit of Israelis, Palestinians, everyone really. I say this as an Australian after a joint statement this morning by six of our former prime ministers to this effect. What's the vibe out there?
Huh. I'm not particularly hooked in to most news, but the general vibe I pick up has been shifting toward pro-Palestinian, as far as I can tell simply because Israel is currently doing most of the killing, and there's some sort of time-based discount function applied to atrocities.
I could easily be wrong about this, and my sampling of news sources may not give me a clear view of the current range of opinions. But since you ask, that's what I pick up.
What's an "unbiased observer"? If we're talking about an ethical question, different ethical systems may lead to differing conclusions about who is right and wrong, without anyone being "biased" in any way but using the same ethical framework as the speaker.
I think I share your ethical framework at least in matters like this. And I think most of the political leadership of the western industrial democracies do as well. So we're in good company, but I don't think it's fair to say that all the unbiased observers agree with us and all the ones who disagree are biased.
There are definitely a lot of people out there, including a good fraction of the political leadership of the not-western-industrial-democracies who see the Israelis as basically the equivalent of the Nazis, Hamas as basically the French Resistance, and the IDF as basically the equivalent of the SS and Gestapo thugs sent out to crush the French Resistance. Overall, this is looking like a Scissor Statement.
Yeah, I suppose we're all biased - much as I would wish to be a disembodied all-knowing mind effortlessly perceiving the whims of the universe, I too am a generic citizen of a Western democracy with all the values that that entails. I guess when I say "unbiased observer" I mean "person who is neither Israeli or Arab."
I think there are three things going on. Pro-Israel and anti-Hamas, pro-Hamas and and anti-Israel (sometimes also antisemitic), and people who really want peace and can't figure out how to get there.
I’m sad about the UN. I feel like the path to peace, or at least less civilian casualties, involved the first resolution passing (the one that condemned Hamas as a terrorist organisation). Then you could at least have some international agreement on who’s responsible and that’s the first step to getting aid to the right places. Instead you had the second resolution pass that called for a cease fire which obviously Israel is never going to agree to. Like Hamas is somewhere between partially and completely responsible for the deaths of innocent Palestinians
I think Hamas optimized heavily for being atrocious, and as a consequence should be wiped of the earth. I mean, even the fucking 9-11 attackers could claim that they did especially intend children causalities or causing excessive pain to their victims. Hamas behaved like the bloody Nazis, so their regime should meet the same fate.
If instead Hamas had limited themselves to executing IDF personnel or even murdered 1400 adults of Netanyahu's West Bank settlers, that would still have been a violation of the laws of armed conflict and I would still consider that bad, but not to the point that I would automatically support waging war against the perpetrator.
Urban warfare in a heavily populated area is an ugly affair, but Hamas needs killing, which in turn means the occupation of Gaza. I think that the IDF has every incentive not to target civilians (even if one assumed that Netanyahu would prefer the Gazans genocided, civilian causalities make for terrible PR long before they make a dent in the population).
Of course, I feel that my position is far from universal. From these infamous US student organizations which released statements that Israel is fully to blame before the bodies of the Hamas victims were even cold, to quite a few on the left (including Greta Thunberg) who think that the attention caused by Hamas slaughtering kids would be the perfect opportunity to campaign for "free Palestine" (optionally with the "from the river to the see bit", which makes the genocidal intend quite explicit) to Muslim majority states (which are not generally a shining beacon of pacifism and human rights) loudly protesting casualties in Gaza. (I guess Yemeni or Syrian civilians are just unlucky in that the people dropping bombs on them are Muslim instead of Israeli, so nobody cares about their plight.)
The history is that views will increasingly become more pro-cease fire as time goes by with an almost guaranteed series of Israeli bad behavior "trigger events" shifting opinion. It is noted that this bad behavior amounts to mostly run of the mill messy war execution mistakes and Israel is being held to an entirely different standard than their opponents.
What is different this time is Hamas has set a new standard of barbarianism from which the opinion needs to come down from. Dark days ahead for Gaza.
If the people who executed 9/11 were the government next door and they wore GoPro cameras to celebrate it on social media then the US would have leveled the place three times over. It's hard to remember the rage from that long ago, but it was very real.
I would have assumed that the pro Israel sentiment was going to fall off the further we got past the original atrocities and into the Israeli campaign.
Perhaps it’s less about immediate events as they unfold and more about sustained attention to both sides of the conflict and historical context beyond one line speaking points?
In Australia’s case it’s not even pro Israel - our prime ministers have expressed equal concern for the civilians suffering now as the victims of the initial attack. Just against those who seek to spread division and hatred for profit.
Well I spend no time concentrating on Australian politics but your first claim on this was that Australian politics has changed in its attitudes to rooting out Hamas and are now saying that there is equal concern for the victims of Israeli incursions. That’s a bit contradictory as Hamas cannot be rooted out entirely without significant civilian casualties.
I can’t say I’m an expert in the region, but I hope that you are wrong. Ideally a safe haven for civilians fleeing the conflict could be established, by the UN or by NGOs. Then Israeli forces can safely enter the region and dismantle terrorist infrastructure without incurring civilian casualties. We would need international agreement on who the instigators are and who is thus responsible (Hamas.) The will and the humanitarian aid is there.
Well the two candidates are Israel and Egypt. Obviously neither of them have agreed so far. What I would hope for is international pressure to aid evacuation. Right now international pressure is all over the place. I feel arguing for a cease fire is a wrong approach, unless it’s temporary to allow for civilians to move to safety
The inability to root out Hamas without heavy civilian casualties is by design, Hamas design. Everybody tends to forget that Hamas has agency, they can separate their fighters from civilians and wear military uniforms. Their military installations can be outside of civilian areas.
This would result in a short war and Hamas being decimated so they choose to fight asymmetrically. It's understandable but they shouldn't get a free pass for this when it is also their responsibility to protect their own civilians as well as themselves.
If it's vibe we're considering, based on my mainstream news consumption and the lack of comment from most of my social circle (aside from both sides ing), I've personally gone from sternly critical of Israel to deeply sympathetic - and disgusted by most of the chatter about what it should or shouldn't be doing. In my mostly liberal mainstream news sources the war is very largely being reported from the perspective of Hamas and its subjects. (I'm in France, reading mostly AFP, Reuters & AP sourced copy)
Yeah, same. The mainstream press here in Australia as in most Western countries tends to lean left, so I think the default is to sympathise with the oppressed, but the statement this morning has changed the tone somewhat.
I also agree that lecturing Israel is not really helpful - they are going after Hamas and they have every right to do so. It would have been nice to see the UN agree that Hamas is a terrorist organisation and commit to evacuating and sheltering civilians trying to flee the conflict. The civilians are really the ones suffering here, it's so important that humanitarian aid gets to them and not to Hamas.
I am fine with pacifist protests, but deeply skeptical of pro-Palestinian protests.
In my opinion, if one uses the attention generated by the Hamas atrocities (and the inevitable Israeli response) to campaign for Palestine, that is deeply distasteful.
If a card-carrying NRA member committed a mass shooting and the NRA did rallies in response, I would also consider that much more distasteful than them doing rallies at literally any other time.
I recently put out a podcast where I talk to Giles Milton about his book White Gold. It is about how Europeans were captured and taken into slavery in North Africa and tells the story of one such slave, Thomas Pellow, who was captured at the age of eleven.
It left me with a few slightly uncomfortable questions about my enjoyment of the story.
It is an exciting and exotic tale. The Sultan of Morocco of the time (Moulay Ismail) seems to have been a Caligula like figure. Cruel to the point of psychopathy but with intelligence and wit as well. He liked to drive around his palaces in a chariot pulled by some of his wives and eunuchs. And he had plenty of wives - apparently around 500. And maybe unsurprisingly he is high up in the league table of men with the most children in recorded history.
The story is packed with ironies. Pellow (a slave) is sent as part of a slave raiding expedition across the Sahara into West Africa. He hopes to escape by contacting French or British slavers who have operations there. They do come across a French ship but before he can do anything the Moroccans have boarded the ship, captured the slavers who are sent north in chains to join their compatriots in slavery.
One question I have is at what stage does history become an interesting/exciting ’adventure story’? These were real people who suffered terribly yet from this distance (at least to me) Moulay Ismail is almost a figure of fun. But his cruelty was just appalling. One of his favourite punishments was tying someone to a board and having them sawn in two lengthwise.
So why do I enjoy reading this stuff instead of feeling nauseous? Is it just the passage of time?
Anyway here is the podcast. Giles Milton is a great storyteller and best I can tell it is all true.
> So why do I enjoy reading this stuff instead of feeling nauseous? Is it just the passage of time?
Anecdata point: Putin's war has ruined the music of Sabaton for me.
Warfare (mainly ~1700 to ~1970) is the major theme in their songs. Which was a-ok with me in Europe in 2019, when I was confident that large scale conventional warfare was a thing of the past at least in the Civilized World and hopefully on it's way out globally. Call me squeamish, but now with tank warfare happening in Europe again I would prefer to listen to metal songs about horrors safely confined to the past instead. (I also quit playing world of tanks for similar reasons.)
Lords of the Atlas: The Rise and Fall of the House of Glaoua 1893-1956 by Gavin Maxwell will appeal to you if you want to read more about cruelty and political shenanigans in Morocco. An example among soldiers (quoting an earlier book):
> ‘The man was badly wounded, the camp was a long way off, and his “pals” didn’t mean to have the trouble of carrying him there. So they dug his grave, and began to push him in. He naturally protested. “I am not dead,” he cried; “don’t you see I am living?” “Be quiet,” said a companion; “you were killed at least an hour ago. Don’t you realise that you are dead?” The poor man still cried out till the earth covered him and put an end to his protestation and his life. The soldier who narrated the incident added, “The Moorish soldier is an ungrateful and unbelieving individual. This man, for instance, had no confidence in us, his comrades, when we assured him he was dead. I hate ingratitude,” - and he filled up his little “kif” pipe and handed it to us for a whiff.’
The unforgettable story of one of the pretenders to the throne, who fancied himself a magician, and his hundreds of slaves (one per magic trick) is even worse. I won't quote it here because it might induce nightmares.
For the record, I suspect (and hope) some of these stories aren't true. Apart from all the disturbing stories, there are a few funny ones, and some insight into the difficulties of French imperialism.
Not an answer, but Dan Carlin's "Wrath of the Khan's" series begins with a discussion on this idea; when we talk about the Mongols, a lot of modern history emphasizes the long term effects of the Mongols while kind of glossing over the whole "killed 10% of the planet" thing.
Meanwhile if somebody wrote about the Nazis that way: and emphasized how Hilter ultimately led to the modern UN and propelled technology forwards and led to the modern states of Germany and Japan, it'd be a huge controversy. *Most* of us are far enough removed from the Mongol invasions that we aren't emotionally connected to them, so we can be more clinical about them... but we're not that way with more recent history. And it's going to vary from person-to-person and culture to culture.
Morbid question: Which is the oldest atrocity that still feels emotionally connected to a large group of people? The eldest surviving grudge? I had wrongly thought that Greece v Turkey went back to Troy, but was corrected - that I was conflating several different grievances, separated by millennia.
The Koreans still exalt their defeat of the Japanese invasion in the 1590s, but that's probably inflamed because of what the Japanese did in WWII, so that might not count.
The Japanese still celebrate the divine wind ("kamikaze") that stopped the Mongol invasion in the late 1290s, but that's more about preventing a potential atrocity.
Vlad the Impaler was 500 years ago, and children still have nightmares from the legends that spread about his deeds. But that probably fails the "connected to a large group of people" criterion.
Europe had a lot of extraordinarily bloody wars of religion in the 1500s and 1600s, most particularly the 30 Years' War, but also stuff involving Huguenots. But that's mostly faded away over the last century, at least in America. I don't know what it's like in Europe. My rough understanding is that the French "freedom of religion" policy, laicite, is more of a "don't ask don't tell" policy designed to prevent that sort of thing from happening again.
Deiseach might be able to tell you more about the horrible stuff the English have done to the Irish since 1169, but as far as I'm aware, most of what gets people angry these days only goes back over the last 200 years?
Attila the Hun, the "Scourge of God", was active in the first half of the 400s, but as late as WWI the British called the Germans "the Huns", and in the 1800s Verdi wrote an opera about him.
Some Jews still feel a visceral horror associated with Ukraine not only because Ukrainians collaborated enthusiastically with the Nazis in their genocide of the Jews, such as at the Babi Yar ravine, where tens of thousands of Jews were killed over two days: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Babi_Yar, and not only because the Ukrainians were the main perpetrators of the pogroms that killed hundreds of thousands of Jews after the fall of the Russian Empire: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pogroms_during_the_Russian_Civil_War, but also, because of the earlier massacres in 1648-9 that probably "only" killed tens of thousands of Jews: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Khmelnytsky_Uprising#Jews, but which are often remembered with even more horror than the 20th century pogroms, and the perception that they killed hundreds of thousands, perhaps because the Ukrainians very suddenly killed such a large percentage - around half - of the Jewish population there. Like a child's scar that grows with age, the memory of the 17th century Ukrainian Jewish genocide in some ways eclipsed the actual event, and even the later Ukrainian Jewish genocide.
Those catastrophes also remain emotionally relevant to many Jews, but I suspect that that is mostly because they - particularly the Siege of Jerusalem / destruction of the Temple - are inexorably associated with the subsequent exile from Israel (this association is somewhat ahistorical, as first of all, the end of Jewish life in Judea was more a result of the aforementioned post-Bar Kokhba massacre, and second of all, because Jewish life in Israel was far from eliminated even after the revolt, mostly moving north from Judea to the Galilee, and surviving there for another century, and to a lesser extent, later) and later oppressions and genocides of diaspora Jews.
Thus, this latter example may itself be an example, to some extent, of the conflation of grievances separated by (almost) millenia.
Is the Khmelnytsky Uprising something stories about which actually get handed down in families, or is the memory (or "memory" of it) just a product of Jewish Literacy books/the Israeli school system/some bad play by Elie Wiesel/etc.?
A combination of the two, I think. [Notably, the query was about "the oldest atrocity that still feels emotionally connected to a large group of people" and that didn't specify that the transmission of the event had to be exclusively oral.]
Literary works can shape how an event is remembered, with the event remaining emotionally resonant.
If I had to guess, I'd imagine that had survivors of those massacres and their contemporaries not discussed the events in writing, then by now, they would be vaguely remembered like other historical events, but would lack emotional resonance.
But the centuries of literary references cemented the event's place in the collective consciousnesses of "a large group of people."
>Between 1648 and 1656, tens of thousands of Jews—given the lack of reliable data, it is impossible to establish more accurate figures—were killed by the rebels, and to this day the Khmelnytsky uprising is considered by Jews to be one of the most traumatic events in their history.
Well, I doubt that wins the contest, as the Spanish conquest still feels emotionally resonant to lots of people in Perú and México - and it's not just an outcome of history class at school, or public discourse: there is folk poetry in Quechua recorded in the 19th and early 20th centuries about the last Inca king, there's the myth of the Inkarri, and so forth.
I've never heard of similar folk material on the Khmelnytsky massacres. Does it not exist? Furthermore: one might say they remained in Polish cultural consciousness due to popular 19th literary works; is there nothing of the sort in Yiddish literature, say, and, if it exists, did it have a comparable reach? Otherwise I'm a bit skeptical - it may be an atrocity that was made to "resonate" in the 20th century, for political reasons.
I don’t feel it is the passage of time. I find it just as potentially unpleasant to read stuff like this about people hundreds of years ago as right now. I think it depends partly on how the book is written.
It's in the eye of the beholder. The afghan adventures of Lord Miles, or the reports of Talibans despairing as they have to do office work and spreadsheets is fun if you want them to be, and they're from last year. The insane lifestyle of Gaddafi, setting up a huge tente on the lawn of western government buildings, having an all-female amazon honor guard, etc, is hilarious. And so is his gruesome end, if you're callous enough to laugh at shovel mis-use (I know I am).
And the politicians in democracies? Trump? The libertarian in Argentina? France's most hardcore far-right candidate in 20 years being a berber jew? Shinzo Abe assasinated with a handcrafted weapon that looks like it comes from a post-apo game? That's all great comedy.
Everything is as fun as you want it to be. Or as much as you can let it be.
I will listen to this. Pellow's story has been on my list of things to learn more about for several years. (Also, good question, which I'm now pondering too)
I can recommend this episode if anyone is on the fence, one of the better ones of an already very enjoyable podcast.
About empathising with historical people, I'm in my twenties and have noticed the tragic elements of WW2 aren't as sanctified or as salient for the typical person my age as it is to older people, and even amongst them the tragedies of the Eastern Front are neglected compared the parts of the war Britain was involved in. Then again the moral aspects of the transatlantic slave trade and colonialism have risen in salience over the last couple of decades despite being even further removed in time.
Personally I'd say the 18th century is well past the point of concern.
I guess ultimately if you want to commit an atrocity, do it a long time ago and maybe spread a rumour you were wearing a funny hat.
The farther we are from someone in space and time, the harder it is to conceive of them as persons in the same way we experience the people around us.
If the child down the street dies, you might feel terrible. It might ruin your week and you might feel echoes of the occurrence for a long time. But if your own child were to die, the pain would be orders of magnitude worse and could send your entire life into a spiral. Conversely, if you hear about a child dying from war or natural disaster on the other side of the world, you might feel bad but on a fairly abstract way.
I think we have something approximating concentric circles of caring. The closer other people are, the more real their lives are. People from the distant past are way out in orbit.
I think that’s right. I suppose the other way we feel close is if there are continuing effects. The can understand even an event as long ago as the fall of Constantinople being upsetting to Greeks give the miseries that followed not least the population exchanges (ethnic cleansing?) of the early 20th century.
Anyway I thoroughly enjoyed hearing about Moulay Ismail, horror though he was!
The perception of continuing effects seems highly salient. An example, my native country underwent a brutal suppression by William the Conquerer known as the Harrowing of the North. It was, by all accounts, as cruel and immiserating as any colonial invasion undertaken outside of Europe. Nobody cares, because we obviously went on to amass great influence and wealth. It is simply not considered an injustice, even though it obviously was.
I shared this last time in an open thread comment, we received quite a few positive emails back. Sharing it again (for the last time? don't want to be spammy)
Working with a UK cyber security startup, on a free AI powered Linkedin report that tells you how you're perceived based on your LinkedIn activity. Useful for those job seeking, thought leaders on the platform, and those with public facing jobs (marketing, sales, writers, etc.)
We are part on the Microsoft for Startups programme and we are careful to stay within the terms of use policy.
The key difference between us and some of the other businesses out there is that Visible is built for people to see themselves, not for businesses to spy on people.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but the sequence to get to Yud's ~60-80% chance (actually >90%)³ of AI extinction by the end of the century appears to be as follows:
1. There will be no AI warning shots
2. Even if there are warning shots, we won't be able to develop controls because humans
3. Even if we do develop controls, the warning shots aren't going to be sufficiently representative, by definition, of PCMs (paperclip maximizers)
4. The technological path to ASI continues unabated
5. A PCM emerges
#1-4 have reasonable priors (as do their complements, although not as compelling¹)
But #5 doesn't. There is no experimental evidence for PCMs, and if they're defined so as to be disconnected from weak AIs, then we won't get any of that evidence. When I go through the arguments for PCMs, I concede that I can't find a logical reason for why they wouldn't emerge.² But if I step back, I realize that any confidence in PCMs should remain theoretical, for now.
Shouldn't we assign <<50% to #5 on priors by virtue of this argument alone?
UPDATE: added note 3
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[1]: Interestingly, the complement is a polar opposite story, one that requires some anthropic-y reasoning. For example, the majority of my <<5% estimate comes from the fact that we've survived atomic self-annihilation. But you can reach the opposite conclusion if you put Occam's razor in the hands of a Rationalist, who would likely say that our survival has been due to luck.
Point of protocol, what are the accepted ways of referring to Eliezer Yudkowsky? (Asking because I find "Yud" somewhat grating, but it's plausible that the unsavory echoes I hear in it are the product of my non-English linguistic background, and not only not intended but also not commonly heard.)
Fair point. I probably tend to use the most concise term that is comprehensible to regular readers of these Open Threads. I call Scott Scott, for example, and thus Eliezer, Yud. So, probably Eliezer, then. :-)
He didn't say 60-80% though. He didn't say any probability figure in fact, which has annoyed some folks as it seems evasively vague in a context of people seemingly all-too excited to share and debate their own "p(doom)s"; he's just deathly worried about the lack of traction (by his lights) relative to the scale of the potential downside.
He's trying to play all angles on the prediction, so that he can't be called out as wrong at any point.
He's pretty much said that the chances are extremely high, giving the impression (but not certainty) that he might be above 90% on p(doom), but has also been very cagey on the dates. I would be more surprised that he said by the end of the century, as he *implies* we're talking less than ten years, maybe less than five.
I find zero value in predictions set to take place after we're all dead. 77 years from now might as well be never, in terms of predictions at the moment.
Lack of experimental evidence is not an argument against a scenario where if you get experimental evidence you're dead. Theoretical confidence can be pretty strong too. Which of course doesn't mean your confidence in this specific argument/scenario should be strong, only that evaluating it does require engaging with it at the gears level.
Circling back here, if that's okay. (I just learned what gears-level means). Is it necessary to engage the PCM argument at the gears level in order to win the debate? For example, we wouldn't agree with someone who said I can't convince them that religion doesn't exist because I hadn't read the New Testament.
I agree that some forecasts can only be grounded in gears-level understanding. But don't we just call this the inside view? And even in the case of gears-based forecasts, the gears should be grounded in some experimental data. So, for example, arguments around whether or not atmospheric ignition would ensue at the Trinity Test were grounded in theories of physics, not experiments. But those theories themselves were still grounded in experimental evidence, such as the ability for gases to ignite.
I don't know what, if any, experimental data the PCM argument rests on. If anything, the PCM argument appears to be designed such that it can't depend on any experiments we can do before.
Eliezer seems to be violating his own sequences, such as Burdensome Details and Make Beliefs Pay Rent.
Yes gears level is roughly the same as the inside view.
No you shouldn't need to read a specific holy text to argue the general case for or against religion. Although if a particular adherent tells you they're aware of your general argument and they don't think it applies to their specific case then you should at least update ever so slightly in their favour if you're not going to engage with the gears (and conversely should expect some people not to engage with your inexistence argument).
I would, however, argue that you should have some gears knowledge of at least a couple of religions if you're going to make that argument. Generally, if you dismiss a class of arguments without engaging with any specific one, then you risk arguing only with strawmen. (Note dangers of inoculation in choices here too.)
Eliezer's stuff is not detached from experimental reality. It is just hard to test because it focuses on stuff that doesn't exist yet. But it is something people are actively trying to build and it seems significant that the toy models he uses are not that easy to dismiss even when they're not knock-down blows.
Good points. Thanks. I've been doing my own search, but I haven't yet encountered these experimental models. I'm aware of the basics of the orthogonality thesis and instrumental convergence. As far as I can see, they're still theoretical.
As you have pointed out, being theoretical doesn't mean being divorced from empirical reality. I don't want to overstate the case here, they are definitely theoretical. But when lots of classes of toy models share a property and it's hard to build a toy model that doesn't, then it's at least a little concerning
You're right, it's more than that, and he doesn't state so directly. Here's the indirect citation: "Eliezer Yudkowsky seems to think >90%" https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/why-i-am-not-as-much-of-a-doomer which references the same link from magic9mushroom below.
No; his notorious "Death with Dignity" post (https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/j9Q8bRmwCgXRYAgcJ/miri-announces-new-death-with-dignity-strategy) quite specifically makes the case "if we cannot stop AI Doom, we can at least die an honourable death *trying* to stop it". Then he wrote that TIME article arguing for Butlerian Jihad, which certainly seems in accord with that idea. He does not want to vanish without a fight.
But yes, that post implies P(Doom|Yudkowsky right) = 1 - epsilon.
I think Yudkowsky believes a PCM is the default outcome if you take any sufficiently-powerful optimisation engine and point it at all but a very very narrow subset of possible goals (and we don't know how to specify that subset). The argument is mostly theoretical, based on (a) the size of the space of possible minds, (b) the orthogonality thesis, and (c) the difficulty of specifying vague goals like "human flourishing" so they can't be misinterpreted in horribly wrong ways. But the "PCM by default" claim matches the behaviour of pre-DNN AI paradigms like genetic algorithms very well - I've worked with GAs, and they will indeed exploit any loophole in your specification given the slightest chance. This is the context for Quintin Pope's recent post (https://twitter.com/QuintinPope5/status/1709363036849618983), in which he argues that when it comes to DNNs all three points of this argument are false:
- NN training does not sample uniformly from the space of possible minds (that match the input data), but rather from the space of possible *parameters*, and when mapped to mind-space this forms a much smaller and more tractable set,
- Everything about DNNs depends on the data they're fed, falsifying the orthogonality thesis (he doesn't say this explicitly, but I think it's what he means),
- DNN training tends to produce ensembles of simple, fast rules. This (he claims) means the set of likely DNN-based intelligences is less likely to contain deceptive mesaoptimisers than a randomly-picked element of mindspace, and so precisely specifying the goal is less important.
I'm least convinced by point 3, to be honest: humans are certainly capable of being deceptive.
Thanks. Your comment reminds me of the concept that sci-fi always says more about the present than the future. Is the interpretation here that these doom scenarios were founded in a more mesa-optimizing pre-DNN world, and that the dumber, "embarassingly parallel" GPU world is where we're at now?
Also, I'm curious if you'd consider the term "proxy optimizer" as an alternative to "mesa-optimization." I refreshed myself on mesa-optimization via Scott's post, but it strikes me as jargon creep:
> Is the interpretation here that these doom scenarios were founded in a more mesa-optimizing pre-DNN world, and that the dumber, "embarrassingly parallel" GPU world is where we're at now?
Pretty much, yes. Which does not mean that the doom arguments no longer apply at all - some of them are very general - but intuitions formed under the old paradigms should be treated with more suspicion.
> Also, I'm curious if you'd consider the term "proxy optimizer" as an alternative to "mesa-optimization."
I'm not a huge fan of "mesa-optimiser", but it is at least unambiguous: "proxy optimiser" could mean several things.
The classic doom, foom doom, argument involves an agentive Ai that quickly becomes powerful through recursive self improvement and has a value/goal system that is unfriendly and incorrigible (ie there's an assumption that we only have one chance to get goals that are good enough for a superintellgience, because the seed Ai will foom into an ASI , retaining its goals, and goals that are good enough for a dumber AI may be dangerous in a smarter one). It's not all that applicable to LLMs, which aren't very agentive.
Sure, though Gwern's essay "Why Tool AIs Want to Be Agent AIs" (https://gwern.net/tool-ai) applies - there are plenty of projects trying to build agent-like behaviour on top of LLMs (often in horrifyingly insecure ways).
I agree with this. All AGI alarmist arguments begin with the assumption that there is a continuous path from ”90 on mnist ” to ”AGI.” They never argue for why this is, because doing so would force them to operationalize the term ”intelligence,” and then the discussion becomes the boring work of the engineer rather than fun armchair philosophy.
I don't see where you get this at all. The path from "90 on MNIST" to AGI doesn't need to be continuous or straightforward; for AGI to be concerning, there only needs to be *some* path from our current tech level to AGI and for people to be willing to research it (which they are currently doing, eagerly). And I'm pretty sure Yudkowsky has repeatedly said that he considers "intelligence" to mean something like "optimisation power" - not sufficiently operationalised to go out and build an AGI, sure, but enough that you can then start to think about things like the orthogonality thesis.
EDIT: I agree with your broader point that Yudkowsky et al rely too much on armchair reasoning, but I think it's much more detailed armchair reasoning than you give them credit for!
> The path from "90 on MNIST" to AGI doesn't need to be continuous or straightforward
It does if you intend to use some growth curve to make predictions about the timeline - which all these guys are doing.
To your main point, yeah, I was being a shade uncharitable - Yudkowsky is a lot better than eg Bostrom at defining his terms. There is detail in these guys’ arguments, but it is distributed all wrong. If you want to convince me to worry about AGI and spend tax dollars and our leaders’ political capital on it, you can’t do any hand waving when you’re articulating the problem. More detail needs to go into the massive chasm between current systems and cross-domain optimization (again, not a bad starting point for a definition, but not sufficiently operationalized to convince me).
> It does if you intend to use some growth curve to make predictions about the timeline - which all these guys are doing.
Yeah, fair, all that stuff is very shaky.
> More detail needs to go into the massive chasm between current systems and cross-domain optimization
I think a lot of this arises because Yudkowsky started raising the alarm *before* deep learning, when optimisation was a bigger paradigm in AI research - I've actually become less worried about AGI x-risk since the rise of deep learning and LLMs, because current AI systems are such a poor match to the x-risk scenarios. But I think there's a broader point that's sound: that creating an artificial superintelligence would by default be dangerous unless we manage to solve a hard-seeming technical problem which we currently don't even know how to specify. Personally, I'm on Team "let's try not to create an artificial superintelligence": fortunately (as you say!), we don't currently seem to be on track to get there any time soon.
Yeah, but no one sees Jesus as a paragon of rationality: he literally got mistaken for a demon-possessed lunatic! He was a very passionate guy, and he just told you what's true, with no argumentation.
I await Robin Hanson's inevitable post about how kidney donation is obviously just signalling because you could save more lives by selling your kidney and spending the proceeds well.
EA's have this robotic quality. If everyone in the world was an EA, but you were, say, a benevolent alien, would you want to donate something to save the EA's? My motivation to donate to save strangers grows out of the feeling that they, like me, have people and things they love and they want to have more time to enjoy. I don't see the EAs having people and things they love -- or, maybe they do, but they ruthlessly disregard any preferences based on personal affection, and follow the algorithm. The hard core EA life doesn't really sound like a life worth living to me.
I took my question a step further in this week's post on Male Aggression: https://open.substack.com/pub/falsechoices/p/the-aggressive-male?r=27s0s&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web. I've appreciated the comments I received, thank you all!
Breaking news - jury verdict in the Sam Bankman-Fried trial is in, and he's been found guilty on all seven charges:
https://www.reuters.com/legal/ftx-founder-sam-bankman-fried-thought-rules-did-not-apply-him-prosecutor-says-2023-11-02/
https://www.cnbc.com/2023/11/02/the-emails-texts-photos-that-could-put-sam-bankman-fried-in-prison.html
(1) The courtroom sketch artist is *really* bad. I mean, some of the drawings are not one bit at all like anyone. Ouch.
(2) Turns out that sticking to "I don't remember", not answering the questions, and trying to tell the prosecutor how to do their job isn't a great way to present yourself. Double ouch.
I realise his lawyers probably had to put him on the stand, because it would look too bad if he refused to testify, but man. He just talked himself right into jail:
"Bankman-Fried has been jailed since August after Kaplan revoked his bail, having concluded he likely tampered with witnesses. Kaplan blocked Bankman-Fried from calling several proposed expert witnesses, and ruled he could not testify about the involvement of lawyers in FTX decisions at issue in the trial."
Now the fun begins, because I'm sure there are going to be appeals etc. Speaking of prediction markets, were there any on this trial and the likely outcome? Did any hopeful optimist think he'd be acquitted? And it seems that there's a *second* trial on further charges coming up, so triple ouch?
"Bankman-Fried is also set to go on trial on a second set of charges brought by prosecutors earlier this year, including for alleged foreign bribery and bank fraud conspiracies."
Anyone here have an informed opinion on how long the appeals are likely to take, and how much prison time he'll ultimately get?
I heard somewhere that the maximum penalty for all seven charges was 110 years. Given discretionary ranges on prison sentences, I have no idea what he might actually get from those charges.
https://twitter.com/katie_haun/status/1720267164278780141#m
Suggests decades. A literal application of the federal sentencing guidelines would result in a life sentence, but if the lawyers knock off say six points (out of 47), you wind up with 27-34 years.
A life sentence for a non-violent offence seems way too stiff. I'd be more than happy to see him sentenced to 20 years, say.
For comparison, Shon McHugh, one of the three who participated in the murder that popularized the "Knockout game" - specifically, the one who stabbed the victim to death after the others had punched him - got 10 years.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murder_of_Yngve_Raustein
The justice system is truly a joke. The underincarceration in this country is sick. All three of them should have been executed or given life in prison. This is a country that gives 30 years to life for white-collar crimes but lets murderers go free on $1,000 bail.
Deep down, using your best most rational empirical outlook, do you think your dataset of two entries is truly representative of the median or average outcome of the tens of millions of criminal convictions which took place over the period of time between 1992 and 2023?
And furthermore, do you think that the form of argument you've taken will be persuasive to a neutral observer who has no strong opinion either way?
CNN says "Judge Kaplan asked prosecutors to decide by February 1 whether that will proceed." They don't explain why the judge thinks that is now a question.
Putting SBF on the stand was a nothing-left-to-lose move -- his attorneys had no one else to call on as a potentially friendly witness who had any direct knowledge of the businesses and actions at the center of the trial. Literally every other FTX/Alameda business partner had flipped on him, the bankruptcy trustee had testified as a hostile witness, etc.
Ok, one more thing about the kidney situation, and this is aimed at everyone who didn't think there anything off with the essay, which maybe was most of you: what's the hold up? You realize what Scott just taught you here: you, yes YOU, could save a life at very little risk and inconvenience to you. So what's stopping you? Whatever that blocker is, it is literally a death sentence for someone out there, as plenty people die on that waiting list. Are you sure you can't find a way around it? Donating a kidney is ultimately safe and not very inconvenient, so why not do it?
For myself, when I contemplate doing this, it just seems so damn extreme, getting an organ ripped out of me and going around for the rest of my life with only one kidney. But hey, it just SEEMS that way, looking at it rationally, it appears to actually not be a big deal. This is a real trial by fire of one's commitment to rationality.
But funnily, a big factor in Scott going through with this seems to have been that he got into a context where this started seeming normal, he started feeling like he had social permission to do that, which you know, interesting way to admit you run on vibes just like a postrat.
I know I don't have much of a commitment to rationality, but I have to say again to those of you that do: what's the holdup? Because it appears there are no rational barriers to you saving a life in this way. Who knows, maybe this pushes someone over the edge: I know my writing once convinced a guy to go back to the Giving What We Can pledge, maybe in this way I can have the assist for saving a life even if donating my own kidney to a stranger is a step I'm unwilling to take.
For me a very convinient excuse is that I live in Russia. Anything I donated here is likely to be net negative in global utility. And leaving the country in my circumstances has certain risks, much more severe than one of an operation.
This, however, doesn't answer the question why didn't I do it before the war started, when it seemed that kidney donation in Russia is net positive. And the answer is - I wasn't really thinking about it. As Scott said, it wasn't a thing normalized enough in my society to be reminded about and so I just went on with my life. I think I did have this vague belief that organ donation is a good and right thing to do. But there was always something distracting me, something postponing the idea and thus I never came to it. And after all there is no hurry. I have only one kidney to donate and it doesn't matter much when will I do it.
Scott's post gave me a bump of motivation. So now it is a thing I'm thinking about. Another reason to escape Russia or made it a better country. A thing to be done in better times.
> which you know, interesting way to admit you run on vibes just like a postrat.
Running on vibes isn't some signature "post-rationalist" thing. If anything, it's a pre-rationalist one. Humans have been running on vibes since the dawn of the species. There are however people who try to do it less. To reason beyond vibes. To encorage vibes, actually corresponding to reality, and discorage vibes that don't. To actually overcome their biases. Imperfectly. A work in progress, instead of actual mastery. It's difficult, because we are not yet gods. But it's the less wrong thing to do and there are people, who are doing it. And you to can do it. Maybe not to a point where you are eager to donate ypur kidney for a stranger. But at least to a point where you are not trying so hard to rationalize your uneagerness to do it.
Actually, I'm coming around to do it, but I have been interned in psych wards 3 times and am currently on antipsychotic medication, which are things that may disqualify me. There is also the issue that this would horrify my family, and I don't want to put them through the wringer. They would be against and I would have to convince them to let me do it, because I really don't want to just override them on this.
I want to give you an advanced tip here: be nice to the part of yourself that is horrified and doesn't want to do the thing. If you feel that you need to shut some part of yourself up, crush it under the weight of guilt and obligations - don't do it yet.
Yes, donating your kidney is a moral and rational thing to do. It's still okay not to do it untill it deeply feels this way on intuitive level. People will still most likely need kidney donations in a year and a year after. Take your time to resolve the inner conflict and bring all parts of yourself in agreement.
Do persuade this part of yourself, but be nice about it. You are not god yet.
A friend suggested I post here: I’m a humanities prof creating an archive of media artifacts from the Russian 1990s. We have an existing website but would like to make improvements to UX with a new designer and developer. This work is paid but it’s the academic humanities so it’s not going to be hugely lucrative. If interested, please write to russian90sproject@gmail.com
I would like to start preparing for emergencies, like the next pandemic, a natural disaster etc. Can you recommend good resources to research how to do this?
The usual response is something along these lines. First, make sure the obvious stuff is covered: physical health (eat well and exercise), mental health (including cultivating resilience against boredom and loneliness), financial security (debt-free and emergency savings).
Second, consider generic risks. Can you handle cuts and burns common in kitchens? Can you handle losing your job for a few months? Can you handle a temporary disability? Do you have food and water? (Consider, re pandemic planning, that my most worthwhile prep was having over a month of food in the basement. We didn't need to go grocery shopping till late April 2020.)
Third, consider specific risks. Hurricane? Wildfire? College students setting couches on fire? For example, my neighborhood has lots of very tall trees. I've thought about whether to get a chainsaw. I don't have a regular need for one, but if a large enough storm came through, the neighborhood would be crippled. Granted, the trees have been there for many years, but storms are getting stronger...
As for resources, I've found theprepared.com and r/preppers to be useful. The former for comprehensive guidance; the latter for oddball questions.
Check this collection on "Preparedness" out on lesswrong: https://www.lesswrong.com/tag/prepping
What level of preparedness? You can go full "prepper" and build an underground bunker full of supplies, but most people want to draw a line significantly further back from that.
Possibly of interest to fan's of Scott's fiction: this is a short story I wrote called "They Hexed the Moon": https://vocal.media/fiction/they-hexed-the-moon.
If you like it, please like it or leave a comment on the site as that might help we win a contest.
Buddhism is non-theistic, it's not that easy to group it in with the others. But I mean, maybe it's just an attractor state in the human brain. We like symmetry after all, and this is the ultimate symmetry. This would make all of spirituality a brainfart, but you know, spirtuality luckily thinks the entire world of the senses is a zero to the left, so it doesn't matter.
If it's really non-theistic, why are there so many giant statues?
How exactly is Buddhism supposed to be the "ultimate symmetry"?
Hmm, this was supposed to be a reply to someone else, but I think it was you? Buddhism does have the Dharma, which is definitely this ultimate symmetry you should be in alignment with, a pristine path to liberation.
Is it just me, or do the rest of y'all find Bing Maps to be nigh-unusable?
I haven't used it much lately, but it seems very serviceable. It is accurate/correct on addresses far more often than Google Maps. Most people don't use either enough to notice, and both are correct most of the time. I've found maybe half a dozen incorrectly placed addresses on Google, and so far none on Bing.
I've written a post about my home-rolled Crossword constructor computer program. It might be of interest to fans of American style crosswords or computer programmers.
I did use it to create my first submission to the NYT's last week.
https://gunflint.substack.com/p/computer-aided-crossword-creation-58b
Very impressive! Cool intersection of UI design and algorithms. I'm curious how hard it is to find a matching block of words like the 3x5 rectangle you include, and how much the ease-of-use heuristic helps. How often is it just not able to find a valid fill? What was the most interesting part algorithmically? Your description of the human touch for choosing fill words was pretty fun too. Though I'd imagine there's an interplay between choosing words and writing thematic clues for this part that you didn't touch on.
Ease-of-use from frequency seems like a first-order approximation to something that quantifies how many valid fills are left for the intersecting clues. For example, if you were to put some word in as clue 1-across, how many words are possible in 1 through 5 down? I bet multiplying those sizes together would be a pretty good heuristic. However, it's also probably much slower than a simple ranking, especially when the area is relatively unfilled, though you could also approximate with sampling.
What would be a reasonable process for finding a psychiatrist in New York? (For a depressed relative who lives there. Assume payment isn't an issue.)
Could be out of date, but a few to try https://psychiat-list.slatestarcodex.com/
I honestly don’t think there is a reasonable process (I live there) but either word of mouth, or contact Columbia or NYU. I can recommend mine if you like.
Has it happened to you that you were so affected by some major event or a controversy, that you found yourself obsessing over whether various public figures opined on it and what they said?
I've noticed that I'm growing obsessed over how people reacted or did not react to the events of October 7 in Israel (I'm Israeli). To the point where e.g. I've memorized the syntax of an advanced date query on Twitter, to be able to quickly look up Oct 7-10 tweets from any nickname I'm looking at.
It's strange because in theory I really, honestly don't think that everyone with a public platform of some kind ought to have said something. In truth, Israel has received an unprecedented wave of sympathy and support from the Western world, and I shouldn't care about whether e.g. some blogger I'm following on Substack or Twitter offered some heartfelt platitude (and I don't mean that sarcastically - responses to events of this sort can't help being platitudes, mostly, but they're still appreciated). In theory, I shouldn't care. But in practice, I find that I really do.
I can't quite resolve this gap. The best explanation I can find for myself is something like: "Sure, I can't really expect outsiders to care about the worst massacre in the history of my people since the Holocaust. It's fine that it was just another day to that person A. But should I really continue caring quite so much about the clever takes A has to offer on some culture war issues, or A's opinions on philosophy, or sex, or technology, or whatever? Suddenly it seems though A inhabits almost a separate universe. Normally when I read A, or B, or C, there's this background hardly-felt sense of imagining myself being A/B/C and thinking about those things that A/B/C are writing about. But A's studied indifference to the tragedy my country is experiencing breaks this illusion; I can't really see myself as A anymore and I'm annoyed at my own automatic attempts to do so."
In reaching for some similar behavior, I'm finding only examples I don't quite like - I wonder if that's how Covid antivaxx people feel, for instance, when they ask obsessively whether people they interact with or some public people "took the jab". I don't like the comparison, but maybe it's apropos.
Not really sure where I'm going with this.
I'm not someone with a public platform, but if I had one I think I'd feel compelled to say something only if it were relatively novel in the context of my audience (not necessarily a wholly new position, perhaps a different way of phrasing or interpreting something). And presumably many people, particularly in the immediate aftermath of the massacre (before the retaliation made the situation larger and more complex), felt that condemning was no more an addition to any sort of conversation than being against serial killers.
This is different, for me, on a personal scale. I will say "I'm so sorry for your loss" to someone grieving even if they've heard it from a hundred people that day, or "I understand that that must be stressful" to a Jewish friend who is feeling anxiety over the situation. But those are individual, emotional relations, not broadcasts into the cold internet.
Come to think of it, that distinction might be _why_ I don't have a public platform of any significance. Maybe people who want to have such platforms, and do so successfully, don't have this distinction the same way?
I suspect you're going to enjoy this wonderful bit of satire:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a0Pw_TxBe7w
Thank you, I think I'm going to pass that on!
Classic.
It's pretty darn normal.
This was, and is, a huge event for you and yours.
It likely really shook up your own sense of identity.
Obviously, with your suddenly finding yourself a Very Serious member of a team playing a Very Serious game, you pretty much *just* care to know whether on matters do-or-die these folk have your back.
I get it and it's normal.
It's the same effect that makes people want to know what Immanuel Kant's opinion on slavery is.
I don't know if it has a name, but a convincing explanation is that agreeing with someone over 99 opinion then disagreeing on 1 opinion is psychologically painful, it either implies that (A) the someone is wrong and so are those 99 opinions you previously agreed with on, which you now have to go over one by one and replace/amend them in your web of beliefs (B) you're the one in the wrong, and that 1 opinion you care deeply about and is central to your identity is actually wrong too, which is psychologically disastrous.
Happens to me a lot when I find woke beliefs, which I despise, among an academic or a scifi writer whom I respect. Sometimes I manage to inject enough moral relativism into my web of beliefs to ignore it, and sometimes I can't and the person is "ruined" forever for me in the sense that I can't take them seriously anymore and all opinions that I previously shared with them are automatically weaker and repellant to me towards their opposites. This all has to be weighted by the relative strength of beliefs and their opposites, as in I'm not going to suddenly become religious again because an atheist intellectual I used to respect became a man-hating feminist.
Remember that all opinions are wrong, and the vast majority of our beliefs are attire that we pick for 100 stylistic reasons and 1 practical reason, and you will be comforted.
At this point I believe that most people are crazy, and it just somehow... sometimes... works okay on average, because the people are crazy on some topics and non-crazy on others, so if you keep listening too long to one person you will usually be horrified, but if you let people vote on some narrow technical topic, sometimes the reason wins. But even then, if the supposed side of reason starts discussing other topics, soon the illusion of reason collapses.
Maybe each of us should make hundreds of online identities, one for every belief we hold, and use that identity only to express that belief, at a place where most people already agree with it. That would make internet a much more pleasant experience.
Yes, exactly this, but on a different subject. In retrospect, it was either one of the first signs of PTSD, or under an alternate theory, part of a feedback loop in which I gave myself PTSD. Either way, try to stop doing that? :-(
But to come at this feeling from another angle, do you feel betrayed? Do you feel like a large number of people, whom you trusted to be reasonable, suddenly pulled a mask off and revealed themselves to be only concerned with certain superficial signs of injustice? And in a way that is inimical to your existence? Do you feel like the foundations upon which you built your world view have crumbled? Does thinking about the subject in certain ways produce blinding rage or paralyzing fear?
I visited San Francisco this past weekend, what an interesting place. Things that pleasantly surprised me was how walkable the city was and how clean/safe it felt compared to the reputation it seems to have online. Certainly it's a bit jarring seeing all the toiletries behind plastic covering, and I'm sure I avoided the most problematic areas, but the narrative you hear about the city really doesn't match the experience I had there. Probably the only downside is that the food scene was just ok, most places weren't bad but nothing was that good given the prices. It's also funny to see all the communist/anarchist shops in what must be one of the richest communities in America.
As a regular visitor to SF going back a couple decades, I agree with all of these observations.
The truly-batshit cost of housing prevents my wife and I from seriously considering living there, and the visible homeless problem has increased. But still -- literally every time we're heading to a Bay-area airport for a flight home we have a moment of wanting to not be departing.
And none of my relatives who live there (none of whom are wealthy but they did buy in on houses back before those prices got really insane) have any interest in living anyplace else.
From one angle, I don't like seeing Scott hassled about what I see as a generous and thoughtful choice.
From another angle, he cultivated this forum to include a wide range of sometimes contentious opinions, and pushback was inevitable.
I suspect that most of the pushback is due to the post being a *very* hard sell that the reader donate a kidney to a stranger. It attempts to preemptively counter every rational objection his particular audience might have, and then straightforwardly sprinkles in a bit of guilt here and there.
Had the post's entire copy been, "I've been away donating a kidney to a stranger. It made sense to me and I feel fine now," I suspect there would have been far less criticism.
I feel like there's an unwritten rule where we downplay "good" things about us to avoid seeming like we think we're better than other people, or making other people feel bad for not making the same choices we did. As is played with in the next 20 seconds of this clip from "Mean Girls":
https://youtu.be/fkfwrXgfRr4?t=31
I didn't see any guilt sprinkled in Scott's post at all. It seemed to me like he was explaining what he did and why, but not downplaying it at all. If we look at it, and see persuasive reasons to do something, and feel bad because we aren't, that's on us, and that's what the downplaying would have avoided.
As I commented below (but not sure if you will see):
Scott says, "The ten of you who will listen to this [this argument for donating a kidney] and donate are great. That brings the kidney shortage down from 40,000 to 39,990/year."
The implication being that people who don't donate a kidney aren't "great" and are responsible for the 39,990 deaths a year from kidney shortages.
That's the kind of thing that provokes ire!
Nah. A *very* hard sell would be to add another option for Substack subscribers -- Monthly, Annual, Kidney Donor. (See subscriber-only posts: one hidden open thread weekly, occasional AMAs, occasional extras, and a special hidden thread to share photos of scars.)
HA!
I would agree; it's less the act itself and the more the way he writes about it.
I didn't notice any attempts to make people feel guilty, with the exception of the people who answer on a survey that they would give a kidney to a stranger but do not. And I think people who lie on surveys (even if they're also lying to themselves!) could use a little guilt.
Scott says, "The ten of you who will listen to this [this argument for donating a kidney] and donate are great. That brings the kidney shortage down from 40,000 to 39,990/year."
The implication being that people who don't donate a kidney aren't "great" and are responsible for the 39,990 deaths a year from kidney shortages.
That's a bit of a stretch. If I said "The ten of you who bought me birthday presents this year are great!" that doesn't mean that everyone who didn't is not great, nor that they had a responsibility to give me a birthday present. Similarly, if someone is honored for their donation to a university by having a building named after them, that doesn't mean that everyone who doesn't have a building named after them is dishonorable or that we all have a responsibility to donate to universities. People can be praised for doing something without implying that everyone has a moral responsibility to do that thing.
I don't know what to tell you - I don't see how anyone could read the two sentences I quoted (plus his entire argument for Why You Should Donate a Kidney) and not understand that Scott believes that people should donate their kidneys, that those who do are "great" and those who don't are, conversely, not great.
I just don't see where the guilt comes in. You don't have an obligation to be great in this respect. This is clearly supererogatory, and I don't see anywhere where Scott tries to make people feel bad for not doing it (with the possible exception of people who say on a survey that they would do it, but don't, and I think a little guilt is justified in that case).
Okay, now AI applications are just getting weird and/or creepy.
AI can diagnose diabetes from your voice in 10 seconds?
https://www.diabetes.co.uk/news/2023/oct/say-what-ai-can-diagnose-type-2-diabetes-in-10-seconds-from-your-voice.html
"The study stated: “In women, the predictive features were mean pitch, pitch SD, and RAP jitter, and in men, mean intensity and apq11 shimmer were used. In simple terms, the variation in these features found that women with T2DM reported a slightly lower pitch with less variation, and men with T2DM reported slightly weaker voices with more variation. These differences likely stem from differences in disease symptom manifestations between the sexes.”
Kaufman commented that these differences found via the AI’s signals processing between male and female voices were “surprising”.
The researchers concluded: “Voice analysis shows potential as a pre-screening or monitoring tool for T2DM, particularly when combined with other risk factors associated with the condition.”
Link to study:
https://www.mcpdigitalhealth.org/article/S2949-7612(23)00073-1/fulltext
"Voice synthesis is a complex process that relies on the combined effects of the respiratory system, the nervous system, and the larynx. Anything that affects these systems can influence the voice, whether it is perceptible audibly or detectable through computer analysis.3 In T2DM, individuals experience sustained periods of high blood glucose. Point-in-time glucose concentrations have been hypothesized to affect the elastic properties of the vocal chords, and long-term elevated glucose can have detrimental effects such as peripheral neuropathy and myopathy (ie, the damage of nerve and muscle fibers, respectively). Myopathy has been shown to correlate with an increased prevalence of voice disorders and dysphagia, potentially because of muscle weakness within the larynx, whereas hoarseness, vocal straining, and aphonia are present in individuals with diabetic neuropathy. Furthermore, T2DM has been linked to an increased prevalence of psychological disorders such as depression, anxiety, eating disorders, and decreasing cognitive function, all of which have been linked to vocal changes."
I do wonder how much this is from the voice, and not from "the associated data we used were predictors of likely diabetes and we just shook the voice data a bit to match it up". But if it's true, then wow, we're going to go back to things in traditional medicine like "looking at the eye can diagnose illnesses" and acupuncture points, except this time SCIENCE! because it's the AI.
If I'd heard "you can diagnose diabetes from the voice", I would have lumped it in with iris reading and the likes. Everything old is new again!
Next thing you know AI will be able tell your gender by a simple swab of DNA or a 5 kilopixel selfie through an opaque shower curtain.
✅ Necessary
✅ True
✅ Kind
✅ Joke
How well? I would not be at all surprised if you could diagnose diabetes from the voice and score much better than a random guess; I /would/ be surprised if you could do it well enough to be useful.
You could use it as a screen perhaps. Refer the people the AI flags for a real test.
Depends on what kind of errors the AI makes. If it over-diagnoses diabetes, then yes. If it under-diagnoses it, then we would still need to pay attention to people whom the AI said were fine. Not necessarily more than we already do, but then I'm not sure the AI would be super helpful.
Regarding Scott's kidney post, what does everyone think about mandatory organ, blood, and other tissue harvesting of the dead, with an opt-out option for those that don't want it? Seems like that would clear up the waiting list without having to encourage people to sacrifice their own healthy tissue?
I was more surprised at how everyone seemed onboard with selling your organs
There's a good amount of libertarian and libertarian-adjacent people in the comments, and the argument that the government shouldn't control what you can do with your body is fairly standard libertarian.
Nitpick: it's not "mandatory" if you can opt out. "Mandatory" = "required".
Multiple countries are opt-out of organ donation and it certainly helps with availability, but doesn't solve it entirely because of* reductions in other forms of mortality which increases the pool of alive, occasionally transplant-wanting people.
* I believe mostly uncorrelated
Even with opt-out organ donation, the pool of available posthumously donated organs is limited by a very small fraction of deaths resulting in organs suitable for transplant.
Organs aren't viable for transplant unless they're extracted almost immediately after cardiac death, or prior or simultaneous with it in the case of brain-dead donors.
Old age isn't automatically disqualifying for organ donations, but the donated organs need to be healthy, and in general the donor has to be fairly healthy apart from being dead because transplant recipients are inherently immunocompromised especially right after transplant surgery. If you've had any form of cancer that's at risk for coming back, you're generally disqualified as a donor because of the risk of there being an undetected metastasis in one of your organs. And just about any active infection or communicable disease is a no-no. C.f. that episode of Scrubs (based on an actual incident in 2004) where an organ donor had undiagnosed rabies (misdiagnosed as a drug overdose) that was transmitted to the recipients along with her organs.
Ironically, improvements to road and vehicle safety are a major driving (so to speak) factor in reducing the number of potential donors, as probably the biggest cause of "healthy except for being brain dead" is car and motorcycle accidents. And because of this, opt-out donations might go quite a bit further in the US in terms of meeting transplant demand than it does in many other countries, since Americans drive a lot more than just about everyone else in the world and correspondingly have a lot more fatal car accidents.
A side note that is admittedly morbid: We know that when a low-income country transits to a middle-income country, deaths from accidents increase.
This is because people can afford to buy motorcycles and cars before the authorities get sufficient tax money to build better roads. Plus, it takes time to develop a “safe traffic culture”, including installing (and making stick) professional training before someone is allowed to drive a car.
In addition to an increase in traffic accidents you have an increase in construction site accidents, because the ability of people to finance buildings increases fast, while the regulatory and cultural shift toward “safe construction sites” lags behind.
The morbid moral is: If you are looking for places where there are potential donors aplenty, look for poor countries that are experiencing rapid economic growth.
Several years ago there was a question on DSL so good that I'm going to repost it here: Suppose you want to know what the most obscure state is in the USA. How would you go about figuring it out? A poll wouldn't work, because a state that wins a poll couldn't be the most obscure state. So what method might best determine the most obscure state?
Note: An obvious method might be to get a group of people to list all the states they can from memory and take the state least mentioned. But this won't work because for the purposes of this question everyone has continual internet access. Everyone can write down all 50 states if that is the question.
Probably I'd just query e.g. the Weibo API for each of them to see how often they're mentioned. Likewise, if I wanted to know the most obscure Chinese province, I think some English-language social network would be a good data source.
Take this list of songs about the 50 states and sort by popularity? https://hellomusictheory.com/learn/songs-about-us-states/
(bonus points to #38's description never once mentioning the state by name.)
Obscure to whom ? differs by population.
The obvious answer to me is to simply get all Wikipedia articles as a single gigantic text and count every occurence of every US state in a frequency table, sorting this table will yield the most mentioned and the least mentioned state. It's probably safe to proxy "most obscure US state" by "least mentioned US state", it's true in the sense that, if someone were to hypothetically source all of their information about US states from Wikipedia, mentioning the least-mentioned state will get the most surprise from them. Wikipedia can be replaced by any corpus of text.
Prediction: North Dakota. There used to be a USENET running joke that nobody had ever actually seen it.
>But this won't work because for the purposes of this question everyone has continual internet access. Everyone can write down all 50 states if that is the question.
That just means you need to work a little harder on the survey. Conduct the test in a setting where survey-takers can't or at least probably won't look up the results. The ideal would be to do the survey with a pencil and paper in a proctored environment (call it a study on geographical knowledge or something), but that's logistically demanding and runs the risk of accidentally only answering the question from the perspective of bored college students who have nothing better to do than participate in psychological studies.
You could probably get decent results with a telephone survey. There are fairly mature techniques for correcting for response bias from telephone surveys, so that's less of a concern. And "continual internet access" is mostly in the form of smart phones, and I expect people to be much less likely to use their phones to look something up if they're already using their phones for actual telephony. Some people will still look it up, either because they're already sitting in front of a computer or because they're using speaker or headphones to take the call, but you can filter them out by treating anyone who answers all fifty states (at least without signing the "Fifty States and the Capitals" song from Animaniacs or the "Fifty Nifty United States" song taught in many elementary schools) as a non-response.
Another technique would be to instead of asking for as many states as possible to instead ask them to name the first ten states they can think of off the top of their heads.
I used to wonder about this a lot! My solution is to look at popular trivia sites and see which one is the least guessed.
(Surprisingly, it's apparently Nebraska)
https://www.jetpunk.com/user-quizzes/63858/us-states-without-a-map
Per Sporcle, it's Missouri. I don't know how large Jetpunk's sample is, but Sporcle's quiz has over 30 million plays (though a substantial number are probably repeats, by people trying to learn the states).
https://www.sporcle.com/games/g/states/results
That seems like it can't be right; St. Louis is there, and it's the Show-Me State (which is already more than I know about half the other states).
I feel that a quiz that just asks one to name states without a map to help will offer slightly better results than one that just asks to name states from a map.
I do think it would work, if you just asked people in the street to name as many states as they can. If you're into British quiz shows, there's a fun one called "Pointless", where they do exactly this: the contestants have to try to guess which answer the least number of people got right.
I did this once a long time ago. I was with some friends and suddenly challenged myself to do it (I am Canadian). The last one to come to me was Utah. Hard to imagine.
Yeah, maybe that works.
But what about here? If all we have as a resource is the people commenting here, how do we determine the most obscure state?
If it's here, I want to say "rely on the honour system", but I don't know whether that would actually work.
You'd need actual trolls to cancel the signal from those following the honour system, surely? Those who cheated would list all states and thus only dilute it.
Although, the signal might be pretty weak considering we're us. I don't even live in the 'States and I was able to list 46/50 from memory (missed Montana, Arizona, Missouri and Wisconsin).
Good point! :-)
And yeah, when I was in elementary school, we did a version of "fifty nifty united states", and I might still be able to rattle off parts from memory.
Plus the capitals if you went to my grade school.
How much should Hamas be ridiculed?
The German writer Berthold Brecht, when writing about his play Arturo Ui (re-telling the rise of Adolf Hitler by making him a prohibition era gangster boss) argued that the great political criminals must be exposed, and preferably be exposed to ridicule, as they are not great political criminals, but the perpetrators of great political crimes, which is something completely different.
He was claiming that there is generally a level of reverence and respect for those who kill, from the serial killer to the bloody conqueror, and that this respect must be destroyed. [1]
Looking at the rise of "true crime", I can not help but concur. In my opinion, if you have to put specific serial killer or mass shooter into the media at all, make them the butt of the joke in a late night show or something. Killers generally forfeit what Harry calls the "deontological protection of the innocents", so go wild. Speculate about their penis sizes, whatever.
For terrorist organisations, I feel that the only ones who should take them seriously are the security services tasked with opposing them. While it is sad when terrorists kill someone, the piety which is due to their victims should not rub of on them. The fight of them against western nations is comically hopeless, and their willingness to murder should not cause us to think them Serious.
Of course, it could be argued that ridicule as an aspect of propaganda is yet another old symmetrical weapon. [2] I don't know if that is true. If I find Chaplin's The Great Dictator hilarious and would probably find the antisemitic caricatures in the Stuermer dreadfully predictable, is that purely due to my world view only?
[1] (Warning: German, Warning: pdf) https://www.berliner-ensemble.de/download/document/1331
[2] https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/03/24/guided-by-the-beauty-of-our-weapons/
Political satire (e.g. speculation on the penis size) only works within the frameworks of non-war politics, because it depends a lot on how exagerating an argument makes it poisonous to ever bring up in serious discussion circles again. This is probably not too effective against militants arguing with weapons, the physics of bullets won't change because you made fun of them. Furthermore, the particular sub-genre of political satire that is often employed against Trump or Hitler requires an identifiable person with lots of media appearance and a reputation, you will be hard pressed to find someone like that among Hamas-style anons.
What works is military satire, making fun of bullets by boasting that you have airplanes, and making fun of airplanes by boasting that you have AA missiles. More generally, you can make fun of the entire side you're fighting against, culture, people, economy, etc... The economy angle is very heavily used by Israeli and Pro-Israeli advocates in the media for example, those dirty poors are envious of our economical miracle, we will crush them under the wheels of our 400+ Billion GDP. In 4Chan's /pol, skin color is a devastating weapon, and the fighting takes place by posting a darker skinned Israeli/Palestinian, optionally in contrast to a fairer skinned Isareli/Palestinian, and then declaring the self-evident truth that the fairer-skinned people deserve more suppport and anyone supporting the darker skinned a laughable object of mockery. Lots of soft targets in Culture, for Israelis and Pro-Israelis that's the medival islamist rhetorics that often motivates large swathes of Arab and Iranian Anti-Israelis, a big success story is MEMRI TV[1][2], founded by an ex Israeli intelligence official with the very obvious agenda of posting hilarious clips from talk shows and tv programs where Islamist drivel is taken as a self-evident and built upon. Internally, Israelis often make fun of depictions of Palestinian misery [3], with the latest trend being dressing like them on Tiktok and making exagerated facial expressions of pain or injury[4]. From the Arab and Pro-Arab side, west bank settlers have long been an extremly tempting target, with the latest being "If I Don't Steal Your House Somebody Else WIll" Jacob. Internally, the Jew hatred in Islam's Hadith and Quran form a formidable base to build upon.
And so on and so forth. Politicians form a very small section of satire-able surface area in times of war, there is so many other targets to choose from, and so little sympathy for the objects of mockery, that there are much juicier targets.
Still, Ghadaffi and Saddam Hussien were famous objects of mockery (especially the former), there are just no equivalents to them in the mostly anonymous Hamas.
[1] https://www.memri.org/tv
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Middle_East_Media_Research_Institute#Accusations_of_bias
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pallywood
[4] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_mwcFEpAYkU
It is perhaps relevant that Brecht chose to live in East Germany and wrote a eulogy for Stalin.
Yup, Brecht was a commie. I think the closest he came to criticizing the East German regime was his comment on a worker strike on Stalinallee: "Would it not be easier if the government dissolved the people and elected new ones."
That's interesting-- I think of the quote as funny, but it's only funny when it's pretty much hypothetical.
I think it would backfire.
Mockery, as a tool, is only effective when you wish to be a respected part of the society that is mocking you.
I am not sure. How your leaders are viewed elsewhere, even among your enemies, is still relevant.
Consider two cases:
* "Bin Laden is viewed as evil incarnate in the US. They fear him, they hate him."
* "Bin Laden is widely mocked in the US. Everyone does spoofs of his videos. There are fake Viagra ads featuring him."
Which reputation is more likely to attract followers to his cause?
This might have been a more convincing argument before Trump rode in to win an election on a wave of mockery.
I will note that while Trump was mocked aplenty, he was also painted as Hitler reborn by the left (see https://slatestarcodex.com/2016/11/16/you-are-still-crying-wolf/ . I think Scott's opinion back then holds up relatively well even considering the 2021-01-06 events. Any halfway competent wannabe dictator would have used covid as an excuse for a power grab.).
I think in the primaries, his MO was to say something outrageous which then riled up the left and got his name in the media a lot.
I will grant you that the mockery was not effective at dissuading people from voting for him, though.
Hitler was mocked, ridiculed, and made fun of by the greatest comic minds of his era over and over again. He was the Donald Trump of the '30s in that respect. Judge for yourself how successful the satirists and comics were at stopping him.
I do not think that Hitler was thriving as much on negative publicity as Trump was from the primaries on. And while Trump was seen as Hitler by the left, I don't think Hitler was seen as Hitler quite as much by his contemporaries. Sure, the left half of Parliament rightfully feared him, but he was certainly not the only anti-democratic threat on the right. (To say nothing of the commies on the left.)
The real problem was that other right-wing parties underestimated him. After all, he had been a mere private in the Great War, and a commoner on top, barely good enough to hold the stirrups to power as a junior coalition partner of the revanchist aristocrats in other right-wing parties. Boy were they wrong.
Hitler was mocked, ridiculed, and made fun of mostly outside of the society that he was ruling over though. Nobody in Germany was making fun of Hitler after 1933 or maybe at the latest 1935.
Not that he didn't care about being ridiculed in the UK or France or the US, he demonstrably did at least a bit, but only at the level of adding one more item to an enemies list he'd been nursing since World War I.
I thought it was widely acknowledged that the outraged media reactions to every one of Trump's comments were largely responsible for giving him the widespread attention needed to win the nomination. In other words, if people had generally responded "wow, what a clown" instead "THIS IS WHY WE LIVE IN A WHITE SUPREMACIST SOCIETY AND ALL DISAGREEMENT MUST BE BANNED!" he may well have never been a real issue at all.
I doubt anything like that would have worked. Trump was too good at convincing people he was a great businessman and on their side and opposed to people who were sneering at them.
Correct, especially the second part. Talking to Trump supporters during 2016 what I heard repeatedly was either of two things:
"those fuckers all hate him, so I'm voting for him"
"so he lies or whatever, so what -- he fights!"
Each of those voter motivations was largely impregnable to information about Trump's personal character and/or Trump being made fun of by comedians or whoever.
Being dismissed as a clown looks a lot less like being hated than does the vitriolic all-caps rant. And it usually stops before the part where anyone talks about how one is fighting.
Also, voters definitely do distinguish between "serious" candidates who can possibly win, and joke candidates who are guaranteed to lose and will only waste your vote. Until 2016, the idea of President Donald Trump was always broadly considered a joke, and that didn't stop the moment he announced his candidacy. It did stop at about the time the media coverage shifted to "Donald Trump is a Serious Threat and we must make sure he doesn't win".
I don’t think they were that successful at satirizing Trump. Alec Baldwin as Trump was funny - but he was funny almost in the same way that Trump is funny. (I don’t mean that Trump is witty, but he is a clown, a bit zany and unpredictable.) And that somehow made the fear of Trump a little ridiculous. Those young people who were saying they were scared to go outside, and were going to wear safety pins as a talisman or something. Until that lugubrious Hallelujah cover, SNL didn’t manage to capture that zeitgeist - I believe they may have even regretted that they didn’t.
I had forgotten the safety pins! Yeah, the amount of "we are now living in Nazi Germany/Occupied France and must be La Résistance" were incredible. Looking back at it, I have to think that the chronically online have a lot of other problems as well, e.g. chronic anxiety, which leads to this kind of over-reaction.
It is true that making fun of something can make people forget it is real. I followed the Brexit process after the referendum and some of the people opposing it seemed to find it so easy to make fun of the supporters that they seemed to forget that Brexit was really happening. (Obviously I am not comparing Brexit to Hamas or anything)
True. It's hard to satirize the already funny. Nobody successfully satirized Michael Jackson.
But they tried.
It was the late, great Norm MacDonald who pointed out while every other comic was trying to "stop Trump by making fun of him" in 2016 that comics tried the same thing with Hitler in the '30s and it didn't work.
You could say there was a lot of Hitler Derangement Syndrome going on then.
> Nobody successfully satirized Michael Jackson.
Aside from Weird Al, you mean? ;-)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t2mU6USTBRE
Although apparently Michael Jackson approved enough that he let Weird Al use his subway set...
Some people are their own parodies.
True, but how successful were they at stopping future Hitlers? Mockery usually works by making the object-of-mockery an unappealing position to be in.
As successful as they were at stopping future Charlemagnes.
People don't understand that laughter indicates a lack of danger. Convincing people there's no danger isn't going to make things less dangerous, it's going to make people less prepared to face it.
I think we get the progress we deserve. We have a distinct lack of the gas-mask mustache and babies named "Adolf", and people get suspicious when military uniforms look too snazzy.
But, alas, "kill the Jews" is still being chanted in streets.
I think Hitler deserves the most credit for stopping future Hitlers*. Although we can probably also blame woke-ism on Hitler, as anti-bigotry eventually went way too far. **
*Because nothing fails like failure.
** There's nothing wrong with anti-bigotry, but it has gone too far in the sense that it has been overprioritized at the expense of other values, creating a value imbalance. E.g., we now undervalue virtues such as self-reliance, toughness and dignity.
Somehow Hussein didn't do anything to stop future Husseins!
Honestly, Americans are the world's most ridiculous drama queens.
We went OUT OF OUR WAY to hire really just some guy to be president of the United States because he was black and his middle name was Hussein and we thought it would piss off George W.
And just as soon as he's oit of office he's forgotten and we remake W into one of our Forever Right, Forever Wise, elder statesmen. 🤣
Other countries have vuvuzelas, baby shrieking sound trucks, and politicians throwing animal guts at each other during bunga bunga parties, but we Americans throw random tizzies without warning and mainly out of boredom --- and by the time the rest of the world buys into our bullshit (Covid anyone? 🤣) we're totally over it and frankly rather bored by the subject!
I ♥️ being 🇺🇲.
Some of the discussion below got me thinking: isn't one of the big moral questions where exactly we draw the line between valuing type 1 vs type 2 thinking? Civilization is built on type 2 thinking, yet we can't do without raw, blind, primordial intuition either, no? The easy way out of a repugnant conclusion from type 2 thinking is to defer to type 1 when you're in a jam. And Nietzsche basically spent his career using type 2 thinking -- to praise type 1!
So does anyone have a rule-based ethical system which says "If sent here, go with type 1." ?
Is there a rule based ethical system for keeping your balance so as not to fall over?
I think it’s very much the same thing..
Before talking about how things should be, we should acknowledge how things are: we actually do use type one in a supermajority of situations. We then, occasionally, use type 2 thinking to justify the already made decision, or to try and convince other people.
Which is not as broken as it sounds. Type 2 is best used when learning new skills - for day to day usage, you use the cached patterns.
Haven’t heard of type 1/type 2 before, can you link me to something that explains it? Thanks
It's from one of those famous airport books I haven't read but nearly everyone here knows about. Thinking Fast/Thinking Slow. Thinking Fast, type 1, is your immediate intuition. It's sometimes useful, but prey to all sorts of biases and lacks all thoughtfulness. Type 2, deliberate, careful thinking. Useful in the trades but may not tell you when to run from a stranger.
Gotcha, I’ve heard of thinking fast and slow. I’m kinda autistic and I’ve wondered if thinking fast is one of those things I oughta start trying to do... lol
Maybe ease your way in with a single shot of tequila.
https://youtu.be/fZpPPsTFvPI?si=bt6klPeW1T22-zGe
What's the best non-theistic explanation for why so many of the world's major philosophical and religious traditions have converged on the idea of an entity that is both the supreme law of the Universe and a force calling us towards moral virtue? The most interesting case to me is the Greek revolution, because there it represents a very clear break from the myths of popular tradition; Zeus is king of the gods and sort-of an enforcer of the moral law, but he's neither the original creator-deity nor the true supreme power of the universe, and obeying the Fates (the actual supreme power) doesn't have anything to do with your morality, you just do it because you don't have a choice. It's only once you get into the attempts by philosophers to develop a more rational cosmology that this idea starts becoming important.
Clearly there are significant differences between the conceptions of this entity represented by Platonist Form of the Good, Aristotelian natural law, the Biblical God, the Zoroastrian Ahura Mazda, the Confucian Heaven, the Taoist Dao, and the Buddhist/Hindu law of karma*. But the fact they differ on so many other points just makes their agreement on this core concept seem even stranger.
*(I'm not 100% sure the law of karma is actually an example of what I'm talking about? My knowledge of Indian religions is pretty superficial. If I'm wrong about the emergence of this idea in Indian traditions, it would go along way towards making this feel less mysterious to me.)
Out of curiosity, I tried entering this comment into ChatGPT and got this out:
"The convergence on the concept of a supreme law or entity that governs the universe and calls for moral virtue across various philosophical and religious traditions, despite their many differences, is indeed fascinating. There are several non-theistic explanations for this phenomenon that stem from sociological, psychological, and evolutionary perspectives. Here are a few that may help to elucidate this convergence:
1. Sociopolitical Function: One of the functions of religion and philosophy in society is to provide a framework for social cohesion and moral behavior. A supreme moral law or entity serves as a focal point for unity and a standard for behavior, which is essential for the survival and prosperity of a society. In times of societal crisis, such concepts could be particularly powerful in rallying people together or encouraging pro-social behavior.
2. Cognitive and Psychological Factors: Human cognition seems predisposed to seek patterns, causes, and explanations for phenomena in the world. This has been referred to as a "theory of mind" or "intentionality" — the idea that behind events there are intentions or purposes. This can be extended to the belief in a supreme being or order that has a purpose or goal, especially when it comes to the creation and operation of the universe. The universality of these cognitive tendencies could explain the cross-cultural emergence of similar ideas.
3. Moral Intuition and Natural Law: Many philosophers have argued that humans have an inherent moral intuition. Aristotle's concept of natural law, for example, is derived from the idea that there is a "right" way for humans to live, which is determined by their natural purposes. The convergence on a universal moral order could reflect a shared human intuition about the existence of an objective moral truth or law.
4. Philosophical Reflection and Rationalization: As cultures develop and engage in philosophical reflection, there is a trend toward rationalization and systematization of beliefs. The Greeks, for example, moved from mythological explanations of the cosmos to more abstract, reasoned ones. This rationalization often leads to the concept of a single, underlying principle or entity that explains the order and purpose of the universe, which also encompasses morality.
5. Existential and Psychological Needs: Humans universally face existential questions about life, death, and the purpose of existence. A supreme law or entity provides answers to these questions and a sense of comfort and meaning. It also offers a way to deal with the fear of death and the unknown, providing a framework for hope beyond individual mortality.
6. Cultural Exchange and Syncretism: Ideas about a supreme moral law or entity did not develop in isolation. There was considerable exchange of philosophical and religious concepts between different cultures throughout history. For instance, during the Hellenistic period, Greek and Eastern thought influenced each other, which may have contributed to the development of similar concepts across these traditions.
Regarding the law of karma in Indian religions, it can indeed be seen as an example of this phenomenon, though it is less personalized than the Abrahamic God or Ahura Mazda. Karma is a law-like process that governs moral actions and their consequences. It suggests that the universe has an inherent moral order, and that good deeds tend to lead to good outcomes, both in this life and in future lives (as per the belief in reincarnation). While not a deity, the law of karma functions as a kind of moral force that upholds a just and orderly universe.
In summary, the similarities in these grand concepts across cultures are likely due to a combination of universal human cognitive processes, sociopolitical needs, psychological comfort mechanisms, philosophical rationalization, and cross-cultural interactions. Each of these factors could contribute to the development and acceptance of the idea of a supreme moral law or force in different cultures."
Speaketh thee of The Axial Age.
I think current scholarship holds that the Zoroaster probably died a while before the standard dates for the Axial Age, and Judaism probably already had this concept in some form before then. But it's closely related, yes.
To my mind, there isn't a huge leap between
> Q: How do we coordinate our fellow apes to behave nicely?
> A: Tell them that the God-King commands them so.
Or put another way,
> Problem: Wouldn't it be nice if all of our in-group chose "Cooperate" in the prisoner's dilemma?
> Solution: surrender your self-interested reasoning-capacity to that of a high-status and benevolent central-coordinator.
I think this is probably the most plausible answer I've gotten so far. But I'm still not totally satisfied with it; the trouble is that it does *too* good a job of explaining *specifically* the Biblical descriptions of God, to the point that it makes it hard to explain why all the other traditions' descriptions have so little in common with them. As a social technology, viewing the supreme power as a ruler who gives clear, explicit commandments and sends disasters to punish those who violate them seems obviously superior to describing it as an impersonal force that pushes us towards goodness in some vague way that only philosophers understand, such as the Tao or the Platonic Form of the Good. So if the unifying factor of these traditions were merely the search for a way to promote cooperation, I'd expect that nearly all of them would converge on the former idea, whereas in reality most of them are closer to the latter.
Well, I dunno. There's probably pros and cons to relying on obedience, as opposed to volition. And I think they can occur in parallel. If you look at The Republic for example, the Platonic Good was supposed to be articulated via Philosopher-King, no?
Some other quick caveats: I think most social phenomena aren't actually prisoner's dilemmas, because there's often multiple equilibria. And when I say "coordinate", what probably comes to your mind is being a good-samaritan to lepers and tax-collectors. But I was thinking more along the lines of asabiyyah. Organized warfare is a form of coordination too.
>But I was thinking more along the lines of asabiyyah. Organized warfare is a form of coordination too.
I agree, but I'm not sure how that affects the point. A military campaign is exactly the sort of scenario where I'd expect clear rules and consequences for disobedience to be *most* important.
Though, reflecting on it more, I suppose one benefit of keeping the details of this kind of cosmology vague is that it makes it hard to falsify. "Desert the army and God will smite you" is a claim that can be easily tested and disproven; "deserting the army will inflict spiritual damage on you by limiting your ability to partake in the Form of the Good", not so much.
Every once in a blue moon, I try to branch out from just Scott to see what else is out there. I happened to come across this essay by Sarah Constantin. Her analysis points in a vaguely similar direction, although it goes much farther than mine.
https://srconstantin.github.io/2017/09/12/patriarchy-is-the-problem.html
"quick caveats" was intended as more a post-script than a rebuttal.
> There's probably pros and cons
What I'm trying to get at here is, the behavior is often endogenous. E.g. consider sports. Sports is, in all likelihood, a simulation of warfare. Fans get fanatical because it's fun. Or consider Valhalla. The reward for fighting and dying honorably in combat was: you get to fight even more. Humans are like skroderiders in that we come with a political-module buried in our monkey-brain. Thus flogging, while effective, isn't always needed.
"What's the best non-theistic explanation for why so many of the world's major philosophical and religious traditions have converged on the idea of an entity that is both the supreme law of the Universe and a force calling us towards moral virtue?"
My memory of Greek mythology is admittedly extremely sketchy, but is it really obvious that Zeus is an enforcer of the moral law? He is described as such in the Odyssey, but not really I think, in Greek mythology in general.
There's a really jarring disconnect between reading Euthyrphro and Bullfinch. Plato seems to take it for granted that the man on the street will think of the gods as exceptionally holy. In the latter they come off like a bunch of hooligans nobody could seriously worship.
Possibly the versions preserved in popular culture are not representative of the understanding of the gods that led to reverence and sacrifice, and the connection between creator gods and morality gods goes back further than those myths would suggest.
Or it was just jarring and weird and not easy to reconcile, it's hard to tell.
I've heard a theory that most of what we "know" about the Greek gods is from late period satires, and we don't know what it was like when they were the basis for a serious religion.
That would make sense. It's weird that we talk about cultural or political shifts over spans of just decades, but then we talk about civilizations or religions that lasted 3,000 years as if they could possibly be any coherent single thing.
We're always doing a bit of Spider Paleontology with ancient civilizations aren't we? https://xkcd.com/1747/
I think it depends on which mythology you go to? As I recall, Hesiod leaned more into the "justice" angle of things, as opposed to the Illiad which was more about supernatural squabbles, and the Odyssey which was a little in-between. I've heard the difference described as something like "Homer wrote for warriors, and Hesiod wrote for shepherds".
Zeus evolved according to the needs of men.
C. S. Lewis has something to say on this in the introduction of his book "The Problem of Pain". He describes the possible origins of religious belief and how divine beings may have become associated with morality. He starts by describing an experience he calls the Numinous: the feeling you might get if you suspected you were in a haunted house, or a sacred space. This feeling, combined with the almost universal early human belief that the world is full of spirits, may account for the development of the idea of gods in general. He then expands on the moral element:
>All the human beings that history has heard of acknowledge some kind of morality; that is, they feel towards certain proposed actions the experiences expressed by the words “I ought” or “I ought not”. These experiences resemble awe in one respect, namely that they cannot be logically deduced from the environment and physical experiences of the man who undergoes them. You can shuffle “I want” and “I am forced” and “I shall be well advised” and “I dare not” as long as you please without getting out of them the slightest hint of “ought” and “ought not”. ... Morality, like numinous awe, is a jump; in it, man goes beyond anything that can be “given” in the facts of experience. And it has one characteristic too remarkable to be ignored. The moralities accepted among men may differ — though not, at bottom, so widely as is often claimed but they all agree in prescribing a behaviour which their adherents fail to practise. All men alike stand condemned, not by alien codes of ethics, but by their own, and all men therefore are conscious of guilt. The second element in religion is the consciousness not merely of a moral law, but of a moral law at once approved and disobeyed. This consciousness is neither a logical, nor an illogical, inference from the facts of experience; if we did not bring it to our experience we could not find it there. It is either inexplicable illusion, or else revelation.
>The moral experience and the numinous experience are so far from being the same that they may exist for quite long periods without establishing a mutual contact. In many forms of Paganism the worship of the gods and the ethical discussions of the philosophers have very little to do with each other. The third stage in religious development arises when men identify them — when the Numinous Power to which they feel awe is made the guardian of the morality to which they feel obligation. Once again, this may seem to you very “natural”. What can be more natural than for a savage haunted at once by awe and by guilt to think that the power which awes him is also the authority which condemns his guilt? And it is, indeed, natural to humanity. But it is not in the least obvious. The actual behaviour of that universe which the Numinous haunts bears no resemblance to the behaviour which morality demands of us. The one seems wasteful, ruthless, and unjust; the other enjoins upon us the opposite qualities. Nor can the identification of the two be explained as a wish-fulfilment, for it fulfils no one’s wishes. We desire nothing less than to see that Law whose naked authority is already unsupportable armed with the incalculable claims of the Numinous. Of all the jumps, that humanity takes in its religious history this is certainly the most surprising. It is not unnatural that many sections of the human race refused it; nonmoral religion, and non-religious morality, existed and still exist. Perhaps only a single people, as a people, took the new step with perfect decision — I mean the Jews: but great individuals in all times and places have taken it also, and only those who take it are safe from the obscenities and barbarities of unmoralised worship or the cold, sad self righteousness of sheer moralism. Judged by its fruits, this step is a step towards increased health. And though logic does not compel us to take it, it is very hard to resist — even on Paganism and Pantheism morality is always breaking in, and even Stoicism finds itself willy-nilly bowing the knee to God. Once more, it may be madness — a madness congenital to man and oddly fortunate in its results — or it may be revelation. And if revelation, then it is most really and truly in Abraham that all peoples shall be blessed, for it was the Jews who fully and unambiguously identified the awful Presence haunting black mountain-tops and thunderclouds with “the righteous Lord” who “loveth righteousness”
The whole introduction is well worth reading.
http://www.samizdat.qc.ca/cosmos/philo/PDFs/ProblemofPain_CSL.pdf
>Nor can the identification of the two be explained as a wish-fulfilment, for it fulfils no one’s wishes. We desire nothing less than to see that Law whose naked authority is already unsupportable armed with the incalculable claims of the Numinous.
Really?
I dunno, this seems like Lewis projecting his own feelings onto the average person. I would guess that for most religious believers, this is absolutely a wish-fulfilment.
Could you unpack that? I'm not seeing it.
I can't help you on the development of the idea, just throwing my tuppence worth in:
"Zeus is king of the gods and sort-of an enforcer of the moral law, but he's neither the original creator-deity nor the true supreme power of the universe"
I think, starting off, you get the gods as powers that "doesn't have anything to do with your morality, you just do it because you don't have a choice". Zeus is the thunder and the lightning and the upper airs, you can't argue with a thunderstorm. So you just try to appease the powers.
As culture develops and you get philosophers looking at these questions, then you get the move towards explanations that are more complex/abstract than "to get the rains in time, you pray and sacrifice to the rain god". (One example of this is Indra, the Zeus-equivalent in Hindu pantheon; he is in charge of sending the rains, and one day out of pique at not being, as he sees it, respected enough by the people on earth he decides to send destructive floods. This is due to the actions of Krishna, who has convinced the local people to worship the mountain instead of Indra. Krishna saves everyone by lifting up the mountain so they can shelter under it, and Indra comes to realise that this isn't a mere village boy but a divine incarnation of Vishnu, so he stops the storms and repents. And so his pride is broken and he is taught to do his dharma - send the rains in time - without expecting worship and sacrifices as 'bribes' or flattery).
That gives us things like the development of the concept of Ananke, who is personified as a goddess of necessity (in a way, the 'laws of nature' that govern the universe). Even Zeus has to obey Necessity, which is why he can't alter certain decisions of Fate either to prevent them or undo them.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ananke
For Indian tradition, I think it's more dharma (a complex concept which includes the idea of moral or ethical law, righteousness) than karma (which is the working out of your dharma and if you behaved in accordance with it or not, then you get the fruits of your past actions for good or ill).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dharma
Everyone can have a dharma according to their station in life - husband or wife, king or subject, layperson or religious - and it's possible for different dharma to come into conflict. We see this in the "Ramayana" with the two brothers of the demon-king Ravana; Kumbhakarna and Vibhishana. Both of them become convinced that Ravan is in the wrong to seize Sita and fight against Rama, but Vibhishana flees Lanka to join Rama's army and aids in the fight against his brother (including revealing secrets of the city) while Kumbhakarna fights for Ravan and is eventually killed by Rama.
So which of them is right, and which of them is wrong? Well, they're both right, and both wrong. Vibhishana is cursed by Ravan to be known forever as a traitor to his family and country, and indeed you can see it that way - by revealing the secrets of that side (including the secret of Ravana's invulnerability) he is a traitor. But he is acting out of the dharma of righteousness, to fight on the side of the good and against the evil.
So is Kumbharkana wrong? He knows the cause he is fighting for is wrong and is doing evil. But he is acting out of the dharma of loyalty to family and king (Ravan, his elder brother) and to his homeland. So he's in the right there.
That's how two sets of dharma can come into conflict and how there is different karma resulting out of the choices made.
>For Indian tradition, I think it's more dharma (a complex concept which includes the idea of moral or ethical law, righteousness) than karma (which is the working out of your dharma and if you behaved in accordance with it or not, then you get the fruits of your past actions for good or ill).
>https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dharma
Based on the link you sent, it looks like Rta is the closest matching concept, with dharma and karma both being extensions of it.
>"But the fact they differ on so many other points just makes their agreement on this core concept seem even stranger."
If you reflect on this part of your question, you should be able to see that your question is itself rooted in the same cognitive tendency as the religions you are asking about. What you are saying amounts to "Look at all these different things — I realize they might all seem different from each other, but if you ignore the differences, isn't it weird that they are all fundamentally the same thing?"
Grouping phenomena into categories and coming up with explanations for the characteristics of those categories are fundamental cognitive processes by which we make sense of the world. Pursued to the extreme, these processes lead to the kind of monistic explanatory schemes that you are asking about. So one way of rephrasing your question would be "why have people in a wide range of cultures proposed monistic explanatory schemes?" But if there is no universal barrier that prevents people from seeking unifying explanations beyond a certain point of generality, then monistic explanatory schemes are naturally going to arise from time to time in a variety of cultural contexts, just through the normal operation of fundamental cognitive capacities.
Monistic explanatory schemes don't necessarily have to assume that the source of existence cares in any way about human moral codes, though. If anything, it seems more intuitively logical to assume the opposite, for reasons that were well-understood by at least some of these traditions already in ancient times (see The Book of Job or Plato's Euthyphro).
If you posit different explanations for moral and non-moral facts, then you don't have a monistic explanatory scheme any more.
You are right that it is easy to raise objections to monistic schemes, and that we have ancient records of people raising such objections. But this is not what your original question was about: as I understood it, you were asking why monistic schemes would arise and be accepted in the first place.
But by the same argument, a monistic explanatory scheme also requires that the supreme power must be the explanation for all violations of the moral law in addition to the law itself. So the claim that the power is trying to prevent these violations from existing makes it harder, rather than easier, to be properly monistic.
In that case, it sounds like you are wanting an explanation for dualistic explanatory schemes (since you are interested in schemes that offer a unified explanation for cosmology and moral laws, but do not propose the same explanation for violations of the moral laws). But how many of the traditions you named in your post claim that "the power is trying to prevent these violations from existing"?
Platonic Form of the Good: This is a bit tricky, since Plato gave varying accounts of the Forms in different dialogues. A stereotypical Platonic explanation for goodness would be "good things are good because they partake of the Form of the Good" (with the "partake of" relationship somewhat underspecified: this is one of the problems with the theory of Forms that apparently troubled Plato himself). I don't recall any point at which Plato described the Form of the Good as "trying to prevent" violations of goodness.
Aristotelian natural law: The usual reference of this phrase would be to Aristotle's concept of "natural justice" (physikon dikaion), which is an ethical/political concept opposed to "conventional justice" (nomikon dikaion), not a cosmogenic concept like "God" or "Dao." So it doesn't seem to fit your description. (Aristotle didn't really have a concept of "laws of nature" like modern science does; his account of the behaviour of things in natural world was based on the four causes defining their individual natures, not on laws.)
Biblical God: Explaining the existence of evil and/or suffering is a notoriously difficult theological problem for the Abrahamic religions. Solutions to this problem varied, but the presumption of God's omnipotence means that most theologians have rejected descriptions of God as "trying" (but failing) to prevent violations of moral law.
Zoroastrian Ahura Mazda: (My knowledge of Zoroastrianism is very superficial, but I think it might provide the only genuine example of what you think you are seeing, because of the central place it gives to a substantive dualism of good and evil.)
Confucian Heaven: The problem here is that many of the core Chinese philosophical terms, including "Heaven," are highly polysemic. So even if we have a Confucian text at one point using "Heaven" to mean "the supreme law of the Universe," and at another point using the same word to mean "a force calling us towards moral virtue," this doesn't mean we can confidently say the text presupposes a single entity fulfilling both those roles. It could be that there are two separate concepts of Heaven that share a name but are differentiated by context (cf. "sitting on the bank of the river" vs. "depositing your money in the bank"). This may seem odd if you are more familiar with the Greek philosophical tradition, which was deeply troubled by this sort of polysemy and devoted a lot of energy to sorting it out, but the Chinese philosophical tradition tended to clarify polysemy only when it was causing particular difficulties.
Taoist Dao: The Dao of the Daodejing is many things, but it is certainly not "a force calling us towards moral virtue." I'm not sure why you would say that — perhaps you have been misled by the traditional translation of De as "virtue"? This translation was adopted when the older connotation of "virtue" as "capacity to act" was still somewhat familiar to English speakers. (cf. Chaucer's "swich licour / of which vertu engendred is the flour")
Buddhist/Hindu karma: There are many versions of the concept, but the general idea is that good deeds have good consequences for the actor and bad deeds have bad consequences. This isn't "a force calling us towards moral virtue," it's just a description of how the world is. (I don't know of any claim in the Indian tradition that it is "good" or "just" that karma works in this way: the operations of karma are more usually just presented as a brute descriptive fact.)
I agree that you can ignore all these distinctions if you really want to, but that just means either: (a) you have a cognitive preference for broad categories and unifying explanations (in which case you should have a good intuitive understanding of the cognitive tendency that leads towards religious/philosophical monism), or (b) you have specific reasons for adopting broad categories and seeking a unifying explanation in this particular case.
As a general principle, any mapping of a conceptual space, regardless of whether it employs broad or narrow categories, benefits from a clear specification of where the categorical boundaries lie. The approach you have adopted here is to define your categories by examples: Category A is "Things like the Platonist Form of the Good, Aristotelian natural law, the Biblical God, the Zoroastrian Ahura Mazda, the Confucian Heaven, the Taoist Dao, and the Buddhist/Hindu law of karma"; Category B is "Things like Zeus." It isn't clear to me what your motivation is for thinking this is a fruitful way to divide up the conceptual space, or for your implicit assumption that the phenomena in Category A stand in need of special explanation while those in Category B do not.
Simplicity? To paraphrase the Tao Te Ching, from nothing came the One, and from the One came duality (the two, i.e. distinction), and from duality came all the myriad (ten thousand) things of this world.
Or possibly once you get a bunch of smart people trying to systematize a religion or philosophy, it winds up with some sort of ultimate cause. And maybe it's like all those Greek philosophers who speculated about the ultimate nature of the universe and came up with different explanations, and here we are thousands of years later going "look, all these philosophies had the common feature of an explanation, perhaps it's not a coincidence and an explanation exists".
We model the world on the world we first knew, where parents or other grownups were the source of nurture & protection and also the power that judged our behavior good or bad and meted out rewards or punishment.
Perhaps societies which adopt those beliefs tend to outcompete others.
>What's the best non-theistic explanation for why so many of the world's major philosophical and religious traditions have converged on the idea of an entity that is both the supreme law of the Universe and a force calling us towards moral virtue?
I"ll bite....A powerful need to make sense out of the world once we were cognizant enough to make it necessary, (the way small children have imaginary playmates or stuffed animals that talk) leading to....A powerful need to regulate ourselves in spite of ourselves if we were to live together in any significant numbers. What better way than to come up with a force everyone had to obey (A stand-in for Klaatu.)
The rest is just window dressing. God is god but his/her/their/its laws are manmade, which explains their cultural differences.
(A stand-in for Klaatu.)
...wasn't it Gort?
Yes, sorry. Klaatu was part of the instructions not to wipe us all out.
How does a need to make sense of the world lend itself to monotheism, inherently? I’m a believer in coincidence even when it seems improbable, but if I were to try to force a pattern to the coincidences I’ve experienced in my life, it seems like the simplest explanation would be multiple gods, with equal power and opposing values, battling it out to exert their will.
Yes. I agree. Monotheism is the part where we have to regulate ourselves in spite of ourselves. The first part of my comment about narratives to make sense out of the world goes to your point about all kinds of gods representing all kinds of different attitudes.
There are at most two independent traditions amongst your examples. Judaism was definitely heavily influenced in its classical-era development by Zoroastrianism, and Aristotle was definitely aware of Zoroastrianism, which we know from him explicitly comparing his philosophy to Zoroastrian ideas in some of his writings. Not sure about Plato, but Classical Greece has extensive contact with Persia, and Aristotle is far from the only one of Plato's students to have written about Zoroastrianism. And Taoism and Confucianism were both influenced by Buddhism.
So the question now is why Zoroastrianism and Buddhism/Hinduism contain some major overlapping themes. It could be a coincidence, or one could be drawing from the other, or both could be drawing on a common source. Persia and Vedic India are bothe products of the Indo-Iranian branch of Indo-European expansion, so they share common roots, and they remained near-neighbors with considerable trade and cultural contact (and the occasional major war, such as the Achaemenid conquest of the Indus Valley which took place over the course 6th-4th centuries BC around the probable time of the Buddha's life as well as towards the tail end of the very wide window of possible dates for Zoroaster's life) thereafter.
Incidentally, assuming arguendo that there's a single original version of this idea from which all the others are descended, I think the most probable candidate for that original version would not be Ahura Mazda but the Ancient Egyptian concept of Ma'at, which pre-dates both Zoroastrianism and Hinduism by centuries.
Even if all of these traditions picked up the idea from Zoroastrianism, I don't think that makes it seem all that much less weird. It just changes the nature of the question from "why is this the one non-trivial idea that all of these philosophical schools converged on?" to "why is this the one non-trivial aspect of Zoroastrianism that all of these philosophical schools converged on preserving?"
I'm not sure it's the only aspect. There are a bunch of common threads between Zoroastrianism and some or all of the other major religions:
1. Moral teachings emphasize a combination of good actions and good intent, with selflessness and compassion being major features of what constitutes "good intent". Details differ (e.g. Catholics believe that Good Works are necessary for salvation, while Lutherans believe that only Faith is essential but proper Faith should inspire you to perform good works), but in broad strokes I think this is pretty close to universal across Christianity, Judaism, Islam, Hinduism, Buddhism, Confucianism, and Taoism.
2. Zoroastrian Dualism tracks pretty closely to the God vs Satan conflict in most Abrahamic religions, as wells as with the conflict between Devas and Asuras in Hinduism and Buddhism (*). The concepts of Yin and Yang in Taoism and Confucianism track less closely but shares some major themes, particularly the division of cosmology into two opposing forces associated with light and darkness and with creation and destruction, with the notable difference that Yin is not seen as inherently evil like Satan or Angra Mainyu.
(*) Although curiously, the Devas, seen as the "good guys" in Hindu and Buddhist theology, have a name which is a cognate of "Daeva" (the bad guys in Zorastrianism). Western religions seem to agree with the Indic religions over the Zoroastrians here, as "Deva" is also a cognate of "Deity", "Deus", and "Zeus". and the similarity to the English word "Devil" appears to be a misleading coincidence as the latter comes from a Classical Greek word meaning "slanderer" or "false accuser".
3. Moderation as a virtue is central to Buddhism and is fairly important in most Abrahamic religions as well as in Taoism. Not sure about Confucianism, and Hinduism has a variety of traditions on whether one should strive for moderation or for as much asceticism as possible.
I expect there are other conserved features of Zoroastrianism, but that's what I've got off the top of my head.
(1) and (3) are pretty weak and trivial resemblances. I doubt Aristotle or Buddha needed to know about the Zoroaster to come up with the idea that acting out of prosocial motives was good, nor the notion that excessive self-indulgence was often harmful.
(2) is more interesting, but to me it looks like more a confusion of language than an actual broad similarity. As you already noted, that Taoism preserves the associations of the two great forces with light and darkness only in the literal sense, dropping the association with good and evil. Christianity does exactly the opposite -- God vs. Satan only consistently corresponds to light vs. dark in the metaphorical sense of good vs. evil; in the literal sense, both of them are more often associated in scripture with light. "Opposing forces" is similarly ambiguous; yin/yang are "opposing" in the sense of "having diametrically opposite qualities", but not in the sense of "working towards conflicting goals", whereas with the Christian God and Satan it's exactly the reverse. So, while you *could* group them all together as "the division of cosmology into two opposing forces associated with light and darkness", that would be more an indication of the ambiguity of language than of an actual convergence. And even then, there's still nothing like this in Judaism (where Satan is not at war with God), and I'm pretty sure there's nothing like it in Greek philosophy either.
>(1) and (3) are pretty weak and trivial resemblances.
You could definitely make that case. But there are a lot of religious traditions that don't put a big emphasis on these, certainly a lot less emphasis than the likes of Buddhism, Taoism, and Christianity put on them. Moderation is absolutely central to Buddhism, for instance, but I don't think it was even on Odin's radar.
It's my opinion that these seem obvious to us because we're products of cultures for which these concepts have been in the water supply for 1500-3000 years. The original similarities you first brought up, those of having a chief deity who was the creator and rightful ruler of the cosmos, and who moreover was the source and enforcer of moral law, seem equally obvious to me for similar reasons. But you rightfully point out that while they're heavily prevalent in most modern major religions and many classical philosophies besides, they don't really seem to be things outside of the sphere of influence of Indo-Iranian religious traditions.
>And even then, there's still nothing like this in Judaism (where Satan is not at war with God)
That's true of most modern flavors of Judaism, and it was true of ancient First Temple Judaism, but Second Temple Judaism (which developed under Achaemenid Persian rule) was heavily influenced by Zoroastrianism in many respects including interpretation of Satan as being a quasi-divine force acting against God. As I understand it, the modern Christian interpretations of Satan are derived most directly from Second Temple Judaism. I think Islamic ideas of Satan are also derived indirectly from Second Temple Judaism (by way of Christianity and of late-antiquity Middle Eastern Judaism) although they probably also got some influence directly from the Zoroastrians.
>I'm pretty sure there's nothing like it in Greek philosophy either.
That's true. At least not without a lot of stretching. Classical and Late-Antique Greek Philosophy mostly conceived Evil as being either the mere absence of Good (emphasized in Neoplatonism) or a product of a flawed human choices made in ignorance of the Good (emphasized in Stoicism), not as an independent force in its own right. In non-moral terms, there is the Stoic concept of Pneuma: a primal substance associated with heat, fire, creation, life, and the spark of the divine within humans. At least superficially, Pneuma seems to track pretty closely with the role of fire in Zoroastrian cosmology, but I don't think the Stoics though of Pneuma in binary terms: rather than Pneuma and Void being opposing force or elements, Pneuma was the main interesting part and Void was merely its absence.
Does anyone here know a good source for average temperature of cities around the world? Wikipedia has an article, but it has only a fraction of the cities I want data for.
There is a Lancet article that finds global deaths from cold much larger than from heat — about seventeen times as large. There is a later Lancet article, with the same lead author, that finds that the temperature increase from climate change, at least for the more rapid variants, increases mortality summed over the rest of this century. That's puzzling, since not only does climate change raise low temperatures as well as high, it raises low temperatures more than high temperatures and raises temperature more in cold regions than in warm. The explanation of the puzzle seems to be that mortality increases much faster with increasing temperature for temperatures above the optimum than it decreases for temperatures below.
The second article makes no allowance for adaptation, assumes that the mortality effect of a given temperature will be the same after almost a century as before, which strikes me as unlikely — Chicago winter temperatures would have a drastic effect in San Jose, not so drastic in Chicago, where people have adapted to them. It occurred to me that the same data used in the articles could be used to estimate the size of the adaption effect. The articles calculate, for each city, its optimal temperature, the temperature resulting in the lowest mortality. Regress that on average temperature and you get a rough measure of how much the inhabitants of a city adapt to higher or lower temperatures. To do that I need average temperatures for the several hundred cities the articles give optimum temperatures for.
The articles' calculation is more elaborate than I have described. The links, for the curious, are: https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lanplh/article/PIIS2542-5196(17)30156-0/fulltext
and
https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(14)62114-0/fulltext
I've used data from this NOAA site for a US-based analysis I did: https://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/cdo-web/search
It might not have the international data you're looking for, but it might help.
Thinking about it in terms of homeostasis - heat will dehydrate (you lose water to lower your core temperature). Cold will starve (you burn calories to maintain your core temperature, until you can't). Dehydration tends to kill much faster than starvation. Not to mention modern cities, specifically, are heat traps - concrete and tarmac retain heat from the day, and you also get ambient heat loss from lighting, heating, and vehicles. You'd be able to hug the walls of buildings (which, even well insulated, will leak out some heat). You'd probably be more likely to die of cold when you're not in an urban environment. (it's not impossible, but rural cold would probably kill a lot quicker - from memory the few cold related homeless deaths I read about happen when the person is asleep, lowering core temp even further).
Whereas the situation is flipped for heat. Buildings are still leaking heat, because compressors for cooling produce heat. All the effects that keep a city warm when it's cold now makes it extra inhospitable. And if you're not able to access shelter, you probably also have poor access to drinking water. That is what kills you.
Cold does not kill you by starving you, it kills you by making you cold. No amount of carb-loading will prevent you from hypothermia if you're out in the cold without insulation of some kind, and you don't die because you run out of calories, you die because your core temperature gets lower than 80 degrees.
It's true that if you don't have sufficient calories in your system then your core temperature will get that low faster, but starvation is still not the cause of death. For that matter, dehydration is rarely the cause of death in heat deaths as well! Heat deaths occur when your core body temperature get's too hot. Dehydration can make that happen faster, but you're still dying of heat, not dehydration.
Doh, you're right! Heat generation and heat loss aren't instant effects, there's a rate which needs to exceed the environmental influence plus clothes. Yes, each of these mechanisms can fail when the body can't keep up with the environment. All the other things (urban environments trap heat) still apply. But acute hypothermia isn't normally starvation, it's just the rate at which heat is generated can't keep up with heat loss. Any way the person is able to keep the heat in, via external methods, will reduce the risk. So no, cold and starvation aren't that close.
Dehydration and heat, however, are much more closely linked. Heat exhaustion is basically too much water and electrolyte lost through sweating, which leads to heat stroke (thermoregulation breaks). Water takes time to absorb even if you drink as fast as you can. It's not enough to simply bring down the victim's body temp - the fluids also need to be replaced!
I'll take your word for it on the dehydration thing, I'm used to cold climates so I know a bit less about how to avoid dying from heat.
I'm not sure if it's a good source, but this site: https://www.extremeweatherwatch.com/ lists various weather characteristics for various places. e.g. average highs and lows by month (and other meteorological conditions) for Beijing: https://www.extremeweatherwatch.com/cities/beijing.
Regarding the first study, by Gasparrini et al. the big question is obviously the veracity of the models they use. But I also questioned the presentation of their finding, noting previously (https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/open-thread-286/comment/21431867) that:
>Even assuming all the models are perfectly correct, As quoted by Scott, Bressler writes: "For all 23 countries, Gasparrini et al. predict an increase in heat-related excess mortality and a decrease in cold-related excess mortality under climate change scenarios, with most countries experiencing a net increase in mortality."
>However, if you look at Gasparrini's study, under the RCP 2.6 scenario, they predicted increased mortality in 11/23 countries, which is not most countries.
>Even under the RCP 4.5 scenario, they only predicted increased mortality in 12/23 countries, which is the barest possible majority.
>It seems like a much more accurate version of what Gasparrini said about this scenario is that net mortality would increase in about half of countries and decrease in about half of countries.
No source here, but it's easy to contrive explanations for predictions that in a warmer future, heat will be more of a killer than cold currently is. Just predict that it will be hot enough in a large enough area that being outdoors is unsurvivable without something much like a space suit.
FWIW, I recall encountering a plausible prediction of this kind, for a world many millions of years in the future, where all the continents had once again come together into a single mega continent (so most of the land was extremely far from any ocean), and the sun's heat had increased by enough to be significant. I have no reason to disbelieve their prediction of routine outdoor temperatures of 60 degrees Celsius. I don't think unprotected mammals can survive that.
More to the point - you don't need 60 degrees Celsius for heat to become a killer. I don't know where the tipping point would be, that would make heat the larger risk.
A lot depends on living conditions. Air conditioning becomes a necessity at some point, and outdoor work becomes high risk, except possibly at night, or very early/late in the day. . And of course air conditioning fails, just as heating systems fail. Which is more failure prone, and which failure will kill a person faster? (Obviously, that's temperature dependent. Where I live, a heating failure is just an annoyance, but lack of air conditioning is miserable for weeks of every year. But neither is likely to kill me, short of some pre-existing condition.)
The full-blown "you die lol" is at wet-bulb exceeding 35 Celsius; at that point, perspiration no longer cools you because exposed evaporating water is still warmer than your skin, so you cannot shed heat and will immediately die from hyperthermia regardless of other factors. The actual dry-bulb temperature is not amazingly relevant assuming sufficient water supplies and ventilation, at least for healthy adults.
One relevant thing about cold is that there is a long tail of passive measures to mitigate it; hypothermia can be passively thwarted by insulating clothes to a very large extent. I think the actual limit would probably have to do with sufficiently-cold air creating chillblains/frostbite on your lung surfaces. If not that, there's the absolute limit of "below -200 Celsius, any breathable air would condense".
Boy, it’s been a long time since I heard anyone speak of Wet Bulb and Dry Bulb temperatures.
I spent a couple years modeling heat transfer properties for yet to be built commercial air conditioners.
Being intimately familiar with the properties of moist air was a job requirement.
I still have visions of psychrometric charts if I close my eyes and think about it.
There was one older ME who kept a sling psychrometer in his desk. Just in case.
https://www.instrumentchoice.com.au/news/how-does-a-sling-psychrometer-work
The company had a niche building anything engineerable in cooling and heating.
Swimming pool chillers for a royal in the UAE? You bet. A custom HVAC system for what was then the world’s largest mall? Uh huh that too. Actually that was technically only a VAC system. Even at -25 F no heating was required. Electrical equipment and warm bodies provided enough heat so only AC and ventilation was necessary.
It turned out that even moderate cold can kill-- imagine a person who's underfed doesn't have warm clothes, and damp cold at 50F that doesn't give a chance to warm up. I'm not sure how many days it takes.
Hours, not days. The condition you describe is horrible.
Also, I don't know how much it's death from starvation and how much it's death from infection.
Oh, straightforward hypothermia will do the trick.
> mortality increases much faster with increasing temperature for temperatures above the optimum than it decreases for temperatures below.
Having put no real thought into this before, I can pretty easily tell myself a story where it clearly makes sense. Say people are comfortable somewhere around 70F, or whatever. If you go up just another 50-60F from there, you start reaching temperatures that are absolutely unsurvivable. Even naked and with zero exertion, at some point sweating can't cool you fast enough to prevent heatstroke and death. As humidity rises, this point falls, getting well under 100F at very high humidity.
Meanwhile, the coldest permanently inhabited human settlement (in Siberia) apparently sees _average_ winter temperatures of -58F, which is more than 120F below my rough line for "comfortable". And it obviously gets below that, being the average. Certainly people aren't going outside at the very lowest temperatures, but the technologies necessary for survival in the cold are very old and reliable ones -- clothing, insulated structures, fire. There's no old and reliable technology that will keep you alive for very long at 130 or 140 or 150F. You just die.
I am sympathetic to the argument that we have better adaptations for dealing with extreme cold than extreme heat (easier to light a fire from scratch than to build an ac unit from scratch), but it also seems true that the hottest places on earth are a lot less hot than the coldest places are cold. The highest recorded temperature on Earth was 138 F. That's 40 degrees hotter than normal human body temperature, which is what we're trying to maintain to stay healthy. Meanwhile the coldest temperature ever recorded is -128 F, 226 degrees below normal human body temperature. So it seems to me that the Earth is mostly colder than humans would like.
Of course we humans mostly live in the warmer areas, which makes it more likely that people will be negatively effected by rising temperatures. But think of how much of the Earth's surface is currently inhospitable to human life, but would be if temperatures rose. An entire continent (Antartica) is locked off from human use and habitation due to cold, but even the hottest places on Earth, if not inhabited, have historically been traversable (Sahara Desert, Gobi, etc).
There are permanent bases in Antarctica, and people do live there full-time. It's not especially pleasant or hospitable, but it is survivable, habitable, and inhabited. See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_Antarctica . My impression is that dying of cold is not especially common there in the modern era (it seems to be mostly transportation accidents, similarly to other places, although more of them are aircraft.)
The hottest places on Earth right now are mostly safely traversable, most of the time. It seems like Death Valley in California kills around 1 or 2 people from heat on average every year. During the summer, the National Park Service strongly advises against traversing the hottest part of Death Valley, and advises staying close to your (air conditioned) car if traversing any part of it. This is hard for me to verify, but I suspect there are already periods of time every year when the hottest parts of Death Valley are simply not possible to traverse (without air conditioning) and survive. I don't know whether there's any place on Earth that's absolutely too cold to traverse (although certainly there are some that would be profoundly unpleasant and dangerous to attempt.)
I agree with your suggestion that warming temperatures, ceteris paribus, would probably render more of the Earth _practical_ for habitation than it renders uninhabitable, if considering only the temperature. However, I think any areas rendered uninhabitable by heat would be similar to areas inundated by sea level rise: past a certain point, they would become absolutely uninhabitable, not merely unpleasant. And the mention of sea level rise is a reminder that ceteris is not paribus; warming temperatures would definitely lead to other changes, some of which are hard to predict. And the spectre of runaway positive-feedback warming is very alarming, although I am not a climate scientist and don't have a good mental model of it, beyond "it is at minimum plausible" and "it would be catastrophic."
It's necessary to think about the tech/wealth level needed to survive in a place.
There are still a lot of inhabited places that don't even have plumbing.
I'm sympathetic to the argument that we have better adaptation technology for extreme cold than extreme heat. That doesn't change the fact that humans are much better adapted to heat than to cold. While it's true that we can live in Antartica, we really don't because it's too cold. The Sahara Desert has a population density of 0.4 people per square kilometer: Greenland has .028. Inyo County, half of which is located inside Death Valley, has 1.8 people per square mile, while Antartica has .00092 people per square mile.
Humanity just does better in the heat than the cold, and there is no place on Earth so hot that nobody lives there, while there are many places on Earth so cold that nobody lives there.
EDIT: I went and checked in case Inyo County was a bad example: apparently about 300 people live year round in Death Valley proper, which is about 3,000 square miles, so Death Valley, the hottest place on earth, has 0.1 people per square mile to Antartica's .00092 and Greenlands .028.
The theoretical ceiling is based on the only major mammalian processes for maintaining a body temperature lower than the ambient temperature are sweating and panting, both of which rely on evaporative cooling. A sustained wet-bulb temperature above around 100ºF would thus be intractably incompatible with human life. The standard estimate for the maximum wet bulb temperature compatible with life for more than a few hours at a time is 35ºC/95ºF, which leaves a little bit of a temperature gradient for shedding metabolic heat. The practical limit is believed to be a few degrees lower, to allow moderate normal activity and leave some margin for less-than-ideal conditions for evaporative cooling.
With little or no humidity, under ideal conditions for evaporative cooling, people can survive indefinitely at very hot temperatures. Not quite as hot as the wet bulb temperature limit alone would imply, but people can and do live and work in hot desert climates. For example, the average daily high in Riyadh is 110ºF in July and August, and the record high is 121ºF. But it's a dry heat. The technology for coping with hot, dry climates is also pretty straightforward: wear loose, breathable clothes in high-albedo colors when you're in the sun, spend as much time as possible in well-ventilated shade, and drink plenty of water.
The concern is that there's also a lot of hot, humid places where lots of people live, especially in the tropics, which already get pretty close to the 35ºC wet bulb ceiling.
What matters, for the actual calculations they did, is not the effect of raising temperatures by 50°C but of raising them by three or four degrees.
But you should still see the same effect, just at the tails, right? For any threshold of "too hot" you select, that's currently in the tail of the distribution of e.g. "number of days at this temperature", the frequency of events over that threshold will increase as the average temperature increases.(And on a relative basis, you in fact expect it to increase fastest at the tails.) If the distribution of "how hot is it today" is roughly symmetric up and down, but the distribution of "how how is survivable" is not, you would expect "number of days that kill people" to rise much faster with increasing vs decreasing temperatures. I think, if I did that right.
There’s a perception here that daily high temps as record breaking as they were, didn’t tell the story of this past summer; that duration of higher temps in the course of a day - hours at - is worse than in the past.
Anecdotally, I have found it much more bearable to spend time in places that reach 100F/38C for a few hours during the day but cool down to 75F/24C at night than places that stay constantly in the range 82F/28C-90F/32C. However, I'm not sure my experience isn't biased by humidity effects, since the latter kind of place tends to be more humid than the former.
Hello, I have written a new essay: https://arcove.substack.com/p/iron-lotus
...and also a modestly well received twitter thread about my writing process: https://x.com/dschorno/status/1718735873163042964?s=20. This I think i mention "microhumor" which I believe is a term I picked up from scott at some point but I'm not sure
The essay uses the early internet hoax, "bonzai kittens", as a metaphor for how we are physically and psychologically shaped by pressures and constraints in our environments. It strings together a bunch of connections between ideas like a sort of theme park ride: foot binding, posture, wilhelm reich, taylorism & schools, parenting trends, and some pop culture stuff.
I have a bizarre notion that child seats in cars cause some children to accommodate to not being able to move much.
Now that you mention it - I would have hated a car seat, had I ever sat in one. That's a lot of hours being carted around if you have older siblings especially, not to be able to play in the car.
Memory from when I was a baby who had a baby: we had gotten a car seat because they had told us, you won't be permitted to leave without one. Did most people nonetheless hold their one-day-old baby in their arms as they drove home? If they did not, I guess they had one of those car seats that lays out sort of horizontal for a tiny baby. I'm not sure the car seat we bought had that capability but it might have and we just didn't understand how to use it. So we just set it upright like you would for a year old baby. We strapped him in.
One day old.
I have to say he slumped a bit.
That is an interesting idea. The original version of the essay talked about some claims about pre-nazi german parenting I read, but some of them were just so shocking that I feel like I would have needed to track down original sources (which are mostly print-only german books that I cant read lol). Anyway one of the things was about swaddling and leaving babies tightly wrapped "like mummies" for long periods of time, which seems like a more extreme version of this idea
My dad grew up in northern Italy in the 40s and he told me that until a year or so of age babies would be tightly wrapped in fabric and left there to cry while parents worked. That apparently was the standard treatment kids got, the parents had no time to run after them as they had to work in the fields
I. Ould help you with these german books. Anyway, any printed ideas about childcare before 1945 probably had comparatively little impact. Sensible mothers pretty much did as their mothers and grandmothers had done.
hey that is an excellent offer. Im currently switching gears to a different project but if I start tugging at the thread again perhaps I will reach out.
The context was that someone (who I consider to be very smart) was telling me about this field called "psychohistory" which is, I gather, the study of historical attitudes towards child abuse and how those abuses shaped societies of adults raised that way. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychohistory. I would love to get a read on whether these ideas have anything to them or if they're just like radical 50s/60s scholars making things up (either would be pretty interesting).
The specific document with regards to pre-nazi parenting was here: https://psychohistory.com/articles/the-childhood-origins-of-the-holocaust/, would have loved to get around to doing some spot checking of the claims to see if they are real, played-up, or made up: in particular this tight swaddling, stuff about frequent enemas etc.
this passage in particular was going to be a litmus test: "Children regularly had to be dragged violently to school screaming, they were so afraid of the daily batterings that were inflicted there, and childhood suicides were frequent in reaction to beatings or such practices as “cold water bathing” that was often practiced to “harden” them", and the citation was "Katharina Rutschky, Deutsche Kinder-Chronik, p. 93.", but I couldn't find it online. Would love to know what that page says, but no particular pressure at this point
That book seems to be available on German Amazon site, but of course you'd need to be able to read German:
https://www.amazon.de/Deutsche-Kinder-Chronik-Katharina-Rutschky/dp/3893400427
Seems to be from 1983:
German children's chronicle. Images of desire and horror from four (4) centuries.
rutschky, Katharina:
ISBN 10: 3462015672 / ISBN 13: 9783462015676
Publisher: Cologne: Kiepenheuer and Witsch, 1983
Certainly cold water bathing, beatings at school, and swaddling were not confined to Germany and happened in other countries. I remember from the Chalet School series of children's books one in particular where the new foreign (non-English) girl caused a stir by demanding *hot* water to wash in; the other girls were made of sterner stuff and bathed in cold water because it was deemed healthier and character-forming. Of course, the foreign girl learns to become a model student and lose such fancy ways as expecting hot water:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chalet_School
"Throughout the series, various girls arrive at the school with personal problems, bad attitudes or behavioural issues. As a result of the ministrations of better-behaved classmates and the school mistresses, they tend to discover the error of their ways and become model pupils. This formula of a troublesome new girl who reforms and conforms is most common in the later books."
basically it's very fascinating but also definitely above my pay-grade
also, apropos of nothing, I am the person who started the date me docs trend (https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/in-defense-of-describable-dating) and I found out today that I indirectly have caused at least one baby to exist so that's cool
The linked video is nominally about video games, but it is mostly a Protestant complaining that other Protestants are Protestant-ing incorrectly (and flexing? that he literally went to church with Donald Trump):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=COiNrIM9KVE
I was raised Catholic, so I have no idea how commonplace this inter-Protestant bashing is. My only previous exposure was the kid who lived next to my grandparents claiming that the Methodists were "backsliding." (I think he was a Baptist.) Is this a thing people normally talk about?
American Protestantism is fascinating, since the jibe about Protestantism being fissiparous gets turned up to eleven there. It really is like the Emo Philips joke.
For example, the Rapture. Something I only became aware of due to an 90s movie where it was a major plot point (David Duchovny was in it pre-X Files: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Rapture_(1991_film)). Since I was completely unfamiliar with the doctrine, I had no idea what was meant to be going on.
So I had to look it up later, and it turns out: minor doctrine of what, in Europe, is a tiny breakaway sect - the Plymouth Brethren: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Nelson_Darby
In America, becomes highly influential due to a particular version of the Bible and thus spreads among the evangelical/fundamentalist/non-denominational churches: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scofield_Reference_Bible
To the point where people unfamiliar with Christianity in general will presume that *all* Christians believe in the Rapture. I've read fiction where even ostensibly Catholic characters will mention 'the Rapture', at which point I have to stamp my foot and cry aloud "No!"
I mean, this is so minor for mainstream and particularly non-American Christianity, I didn't even know *if* we Catholics had a position on this (turns out we're officially amillennialists https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amillennialism) but in America it's presumed to be a mainstream belief.
(I only found out a lot of this due to Fightin' With Calvinists On The Internet and hanging around a lot of Protestant blogs to discuss "so what do Catholics believe, anyway?". I'm still not entirely sure of the finer points of distinction between denominations).
Also, historical and mainstream American Protestantism needn't be the most numerically superior: Episcopalianism, a part of the Anglican Communion, is tiny in numbers and dropping, but historically was the most important American church precisely because of the links to the Church of England, and many of the Great and the Good in American life were Episcopalian.
The mainstream branches are the most liberal, which is why there is a lot of upheaval from time to time with the more conservative members splitting away (or the more liberal split off from the more conservative). Since America has such a large population, even a splinter denomination can rack up the numbers. That's how you get three major Lutheran denominations, for instance, ranging from conservative to liberal (the ELCA, LCMS, and WELS) as well as many minor ones.
Talking about "Baptists" will usually mean the Southern Baptists, the most conservative/traditional; there is also the branch of the American Baptists which are more liberal. That's why you need to be clear which branch you mean - Bill Clinton is a Baptist (American, not Southern) so saying someone is a Baptist may lead to the wrong impression.
Mind you, the 17th century in Great Britain was ripe for a huge number of splinter and non-conformist breakaway sects, so I think this probably carried over to the USA as well and they just carried on:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/17th-century_denominations_in_England
> the jibe about Protestantism being fissiparous
I've always liked the summary, "Protestantism is inherently schismatical."
I am part of the Christian Church wing of the Restoration Movement churches: my joke when trying to explain it is that "Two hundred years ago some people tried to unite all the denominations and ended up making three more."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Restoration_Movement
We just need to develop one universal standard version of Christianity that meets everyone's theological needs. https://xkcd.com/927/
Exactly!
There's a lot I don't understand about religion in America (having been raised Catholic in Australia).
Like, this guy is a member of the Reformed Church of America. Looking at the map on their website, they have just one hundred churches across the entire country, with not a single one west of Denver. So if you're a good church-going member of the RCA, does this mean you just can't ever move west of the Rocky Mountains?
You can search for an RCA church near you, and apparently there are five in San Francisco? So they did go west of the Rockies, it may just be that their churches don't have the RCA brand (or are 'in full communion with' churches):
https://www.rca.org/find-an-rca-church/
They're the descendants of a particular ethnic church, the Dutch Reformed, which is why they're so numerically small. If these American minor denominations were Eastern Orthodox, they'd fit comfortably into the model of ethnic churches (e.g. Greek Orthodox is not Serbian Orthodox is not Russian Orthodox is not Bulgarian etc.) where they were founded by immigrants from a particular country and exist mainly to serve those communities and any immigrants from the home country who arrive, but don't really try to recruit by proselytization of the Westerners.
EDIT: Bah, humbug? This guys says that defining what is a "Christian" game may be difficult, which is fair enough, but then says the answer to "Is LOTR Christian?" is "maybe" but for "Left Behind" it's "yes".
Brother, Tolkien has Elven marriage modelled on Catholic theology. One of these books is Christian, the other is heresy 😁 At least he accepts that "The Divine Comedy" is Christian; yeah, thanks mate, it was only written three hundred and seven years before the ancestors of your denomination got together in New York!
The RCA is close to the CRCNA. They have lot's of churches west of the Rockies https://www.crcna.org/churches?barrier=&disabilities=0&distance=733795&fragrance=0&language=&latitude=37.76258793531642&livestream=0&longitude=-104.9788144838418&name=&nameSearch=0&projection=0&search=0&signing=0&sound=0&status=Active&transportation=0&zoom=3.6118212108408576
And if that is no option you could still try a Presbitarian Circh since they too are Calvinist (but historically accosiated with Scotland.
I found the video disappointing: I was hoping for a video-game-centric perspective rather than a Christian-centric one. E.g., *Okami* is a Shinto video game, and it's very good: a bit of comparative religion might have shed some light on why there's no Christian equivalent. Instead we got Calvinist inside baseball.
El Shaddai: Ascent of the Metatron is about as good as it gets, and i think Nier Automata ripped it off some.
christianity though seems to ignore geeky men and men in general are set in approved roles in churches. music, youth pastor, teacher, athlete, father, Inklings addict, etc. Most focus is on women, the amish romance being a big example.
geeky guys get driven out of the church pretty fast. Atheism sort of owes its success to that; the church even now cares so little that they dont even bother making bad christian versions of geek stuff. Go to a christian bookstore and its all romances if you want to read a novel.
In the eighties they tried...stuff like dragonraid as a d and d substitute, or authors like Steven Lawhead trying to write Christian fantasy. Now they just don't try.
I noticed the occasional British English spelling. I was guessing Canadian though.
I think that's what the "churches in full communion" thing is designed to help with. If you literally can't go to their church, you can attend one of the others on the list.
<fictional evidence, perverse humor>
https://bible.org/illustration/die-heretic
</fictional evidence, perverse humor>
I've heard a lot of Protestants tell this joke, and it's the sort of joke that wouldn't be funny if there weren't some truth to it.
Wordy is Lutheran Missouri Synod but his new wife is Lutheran…
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=x3HuShaTNoY
Edit: Oops Woody, from Cheers got autocorrected out of existence with my phone typing
Yeah, the joke there is the LCMS is more conservative, while the LCA is one of the smaller and more liberal Lutheran splits. Or rather was, Wikipedia tells me it dissolved in 1987:
"The Lutheran Church in America (LCA) was an American and Canadian Lutheran church body that existed from 1962 to 1987. It was headquartered in New York City and its publishing house was Fortress Press.
The LCA's immigrant heritage came mostly from Germany, Sweden, present-day Czech Republic, present-day Slovakia, Denmark, and Finland, and its demographic focus was on the East Coast (centered on Pennsylvania), with large numbers in the Midwest and some presence in the Southern Atlantic states.
Theologically, the LCA was often considered the most liberal and ecumenical branch in American Lutheranism, although there were tendencies toward conservative pietism in some rural and small-town congregations."
Now it's merged into the ELCA.
I, a Canadian, want to learn about Margaret Thatcher. Normally the thing to do here would be to find a biography, but I hear she is an unusually controversial politician, so I expect that most of the books I could find would be either partisan hit pieces or hagiographies. Can anyone recommend a book or other resource that does what I'm looking for, a just-the-facts history suitable for people with no knowledge of British politics?
One idea is to read her autobiography - it'll probably be biased towards being positive in her, but in a predictable and noticable way, and you can get a lot of information about the kind of person she was just by reading her style. (This is probably less useful to evaluate the outcomes of her specific policies)
FWIW, this feels like a situation where an "adversarial" approach will probably give better results than an "inquisitorial" one - read one or more books by her admirers and one or more books by her critics, rather than assuming that reading a median book and assuming that that means fair.
Was this prediction from five years ago accurate?
'The rapid appearance now of practically useful risk predictors for disease is one anticipated consequence of this phase transition. Medicine in well-functioning health care systems will be transformed over the next 5 years or so.'
https://infoproc.blogspot.com/2018/10/population-wide-genomic-prediction-of.html
I think when you see "within five years" used about any kind of new tech, you should expect "this is never going to work, or if it does, it's going to take more like fifty years".
Probably not. Maybe there is no well-functioning health care system on earth so there has been no transformation. In that case, no contest, I reckon.
The negative reaction to Scott donating a kidney reminds me of the kind of inverted-morality common among low-conscientiousness, usually but not always low-class people. To these people, stealing from family members, cheating on one's romantic partners, driving drunk, that's all kinda sorta bad. But if someone says they're sorry, they are owed instant forgiveness. And trust, which is an entitlement, not something people earn through trustworthy behavior. The worst sin one can commit is to think you're better than others, to look down on them, to not forgive them. These people almost always make an exception when they are the direct victim, but otherwise, forgiveness man. Jesus said so. I am owed it.
You see an extreme version of anti-morality in prisons. John stabs his cellmate to death? What do I care, none of my business. John reported his cellmate to prison staff? I'm full of righteous indignation, we in the prisoner community must altruistically punish him! Morality becomes inverted. It's easy to see why this happens, if you want to get away with violating rules, anti-morality is rational.
The weird thing about the negative reaction to Scott is that it's coming from ordinary people who pay their rent on time, don't leech off of family members, and never show up to work drunk or high. But the motivation seems to be the same. You have this person who did this thing that seems to indicate they are morally superior to me. I could try to emulate them. Or I could not, acknowledging that, yeah, they probably are morally superior to me. Or I could say, "omg, that's WEIRD, man, and sounds GROSS too! I mean, for a STRANGER no less!"
The act was saintlike, but I expect a saint to teach me things about compassion and the Good, not quote me a bunch of statistics. For fuck's sake, I took the Giving What We Can Pledge, meaning I give 10% of my income to charity, but I was only able to do that because my spiritual principles demand that I do something like that, not because the math was THAT convincing, though the math checking out was helpful, granted.
What can you do about those unenlightened proles anyway? They just don’t respect their betters. Your smugly tone deaf comment might might win over the skeptical though. That’s definitely how social progress is made.
How would you have phrased it?
The goals of EA are good, noble, even. True believers have a lot to learn about PR though.
You don’t win any converts by implying people who have yet to sign on are morally defective.
New ideas need to be evaluated and processed. It’s possible to make an effective case without talking down to people.
I ate vegetarian for over a decade and it never occurred to me to tell someone eating a burger that I was better than them, if for no other reason than because I knew I wasn’t.
I had just had an affecting experience having to kill an animal - a fish - before I prepared it for cooking. That was my own experience, no one else’s. So it would have been ridiculous to say something like “Do you ever think about the cow?”
By his world view, he had been granted dominion over the animals of the earth by his Creator.
I'm not actually sure it's a coherent moral opposition and it might just be a kneejerk disgust reflex at this idea of self-multilation.
I feel like I'm cool with it, but Ive been very good friends with someone who only has one kidney (had renal failure in childhood, got a kidney transplant) and they were basically fine at everything, so I believe them when they say that it's pretty low complication if you have good renal function.
That being said, where it gets icky for me is when he brings up paying for kidneys. At the moment, the system runs on altruism and occassional kinship (loved ones donating to get "trades" for someone with renal failure). I'm worried about so many way things can go off the rails the moment profit comes into play. For one, donors do not benefit from being accepted, other than warm fuzzy feelings, so the supply of healthy kidneys would be fairly good. If there's a financial incentive, however, people might be tempted to tamper with the screening process so they could get paid - the donor would be much worse off, and the transplantee might get all kinds of problems. There's extortion issues - would it be completely impossible for an abusive partner, cult leader, or whatever to force someone to donate, in order to receive the tax cut? What would it cost the system to have to add even more safeguards against this?
I really don't think adding free market is going to help here - I think when it comes to health, it pretty much never does.
That being said, non-monetary rewards (like automatic priority for future transplants) is definitely a good one, and probably needs to be publicised more - it sounds like people often only find out when a loved one needs a kidney. You could throw in more things like free parking at the hospital (or extend it to any hospital?). Social clout is a given, so maybe a voluntary public registry of kidney donors (i.e if you choose to, they'll put your name on a website so you can tell everyone you donated a kidney - probably more relevant for a celebrity of some kind). This would also normalise and publicise this sort of thing. Maybe Oprah should do a segment on kidney donation.
Thousands of people die due to lack of kidneys under the current system. If people could buy and sell them, those people would not be dying. It really is that simple.
Is it, though? Is a thousand people living 10 more years worth potential coercion of thousands, potentially more, of other people?
Let's think of another way we could solve the organ donation crisis: by ballot. You randomly select a citizen to donate kidneys, just as you randomly select a citizen to serve on a jury. They screen you to make sure you can do it with no ill effect to yourself. Isn't this obviously worse?
No, I think we should incentivise voluntary donation with non monetary rewards. Yeah, maybe the kidney donors will be like annoying vegans at dinner parties, but that's a risk I'm willing to run. It's also quite actionable - convince someone very high profile and widely liked to do it. To be honest, despite how polarising the vegans are, if as many people committed to kidney donations as to never eating animal products, you could probably entirely solve the demand gap.
Yes, it is. Should we also ban adults from having sex? After all, cult leaders and abusive partners might force people to do it.
What you're advocating is coercion, plain and simple. You want to use the coercive power of the state to prevent the trade of money for organs. The coercion you advocate consigns thousands of people to death. When you advocate something like that, you should have a better argument than you feeling icky about the "market" and the potential coercion in what will be only a very small proportion of organ donation cases.
Biting the bullet on this, being part of a cult or an abusive relationship is a choice. 99% of the time, organ donation will be fully voluntary. We shouldn't stop that, cosigning the people to death, for the sake of a few people who voluntarily make the choice to remain in a coercive relationship or religious movement.
"No, I think we should incentivise voluntary donation with non monetary rewards."
In other words, do the same thing over and over again and expect a different result.
The state uses it's coercive power to make stealing food illegal, consigning people who can't afford food to starvation. The state sends agents to evict people if they can't afford to pay rent, consigning them to homelessness. You could make this argument for anything!
I don't think we've tried hard enough to do the non-monetary rewards and awareness path, which is why Scott's blog post is actually an enormous net positive - it raises the idea and reinforces that this is a thing high status people do. It's also worked before - in 2021, a beloved Bollywood actor died. He had signed up to be a postmortem organ donor, and donated his eyes - this spurred a large increase in people signing up to donate their eyes, because a famous person has done it.
I think we should focus our efforts in convincing at least one very famous beloved person to go through with it and tell all their followers. Imagine if you could convince Kim K or Oprah to donate a kidney to a stranger and document it on her show! It seemed to have worked for veganism - celebrities talking about it has spurred people into considering and doing it.
"The state uses it's coercive power to make stealing food illegal, consigning people who can't afford food to starvation. The state sends agents to evict people if they can't afford to pay rent, consigning them to homelessness."
There's an obvious person who benefits from laws against stealing food: the person who owns the food. Ditto with laws against living in places without paying rent. Both are laws against directly harming people. Compensated organ donation does not harm anyone beyond giving you a bad feeling in your tummy. That's not a good enough reason.
Last I knew China uses kidneys from executed criminals. Interesting possibility. If you're going to take somebody's life anyway, doesn't make it any worse to harvest their organs.
It does open up a lot of opportunity for corruption: bribes to speed up an execution so that the organs will be ready for a rich patient, kickbacks from corrupt transplant doctors to judges to ensure a steady supply of executions, etc.
Incentives executions as well.
"You say that death penalty for marijuana is too harsh? My grandma needed a new kidney to survive, and luckily she got one from an executed prisoner. What you suggest is that my grandma should die so that some worthless junkie could continue taking drugs a few years longer before he kills himself anyway. Well, f--- you!"
...is what the political discourse would become like, if organs from executed prisoners became the new basic human right.
I don't quite agree with your anti-morality model. I think most people had a strong emotional reaction to what Scott did, and some here are not accustomed to feeling feelings. And when they come here they are not usually asked to, at least not by Scott. But this time the weres. It gives them a feeling that something dangerous and wrong has been shoved under their noses, in a place where they rarely have that experience. So they cry foul, saying that what Scott did was fucked up.
Well, we had at least one person going "but what if nasty meat-eaters get that organ? no, that would never do!" and thus inviting praise for being so highly ethically superior as to consider this type of question.
I've got to consider that some kind of anti-morality: better to let someone suffer and/or die, than help them, and no I'm not being selfish (or merely squeamish), I'm actually *more* virtuous and *more* moral than the person donating to a stranger.
Well, any fool can donate a kidney, but it takes a truly sophisticated person to compose a clever online argument explaining why good is actually bad, and bad is actually good.
I'm just struck by the glaring blind spot of inventing a cartoonishly simplistic moral framework to assign to others with whom the OP disagrees. All to... accuse them of using a cartoonishly simplistic moral framework w.r.t. Scott's decision.
"Other people bad, but not me" is the most useless boring analysis of any situation, even if very occasionally there's all there is to it, what with the stopped clocks and all.
What do you think of the "no snitching" culture in prisons? It is a bad thing? Or was it a delusion I invented for the purposes of argument?
I have no opinion on prison culture, sorry. I don't know enough about it to offer anything useful.
I do think you brought it into this argument for no good reason, I fail to see any connection to the topic at hand.
I think that a lot of basically-good people carry around very different sorts of moral systems. Most of these moral systems basically agree in most everyday circumstances, which leads to an illusion that we're all in agreement on most things. And where moral systems do disagree in everyday circumstances, these get encoded as political differences, which we are at least accustomed to.
But sometimes, unusual circumstances arise in which fundamental moral differences are exposed, and it's shocking. It's like finding your next door neighbour is filled with blue fluid and tentacles.
Ultimately, Scott's decisions show that his moral system is alien to my own. Not necessarily in a bad way, just in a weird way.
Right. Most people don't have a moral system -- I know I don't -- just vague moral intuition. His system goes against my intuition in multiple ways. For one thing, I think Scott's life is worth a lot more to the world than some random person, and I don't like to hear that Scott's life expectancy has been reduced, if only by a few weeks. Not that I believe in doing moral math -- but my intuition is that his few weeks is worth more than an average person's dozen years. I mean, he might do something brilliant in those few weeks -- like donate a kidney!
But maybe you're not taking into account the benefit to Scott of doing a hugely substantial thing he believes is right and wants to do. There have been a few times when I have given substantial things to strangers -- though nothing as big as a kidney -- and I felt very moved by doing it, and had a sort of high from it. It wasn't a proud-of-myself high, it was a feeling of a much closer ongoing connection with the rest of humanity. In fact one reason I have had so much to say on this thread is that I feel bad for Scott, being attacked by so many. For fuck's sake, leave the man alone to finish recovering and to fully experience being the person who actually made that big donation he wanted to make.
I don't have a moral system either, and agree with you that most people don't. I think of a lot of those who don't aren't aware that they don't, though.
I don't think that's it exactly. My visceral (ha) reaction was negative, though not extremely so; and I definitely do think he is more selfless and thus better than myself.
I think my suspicion is rooted in just that, a suspicion that the body is a fine thing which ought to be preserved, not intentionally damaged. But then I don't even like tattoos.
However, while I didn't read his whole long post, I'm well aware that he considered the damage and tradeoffs minor. It's wonderful to think how thrilled someone else is, and their family.
There was a guy at college - older than most of us, since college was a cheap pastime then - but still in his 20s somewhere, and he died of kidney disease and it was said (I didn't know any facts for certain or know him well) that his own mother could have donated a kidney to him but wouldn't. We found that shocking (whether or not true) so maybe this is situational - for a mother *not* to do so, is equally disturbing.
I will say I have lost an organ - it just had to go - and while this didn't seem like it should matter that much, it took me a long time to have much energy again. I was in my mid 30s, not sure how old Scott is.
Not a dealbreaker but might be a consideration if you are very busy in the prime of your career perhaps, or you have small children or whatnot.
But perhaps the circumstances having been illness and not voluntary in excellent health, are completely different.
I remember Larry McMurtry saying after he had heart surgery, that he didn't like to read books anymore. And he had an unusual love of books.
>I remember Larry McMurtry saying after he had heart surgery, that he didn't like to read books anymore. And he had an unusual love of books
Oh, that's disturbing. General anesthesia is somewhat neurotoxic, but the effect isn't very strong except in the elderly. How old was McMurtry when he had his heart surgery?
I think it was about ten years before he died.
I'm not a big fan or anything except in the sense that I like that he sorta popularized stuff that I like (even if he thought he was being revisionist). But once I took home from the library a sort of large format book he wrote in those final years, about Custer. I read it and was vexed by the amateurish quality. Sentences, even paragraphs that basically repeated themselves, unedited, that sort of thing. Mistakes and contradictions within the same couple of pages. Distinctive words repeated too close together. I only remember thinking, they didn't think he needed an editor, or else they don't edit anymore.
I feel like he probably exercised the usual sort of writer's precision earlier in his career, and this was a falling-off.
> We found that shocking (whether or not true) so maybe this is situational - for a mother *not* to do so, is equally sickmaking.
This appears to be a changing norm; in Strangers Drowning (2016), Larissa MacFarquhar notes:
> Twenty-five years ago, the philosopher Peter Singer was struck by an article about a woman who had donated one of her kidneys to save the life of her son. He felt that this was an extraordinary sacrifice, and he cited the story in one of his books as an example of extreme unselfishness.
That is strongly suggestive about Peter Singer's childhood, or his mother, if so.
I agree Scott is probably more selfless than both of us. When one of my sons needed a liver transplant, I volunteered without hesitation. While I was checked up, not smoking or drinking over half a year, he got his piece of liver from someone else (this not being feasible any more here, AFAIK). I surely never considered giving a piece of my liver to anyone but with my kid it was no question.
It all reminds me of something I read back in the days when BLM was the biggest thing around, and it was practically a competition to fall to your knees and gratituously show off how much of an ally you were (looking). Well, one woman actually believed all that nonsense (albeit back in 2015), and donated a kidney in inspiration.
Yeah, it didn't end well for her. The full story is at https://web.archive.org/web/20230307125843/https://www.nytimes.com/2021/10/05/magazine/dorland-v-larson.html (or https://www.arcdigital.media/p/my-kidney-for-your-approval, but that's paywalled), but in short, turns out the worst thing you can possibly do to someone is to take them seriously, listen to what they have to say, and live up to the values they espouse. They'll fucking *hate* you for that. For most, it is quite literally unforgivable.
The Woke world is extraordinarily cruel.
The quote "It’s almost as if Dorland believes that Larson, by getting there first, has grabbed some of the best light, leaving nothing for her." seems telling, as though this is a battle between a zero-sum framing of the world versus one that allows for a win-win approach. Did Dorland parlay the exposure from this story into fuel for her own writing career? I sincerely hope she has done so, if only to demonstrate that she has moved beyond zero sum narratives.
Anyone know any ways to get ADHD medication in the UK- not including going through the NHS?
In the US is it very easily obtainable on college campuses. Lot of students who do not have ADHD use it to help themselves study and write papers. I don't recommend getting into a pattern of doing that, though. It's an abusable drug. You can get addicted. And if you take some, remember that most people find a dose of ADHD medication quite pleasant. It elevates mood and increases energy. Liking how it feels is *not* evidence that you have ADHD and need the drug.
I believe most ADHD drugs are controlled substances in the UK, so you'll need a prescription if you want to get them legally (disclaimer: IANAL and IANAMD). You have to pay for private prescriptions, though once you've titrated your dose you may be able to get a private psychiatrist to write to your NHS GP and say "SGfrmthe33 needs Drug X for their ADHD, please prescribe it on the NHS." Good luck!
Tyler Cowen was recently a guest on Rick Rubin's podcast Tetragrammaton, and towards the end of the episode, when Rubin asks him if there's anything else he'd like to share, he says that he wishes it was more widely known that Paul McCartney released a second, much improved recording of the song C Moon. He doesn't give many more details, and as someone who isn't too familiar with deep Beatles/McCartney lore, I found it a little difficult to follow up on this. I did find the following version on Youtube, which is billed as a "remaster", but I'm unsure if this is the version that Tyler was referring to:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hwbGh204HWE
If anyone here can verify that this is the version Tyler was so excited by, I'd appreciate it!
P.S. Tyler, if you're reading this, please talk about music more often!
How did British intelligence decode the Zimmerman Telegram?
I've read the Telegram was enciphered using "Code Book 13040." Did the British have a copy of the Book?
The details of how the Telegram was decoded are not made clear on the internet. If doing so merely meant looking up entries in Code Book 13040 and matching them with the numbers in the Telegram, then the task could have been given to a person with no special skills. Instead, I've read that decoding it required two, talented cryptoanalysts to work for on it for basically a full day.
I vaguely recalled hearing about this in a podcast, I'm sure there are better academic sources but this has some key details (I recommend the whole podcast if you are interested in the topic). I found the transcript here: https://historyofthegreatwar.com/episodes/2017/132/
"So the message had been sent, but it was encrypted, and the Americans could not break the encryption that was being used by the Germans at this point, so how did they find out what was in the message? Well that is where the British enter our story. The British had been able to break both the German and American diplomatic ciphers for pretty much the entire war. In fact in 1917 they had been reading every single message sent on the American trans-Atlantic cables for 2 years. However, at this specific moment the Germans had introduced a new cipher, called 0075, that while the British could read some of, they had not been able to fully crack. The most talented people that Room 40 had were soon put on the Zimmermann Telegram, here is Nigel de Gray the initial analyst “We could at once read enough groups for Knox to see that the telegram was important. Together he and I worked solidly all the morning upon it. With our crude methods and lack of staff no elaborate indexing of groups had been developed–only constantly recurring groups were noted in the working copies of the code as our fancy dictated. Work therefore was slow and laborious but by about mid-day we had got a skeleton version, sweating with excitement as we went on because neither of us doubted the importance of what we had in our hands” When a partially decrypted message was given to the head of Room 40 he would tell Grey that “This is a case where standing orders must be suspended. All copies of this message, both those in cypher and your own transcripts, are to be brought straight to me. Nothing is to be put on the files. This may be a very big thing, possibly the biggest thing of the war. For the present not a soul outisde this room is to be told anything at all.” Intercepting a message, figuring out what was in it was all well and good, but there was one very sticky wicket. In Room 40 and the military informed the British Foreign office of the telegram they would be bound to share it with the Americans. At that point the British would have been in a tough spot. They would have had to tell he Americans were they got the message from, and that meant telling the Americans that they were reading everything on their cables, and that they had been for some time. This would have made the Americans none too happy, so some other method had to be found. The solution was found within the message itself. The British knew that the message was going to be forwarded to Mexico and they hoped that at that point it could be obtained by a British official in Mexico City. This was completed when the message was sent and the contents were forwarded to New York City and then to London. This message was also encrypted with an older cipher, which was the only one that the German embassy in Mexico had, and that let the British double check their copy of the original message and it gave them the ability to claim that they had never seen it before when they shortly handed it over to the Americans."
Ah and more info here: https://crypto.stackexchange.com/questions/77951/how-were-codes-in-ww1-reciphered-to-enhance-security-levels-without-them-turni
So, it was easy to decode the telegram that was forwarded from Washington to Mexico, as this was encoded in 13040. But what the British cryptographers were working hard to decode was the message to Washington from Germany that was encrypted via 0075, a relatively new and not fully deciphered code. They then used info from that to intercept the forwarded telegram in Mexico City, confirmed the full text by deciphering from 13040, and leaked it to the Americans (while lying about how they got it).
My understanding is these books were one-time pads, with each letter translated differently according to the book. Of course, these books were used more than once, so weren't really one-time pads, which allowed them to be cracked with the Enigma machine to assist.
How can you tell if the advice your doctor gives you (be it to get a test done or no recommedation of any test) is in your interest versus in his or her own interest?You have no way of telling what his financial incentives are. His contract with the insurance company is not visible to you.
Why can't this contract be visible to patients?
Contracts between a doctor and an insurance company are typically private affairs: you could ask to look at it, but you don't have any legal right to see it.
If your doctor owns his own practice then it is almost always in his financial interest to do more tests or procedures, regardless of any contracts he has signed with insurance. Physicians get paid by insurance based on the procedures they provide to insured clients, so more procedures means more money for the doctor. Not to say that your average doctor would advice tests, appointments, or procedures that are unneccesary, but that is where their financial interest lies. And there is a big gap between "unneccesary procedure" and "possibly unnecessary procedure", and a doctor might be biased to lean on the side of "lets do it just to be safe" since he makes more money that way.
However, if the tests he recommend are done by a third party company like LabCorp, then he probably isn't making any money off those tests. If the testing company is attached to his business, then he probably is.
Doctors who don't own their own practice might have different compensations structures: they could be on salary and get paid the same regardless of procedures performed, or on commission, or any number of arrangements.
As a psychologist I have a contracts with insurance companies, and all I commit to in them is to agree that for anyone I see who has the company's insurance, I bill the company for their care, rather than asking them to pay directly, and I commit to accepting the company's payment and not asking the patient to pay some extra on top of the amount the company has set as the allowable charge for the procedure. I doubt that doctor's contracts are different. All procedures are identified buy 5-digit codes, and you can usually look online to find out how much the doctor is paid for each procedure. If doctors' choice of treatment is motivated by their insurance contract, the way that would play out would be that the doctor administers the procedure that pays best, rather than the one that is best for the patient. My guess is that in practice, few doctors actually administer a more expensive but less effective procedure. The cheating would take the form of claiming that had done something more complex than the one they had done. For instance when I see people with OCD I get paid less for talking with them than I do for doing a session of exposure therapy, I could claim to be doing exposure at every session and make more money. (In fact, though, I do not do that.)
My advice is to ask your doctor these questions explicitly. If she is unwilling to answer these questions, or she takes them as an attack, she should find another line of work, and you should find another doctor.
I guess I assume the best of them by default. It can be complicated for them when the insurance company puts pressure on them. This is all so complicated.
A math teacher I know recently posted on FB a nice set of four puzzles that look harder than they are. In each case, it looks like there isn't enough data in the problem to find a definite solution, and there can be many possibilities - but once you think about it carefully, it turns out that there's only one way it can work. Here they are, roughly in the ascending order of difficulty (translated from Russian). They can all be solved without pen and paper, but if you do need to write things down, there ain't no shame in it.
1. I bought a lottery ticket with a five-digit number, and the sum of its digits turned out to be equal to the age of my neighbor. Find out my ticket number, taking into account the fact that my neighbor was easily able to do that.
2. Ten children stood in a line, each carrying some nuts. Each child gave a nut to every child to their right (careful: not just to their right neighbor). After that, the girls all together had 25 more nuts than at the beginning. How many girls were in the line?
3. The sum of the three different smallest divisors of some number A is 8. How many zeroes are at the end of A, as it's written in decimal?
4. Five married couples met and exchanged some handshakes. Nobody shook hand with themselves or their spouse. One husband asked everyone else, including his wife, how many hands they shook, and it turned out that all 9 answers were different. What was the number his wife said?
I think I misinterpreted 3, because it's been a long time since I did much math. But I think I still got a unique answer!
V vagrecergrq "qvivfbe" gb zrna fbzrguvat zber yvxr "snpgbe", naq pnzr hc jvgu artngvir sbhegrra nf zl nafjre, juvpu unf ab mrebf. Gur snpgbef ner artngvir bar, gjb, naq frira, juvpu fhz gb rvtug. Gurer pna'g or mrebf ba gur raq orpnhfr gurer pna'g or nal svirf, orpnhfr svir vf fznyyre guna frira.
The sum of those is negative 8, not 8, "divisors" generally means positive numbers. Also 1+2+7 doesn't equal 8.
?
2+7-1=8
oh, (negative 1), 2,7, I thought you means negative (1,2,7).
That still doesn't work here even if you allow negative divisors (which you generally wouldn't): if -1 and 7 are divisors so is -7.
At various points math relies upon conventions, which are usually chosen so as to make other parts of math fall out well. Like I said, it's been a long time and I don't recall how factorization dealt with negative numbers. But it seems to me as though the simplest way is to have a single -1 be part of it. Otherwise there's no reason to prefer (-2,7) to (2,-7), and (-1,-2,-7) works too, and as I mentioned elsewhere, it's possible to pull an infinite number of (-1,-1) pairs out of any number.
Nobody said you had to choose a set of devicers that multiply to A. So the devisors of 12 are (1,2,3,4,6,12) those of y are (1,7) but if you allow for negative devisors the devisors of seven will be (-7, -1, 1 , 7)
Great puzzles! Just the right amount of difficulty. I'll give my answers in ROT-13 (https://rot13.com/) to preserve the spoilers for those who want to work through it themselves:
1: Gur ahzore "Avar" svir gvzrf, fvapr gur havdhrarff erdhverzrag zrnaf lbh arrq rvgure bs gur gjb zbfg rkgerzr inyhrf (rvgure nyy znk be nyy zva), naq nyy zva jbhyq yrnq gb fbzrbar jub'f 0 lrnef byq, fb vg zhfg or fbzrbar jub'f sbhegl-svir lrnef byq.
2: Svir tveyf, jvgu svir oblf gb gurve yrsg. Rnpu bs gur 5 oblf unaq rnpu bs gur tveyf n ahg, fb 25 ahgf ner genafsreerq va nyy.
3: Bar mreb. Ng svefg vg ybbxf yvxr lbh pna eha jvgu rvgure "Bar, Gjb, Svir" be "Bar, Guerr, Sbhe" nf gur qvivfbef... ohg lbh erzrzore gur havdhrarff erdhverzrag, ybbx pybfre ng gur gjb frgf bs qvivfbef ntnva, naq erzrzore gung Sbhe vf qvivfvoyr ol Gjb, fb "Bar, Guerr, Sbhe" fubhyq npghnyyl or "Bar, Gjb, Guerr", juvpu qbrfa'g nqq hc gb 8. Fb gur qvivfbe frg zhfg or "Bar, Gjb, Svir", juvpu unir gur Yrnfg Pbzzba Zhygvcyvre bs Gra.
Ng guvf cbvag vg frrzf yvxr *nal* zhygvcyr bs Gra jbhyq gurersber jbex, vapyhqvat zhygvcyrf bs Bar Uhaqerq naq Bar Gubhfnaq, ohg lbh erzrzore gur havdhrarff erdhverzrag naq ybbx pybfre. Bar Uhaqerq vf qvivfvoyr ol Sbhe, fnzr jvgu nal zhygvcyr bs vg. Bar Gubhfnaq vf nyfb qvivfvoyr ol Sbhe, naq fnzr jvgu nal zhygvcyr bs vg. Vs vg jnf bar bs gubfr, gura gur fznyyrfg qvivfbef frg jbhyq or "Bar, Gjb, Sbhe", abg "Bar, Gjb, Svir".
Fb vg unf gb or *whfg* n zhygvcyr bs 10, juvpu zrnaf bayl n fvatyr Mreb ng gur raq. Ohg bgurejvfr, vg pna or nal zhygvcyr bs 10 gung vfa'g qvivfvoyr ol Guerr be Sbhe, yvxr Svsgl, Friragl, Bar-Uhaqerq naq Gra, rgp.
4: Sbhe. Gur znkvzhzhz ahzore bs unaqf nalbar pbhyq funxr vf Rvtug, fvapr gurer ner gra crbcyr gurer naq gjb crbcyr lbh pna'g funxr jvgu (lbhefrys naq lbhe fcbhfr). Gur zvavzhz vf bs pbhefr Mreb. Fvapr gurer ner Avar havdhr nafjref, gung zrnaf rnpu crefba nfxrq svg vagb bar bs gur avar fcbgf orgjrra Mreb naq Rvtug: Mreb, Bar, Gjb, Guerr, Sbhe, Svir, Fvk, Frira, Rvtug.
Mreb vf vagrerfgvat, fvapr vg pna'g funxr nal unaqf. Rvtug vf nyfb vagrerfgvat, fvapr vg zhfg unir fubbx gur unaqf bs rirelbar ryvtvoyr. Ohg Rvtug nyfb pna'g unir funxra Mreb'f unaqf, fvapr Mreb jnf arire funxra (gung'f jul vg'f Mreb). Gurersber, Mreb naq Rvtug zhfg or fcbhfrf, rkcynvavat jul gurl qvqa'g funxr unaqf.
Bhg bs gur erznvavat ahzoref, Bar vf vagrerfgvat orpnhfr vg zhfg unir bayl funxra unaqf jvgu Rvtug (jr xabj vg'f Rvtug fvapr Rvtug fubbx unaqf jvgu rirelobql). Frira vf nyfb vagrerfgvat fvapr, bhg bs gur crbcyr yrsg (Bar guebhtu Frira), gurl zhfg unir nibvqrq funxvat unaqf jvgu bar bs gurz - orpnhfr jr xabj gurl qvqa'g funxr unaqf jvgu gurzfryirf, naq qvqa'g funxr unaqf jvgu Mreb (fvapr Mreb arire funxrf unaqf), naq gurl arrq gb nibvq funxvat bar zber crefba'f unaqf gb or Frira... naq jbhyqa'g lbh xabj vg, Bar qvqa'g funxr unaqf jvgu gurz. Jub qbrfa'g funxr unaqf jvgu rnpu bgure? Gung'f evtug, fcbhfrf. Fb Bar naq Frira zhfg or fcbhfrf, va gur fnzr jnl gung Mreb naq Rvtug zhfg or fcbhfrf.
Ercrng sbe Gjb naq Fvk: gurl zhfg or fcbhfrf, bapr lbh jbex guebhtu gur ybtvp. Gura qb vg ntnva sbe Guerr naq Svir: gurl zhfg or fcbhfrf. Nyy gung'f yrsg vf Sbhe. Ohg jr xabj *rirelbar* ng guvf pbhcyr'f zrrg unf n fcbhfr, fb Sbhe zhfg unir n fcbhfr gbb. Jub'f yrsg nf 'hacnverq hc'? Gur bar crefba bhgfvqr gur Mreb guebhtu Avar tnat, gur uhfonaq-thl jub jrag nebhaq nfxvat rirelbar ryfr naq tbg gur Avar qvssrerag erfcbafrf. Uvf jvsr zhfg or Sbhe. Guhf, Sbhe.
I got something different for 3.
V vagrecergrq "qvivfbe" gb zrna "snpgbe", naq "bar" vfa'g hfhnyyl pbafvqrerq n "snpgbe".
I suspect your answer was the intended one, and I misinterpreted the question. But I still came up with a unique answer (I think).
Ah, but: V gubhtu gung zvtug or vg, ohg gur qvivfbef unir gb or *qvssrerag* sebz rnpu bgure, naq gur fznyyrfg 3 ahzoref gung qb fb (Gjb, Guerr, Sbhe) *qba'g* nqq hc gb Rvtug. Gurl nqq hc gb Avar. Fb pyrneyl Bar unf gb or nyybjrq.
I did get to 8, though. ;-)
Hmm, I checked Wikipedia and the like, and it seems Bar vf n inyvq snpgbe. Va snpg, vg'f n inyvq snpgbe va rirel fvghngvba:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Divisor
https://www.britannica.com/science/factor-mathematics
http://www.amathsdictionaryforkids.com/qr/f/factor.html
Think about it this way: if Zvahf Bar vf n inyvq snpgbe, jul fubhyqa'g Bar or? Gurl'er obgu zntavghqr bar.
V thrff jung unccrarq vf gung V jrag fgenvtug gb "cevzr snpgbevmngvba", vafgrnq bs "rirayl qvivfvoyr", ohg V sbetbg jurgure artngvir bar pbhagrq. V fhccbfr vg'f cbffvoyr gb crry bss na vasvavgr ahzore bs cnvef bs artngvir barf, fb znlor vg'f abg fbzrguvat gung fubhyq pbhag ng nyy.
Thanks!
One is a trick question: your neighbour is a terrifyingly precocious neonate.
If that were the answer i dont think it would qualify as a trick. My assumption here was that these would follow the most common lottery ticket conventions (not sure if posting those would be too much of a hint).
I've never bought a lottery ticket - do you need to have done so?
I'm a little concerned about a math teacher who buys lottery tickets.
Maybe they are one of those clever people who notice and exploit the occasional poor lottery design.
The ticket has five numbers. Each number is either 0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, or 9.
Google rules for mega millions. Ignore red/gold ball part.
I would love to see a solution to 1, as it strikes me as impossible, thanks. The rest were comparatively straightforward. In fact, you can give the exact position of the girls in 2, beyond just their total number.
I got stalled on 1 by initially assuming it was like lottery tickets I am familiar with in which every digit is unique. Then I relaxed that assumption.
Is "easily able" meant to suggest finger counting?
I made the same mistake. I first parsed it as the *adding* was easy, which... tells us the neighbor is at least 6 or so. But we're meant to read it as the narrator *already knows* the neighbor's age, and the neighbor is able to easily invert back to the lottery number based only on its sum.
Whether or not the answer is finger countable, that is not what is relevant.
I'm having trouble parsing that then, if it wasn't meant to be arch. I hope someone will supply the answer!
Gur pehpvny guvat vf gung lbhe arvtuobe vf abg nqqvat hc gur ahzoref ba gur gvpxrg gb svaq gurve bja ntr. Lbhe arvtuobe xabjf gurve ntr nyernql, naq vf hfvat gung gb svther bhg gur ahzoref ba gur gvpxrg.
Go with "able".
Heavy hint (don't know how to do a light hint here): Abeznyyl lbh'q rkcrpg gurer jbhyqa'g or n havdhr nafjre gb guvf dhrfgvba, orpnhfr jungrire vg vf, lbh pbhyq crezhgr gur qvtvgf. Gur snpg gung gur arvtuobe jnf rnfvyl noyr gb fbyir vg gryyf lbh gung crezhgvat gur qvtvgf qvqa'g tvir uvz nqqvgvbany nafjref.
Gunaxf!
Vg vf bayl n znggre bs gvzr orsber jr nyy fgneg fvtug ernqvat ebg guvegrra
Thanks for these
Does 3 have 1 clear numerical answer?
Yes.
Ah! Finally got it. Thanks.
I think the wording might be ambiguous?
If I interpret "the three different smallest divisors" to imply there are no duplicates in the number's prime factorization, then the solution is unambiguous, but that's not a natural reading for me. Normally if you're asked to list the divisors of a number you don't repeat numbers that appear twice, so the three smallest divisors would be the same whether it was divisible by 10 or 10000.
Nope. Keep thinking.
Oh! Got it.
100 vf qvivfvoyr ol 4, fb gur 3 fznyyrfg qvivfbef jbhyq or qvssrerag.
...and 4 isn't a cultural thing, it's just math? I'm not seeing how that one works at all.
Yeah, it's just logic/math. It's not a trick question. I found it easier to use a pen and paper for that one.
...pen and paper does indeed make it easier. Got it.
Those were fun, thanks! (Though I must confess I don't get #3 at all.)
Aha, I was pondering #3 as I took a shower and the answer came! How satisfying.
Something else, I've been thinking about regarding superintelligence: can sufficient intelligence truly melt down any barrier? Sure, Yudkowsky says you can bet on a chess engine winning, even if you don't know how it will do it, but has anyone bothered to find an amount of handicap such that the human player always wins, even against the best chess engine? The same could be done to AlphaGo: there has to be a handicap there that makes it so AlphaGo can't win against professional go players.
Perhaps it would allay some fears if it is established that there are problems that no amount of intelligence can solve (other than stuff like the halting problem or the incompleteness theorems, I guess).
Even the best tic-tac-toe engines can't beat humans.
This general question has been examined a bunch before. Quoting Yudkowsky, "The theoretical limit [on how much you can deduce about the outside world] is that every time you see 1 additional bit, it cannot be expected to eliminate more than half of the remaining hypotheses (half the remaining probability mass, rather). And that a redundant message, cannot convey more information than the compressed version of itself. Nor can a bit convey any information about a quantity, with which it has correlation exactly zero, across the probable worlds you imagine." ( https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/5wMcKNAwB6X4mp9og/that-alien-message )
In actions, there are similar levels of limitations: You can optimise among the number of various possible choices you can make, but not beyond that. In chess, that's about 10^60, with rather limited variation in outcomes. In life, everything is so much larger and complex and chaotic that thinking of hard limits won't really get you anywhere at all. In practice, things look a lot more like https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q9Figerh89g , where even at human intelligence, you can drop a bunch of squishy helpless entities on a harsh and hostile planet, armed with just a bunch of squishy fingers and no more, and they'll be going to the moon and manipulating DNA and setting off nuclear explosions pretty much instantly (on the timescales which previously mattered).
It's almost certainly really, really easy to devise problem no amount of intelligence will be able to solve before the end of the universe - there are a whole bunch of NP-complete things of this form that are used as cryptographic primitives.
For example, if I generate a square matrix M with a few thousand rows and columns, sampled from a suitable distribution, and then show you M and y=Mx+e where x is an integer vector and e is chosen uniformly at random from a sphere whose radius is the length of the shortest vector in the lattice spanned by the columns of M, then x,e are uniquely determined by y, but it's very, very likely that no sequence of calculations that recovers them with non-trivial probability in practical time exists, and so no matter how smart you are you probably can't find them.
Modern cryptography is based on much smaller (but harder to describe) problems, with hundreds to tens of thousands rather than millions of unknowns, but again. most of it is probably not breakable before the end of the universe.
The slight catch is that being /totally certain/ that a particular problem is hard is hard. It's easier to write down a list of 100 fundamentally-different problems of which 99 are genuinely hard than it is to get 100/100 or to spot the one where an efficient solution algorithm exists. But a lot of expertise has been put into this, much of it on the "Keep it simple, stupid" principle.
The issue of Superintelligence isn't that if there's any single specific hard problems, all of humanity will be protected, but that of all problems that would be decisive to solve, are all of them hard?
It doesn't matter if RSA or elliptical curve cryptography is not reversible, if an AI can just use iPhone cameras to look at power buttons and read the secret key directly. Similarly it doesn't matter if nuclear silos are well protected if you can engineer several plagues, or ice-9 human proteins with prions in livestock.
Can't wait for someone to call all of the examples provided science fiction.
If you can do those things, yes.
But the point is that far too many AI doomers confuse "intelligence" with "magic superpowers".
Take the "talking your way out of the box" example. Even if there does exist a form of words that will persuade a human to let you out, the assumption that a "sufficiently intelligent" being will be able to deduce them in practical time is a very, very questionable one.
No matter how smart your AI is, it's still capped at, say, 2^35 operations per thread per second, which means it will only ever be able to solve problems for which a circuit solving that problem in a practical number of operations exists, and that's a very small subset of problems.
I'm extremely confused at calling the AI Box experiment as an "example" as if several actual humans haven't successfully talked themselves out of the box. And no, it wasn't the "greater good" lie that people keep trying to speculate, since it worked on a skeptical CS undergraduate who had no previous contact with Eliezer, and Ron Garrett, who did not unbox, has said that even though it didn't work, that his estimation of charisma actually working went up. Assuming you didn't know this before, does that change your mind at all your intuitions on what is or isn't possible? Because the opposite of thinking of intelligence as magic powers is to often deny the reality of things that have actually happened!
Like, this entire approach of trying to "mathematically" prove superintelligence is impossible is just an entire dead end, since it often also proves that World War 2 couldn't have happened (who could be charismatic enough to embroil all of Europe in war, in living memory of the last war that people called "the war to end all wars"?) or that somehow random drift of proteins has optimization power that is physically not realizable, on top of being more powerful than actual directed design. Or ignoring that often these problems involve constraints that just aren't relevant, like, the traveling salesman problem is NP hard, but that's only when you require the optimal solution! You can have fairly good heuristics to generate fairly-close-to-but-not-optimal results in polynomial time, or just use an algo with a worse worst case runtime but much faster average runtime.
See:
https://gwern.net/complexity
For a more detailed treatment of this argument.
The fact that people have talked their ways out of boxes doesn't really change my views much, for the same reason that learning that people sometimes kick through walls makes me think that it's impossible to build a wall that's hard to kick through.
(Actually, that's a slightly unfair analogy. I am arguing against the strong claim (which may be a weakman, but is definitely not a strawman) that AI will definitely be able to talk its way out of any box, but keeping my own claim weak and not making a confident counter-prediction that building boxes it won't be able to talk its way out of will be hard).
Similarly, I'm absolutely not claiming that "superintelligence" is impossible - I /am/ claiming that it's not well-defined, but I think that lots of things that definitely fit deserve to be called /will/ be possible.
But I /am/ claiming that a) even those superintelligences will be /limited/, sometimes in obvious ways and sometimes in surprising ones and b) a lot of the people making the most dramatic predictions about AI don't seem to appreciate that, and are consequently overconfident in their optimism/pessimism.
At this point, I think it is reasonable to predict with moderate confidence that within 100 years AI will be able to do pretty much anything a human mind can do, and some other things, but /not/ reasonable to make predictions that are simultaneously confident and extreme about how far those other things will go. And I do think it's easy to confidently identify a lot of things it /won't/ be able to do.
I think that Gwern's claim that complexity classes alone don't tell you much, and that you need to look at the actual numbers under those classes, is absolutely correct; but for lots of problems people have looked at those numbers in considerable detail, and in some cases the answers are not pretty.
It's weirdly revisionist to say "there doesn't exist a sequence of words to persuade a (implied: any) human in finite time" and then claim you were talking about a specific human and a specific boxing circumstance. Because if you were, I gather you would have said "every". This is exactly my point! The claim "there exists at least one circumstance in which my point is valid" is substantially weaker than "there are no circumstances under which my point is wrong". I just do not believe intuitions about what is possible are good or reliable guides when they predictably end up way too pessimistic.
Also saying that "people have looked at the numbers and found them wanting" is a cop out. I've seen that line used many times, and every time they decide to elaborate, either the example they give is just straight up false, or they are unable to name even one example. Surely, you can name three that aren't cryptographic algorithms, which suffer from all the side channel problems I was talking about earlier.
(You don't have any obligation to respond, but I am quite cross with people repeatedly waggling their eyebrows and saying "well *I* certainly don't have an argument, but it exists somewhere out there that I cannot name" when it comes to AI risk)
This isn't the type of answer you're looking for, but: it depends on how good the human player is. Given sufficiently (astoundingly) bad human play, the AI could still win with the bare minimum of just a king and a pawn.
That sounds implausible, but I know a youngster (7ish) who knows all the rules, but doesn't like taking pieces, because it's too mean. Given sufficient table-talk about fairness, I might be able to pull something like this off. I wouldn't, because it would be too mean.
To repeat my comment from below (since Substack doesn't notify posters of a parent comment on responses to response comments):
With queen odds, even an amateur can beat a strong engine. So the material handicap necessary for a top human to be able to crush a computer is significantly less than a queen.
However, a pawn is definitely not sufficient. Even with two-pawns-odds, Nakamura scored 1-1 against Komodo in 2020 here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zgnWq9gxyCM.
Knight for pawn odds would seem to be a significantly stronger handicap, (although officially this is a 2-point material deficit, the knight is much stronger than three pawns in the opening, as the pawns impede piece activity).
With knight for pawn odds, Nakamura drew Komodo and Vachier-Lagrave lost - still far from a crushing advantage for top humans: https://www.davidsmerdon.com/?p=2122.
As another comment noted, with knight odds, very strong humans consistently, but not universally beat engines. In 2020, Smerdon beat Komodo 5-1 with knight odds and in 2022, Finegold beat a newer version of Komodo 4-2 with knight odds: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iOWZlVmfzEs.
The top humans might be able to very consistently win with knight odds, but would still probably occasionally draw or even lose.
So the handicap needed for top players to have a crushing advantage over a computer is probably around a knight or a little more, but much less than a queen.
Incidentally, AlphaZero is not the top engine. Stockfish has won every Top Chess Engine Championship since mid-2020, and the large majority since 2014. AlphaZero was very successful with publicity, but not as successful with chess. It has not been maintained over the years.
Even Leela Chess Zero which it inspired and has been maintained over the years is weaker than Stockfish, and only won the engine championship twice; most recently, two and half years ago.
> With queen odds, even an amateur can beat a strong engine. So the material handicap necessary for a top human to be able to crush a computer is significantly less than a queen
I wonder if this is just because the computer isn't well trained for the situation (which never occurs in normal play) where it has everything except a Queen? Instead of relying on its well-worn opening tables it needs to improvise, and then by the time the distribution of pieces becomes a bit more normal it may have got itself into a weird position.
What I'm wondering is whether you could easily throw a bit of extra training in missing-queen situations at the chess engine and make it unbeatable again.
I don't think so. While it's true, that typical engines aren't trained for beating humans in odds games (Stockfish, for example, is optimized for performance against itself), I think a queen is much more than enough of a handicap, for top humans to beat any engine. In fact, the version of Komodo that Feingold beat was optimized for beating humans in odds games, and knight odds were still enough for Feingold to win, even though he was probably not even a top 1000 player, at the time.
While that Komodo probably had less training than other engines, the difference in strength of the engines, is probably not as large as the difference in queen odds vs. knight odds. Thus, it seems very unlikely to me that any engine - even a literally perfect one (cf. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Endgame_tablebase) that solved chess *and* was trained with algorithms to navigate the game tree towards branches where humans are likely to blunder, could be a match for the top human players.
I think this is wrong, see this comment by gwern https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/odtMt7zbMuuyavaZB/when-do-brains-beat-brawn-in-chess-an-experiment?commentId=HB2GgxEm7zPGQhWkM on how much retraining matters and how Nash Equilibrium moves can be substantially worse vs weaker players. Hikaru Nakamura's Botez gambit speedrun: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL4KCWZ5Ti2H7HT0p1hXlnr9OPxi1FjyC0 where the SuperGM gets to 2500 elo on chess.com while purposefully saccing their Queen. I don't think there's a reasonable account which says that all possible chess engines cannot play queen's odds when a human has already done so against much better players.
I think your attempted refutation from Nakamura fails for 2 reasons.
First:
>when a human has already done so
Is not accurate, as there is a huge difference between queen odds and a queen sacrifice.
Second:
>when a human has already done so against much better players
Seems to probably misunderstood what I said. While I did note that amateur players can beat top engines with queen odds, I *didn't* say that amateurs could beat top *players* with queen odds, and I certainly didn't say that amateurs could beat optimally designed engines with queen odds.
I said that I didn't think that an optimal engine could beat *the top humans* with queen odds.
Nakamura's opponents (who as already noted, weren't facing queen odds) were very much *not* the top humans. Of the videos I saw at the end of his run, his opponents were mostly sub-2400 and exclusively sub-2500 Chesscom (not Elo).
That would probably place them around the top 10,000 players in the world, (with significant variance).
Such players may be "much better players" than amateurs, but they aren't "much better players" than "the top humans," whom my claim related to.
I don't see anything dispositive in Gwern's comment, either. We all already know that an engine specifically trained for odds games will be much stronger than a regular engine, and I made that point in the comment to which you are responding.
The question is how much of a difference that would make. Obviously, there are limits, and it's inconceivable that any engine would ever be able to hold a draw against top players in e.g. a K vs. K + Q endgame.
We know that regular engines get crushed by humans with queen odds, and that even Komodo modified for odds games got decisively defeated with knight odds.
Does anything in Gwern's comment demonstrate that optimally trained engines which would be much stronger than that Komodo variant would be not just much stronger, but *so much* stronger that they would go from losing with knight odds to winning with queen odds? Not that I see.
> Is not accurate, as there is a huge difference between queen odds and a queen sacrifice.
I see, I mostly checked near the beginning of the playlist, where he did play the gambit (I.e. blundering the queen) as opposed to near the end, where it looks like he's still relying on the queen for a couple of turns to defend and the like. I believe I was substantially wrong about this being comparable to queen's odds, but I still think it's (slight) evidence against, would you have made the prediction this would be possible by any entity up to this elo level, assuming you didn't know about this before?
> explanation of why I misunderstood
Apologies, claim retracted. My comment was aimed at the claim that queens odds victories would be maintained even for trained engines. I will defend myself slightly by saying that the post I was replying to made no acknowledgement that engines were substantially hobbled by their current training regime, but that is absolutely no excuse for reading positions that you didn't espouse.
I think you're probably just right about queen's odds vs top humans, just because it's hard to imagine a solved version of chess that doesn't involve the winner using the queen, but I think that's more a statement about the boundedness of chess rather than the boundedness of engines. Considering that stock fish has gained 800 elo in the last 10 years, I would guess that even if elo gains continue for 10 years (or perhaps partially equivalently, a computer 128 times faster than what chess.com uses) is more around positional play and longer term play rather than being much stronger at being down.
> even though he was probably not even a top 1000 player, at the time.
Not even top 1000 in his chair!
The below article suggests a knight down (or knight odds) is (or was in 2020) about the level you are looking for: https://www.chess.com/news/view/smerdon-beats-komodo-5-1-with-knight-odds
This was against komodo, not sure how that compares to AlphaGo.
Well, even the best chess computer wouldn't be able to win if it was handicapped down to only a king. Or only a king and a rook. Heck, it wouldn't be able to beat a ten year old with that, no matter the computing power.
I have thought about the same. Right now we think intelligence is very important because it is a tight constraint, the same way raw man power was a taut constraint in earlier ages when it came to building things. Nowadays we could easily make cranes or excavators a lot more powerful than the ones we have, but we don't, because raw power is not the taut constraint anymore.
I'm guessing the threshold is way less extreme than that. Who knows, maybe if the AI is just 5 pawns down, it can't win against a pro human.
Against Carlsen, probably one pawn down.
With queen odds, even an amateur can beat a strong engine. So the material handicap necessary for a top human to be able to crush a computer is significantly less than a queen.
However, a pawn is definitely not sufficient. Even with two-pawns-odds, Nakamura scored 1-1 against Komodo in 2020 here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zgnWq9gxyCM.
Knight for pawn odds would seem to be a significantly stronger handicap, (although officially this is a 2-point material deficit, the knight is much stronger than three pawns in the opening, as the pawns impede piece activity).
With knight for pawn odds, Nakamura drew Komodo and Vachier-Lagrave lost - still far from a crushing advantage for top humans: https://www.davidsmerdon.com/?p=2122.
As another comment noted, with knight odds, very strong humans consistently, but not universally beat engines. In 2020, Smerdon beat Komodo 5-1 with knight odds and in 2022, Finegold beat a newer version of Komodo 4-2 with knight odds: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iOWZlVmfzEs.
The top humans might be able to very consistently win with knight odds, but would still probably occasionally draw or even lose.
So the handicap needed for top players to have a crushing advantage over a computer is probably around a knight or a little more, but much less than a queen.
Incidentally, AlphaZero is not the top engine. Stockfish has won every Top Chess Engine Championship since mid-2020, and the large majority since 2014. AlphaZero was very successful with publicity, but not as successful with chess.
It has not been maintained over the years. Even Leela Chess Zero which it inspired and has been maintained over the years is weaker than Stockfish, and only won the engine championship twice; most recently, two and half years ago.
When people talk about pawn odds, doesn't it matter which pawn? It feels like losing an f2 pawn should be much worse than say, the A2 pawn (which comes with the advantage of an open file)
Your intuition is probably correct. Looking at the engine evaluation of different pawn handicaps (which wouldn't necessarily exactly match human win probability, but gives an idea), the largest handicap for Black is losing the f7 pawn (+3), while the smallest handicap is losing the a pawn (+1.3).
Even the f pawn isn't enough for a human to win consistently, or even necessarily to win at all, though, as Nakamura played a bunch of 2 pawn odds games with different pawn combinations including the b & f pawns and c & f pawns, and he drew all the games, except for one of his games with odds of the c & g pawns, which he lost: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_0MKFyd_578.
So we can roughly infer that with 1 pawn odds (even the f pawn) the engine would be much better than a top human, with 2 pawn odds (including the f pawn), a computer is about equal with a human, with odds of 2 pawns not including the f pawn, the engine may be a little better, while with knight odds, a top human would be much better than an engine (engine evaluates the knight odds as +6 for White, for what it's worth).
That blocking any specific fossil fuel producing or transportation project (What I sort of unfairly call McKibbin-ism, although I’ve even seen John Quiggins defend it in the much larger context of exporting coal from Australia.) will, because of substitution, result in very little CO2 emission avoided but at the cost of the lost project benefits and political costs to the Democratic Administration that goes along, why is this such a popular “activist” tactic? [Disclosure: I hope top use answers to improve a Substack post on this issue.]
Because it's politically an easy win. Blocking production of fossil fuels is both very obviously the right position [for them, not talking in general] and at the moment, very easy due to sympathetic courts and a legal system which may have overcorrected slightly - no, it was absolutely terrible that PG&E could explode an entire Bay Area suburb and basically get away with it, it was awful that companies can operate leaky crude pipelines and never actually come and fix the cracks, it's absolutely horrendous that Deepwater Horizon happened given that it was avoidable - but they're entrenched and way too hard to shut down now, so activists (I do genuinely think they believe they're doing good) go after easier wins.
I'm pretty frustrated with the current state of environmentalism. Due to overcorrection from decades of genuinely way too lax regulation, it's really easy to block, and very hard to build. There will be an energy crisis, because nothing is getting built. Not new fossil fuels (which is probably good) but terrifyingly, not new other energy generation either (nuclear, solar, wind - yes smallscale solar and wind is happening but that will not be enough). The carbon zero options are being blocked with the same overcorrected laws that are blocking oil pipelines. It's indiscriminate, and it really scares me.
(I'm not 100% against blocking new fossil fuels as long as new energy generation is being built to replace the lost energy, because that makes it so that FF can't just outcompete zero or low carbon energy sources while continuing to emit. But blocking both is going to kill so many people)
I think that at least in some cases the activism may not be strictly groundroots, and may be intended to preserve significant reserve capacity for strategic defense purposes while giving the government cover against popular pushback.
For one thing, your popular activist has no understanding of, and won't understand or believe you if you tell them, of your "Given..."
FYI Scott, your Lorien Psychiatry page at https://lorienpsych.com/ currently pops up a big screen saying your plan has expired and the site is going offline soon. I assume this is unintentional, unless you’re actually planning on taking your practice’s site offline. (If I’m wrong, please preserve the writing somewhere?)
Thanks. WordPress currently isn't letting me renew, I'm talking to the person who helped me make the site originally to see if they can do it.
Has anyone had any experience, good or bad, with hiring technical talent from New Founding?
https://www.newfounding.com/
I remember some buzz about this a few months back, seemed like a good idea, but I wasn't in an actionable spot. Now I'm looking at potentially some serious hiring and expansion in 2024-2025, taking a more serious look at it, and while I like the idea...their youtube and twitter feels more like entertainment than serious professionalism. But maybe I'm misreading it. I'd really appreciate anybody who could share some feedback from working with them, good or bad. Thanks!
Has anyone been able to leverage self-hypnosis into observable positive outcomes in their life?
I have a good meditation routine that has obvious quality of life benefits. I thought perhaps the Reveri app could approach some stubborn issues from a different angle, but I can't find a use for it.
Maybe I'm just doing it wrong?
How much precaution do you all take when preparing and eating cooked rice, using ric leftovers?
I use a lot of leftover rice to make new dishes. It sits out at least for the course of dinner. I recently learned about a pathogen that doesn't die even with heat, or its toxin doesn't denature, and rice seems to need a treatment as careful as raw meat with regards to refrigeration?
Is this right?
Thank you everyone for the experiences! I think I won't psych myself out too much but might be more precipitous in refrigerating it, and might not keep old rice quite as much as I do, preferring to make less, as far as I am able. (My pressure cooker won't do a good job with less than 1.5 cups of raw rice, and our family doesn't finish that much.)
The vinegar idea is also good, but it doesn't always work taste -wise with what I'm cooking.
Well, YMMV - my grandparents, who live in a tropical climate, make a pot of rice every morning, leave it on warm, and eat it for the whole day. They're in their late 80s now and it has never been an issue for them. Me, on the other hand - I got good poisoning from overnight rice (left in the cooker) in a dry temperate climate, so idk.
What I do now is the rice cooker is switched off as soon as dinner starts. When it's cooled, it goes straight into the fridge. If I forget, the next morning I will make fried rice - making sure to use a high smoke point vegetable oil and cook the rice again with egg and frozen veggies and other stuff I have on hand. So far this has served me well. The fried rice, of course, needs to be browned, ideally slightly crispy - this means Maillard reaction, which both makes it tasty and is a surefire indicator that it's reached over 140°C - whereas water methods of reheating rice (including microwave), putting it in soup, making congee, etc will only reach 100°C unless you burn it.
You could probably also bake it. But yeah, overnight unrefrigerated rice should be heated high enough to brown/crisp it.
Thought I'd add a quote from the USDA:
"B. cereus [ha!] grows best in a temperature range of 39°F (4°C) to 118°F (48°C). Optimal growth occurs within the narrower temperature range of 82°F (28°C) to 95°F (35°C) and a pH range of 4.9 to 9.3."
Given that white vinegar has a pH of 2.4, addition of 1-2% vinegar to the cooking water should be enough to drop the pH well below 5. If the rice is intended primarily as an ingredient in later recipes, a shift in flavor from a little vinegar would probably be all but undectable.
Just some food for thought. But please, no one die from keeping out lukewarm rice indefinitely.
That vinegar piece is interesting. Rice used in sushi and other similar dishes often has vinegar (and sugar and other seasoning) added and the rice is served at room temp. I wonder what came first, the vinegar as preservative or the vinegar as flavoring.
I make about three cups of rice at a time, eat about a cup of it, and leave the rest in the rice cooker on the counter for a couple of days, until I pull another portion out and throw it in the microwave. It's fine unrefrigerated for about three days. The main danger I've found with rice is that early mold is white and can be hard to see.
I boil about three servings worth of brown rice [generally with some garlic and onions], eat one, leave the rest on the shelf to cool for an hour or so, then put it in the fridge. Generally I will heat up the two remaining servings about three or four days apart, so the last one will be at least a week old. Thus far there have been no adverse consequences. Over the years I have become increasingly blase about how long I leave stuff before and/or after cooking...
We eat rice almost every day. The leftovers sit out in the rice cooker, and in winter we'll keep using these until the third day, either cold from the pot or recooked/stir fried. In the summer we usually give to the chickens after day 2. We've been doing this for literally decades. I recently heard about this pathogen, and discussed it with my partner; we agreed that our experience plus that of billions of Asians over many years suggested it was a risk we need not be concerned with. If it matters, I'm a public health epidemiologist, and my partner is Asian.
My understanding is that the toxin is produced in hazardous quantities when rice is reheated, but not much. That is, warming rice without cooking it lets the bacteria multiply without killing it. Then after a while the bacteria have created enough toxin to be hazardous. We never heat old rice without really cooking it (because why?).
So I must discontinue my practice of freezing leftover rice and then tossing some of it in hot soup, say, or stirring it into a stir-fry for one?
No, that's fine: the dangerous thing is leaving rice out on a warming dish for a long time, say as part of a buffet.
Oh, okay. Cook and freeze pretty quickly.
Ideally, yes, though it's also fine to keep the rice above 65C/150F (as the better class of rice cookers do), and it's probably not too bad (though still in contravention of health codes) to leave it out at room temperature for a day or two. The thing to avoid is keeping rice above 20C/70F but below 65C/150F for an extended period, as those are the ideal conditions for microbial growth.
I'm saying the opposite. We recook our rice all the time, as stir fry and in soup. Just be sure you get it hot enough that any bacteria die, if you are concerned about toxins.
I don't think I'm getting it hot enough at all. That would sort of require boiling the sauce or soup or stirfry or whatever it was going to enhance. Which wouldn't be ideal. I think I'll just make afresh each time.
Tossing it in hot soup maybe won't get it very hot, but adding it to a stir-fry certainly should. Unless you cook a stir-fry, plate it up, and then add cold rice? That would be very strange. But even with the soup, you're eating it straight away, right? There's not much time for significant bacterial growth.
My family has routinely used leftover rice, including in ways that have a number of hours sitting out (e.g. plain rice sitting out for an hour or two during one dinner, then sitting in the fridge for a week, then making it into fried rice, it sitting out during dinner for another hour or two, then another week in the fridge). We’ve never noticed any ill effects of this.
I never keep rice as leftovers out of fear of pathogens and because rice is cheap.
Autism and elevation: Can someone fact-check me?
Hello all,
I found some articles/studies showing a pretty strange correlation between elevation and rates of neurological issues and autism. All these studies seem pretty old, but the correlation they found is pretty shocking:
“for every 328-foot increase in altitude, there was a corresponding 2 percent increased risk of developmental delays.” (For reference, New Mexico is 5,700 feet, LA is at 310 feet, while Boston is 46 feet, which means New Mexico children are at about 35% more risk than Boston children... wow!)
“children living above 8,530 feet were twice as likely to be at risk of experiencing delays in their mental development as those living at or below 2,625 feet.”
Does anyone who knows more about this field know if this is accurate, or was the methodology flawed here? If so, why is it that I can find so little modern data on this?
Here is the laypeople article I am looking at: https://medicalxpress.com/news/2012-11-children-high-altitude-higher-mental.amp
Here is the corresponding medical study: https://www.jpeds.com/article/S0022-3476(12)01025-6/fulltext “Living on Higher Ground Reduces Child Neurodevelopment—Evidence from South America”
Edit: grammar errors
Edit: here is a link to read the article for free-- https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3556200/
No idea about autism, but babies born at high altitudes also have lower birth weights on average (at least in the US people who live at higher altitudes also have lower adult weights even when controlling for confounding factors. people who move to high altitudes tend to lose weight as well).
Oh cool! I didn't know that. Do you have a study on this that I could read? (You piqued my interest.)
I don't unfortunately. I forget the original source for this, but our first child was born while we lived at altitude (about 5000 ft) so it must have come up during preparations for that. The OB/GYN also confirmed low birth weight.
As for the body mass of adults, I can't remember either. I believe it was in a news paper article about obesity, but it was probably 10 years ago when I first read it.
Oxygen supply to the brain (and/or developing brain in utero)?
Part of living at elevation is reduced atmospheric pressure and lessened blood oxygen saturation:
"The effects of high altitude on humans are mostly the consequences of reduced partial pressure of oxygen in the atmosphere. The medical problems that are direct consequence of high altitude are caused by the low inspired partial pressure of oxygen, which is caused by the reduced atmospheric pressure, and the constant gas fraction of oxygen in atmospheric air over the range in which humans can survive.
The other major effect of altitude is due to lower ambient temperature."
I would have thought that for significant effects you'd need to be living pretty high up, but what do I know about the sensitivity of infant brains to oxygen?
Perhaps it has to do with the population that lives at higher altitudes.
Hmm... I thought that too (the effect seems too big to be true), but here is what their methodology says:
Data from a unique study of normal infant neurodevelopment in five South American countries are used. The sample includes 2,116 infants 3–24 months of age who were evaluated for neurodevelopmental problems by study physicians during their routine well-child visits at 31 pediatric practices. We employ regression models with country fixed-effects that compare the neurodevelopment of children born at different altitudes within the same country to avoid confounding. The regressions adjust for several socioeconomic and demographic factors. We also evaluate altitude effects stratifying by sex, age, and household wealth. Infant neurodevelopment was evaluated by physicians using the Bayley Infant Neurodevelopment Screener (BINS). The primary outcome is an indicator for whether the infant is at high risk for neurodevelopmental problems based on the BINS norms.
I think they controlled for the main things that I could think of that would influence this. What else do you think might be causing the effect?
They could easily be overcontrolling/colliding on dependent variables, creating spurious connections.
Air pollution maybe? High-altitude cities tend to be surrounded by even higher mountains that trap air pollution over the city.
I'd like to see an attempted replication in the US (or any other country with a lot of people living at both high and low altitudes and reliable medical data, which is pretty much just the US and Canada.
I can't say anything about the methodology, but, if the claim is true, several plausible reasons for it come to my mind. An example would be different micronutrient content of soil in various geographical regions, e.g. iodine, which plays a crucial role in brain development and is on average present in higher concentration in soils near the coast.
Interesting theory-- it does seem plausible, especially because the study was done in South America, where I am guessing agriculture is more local. I thought the reason was something like: children get less oxygen because the air is thinner higher up?
It seems plausible, but I still think there is something more happening.
For example, in this US screening (just a preliminary study) they found a similar effect... https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/1087054715577137 And since the US uses Iodine salts (and eats a lot of salt) I doubt this is all due to Iodine.
Would a public tagging system be a good idea for ACX? I'm thinking about a crowd-sourced method of noting substantial discussions, like the recent one about getting into experimental treatment trials or the current one that's shaping up about integration and differentiation.
For both threads and posts?
I was thinking especially about threads because I think that's where it's most likely for good stuff to be lost, but I wouldn't mind tags for posts as well.
Unfortunately, if tagging is to be publicly sourced, it would also need some moderatiion.
...public tagging, as in... graffiti?
No, tagging as done at dreamwidth.org and metafilter.com. A tag is a word or short phrase to indicate the subject of a post.
Lesswrong.com also has tags.
AI doom is one thing, but AI saving the world? Destruction is much simpler than creation: how does an AI solve the favelas? Israel-Palestine? The CCP? North Korea? Is there really something even a superintelligent AI can do about these things? I'm not sure if we end up in these messes due to a lack of intelligence...
Are there any major world issues that don't reduce down to poverty being bad, as your examples do? If so, AI might not be able to solve those. But AI can definitely solve the poverty problem.
I had the same thought as you a year ago which is why I wrote down a handy list of 10 steps an AI should follow to save the world. I don't share it much because an AI should have no problem coming across it given how much data they train on, but I'll leave a link here in case you have any opinions on it https://elsewhereunbound.com/the-plan/ There's also a story that goes into more detail.
Sure. Kill everyone. No more favelas, Israel-Palestine, CCP, North Korea.
But assuming you meant to include "and don't kill everyone, or anyone, and don't stop new people from being born, and don't [ad infinitium]"...
Classically, one of the attributes of a super-intelligent AI is supposed to be superhuman persuasiveness. (The whole "AI boxing" thought experiment.) If such an AI gets to spend enough time manipulating ("talking with") enough people, it could solve all those problems. It might not seem to be much different than talking with some super-charismatic cult leader and suddenly realizing what the root of all your problems is. (Usually, it's "not being a member of the cult".)
Will an AI be able to judge any of these as bad, other than polling people in some way?
I asked Bing:
> Hi, Bing, are favelas bad?
I got:
> Hello! Favelas are a type of working-class neighborhood in Brazil. They are often associated with poverty and inequality 1. Favelas are typically formed when squatters occupy vacant land at the edge of the city and construct shanties of salvaged or stolen materials 2. The people who live in favelas are known as favelados 1.
> It’s important to note that favelas are not inherently bad or good. They are a result of the unequal distribution of wealth in Brazil 1. While some favelas have high crime rates, others have low crime rates and a strong sense of community 1.
> In summary, favelas are a complex issue that cannot be easily categorized as “good” or “bad”. They are a reflection of the social and economic conditions in Brazil 12.
> Is there anything else I can help you with?
> Learn more: 1. en.wikipedia.org 2. britannica.com 3. dictionary.com 4. gettyimages.com
So perhaps the RLHF mealy-mouthedness is doing for the AI what it does for humans, which is to keep it from saying something with unfortunate implications when dealing with a complicated situation.
I mean, if it's aligned, which is what we're discussing here, it should know all these things are bad.
I'm not sure this is meaningful to think about, if it is assumed to be aligned. If it is, then it will magically (mechanically?) come up with solutions to all of those, and then some. But what we think is aligned may not be actually aligned until it does something intelligent people judge to be bad.
Will it really? Do you really think we have these problems because we're not smart enough to solve them? That there exists an amount of intelligence you could throw at this and find a solution?
I think we have those problems because we aren't ruthless enough to solve them. All of them have the same solution.
Yes, I think so. I'm no superintelligence, but here are some solutions that may or may not work:
Favelas: Build good housing for everyone, somewhere else at first then raze existing favelas and you can build more. This is really a question of poverty.
Israel-Palestine: Those in Gaza can remain, free from Israeli attacks. They may govern themselves for internal affairs, as long as it doesn't conflict with AI rules and rulings. Same with Israel. They don't get to make rules for each other.
CCP: They prefer Communism, so they may have it, administered by AI judges that rule infallibly. Chinese affairs concern the Chinese. Trade continues under AI guidance.
North Korea: War-mongering leaders are deposed. Koreans govern themselves, subject to AI rules. Probably commerce between north and south Korea.
Given your assumption that we have an aligned AI, yes, all these things must be possible.
Thinking about favelas, if we're looking at a very wealthy future, it might be possible to improve favelas without tearing them down. This has some advantages of being less disruptive.
The theory seems to be that AI will unlock unlimited wealth and therefore there will no longer be concerns about resources - since we will all have as much as we want.
Israel-Palestine is a good counter-example, since what they want is an exclusive good of a certain piece of land.
I think most of the actual *warfare* is driven by material conditions - that is, living under the Gaza blockade is bad enough that people are willing to sign on with Hamas's plan of "launch suicidal attacks with little military impact and hope it gets enough international attention to change something."
If Israel and Palestine are still arguing over access to the Temple Mount, but they're doing so from the comfort of their fully automated luxury arcologies instead of shooting each other, I'd count that as "good enough."
That's possible. Going by what people on both sides of the issue have been saying for 75 years, the land is a significant goal in itself. Given how crummy a lot of that land is - poor farming, lack of resources - it doesn't appear to be a matter of material wealth.
Of course, that might be a minority opinion on either side, and generous wealth might just calm the whole situation down. I'm not counting on that. Otherwise, the aid packages to the Palestinians over the years should have done something to calm it down, but it doesn't appear to be so.
Scott donating his kidney didn't sit right with me. There was even a guy who unsubscribed because of this. I think I pinpointed why: he was telling us about this very extreme act in his usual subdued tone, when I think it called for something like Radicalizing the Romanceless. And it is radical: someone pointed out that a friend of hers died during the surgery to remove her kidney (to give to her dying husband). A procedure that invasive will always be risky, even eliding the fact you have mutilated yourself. And to do it for a stranger? Cold altruism? As my brother said when discussing this: if you can sell this as reasonable, you can sell literally anything as reasonable. Myself, I'll keep reading, but it definitely gives a different tenor to that 30% chance of AI destroying the world that Scott gave...
To me, it was unsurprising, but I've been following Scott on and off for a long time.
It felt very much like what I'd expect from the person who wrote "Unsong".
Wow, now I really need to read Unsong. Shouldn't have put it off.
It's quite good, if you like that sort of thing, which I do. There's a quote from long ago that's stuck with me:
"Tradition is not the worship of ashes, but the preservation of fire." - Gustav Mahler
And in some ways, "Unsong" feels like an attempt at presenting the fire within utilitarianism.
I share your concerns Carlos though (presumably like yourself) my preference is to err in Scott's favor.
If he were being entirely mathematical he could probably save more lives, more effectively, by simply donating everything beyond his (family's) sparest living expenses to charity.
He did it for all sorts of basic human reasons, including, as he explains in detail, self-righteous anger at being told that he couldn't!
Of course his main reason was likely that not only do people need kidneys and he happens to have a spare, but that his field of influence multiplies and magnifies the likelihood of more than one life being saved via stranger-donation.
And that furthermore, as this gets normalized and people regard strangers (even when they're not on the news!) as worthy of their concern, we will find better solutions to the kidney crisis and other social ills because "we are all in it together".
I can absolutely understand the fear that some high iq cultish eggheads might begin to *require* us to give one of our kidneys into their kidney bank but I don't see that coming from Scott's donation any time too soon.
That said, I can understand the reticence.
The degree to which a small group of hysterical women and sci-fi soaked men managed to inflate the power of the government and to cow the majority of the citizenry during the past few years is worthy of examination.
Insisting that everyone remain indoors for years, and double masked when they dare to venture outside, and to compromise their own bodily integrity against their wishes by taking a shot of something or other (even when the shot administrators agreed that for a specific individual in question it was not likely to be salutary) has, and ought to have, a deleterious effect on the trust granted to those at the cutting edge of mathematics-based-morality.
>He did it for all sorts of basic human reasons, including, as he explains in detail, self-righteous anger at being told that he couldn't!
Doing something quite dangerous out of spite for people that are (very charitably) trying to protect you or (more realistically) covering their own institutional asses might be human, but it's not *rational*, and that's one of the main aspects that I find off-putting. In almost any other context, we'd call that reaction childish. It's a weird, altruistic analogue to "if all your friends jumped off a bridge, would you do it too?"
It is a very good thing to do. Saintly, even. Superogatory to quite an extreme degree. But it's another example of a certain tension or obfuscation when Scott gets into the charitable writings. Like when he posts about "EA as a tower of assumptions," and getting people to buy into this structure (that might lead to eggheads demanding your kidney for inclusion), right after writing about how no matter how good the math is in What We Owe The Future he couldn't shake the feeling that if the math leads somewhere nonsensical, you nip it in the bud instead.
I don't see how this argument differs for any form of charity. To give $10 to a stranger? Cold altruism?
And like, if you're giving someone a kidney, it's because they are going to die if they don't get a kidney. Is saving a life a radical action?
Serving as a soldier in Afghanistan probably had a higher death rate than donating a kidney. I have met many people who have done so describing their decision just as calmly as Scott did his.
The chance of death from the surgery is the same as two months of background mortality risk at my age. It's comparable to the chance of death from an older person deciding not to wear a face mask when going outside for a year.
Thanks for replying. You know this probably pinpoints like a laser what the big clash I have with rationalists consists of: I say math should not make you rip out one of your organs. But perhaps a rationalist (okay an effective altruist) would say, if you are going to rip out one of your organs, math should be precisely the thing that makes you do it.
It all feels very High Modernist, cold rationality driving big bold decisions.
Do you really feel like there wasn't a lot of fire making you do this?
I think I explained my emotional reasoning in the original post.
Think of it as like flying to Rome. You do it because you want to see Rome. Then there's math showing that planes rarely crash and are very safe. If the math said planes crashed all the time, you wouldn't go. But you're not doing it because of the math.
See, but there was remarkably little emotion in that essay. Here's the thing: you did something saintlike here. I was literally reading in a book on Tibetan Buddhism the other day a story about a lama who upon learning that a man had a terrible illness that could only be healed by eating human flesh (weird story), grabbed a knife and cut off a strip of flesh from his thigh to feed him and heal him. The story was summarized like this:
> Guru Dharmarakshita, who realized the nature of emptiness by meditating on love and compassion even to the point of giving away his own flesh.
Extrapolating from the act, one would think you have some major things to teach about love and compassion now, as you gave away your flesh. Hell, doing this is called Bodhisattva activity. Yet, have you learned anything about emptiness, love and compassion? What do you see now that you are in Rome?
You realize that it kinda sounds like you should be teaching Daniel Ingram about spirituality. I mean, if he hasn't donated a kidney, he should do so in a hurry, because what does it matter, to an enlightened being? But then, re-reading your essay, you did say you don't think you modified yourself into a saint, it's more like giving a kidney started seeming as normal. Hmm. I did read somewhere once that enlightenment should be understood as something an entire community can accomplish, not so much an individual. Something to think about in my own spirituality.
But you know what, you're an atheist right, you can turn that same skepticism to Buddhism, you can totally ask if anyone can get away with claiming enlightenment if they haven't or won't donate a kidney. I realize this is perhaps too confrontational for you, but you were joking you wanted to get a beef going some time ago.
To reinforce this, as Eremolalos points out down the thread, different death odds have different relationships to relevant hidden information that should change how you should evaluate the meaning of the statistic. Kidney donations are probably more like plane crash statistics than they are like an equivalently invasive procedure done to a random human.
> But perhaps a rationalist (okay an effective altruist) would say, if you are going to rip out one of your organs, math should be precisely the thing that makes you do it.
Yes, they would say that, and they would be right to. If you are going to remove one of your organs that could only possibly be a reasonable course of action if you know that: 1. the risk to you is minimal and 2. doing so will very likely save a life. There is no possible way to determine those things without using math (specifically probability).
I don't think Scott donated a kidney *soley* based on math. There are other values that play into it. He clearly values human life a great deal and cares about living by his principles.
The argument that he shouldn't of considered the math is fundamentally very bizarre. Would it had been a more responsible decision if he understood the risk to himself less?
He didn't talk about how much a human life means to him. He really makes it sound like the main thing is that he was in a context where giving away a kidney was normalized.
The entire article was about how much a human life means to him. He spends a lot of time comparing the risk to himself versus the benefit to another persons life (and then donating a kidney) because he is very invested in saving lives. None of the math he does would make any sense at all in the absence of a strong value toward saving lives.
The problem with you criticism isn't just that its wrong in a factual way. Its that it doesn't make any sense. You are treating the math and the values like they are opposite when in reality they inform one another. There is no point to doing a deep dive on the risk if you do not care about saving lives. And you can't live up to your values if you can't understand the consequences of your actions.
It's funny how people can be so used to dishonest behaviour that when they meet someone actually acting on their beliefs it is some shocking revelation, possibly even making them to perceive the honest person in the worse light.
Alao,many ideologies as are for show, and but to be acted on. The Marxist who actually wanta to start a revolution is rather worryng. It's a social concern as well as an indivudual one.
No, it's not that, it's about selling extreme acts in such a calm voice. It makes it surprising that it didn't set off cognitive dissonance in Scott.
But you already knew that Scott supported EA causes and seen him calmly talk about it. Likewise, with 30% AI risk. Scott has probably resolved most of his relevant cognitive dissonance long time ago
So the reason that you are shocked now and not then is that it's your cognitive dissonance that wasn't resolved. And it has to do something with the fact, that at the time you, probably subconsciously, assumed that Scott "doesn't really mean it". And now as it turns out that he definitely did, this defensive mechanism of your psyche is no more.
This sounds exactly like being used to people being disingenuous to the point of being offended by someone's honesty.
I don't think Carlos was judging Scott disingenious. Scott's a fairly impressive fellow and I assume Carlos shares that impression.
As for Scott's tone, I liked it.
I am also selling something radical.
But just just because it is radical doesn't mean that I need to change my tone.
LIVING is radical. It is a game for keeps. There are no rules. The future is not written.
Just because someone has a view different from the prevalent one doesn't mean that they are required to sacrifice their sense of humor or to proclaim their position as radical and to shout it from the rooftops or to refrain from discussing it other than in the environs of copious sackcloth and ashes.
And it definitely OUGHTN'T mean that they should hide their self doubt or their Simple Human Smallness.
Life is too serious to take seriously. And being as There Are No Authorities, it's fair for Scott to trod down and proclaim his own path without having to pen a thesis defending his beliefs and actions which run counter to the mainstream.
That said, Ape, I am pretty sure that Carlos isn't taking issue with Scott's honesty, just with whether he "has the right" to proclaim something so radical without a preamble along the lines of The American DOI explaining in serious and somber detail why he is parting ways with prevalent assumptions by doing and encouraging such acts of charity.
This act is really not that extreme. People often take risks greater than the one he took as part of recreational activities, for god’s sake — downhill skiing for example. Scott sounded calm, but It wasn’t hard to recognize there was some deep emotion involved. In fact he actually wrote about some of the feelings, things having to do with personal angst, and the desire to be a good person. Yes, he sounded calm, that’s his style, but he didn’t sound robotic. (Irritating parenthetical note: you know who sounds robotic to me? Hard core Effective Altruists)
You know, I generally object to use of the term “triggered,” but it does seem to me that what Scott did really triggered some people. What I mean is that some people here sound sort of diffusely upset, as though the idea of Scott lying on the operating table really freaks them out — but then they’re taking their upset feeling as evidence that he’s a bit crazy, or has made a really disillusioningly bad decision. Maybe some of you people are in fact mostly shaken at the idea of him dying, disturbed by the grisliness of surgery, guilty because you would never be willing to donate this way, creeped out by the idea that he struggles with self-esteem issues like everyone else does . . .
I can only speak for myself, but when my PTSD is triggered, the emotions I get are about as far as possible from utilitarian benevolence. Once upon a time, I tried to integrate them with my normal self, but over the last few years I've started talking about "me" and "my PTSD", and that really seems like a safer way to frame things. Possibly, people who aren't faced with such a stark choice, may not have to take such a radical stance, and might wind up trying to justify the existence of their emotions using what seems to other people to be extraordinarily flimsy reasoning?
I think he does not see it as "extreme."
That is what is so unnerving to me.
Why do you think it is so extreme? It seems a few people is having a very strong reaction to this due to something like bodily sanctity, is that it?
Personally I think it is of course a large step to do surgery for something like this, and I'm not sure I would do that myself. For me that is mainly due to the effort and discomfort of going through surgery, not due to the fact that I would be a kidney down. I'm convinced that the risk is in fact low, though I'm not sure if I could convince myself to feel like there is low risk emotionally. All in all I don't think I would do that for a stranger. A family member or friend would be a different story.
Still, I think I find it far less extreme than some here. What makes this very different from say removing your tonsils or appendix?
I had a similar reaction to the post. What didn't sit right with me was the use of statistics. Something feels wrong about ignoring strong intuition against invasive procedures in favor of a "1 over large number" chance of dying. There are always unforeseeable complications.
Edit: I have updated my position, see discussion below.
This seems a general argument against ever undergoing surgery, for any reason. Even if you are in dire need on an open-heart intervention right now, it's never going to sound intuitively appealing. That's what reasoning and calculations are *for* -- situations in which intuition is insufficient or outright wrong.
I’ve explained how I’ve updated my understanding of this in my below conversation with Eremolalos (thread continues, and I rephrase my statement) and in a reply to Scott above.
I think what I should have said above was “unnecessary invasive procedure”. When I was six, I broke my arm, and my doctor explained I needed a specific surgery for it to repair normally, and going along with it felt intuitively the right thing to do.
You guys realise you don’t have to be a math nerd to understand the probability or danger of things? It’s not asking too much of people educated even to just high school level to do this.
Of course it feels wrong. It's a tautology.
When your intuition is saying one thing and the data is saying the opposite, according to your intuition, trusting the data feels like a mistake. Likewise, according to the data, mistake is following through with your intuition.
The question is: What is *actually* a mistake? Not what *feels as* a mistake? Is your intuition calibrated so well to predict real world outcomes better than scientific process? Or not?
The advantage my intuition/emotional reaction/gut reaction has to scientific process is that it was the system that let my ancestors survive since living things had nervous systems. It also seems to be integrating sense data/memories that I don’t have conscious access to. It can’t make clerical errors (at least, not in the way science can).
The advantage the scientific process has to intuition is that it updates much faster, and isn’t maladapted to the modern world (our intuition or primal instinct weren’t primed in the same way to accommodate modern abstractions).
The point about intuition not making critical failures is arguably wrong, but generally a well done summary!
So now the question reduces to whether general adaptation against organ removal in the ancestral environment better fits modern kidney donation surgery than decades of accumulated scientific data about this surgery in particular. When framed like this, the answer seems quite obvious, doesn't it?
Thanks! I agree with what you’re saying. The context, medically and statistically, of kidney donation is also different than any random surgery done on any random person, and much safer, and this is a place where my intuitive reaction doesn’t show a complete picture.
I don’t think intuition can’t be wrong or can’t make catastrophic errors (especially since its present form is maladapted to the world), but that its errors are usually different than scientific process errors.
I have a conservative outlook, so I get where you're coming from, but...
Statistics are unnatural but very useful. As people living outside of our natural (evolved) circumstances, we need to be able to think about when our natural responses help us and when they hurt us. Something like seeing video from a terrorist attack on TV will affect us deeply, but we need to be able to step back and analyze if it really means what we feel it means.
I wouldn't give a kidney to a stranger, but I appreciate someone trying to understand a situation where the natural feeling is wrong and act against it.
The chances of dying are 3.1 per 10,000 donors. I don't know the chance of major complications -- I doubt that it's high. The chance of minor complications, such as a UTI, is not low at all, and no doubt Scott knew that and accepted the risk of them. And I'm sure the risks of what he did are lower than those people take for other experiences they value and other things that want to accomplish: backpacking alone, downhill skiing, travel in 3rd world countries, and the many careers that entail unavoidable risk. I think he fucking felt like donating a kidney, and good for him for doing what he wanted to.
There are a lot of people on here talking about the way the idea of giving a kidney feels wrong to them. Fine, you don't feel like doing it, in fact you're alarmed and repelled by the thought? Don't do it. But why are you interpreting your revulsion as a deep insight into the wrongness of what Scott did -- it's a violation of the purity and integrity of the body, it's self-destructive, etc. Sounds to me like you just have a particularly strong case of the disgust and anxiety most people feel about surgery and the removal of something from the body. Why are you trying to elevate that into an insight about the misguidedness of Scott's decision? It reminds me of a tone some people have when they object to gay marriage or make the case that homosexuality is a mental illness. You can tell that they are just very very squicked out by the idea of 2 men going at it sexually. EWWWWWWW! But they're presenting that reaction as an insight about ethics and sanity.
Hm, so donating a kidney is 100 times more dangerous than skydiving. Interesting.
https://www.uspa.org/discover/faqs/safety
Alternatively, donating a kidney is about as dangerous as going in a car for 100 miles.
Maybe. Wut about this? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3LFkPzObIug
Ugh.
Even the tiny possibility of that sort of thing happening is why I made damn sure there was no possible way I could fall out of my harness.
Also, it's probably a good thing that surgery failures and near misses aren't recorded and up on youtube. But I think it does make the comparison a bit misleading?
It looks at the beginning of the video like the woman changed her mind and was trying to push herself and her host back into the plane. He’s resisting this (wtf? why?) and finally kind of wrestles her out the door. But that introduces spin into their descent, really fast spin too, and that probably put forces on the harness from angles it’s not designed to resist as well. Ugh, fact that host refused to honor her wish to change her mind is enuf to put me off skydiving forever. Fuck that guy!
So you’ve skydived? How was it?
I wasn’t squicked out by the kidney stuff, I was squicked out by the number stuff. I wasn’t playing my reaction off as insight into ethics or sanity. As Arrk says, these kinds of reports aren’t very detailed information, and I don’t take very much meaning from them. Even so, I still understand Scott’s actions as rational given his preferences, which he makes clear in the post.
I really don’t appreciate your tone. You’re using the same emotional affect you’re accusing me of having and reading things into what I said that aren’t there.
You said "Something feels wrong about ignoring strong intuition against invasive procedures in favor of a "1 over large number" chance of dying. ." If you'd said something *is* wrong with making a decision on that basis, and said what it was, that would be different. Then I might or might not agree, but I would see your thought process as reasonable. But you are saying it *feels* wrong, and it does seems to me you're implying that your feeling is something more than free-floating personal distress -- it's some intuition of the wrongness of Scott's decision. Also, you begin your post by saying your reaction was similar to previous poster Carlos Ramirez's, who said that the donation was not a reasonable thing to do, and that he now trusts Scott's judgment less. So altogether your post does seem to me to be saying not that you're squicked out by the number stuff, but that you take the creeply feeling as an indication there was something wrong with Scott's decision.
As for your objecting to my openly annoyed tone: Openly showing emotion, which we are both doing, is not what I object to. I object to your presenting your creeped out feeling as support for the idea that Scott did something wrong. I'm not presenting my annoyance as evidence you did something wrong -- I'm sounding openly annoyed while I explain what I think you're doing wrong.
I think I see where you’re coming from and I will be more careful about word choices in the future. I should not have said my reaction was similar to Carlos’s - that implies more than “my emotional reaction to the post was discomfort”. I would like to rephrase what I mean and wanted to say without certain words:
I don’t like the way Scott used odds of dying in his post (with the exception of the MRI one, which was a good use of odds). These odds don’t express some important information and aren’t always meaningful. It’s unlike coin tosses or roulette where the odds reflect a very simple system. Humans are complex, specific complications are weird, and “chances of death” can’t tell you what went wrong and where. A general statistic like “50% of marriages end in divorce” doesn’t apply to all socioeconomic classes or types of marriages. Medical statistics are different than divorce statistics, but suffer from generalizing across very different kinds of things. For this reason, the post made me uncomfortable.
I don’t think you’re right about medical statistics not being an appropriate or reasonable guide when it comes to Scott’s decision. Yes, you are right, people are complex and there any many paths by which something can go wrong. The doctors can’t check in advance for every conceivable glitch in somebody’s functioning which could turn lethal under the stress of surgery. People might have a very rare, very severe allergy to anesthesia or some other drug used, a rare heart condition that can’t be spotted in the workup they give potential donors, etc. However, despite the great diversity of things that can go wrong, there is a great paucity of things that actually do, as evidenced by the statistic I quoted, which is based on 80,000 kidney donation. That shows that the criteria used in OK-ing people as candidates for kidney donation are adequate to keep the chance of death very low, despite the fact that there are many ways that the surgery could kill somebody. Apparently the workup they do in selecting people does a good job in eliminating practically everybody who could be die from the surgery in one of dozens of possible ways, including some ways the doctors working them up may never even have thought of. The proof of the pudding is in the eating.
There certainly are some situations where stats are not appropriate as a basis for decision-making. Getting married is one. The 50% divorce rate is not terribly relevant. For one thing, people don’t get married because they have researchd the odds and believe the odds are great that they will stay together. They get. married because the love each other and want to form a partnership and believe their bond can withstand life’s stresses. Also, once you’re married there are lots of things you can do to minimize the chance you’re one of the couples who gets divorced.
Medical statistics are not useful if they are based on a small sample, or a sample of people who are unlike you. They also are not good if there is a lot of variation among different subgroups of the large group the stat in question came from. But apparently the group of people who are permitted to donate kidneys is quite homogeneous when it comes to risk of death. The doctors have removed in advance practically all the people whose chance of death varies from the 0% the doctors are aiming for: older people, people with heart conditions, bleeding disorders, kidney problems, etc. We don’t just know that they tried to do it, we know they succeeded extremely well at doing it, because only 3 people in 10,000 die. It’s possible those who die all belong to some not-yet-identified group that should be eliminated from the pool. But if they do, it’s a group with very few members in the population — at most 3 in 10,000.
Agreed. I, personally, am squicked by the idea of donating a body part that doesn't grow back (unlike blood, which I donate regularly). I view Scott's donation as a courageous and noble act. He is a better person than I am.
I agreed with you until a certain point. Agreement: if you think donating a kidney is a poor decision, stick with your decision and let others make theirs, unless you have a good reason you can back up why it is a bad idea for absolutely everyone.
But objecting to gay marriage is not the same as outlawing gay sex. This is missing the point about marriage (having been) well-defined for society, with mother and father having roles in the raising of children. I'm not going into the facts of whether a man and a woman are best for raising children, since I don't have any facts regarding it. But I do object to redefining marriage.
Redefining marriage raises questions that have never been addressed, as far as I can see. Are brothers (or sisters) allowed to marry each other? Why not, if gay marriage is allowed? Can fathers marry sons if of legal age? What is to prevent three or more men marrying? I bet some of these might actually be desirable from a purely legal standpoint, such as to avoid inheritance taxes.
About gay marriage, outlawing gay sex or whatever. I'm not arguing for or against either of those. And I understand that there are some reasonable grounds for objecting to gay marriage, considering homosexuality an illness, etc. My point was only that *some* people's arguments against gay-friendly points of view & social policies seem to me to come down to "EWWWW! Homosexuality grosses me out." And I think those people are mistaking a personal aversion for a deep insight into the profound wrongness of homosexuality.
Is there a reliable guide to which aversions have some evolutionary basis or efficiency?
I don't know of one, but I don't know much about evolutionary psychology. A lot of our non-sexual aversions clearly lead to us avoiding things that are likelier than most to harm us -- aversions for things that have the smell of bacterial decay, aversions to foods that taste odd to us, to people who look or act unusual, to heights. But se do seem especially prone to sexual aversions. Why?
Here's a weird, gross theory I just came up with: It seems as though some of our health and safety aversions would have given us an aversion to sex: Before it was easy and expected to bathe regularly, most people's bodies must have had quite a strong smell of bacterial decay. And people act unusual during sex. And both parties are very vulnerable to being injured by the other. So maybe our default feeling about sexual intercourse would have been aversion, but nature had to build in an exception to the usual aversion cues so that we would procreate. But it's a very *narrow* exception: It makes us crave vaginal intercourse and enjoy it, but other things that are in fact very similar seem repellent to us.
Pervasiveness or not. While I'm not sure that there are any historical societies that consider homosexuality completely normal, some modern societies seem to make an unusually big deal of being against it.
Whence stems the aversion, or what does it mistake?
The main causes of aversion I've noticed are:
a) butts are gross
b) it's unmanly
c) not wanting to be the target of predatory sexual behavior
d) not wanting to have innocent friendly interactions tainted by sexual overtones
Perhaps not coincidentally, those don't apply as much to female homosexuality.
What about using statistics is wrong in that case? A large number of kidney surgeries are performed, so it seems to me like the actual observed rate is pretty strictly a more informative source of information than e.g. intuition (assuming you don’t think you have higher risk than the general population)
I suspect, as usual with statistics, that you would have to look more closely at them to determine useful information. In the cases where something went wrong, WHY did they go wrong? Surgeon error? Undisclosed donor medical condition? Unknown medical condition? Unforeseen problem that is now unlikely to recur?
Also, take the specific patient into account. Are they in good physical shape to be undergoing a major medical procedure? Do they think they are?
I'm usually not a fan of trying to manage the tone of someone else's writing. Emotional resonance can be very personal.
I had my own thoughts on the substance of Scott's piece, which I commented on there.
I know that one person doesn't count for much, but just to get it out there, my vote has flipped on the question of next year's review contest. I initially voted to keep it to books, but the idea of opening it to a broader set of essays has started to appeal to me recently.
Seems like most winners use the books as a framing device for conveying an ideology anyway, might as well canonize it.
I like the book reviews because I like learning what books I would never read are about. Most non-fiction books don't deserve to be read in full; those who condense them for us are doing The Lord's work.
Heh, fair enough. Plenty of long, dry books out there, and it's nice to have a more colorful tongue summarize the work.
"Post about anything you want, ask random questions . . . "
OK, WHY is it ( do you think ) that the 4th amendment is routinely violated at every airport in the U.S.A. ?
"US Constitution is a living document"(TM)(R). Large collection of related head-scratchers (for those new to the subject) to choose from, e.g. Wickard v Filburn.
That is, "Ah, you say you were treated unconstitutionally? Try complaining to one of our judges. Didn't like the verdict? Here are some pre-vetted candidates for you to vote for and pretend that it will make a difference. Pretense of participatory politics and multi-party rule wearing thin? Here's some provocateurs that will totally help you pull a coup. Hope you like this new prison uniform" etc
The 4th amendment was thrown out by the USG in a de facto sense decades ago. Driving around with thousands of dollars in cash? That belongs to the government now. Renters growing pot in the backyard of your rental property? Your property belongs to the government now. Driving lawfully? Well, we have a mandatory check point. You're going to have to get out of your car and give us a sobriety test.
I'm not a lawyer, but the problem seems to be the wording "unreasonable *under the law*". The Constitution is supposed to protect us from unreasonable laws, but the 4th amendment doesn't seem to do that *by definition*, rendering the amendment toothless. Maybe it meant something once.
The fourth amendment, like much of the rest of the Bill of Rights, has it's historical roots in specific grievances against George III and his ministers. In this case, efforts to enforce the collection of taxes on the sugar and molasses trades against American smugglers. One of the things that raised quite a bit of ire was the use of a legal mechanism called "general warrants" or "writs of assistance", where the King personally authorized certain specified officials (customs agents in this case) to conduct searches and seizures in the pursuit of their duties and to requisition assistance from local law enforcement in executing these powers. Americans in general and Bostonians in particular (Boston being a major hub for shipping in general and molasses smuggling in particular) rather aggressively challenged the legality and legitimacy of these general warrants on multiple occasions.
The fourth amendment's core purpose is to permanently abolish general warrants as a matter of American law, while still allowing the uncontroversial specific warrants that would be issued by judges to authorize one-off searches and seizures. That's why the second half of the amendment reads "and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized."
The exact text of the amendment is based on prohibitions on general warrants codified in Virginia in 1776:
>That general warrants, whereby any officer or messenger may be commanded to search suspected places without evidence of a fact committed, or to seize any person or persons not named, or whose offense is not particularly described and supported by evidence, are grievous and oppressive and ought not to be granted.
And in Massachussett's 1780 state constitution:
>Every subject has a right to be secure from all unreasonable searches, and seizures of his person, his houses, his papers, and all his possessions. All warrants, therefore, are contrary to this right, if the cause or foundation of them be not previously supported by oath or affirmation; and if the order in the warrant to a civil officer, to make search in suspected places, or to arrest one or more suspected persons, or to seize their property, be not accompanied with a special designation of the persons or objects of search, arrest, or seizure: and no warrant ought to be issued but in cases, and with the formalities, prescribed by the laws.
The core of modern controversies over the legality of searches and seizures comes from an issue that wasn't even on the radar at the time, where it's now assumed that law enforcement and regulatory agencies can perform some level of "reasonable" searching and seizing without a warrant of any kind, general or specific. Courts of the late 19th and early 20th centuries allowed the erosion and eventual abolition of conventional remedies of police and officials being personally civilly and criminally liable forcibly searching and seizing without a warrant (i.e. without a warrant, you have no more right to push your way in, break open locks, and carry stuff off than a private citizen would). Then the Warren Court noticed that something was missing and make the tactical error of trying to adjudicate what was reasonable or not and to introduce new remedies (specifically the exclusionary rule) instead of restoring the old ones. The exclusionary rule is a lot better than nothing, but it has two major shortcomings: it only directly protects guilty people with innocent people protected only indirectly by a reduced incentive for police to engage in unwarranted searches, and even when evidence is excluded police and prosecutors are generally no worse of than they would have been had they not done the search. So police are apt to roll the dice in marginal cases and hope the courts will rule in their favor, public support for rigorous enforcement of the fourth amendment is weak because it's mostly seen as allowing criminals to "get off on a technicality", and there's often no recourse for invasions of your privacy by law enforcement if they don't result in excludable evidence against you.
Since 9/11, courts require metal detection and inspection, and not even pocket knives are allowed. This requirement is still in-place even after all of these years, and no incidents prompting it. And one does not necessarily have the option both fight an injustice and not to go to court.
I have had to give up two nice Swiss Army knives and a monkey wrench because of this.
Technically, it's called the Border Search Exemption or something like that. Basically, the border patrol can do whatever the heck it wants at ports of entry as long as it's got the 'contraband or border security' fig leaf. And that's *very* liberally defined (ie up to 100 miles inland, and includes all international airports, which is most of them these days).
Originally, it had to do with the fact that *actual* border searches (including inspecting cargo ships) were considered a power of the government--no one had a right to bring stuff over the borders without paying the tax/being inspected. And that didn't require warrants at all. It got drastically expanded when airports came into play and security theater kicked into high gear.
Basically, it's the judiciary making up stuff so as not to cause too many waves or get accused of helping terrorists/smugglers.
I'm not happy about it either, but I imagine the lawyer answer is that you consent to the search. No one's forcing you to fly.
You have freedom to travel. You can drive, or take a bus or train, without any inspections at all. The majority of interstate travel is done that way.
Also, airliners could not possibly have been used as weapons? So it was physically impossible to hijack a plane, fly it into a building, and kill people with it?
The physics of the individual crashes, that is each of the 4 allegedly hijacked airliners totally disappearing upon crashing, like POOF, somebody borrowed Harry Potter's wand ? . . . or something ?
What is it about the physics of the individual crashes that you find impossible?
In the case of any real airliner crashing into a wall such as at the WTC or Pentagon, the Plane would have had a minimum of 60 milliseconds between initial contact with the wall and when the wings could have touched the wall, the fact is that the plane would have been subject to asymmetrical forces and given that, the plane would have broken to bits before having any opportunity to make the whole plane disappear inside the building.
And not to forget about the protagonists' miraculously indestructible passports...
(Cue countdown to "shuddup, 'truther'", "your teeth will fall out, conspiracist", etc)
I have opted not to fly at least since Covid, for the imposed requirements and for the unpleasant experience.
Ya, "COVID" was & still is, a SCAM
Is it a coincidence that you're endorsing two completely unrelated conspiracy theories in the same thread?
Does anyone else become peeved by noticing people being hypocritical in their accusations of hypocrisy? This is something I've been thinking about for a long time (actually, since I was a tiny little kid).
Let me give you the classic example: free speech debates. As far as I can tell, factions on both the left and right have shut down or tried to shut down legitimate speech in recent years. (I'm not going to debate which one "is worse"; let's just agree that neither are blameless.) And people on both sides know this. So whenever some kind of free-speech-disrespectin' goes on, there's always someone on the opposing side who smugly notes something along the lines of, "Wow! I can't believe [INSERT PEOPLE YOU DON'T VOTE FOR] hates free speech? I thought that they were the protectors of free speech! Guess that's not trueeeeeee!" And then they secretly admire their profound philosophical genius.
But if you look at things from a broader perspective, you see that not only do both sides sometimes go against free speech, but they both accuse the other side of hypocrisy - while themselves being hypocritical.
I've seen this a little bit with the Israel-Palestine situation, as well. I've seen rightists downplay the wrongs of Israel while focusing only on the evil of Hamas, while also complaining that leftists are hypocrites for downplaying Hamas and only focusing on Israel's wrongs. And I've seen leftists do the opposite.
It's like a distorted version of The Emperor's New Clothes in which everyone is running around in various states of undress, all while calling each other out on their nudity.
There is always motivated reasoning. Another factor, I think, is that acting according to your whims in the moment is usually a right reserved for the powerful, so acting inconsistently is an attempt to signal social status.
Yes, as the old proverb says, when you point a finger accusing someone, 3 of your fingers are pointing right back at you.
However, it's not always hypocritical. If there is ample evidence that the accuser also doesn't like the current situation, then what they're doing is just opening the eyes of the accused to the consequences of their own tactics. For example, if someone is scolding a pro-censorship woke leftist, pointing at the current censorship of pro-Palestinian [1][2][3][4] is a valid way of saying "look what you spent the last decade supporting", and if the scolder is on the record saying that not even his/her worst enemies deserve censorship, then you don't have anything against them.
What I noticed, though, is the much more fearful realization that people don't **want** to behave consistently. They fully realize they're being "hypocrite", they just don't think the charge holds any water. Imagine you're fighting, and when you scream in pain when the enemy hits you, someone calls you a hypocrite because you yourself was firing back at them just minutes ago. That's, presumably, what it feels for them to be accused of hypocrisy. It's an actively foreign way of thinking for them to take the outside view in a fight they're embroiled in, neutrality and open-minded debate of the kind argued for in [5] is just alien nonsense, or "Sophistry", to quote the meatspace friend who told me that when I was arguing against Hamas recently.
Another kind of people try to argue for asymmetric behaviour during the fight using the very claims disputed in the fight itself. Two examples stand out in memory :
- Arguing for Freedom of Speech for atheists with my Muslim circle (completely undercover of course), I say "Why not let atheists in Muslim-majority countries speak their minds, so atheist-majority or secular-majority countries let diaspora Muslims speak their minds as well ?", simple, effective, tit-for-tat. I get back "Muslims should be allowed to speak their minds, they're right, atheists should shut up because they're wrong". The guy wasn't stupid, he certainly knew Competitive Programming enough to make me feel stupid, he just failed to see the logical circularity of letting Islam's supposed superiority, the very topic under debate, dictate the terms and protocols for debate.
- When I argue with wokesters, and point out that (e.g.) feminsts' vitriolic hate for Men tends to mirror misogynistic men's vitriolic hatred for women. I get back "Yes, but men aren't systematically oppressed, there is a difference between punching up and punching down", the very theology of Progressivism, the thing we're disagreeing on in the first place, is being implicitly assumed and used as self-evident to dictate the terms of the debate.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0K7nlI7S0Qo
[2] https://www.npr.org/2023/10/21/1207795093/ceo-of-web-summit-tech-conference-resigns-over-israel-comments
[3] https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-12618691/Air-Canada-grounds-pilot-posted-sick-response-Hamas-brutal-invasion-Israel-saying-Hitler-proud-you.html
[4] https://www.nytimes.com/2023/10/13/books/frankfurt-book-fair-cancels-award-adania-shibli.html
[5] https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/03/24/guided-by-the-beauty-of-our-weapons/
To be a little fair, it's really difficult for a large group of people to avoid hypocrisy. More people means more opinions, more opinions means more contradictory stances. Meanwhile, politicians stand in the middle of it all, trying to represent the broadest set of the population that they can.
Being a true servant of the people makes you as two-faced as the population is willing to tolerate, unfortunately. And wouldn't you know it, we're less willing to tolerate hypocrisy when the other team is doing it. Which lands us here. A bunch of hypocrites, currying favor by accusing the other team of hypocrisy.
At least the parties hold each other to account, though. It would be nicer to have them self-modulate, but history shows that that's a bit of a pipe dream.
Yeah. The part that gets to me the most is when people use the other side's hypocrisy to justify the behavior itself. "You're a hypocrite and don't actually care about free speech, so there's nothing wrong in censoring **you**." It's like a double-helix spiral race to the bottom.
Tit-for-tat is a great strategy, but only in proportion to the completeness and accuracy of one's information. :-/
I tend to think hypocrisy is overrated as a vice. It's relatively easy to think about whether people's words match their actions, and harder to pay attention to the actions and the effects of the actions.
Also, hypocrisy is the tribute vice pays to virtue. I think it's worse when vice completely takes the brakes off.
To quote The Big Lebowski, "dude, at least it's an **ethos**."
Part of what I dislike about all the charges is that, on a personal level, gently pointing out an instance of hypocrisy can be a good way to convince a friendly person to improve. But we're losing that.
I almost feel as though there should be two words, one for "a failure to uphold one's own standards that one feels guilty about and wishes on some level to change", and one for "blatantly holding two conflicting standards and justifying it as the righteous thing to do".
Say what you will about those tenets…
… but nihilists. They believe in nothing.
When vice comletely takes the brakes off it surely is worse than hypocrisy but it's not sustainable. So hypocrisy is a more common problem.
I'm not sure if that's hypocrisy, or just (willful?) blindness. But it isn't limited to free speech, it goes for any thing people are getting behind. The bible quotes JC as saying something about the mote in someone else's eye, vs. the beam in one's own, and that's a really valid observation.
In the past few months I have suddenly started showing symptoms of OCD, ADHD( minus hyperactivity), anxiety attacks usually in the evenings, brain fog and mental fatigue, sudden spasms in muscles, pseudobulbar or maybe google is just making me a hypochondriac.
Sleep, appetite is normal, no sudden changes in lifestyle or stressful events. Blood tests indicate no health issues. My hypothyroidism is under control for years with medication.
I tried Vit D, magnesium supplements - no effect. L-theanine has a minor calming effect but doesn’t help in other areas. I ended up taking Nicotine 1mg logenze occasionally in the evenings which make me feel slightly better. 5-htp gave me giggling fits so I stopped using it. I don’t drink, smoke. Have decent diet and exercise routine.
Any suggestions ?I can’t get psychiatrist appointment for few months. Therapy was useless .
If nicotine helps, you might try alpha-GPC. It converts to the endogenous ligand acetylcholine, which activates both sympathetic and parasympathetic nervous system, unlike nicotine which primarily affects the sympathetic receptors (so much so that they are called "nicotinic").
I am not a doctor, this is not medical advice, etc...
The muscle spasms -- have you had them before? What are they like? Are they those cramps people get in their legs or feet while sleeping or sitting still for a long time?
The anxiety attacks -- are you talking about classic panic attacks? Those have been described as orgasms of anxiety. They're a whoosh of intense fear, usually set off by a vague sense of not feeling right, then there's a kind of take-off into panic triggered by some idea like "maybe I'm having a stroke." Whole thing lasts 5 mins or less, though people often feel quite shaken by it for quite a while after. Is that what you're having? Or if the experience you're calling anxiety attacks something different from that?
What's the OCD like?
Feel free not to answer some or all of these. I'm a psychologist -- willing to make some suggestions, but need a bit more info.
Muscle spasms happen just when I lie down to sleep. It’s for few seconds . It started out feeling like I am slipping on a wet surface though I am lying. About 1-2 times a week. Then that stopped and I got a jerky feeling in muscles near my hips. That reduced and then I got spasms in my shoulders. When these spasms started the leg slipping feeling stopped.
One of my OCD symptoms - when I leave my house or before sleeping. I keep checking if my balcony door is closed, my fridge is shut and all the knobs in my stove are off. i keep looping checking these things and sometimes spend over 5 mins before I can break out of it. earlier I would just check once and leave.
i can play minesweeper game for hours because I find the number pattern comforting. i also like reciting lists whether names, fruits, words alphabetically.
anxiety attack has my pulse riding, I start panting and feel there is a weight on my shoulders. it subsides within few mins but leaves me fatigued and very pessimistic. this usually happens in the evening if I get the attack. if I start giggling uncontrollably its usually between 3 pm to 8 pm maybe a couple of times of month. about 30 sec accompanied by such things like gently smacking my head or thigh
Hmm. That’s a lot of new symptoms all at once, and you haven’t had any major life changes that would justify laying this to difficulty coping with life’s demands. It’s an odd cluster of symptoms, too. I don’t think the case for this being Long Covid is strong. The most common presentation of Long Covid involves physical symptoms. It’s true that there are people who only have odd psychiatric and neurological symptoms, as you do, but it’s not common. Plus the most persuasive recent research I’ve seen about LC is that 4 or 5% of people get it, and that of those more than half stop having symptoms within — I think it’s 6 months. And having a severe case of covid makes you more likely to get LC, and your case was asymptomatic.
I think you should see a neurologist. What you’re having certainly does not sound like any dread neurological disease I know of, but enough of what you describe sounds more neurological than psychiatric that I think you should rule out neurological causes. If you need to get a referral from an internist to see one, emphasize the most neurological symptoms: muscle spasms, giggling fits, difficulty concentrating, brain fog. In fact, for the sake of being taken seriously it might make sense *not* to tell your internist about anxiety and OCD, because the presence of psychiatric symptoms sometimes leads internists to discount other things you say.
I don’t think seeing a psychiatrist is a great idea. What they’re best at is medications, and your cluster of symptoms is not one that any medication I know of addresses. You’d need to be on 4 or so, each addressing one or 2 of your set of symptoms, and they’d counteract each other and curdle. If you want to try therapy again, I’d recommend finding someone who focuses on self-management, rather than talk-about-your-feelings-and-childhood. Those are usually psychologists and people with degrees in social work. You can find people that match this description by searching Psychology Today.
Thanks for your advice. Will try to get a neurologist referral.
Is there something major in your life that recently changed or became worse?
I have subclinical versions of a bunch of these disorders, and when my life was fine, I managed to compensate and even get some synergy from them to make me more productive. This was all at a background level that I'd stopped paying attention to. Then bad shit happened, my coping mechanisms stopped working, and all of a sudden I started getting a lot of symptoms that I'd never seen before.
No major changes in my life. But I am feeling maybe I was just managing stuff with workarounds and now my brain just can’t cope. I was always absent minded, had to maintain lists to remember stuff and can’t multitask. History of depression when I was young
In that case, yeah, some sort of low-grade background illness might be causing it? Something where you don't notice any distinct effects, but everything just gets a bit harder, and you're a bit weaker and tireder?
I'm no doctor, but yeah, you should definitely get checked out. I hesitate to mention the following possibility because you said you have OCD and anxiety, but, well, perhaps take a look at this:
https://old.reddit.com/r/TheMotte/comments/qloadc/wellness_wednesday_for_november_03_2021/hj51vyc/
I tried some of the stuff myself, to see if it would help with a slightly-pre-covid digestive problem I picked up somehow. It didn't help, but there were no side effects either, so whatever's going on with my gut isn't something targeted by that remedy.
As the previous comment, this does sound like a post viral thing like long Covid. I'm three years into this and have had a whole range of changing symptoms over that time. The ones that are hardest to manage are the neurological ones.
By far the most useful intervention though has been a s meditation practice that reached 3 times daily when I was really struggling.
The resultant changes in brain blood flows seems to help with the cognitive fatigue and memory issues to a degree.
Interesting that you mention nicotine as there is currently a renegade research program under way that includes rounds of nicotine patches as a potential way to alleviate some of the symptoms.
Have a rummage for the nicotine test and see if this makes any sense to you.
Thanks will check. I have tested positive for Covid last year but no symptoms.
FWIW, that sounds a bit like one of the (multitudinous different) collections of symptoms that are "long COVID", and not everyone who gets long COVID has a history of ever having the disease. The guess is this is because the majority of cases are asymptomatic. AFAIK, nobody yet knows what causes long COVID, so it's probably some sort of immune system overreaction.
OK, I'm already guessing, and anything further is a Wild Ass Guess. But strengthening you immune system might be the opposite of what you want to do. Or maybe it needs to be diverted to a different target. (Well, fat chance that THAT's the right answer. It's not a single purpose tool. But there HAVE been cases [not AFAIK involving COVID] where that actually worked.) Since I'm guessing you don't want to strengthen your immune system, antioxidants might be a good choice. At least there are a lot of them that you can safely try. And blueberries are tasty.
I have a complicated relation with my immune system :( . Suffered through so many allergies in my childhood which thankfully got better.
Thanks for letting us know, Lars.
Lux Perpetua
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zq5L_0RrRBI
Seconding this. Memory Eternal.
Thank you friend. A long road lies ahead of me
Was the Internet a mistake?
Yes, I realize that all questions of the form "Was X technology a net negative" all have certain things in common, including the obvious problem that many techs become virtually inevitable once the science, infrastructure, and economic incentives are there. But I'm looking at the increase in anxiety and general mental illness which characterizes individuals born after the Internet came on the scene. Millennials and Gen Z are addicted to their phones, struggle with relationships, and seem to spend a lot of time freaking out about AGI or AI girlfriends (https://www.freyaindia.co.uk/p/we-cant-compete-with-ai-girlfriends).
For me the Internet was an amazing, unmitigated good, a light that went on and pulled me out of a gloomy, intellectual cul-de-sac. But for everybody else... I mean I look around and people just seem so much more miserable than when I was growing up.
"The Internet", was the opposite of a mistake. It was brilliant, transformative, and valuable beyond expectation. The same goes for what we retroactively call "Web 1.0" (remember, the internet predates www).
Algorithmic social media (as opposed to "Alice, Bob, and Carol are my chosen Facebook friends so I see all and only their posts"), was a mistake in every sense except that it made a few founders and venture capitalists very rich. And getting rich by peddling algorithmic social media should be viewed in about the same way as getting rich by selling cigarettes or coal.
Where to draw the line between the two, is fuzzy. At some point, we ran out of low-hanging fruit in terms of broadly good things to do with the internet, and while some people started climbing the tree other went after the low-hanging rotten fruit. But a lot of the good stuff we created is still there and still good, and there's some new good stuff every year.
One must not blame the tool for how it is used. If people find their lives are worse, as you describe, for using the internet, then they ought to change how they use it.
Of course, not everyone even recognizes how miserable they are, or how to fix it. Maybe we need a campaign like we had against smoking. We are actually doing some of that now.
I noticed perhaps 10 years ago that Facebook. which I used multiple times a day, was better when I used it less. I carried this to the natural conclusion and find, yes, not using Facebook is better than using it. But I still have a Linked-In account, which I use in a professional manner, not really as a social platform.
How do you diagnose an entire society being made worse for how each of its individuals use a given technology?
I agree anecdotally, but w/r/t Gen Z and all the phone concerns by Haidt etc, I think earlymid 90s teen suicide rates (when I grew up) are mostly the same as now right?
I think the internet just gave the forces in society much more power. While in the past, there were limitations to how much companies, politicians, information, peers, friends, etc. could reach us, now that is no longer the case. For example, while one could always just look away from a billboard, now there are no limits to how much space ads can take up. Or while social interactions have always dictated aspects of our lives, now there are no limits to how far these extend and there are third parties that are involved in these social interactions which can manipulate all aspects of them and create asymmetries. Our entire online world has the possibility to be changed: there are no natural limits.
While there is the possibility for this to be truly wonderful (like you mentioned it was for you), there is also the possibility to go horrifically wrong.
I think, in America, we have failed to regulate and protect our people from the new dangers. This is the root of our issues, not the internet itself-- the internet just highlighted these deficiencies.
Some examples:
- No good data protection in the US.
- General prioritization of profit of companies over the health effects on people.
- Awful anti-trust laws --> massive monopolies + lack of small business protection.
- Lack of regulation of consumer goods before they are placed on the market (this is specifically a US issue... not the case in the EU).
- Educational inequality --> misinformation + lack of critical thought.
These issues are true far beyond the internet, but the internet did highlight this issue and give it room to fester. So, yeah, the internet was a net negative... but only because US regulation is so awful.
The internet was no more a mistake than highways or trains were in terms of moving stuff large distances.
However not many people drive on highways 24/7
I think it's s matter of overload that is the thing that needs to be brought under individual control with app or site blocking schedules to avoid burnout.
The addiction that started with the Crackberry has now become ubiquitous and it's really a matter of individual self-control that is needed.
For along time I've thought there ought to be an "intensity" tax to motivate platforms to discourage intensive use.
Personally, I blame ad-driven social media. It causes people to sort themselves in buckets, and filters for an extremely biased view of the world, and actively encourages exaggeration and misrepresentation. We see all the good stuff "our side" does, and all the bad stuff the "other side" does, and the bits that rise to the top are the most biased and inflammatory.
The Internet, or smartphones? Would the Internet have been more tolerable if it required larger devices to access? Or if access had more gatekeeping for technical savvy? Or required a non-trivial expenditure of wealth, not on the level of a car, but something where a lot of people would say "a game console is cheaper and would make me happier"?
No. But allowing commercial transactions over the internet may have been a mistake.
My guess would be that the "objective" effects are net positive, but that the felt net effects are probably negative due to the greatly increased exposure to both the many, many occurrences of bad things happening to people worldwide and the, often artificially inflated, successes broadcast by peers.
I think to answer this question, you'd need to know all the positive effects of the internet as well - increased connection for some people, unrestricted information for people in authoritarian states, speed of communication that allows charitable efforts to respond more quickly than they could in the past, etc.
Apologies if this comes of as too obvious of a comment, I just thought that it was worth pointing out. I have a suspicion that how you lead questions about technology has a large effect on what people will end up agreeing on: ask whether technology is good because of the things I mentioned above, and people will agree tech is overall good. Ask whether tech is bad because of the important things you mentioned, and people will agree that tech is overall bad. So it's important to start the conversation with info from both perspectives.
The internet was a “mistake” in the same sense that the printing press was a mistake: opening up the capacity of people to spread ideas means more low quality ideas will spread. Roman Catholic theology based upon Aristotelian/thomistic philosophy gave way to simplistic literal interpretations of the Bible, because of the printing press. As a true believer, though, I think this is all by design: the internet has made it possible for people who really love the truth to find more of it than ever. Just look at this community! It couldn’t exist without the internet. I see all of the unhappiness and misery you are describing, and ascribe it not merely to the internet, but as an inevitable result of the decline of religiousity. Being anxious and nervous is only reasonable if you think the essence of being is some mindless machine that appeared for no reason and then somehow, after a bunch of violent natural selection, somehow produced sentient apes. This perspective is the same as that which produces Moloch: the idea that the world came from chaos and we are but accidents, subject to powerful forces that are mostly indifferent to us, but if we make the right kind of sacrifices maybe we’ll get eaten last. The idea that God made the world out of love for us and that humanity has a special place in the cosmos is, I think, a recipe for basic human happiness. People who told themselves they rejected religion 100 years ago still benefited from herd immunity to existential nihilism. That’s now wearing off.
To add a counterpoint, as someone from an atheist family within a largely atheist country, seeing the universe and life as amazing beautiful complexity emerging from a few basic physical law, makes me feel awe and wonder, certainly not anxiety!
I agree. I have never wanted for profound beauty in the natural world. That the oceans, mountains and stars timelessly abide without reference to my human concerns is comforting, not nihilistic. It's religion that has always seemed to me--with no disrespect intended to the religious, whose experience I fundamentally don't understand--as an anxious and paranoid worldview.
In my opinion, an atheist who sees the complexity of the universe with awe and wonder has a healthier relationship with the true essence of being, than does a theist who is terrified of being punished after death with eternal suffering.
Why do atheist's think that theists think this? It's like an amulet they hold up t ward off theism. :)
Some theists definitely think that, and not a few, but I don't know what the actual proportion is.
A beautiful answer :-)
Good points, but I have a different theory. It is the amplitude of Angst over the life course that has shifted with the decline in religion, not the average.
Young people get more worked up, while older people relax more, when religion declines. In the old days, religion provided comfort in youth, when fear of death is at its highest (n=1, but knowledge that I would one day have to die reached peak fear at 12).
When you age, and probably for evolutionary reasons, you relax more at the thought that highly likely Nothing awaits you. Compare that to the old days, when fear that you might end up in the Wrong Place probably increased with age . Hence the widespread tendency to bequest stuff to the Church.
In the end it’s an empirical question, of course. “Some do and some don’t”, to quote the first law of sociology.
That’s a neat hypothesis! I’d love to see some evidence to help disambiguate the two.
In lieu of systematic empirical studies, anecdotal evidence can be worth looking at. Here is a link to a recent interview with the philosopher Robert Stern (b. 1962), who at the end of the interview shares his reflections on life and death since being diagnosed with cancer in the brain. It is a worthwhile read for those who are interested in how to live with the knowledge we all share, that death is inevitable. The relevant part of the interview starts here:
Interviewer: I think about death at least once a day. Are you scared of death?
Stern: This turns out to be a particularly topical question! In the new year I was diagnosed with a type of brain cancer with a short life expectancy, though some people do much better than others. Obviously, this puts things into perspective, making the possibility of death a bit more vivid than it usually is in ordinary life.
Link to interview here:
https://www.whatisitliketobeaphilosopher.com/#/robert-stern/
This may of course depend on when you grew up, and I believe I'm older than the median around here, but -- I doubt very much that US young adults today are collectively more anxious or mentally ill than when I was one. They are _differently_ so in some ways, and also more public about it than my cohort was. But neither of those things is actually a net increase, and if anything I suspect that the overall net is a decrease.
All the research on this question suggests otherwise, to a degree that makes me think it's very unlikely that it's *all* spurious--that it's *all* a result of today's young adults just being more open about the anxiety they're feeling or whatever.
Yeah, I agree. Most "material metrics," like teen suicides for example, have increased by a lot over the past 20 or so years. There have been some metrics (like violent crime in youths) that have dropped, but that is mostly just because we are inside on our phones all the time.
My generation is just really really messed up...
Which other material metrics are you referring to?
Digging into this a bit, looking at CDC data as reported by Pew and others, I find that:
-- teen suicide has not been increasing for twenty years but rather just during the past ten. It was at about 8.0 per 100,000 in 1999, the same for 2004, and about 8.3 for 2011, 2012, and 2013. Then its real rise began with 2014, peaking at 11.8 for 2017. It has since drifted back down a little but is still at about 11.
-- that increase has been not at all evenly distributed across the U.S. "The five highest-ranking states for teenage suicide, according to the latest CDC data, are Colorado (21.2 deaths per 100,000 youths), New Mexico (21.9), Montana (30.3), South Dakota (33.6), and finally Alaska, topping all 50 states with 39.8 deaths per 100,000 youths....From 2015 to 2019, urban suburbs and big cities had the lowest youth suicide rates. The community types with the most youth suicides tended to be more geographically scattered, relatively isolated groups, such as Native Americans, members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, strongholds of evangelical Christian practice, and farmlands in the Great Plains."
And regarding the influence of social media on that, I wonder, are some of those named groups living in isolated communities online differently than teens in suburbs and big cities? Less so, or more so?
Remember the selection effect. These are states that young people net migrate from. Those who migrate (mainly to big cities I assume) are likely to be a select group of more resource-rich youth, and therefore lower suicide risk. Increasing the percentage of suicides among those who remain.
Add to this the "death of despair" effect that Angus and Anne Deaton has written about. Young Caucasian men in middle America are particularly at risk here.
This data https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/suicide-rates-among-young-people reckons that teen suicide rates (for the 15-19 group) in the US have been pretty flat since 2000. Maybe the 13-14 year olds account for the discrepancy?
Looking more broadly https://www.aihw.gov.au/suicide-self-harm-monitoring/data/geography/international-estimates-of-suicide (select "10-24" in the "Age" menu in Figure 1) it looks like suicides in this age group are actually down quite significantly since 1990 across the G20 and across all WHO regions.
I don't think the data supports the idea that the internet, or social media, or smartphones, or any other recent trend, has resulted in an increase in youth suicide.
Maybe the data I looked at was flawed or sensational: https://edition.cnn.com/2019/06/18/health/suicide-rates-teens-young-adults-us-study/index.html
https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/fullarticle/2735809?guestAccessKey=04de2fe2-1b68-4ad8-9afb-e5196b877b2b&utm_source=For_The_Media&utm_medium=referral&utm_campaign=ftm_links&utm_content=tfl&utm_term=061819
One can also look at rates of people hanging out with friends, how much sleep people are getting, etc.
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2017/09/has-the-smartphone-destroyed-a-generation/534198/
On Georgism - if there is the Black Death round 2 and suddenly much less people and (likely) less demand for land, would governments be more or less robust if they were solely dependent on LVT?
More or less compared to what? Currently, the US government relies heavily in income taxes (including Social Security payroll withholding) while European ones rely, I believe, on consumption taxes. Anything that causes there to be many fewer people will cause there to be less tax revenue; presumably it also causes there to be less demand for government services. Funding sources and tax rates can be shifted with relative ease (although revenue as a portion of GDP is uncorrelated with these factors; see https://www.mercatus.org/research/data-visualizations/tax-rates-vs-tax-revenues). To try to answer your question, land values in high-demand places would probably be impacted dramatically, while those in places that are already in low-demand would be impacted very little. So how much revenue is lost depends on how much your government depends on taxes from the latter (although the point of and LVT is to reduce the insane prices in those places, so maybe it wouldn't actually matter).
However, the extent to which states are robust to a sudden large drop in population probably has more to do with how much they spend, what they spend it on, the extent to which they can change those things, how that spending is impacted by the population decline, etc. For example, a lot of spread-out infrastructure like roads and sewage systems might make sense for the current population/density, but not if those numbers dropped by 50%, and that's not easy to quickly reduce spending on. On the other hand, the largest cost of US federal government spending is social security (especially if Medicare is included); presumably, beneficiaries of these programs would be disproportionately impacted by a plague--but if not, reducing spending on these programs is politically impossible. Overall, people would probably have to get used to a lower standard of living than they were used to (fewer people = less specialization = poorer) and handling this fact might be the most important thing you can do.
> European ones rely, I believe, on consumption taxes
I think you're mistaken. E.g. the Swedish government gets about twice as much from taxes on income as from taxes on consumption.
Is that typical or unusual among European countries?
(Maybe what I should have said was something more like "they rely on consumption taxes relatively more than the US does.")
Sweden has rather high consumption taxes (a 25% VAT and probably higher sin taxes than any other EU country), so I'd expect other high-tax countries to be even more tilted toward income taxes but broadly similar. I wouldn't be too surprised if the lower-tax countries of Eastern Europe turned out to be more tilted toward taxes on consumption, though.
I remembered that (while searching for something unrelated) I recently saw this: https://www.oecd.org/tax/revenue-statistics-united-states.pdf
Page 2 has exactly what we're looking for (although for OECD, not Europe specifically).
For income (including social security and payroll but excluding corporate income) we have
US: 66% of tax revenue
OECD: 52%
66/52 = about 13% more.
For VAT + goods and services we have
US: 17%
OECD: 32%
32/17 = about 88% more.
So you're right that what I originally wrote is wrong (assuming the non-European OECD countries don't affect the data much), but my corrected statement about relative reliance looks good.
LVT only gives you the base on which the tax is computed. You still have to multiply that by the tax rate, which can vary from year to year. (e.g. become higher when a war is waged).
In your black death situation, all the bases on which taxes are computed would be affected downwards : revenue, corporate profit, traditional land tax, sales, etc.
Well, in theory, LVT should always be equal to 100% of the unimproved value. Taxing less than that is typically viewed as a compromise, or something you have along the way as you slowly increase the rate.
Really? I thought that "100%" was mostly a number used for thought experiments, and that in practice the LVT would be set to whatever percentage would bring in the needed amount of revenue. (Which might actually be more than 100%, in which case you'd better improve the heck out of your land!)
I thought the theoretical arguments indicated more was better (up to 100%), and this was the stretch goal. Is there any guarantee that even 100% LVT would actually pay for all of what modern governments do?
I have no idea! Mostly, I'm sold on the basic premise that an LVT is a better tax than pretty much all other taxes, with the exception of "sin taxes" like alcohol taxes and carbon taxes.
The general problem is that if you tax something, you get less of it, and you distort the market around it. So the typical solution is sin taxes, where those are the effects you want. But the LVT seems like a clever way of taxing something where you can't get less of it (and the distortion is, again, something you want).
Yeah, the whole point of an LVT is that you *don't* get less of it, because the elasticity of unimproved land is effectively 0.
https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/does-georgism-work-is-land-really did the math for us. TL;DR:
> Conservative estimates show that we can entirely pay for any one of Defense, Social Security, or Medicare + Medicaid using land rents alone. And optimistic estimates suggest that we're within striking distance of the Single Tax–replacing all labor and capital taxes with taxes on land rents (on the federal level, at least).
So I would say "probably not" but it could substantially lower other taxes (although spending would probably just increase instead).
Value isn't an objective number, it shifts with the state of the economy.
Did you not read the comment I was responding to?
How much does children's vaccine response vary year-to-year / with age? I'm asking because my 4.5-year-old used to shrug off vaccines (including claiming that the pediatric COVID vaccine didn't hurt at all, either during the shot or afterwards), but this year his flu shot brought several days of a painful, itchy, warm-to-the-touch rash. From what I understand, this is still within the range of normal (if on the more annoying side of it), but I'm concerned about the dynamics: does this mean he'll now get reactions to all shots, and will the reactions continue to get worse over time? And if yes, what can we do about it?
IIUC, the reaction to a vaccine is strongly dependent on how much your immune system changes. If it goes into immediate attack mode, you have a strong reaction, and also a strong immunity. If it takes it awhile, you have a weak reaction...and you have to test to determine the actual immunity.
This being the case, if you've already been exposed to the thing being vaccinated against, you'll have a stronger reaction. The current flu vaccine is a mixture of strains (as is usual).
N.B.: This is just a VERY general rule. There are lots of special cases and exceptions. But it's a decent rule of thumb.
It can vary by age and by vaccine! The contents of the flu vaccine (antigen-wise) change year over year depending on the strains that are predicted to circulate. There's no particular reason to believe this most recent shot is going to begin a pattern of a pattern of worse and worse reactions
I've certainly had very different reactions to different vaccines, and so has my 11-year-old.
Classifieds Thread Success Report:
I posted about looking for a job in the last classifieds thread. I'm happy to report that, as a consequence, I did in fact get a job which I will be starting this week! I thought that others might be interested in this fact as a data point on how useful that thread is.
Did the actual post here help you, directly?
Yes; I had two people reach out to me and specifically mention my post (one in reply to it, actually). I interviewed with both companies and accepted a job offer from one of them.
Congrats!
Congrats!
I'm looking for a nuanced and intelligent place to be able to talk about or read about changing definitions in autism diagnosis, and more broadly the movement of self-diagnosis among adults. In general I'm skeptical of this.
My therapist thinks I might be autistic. In a lot of ways it fits thinking about behavior as a kid that would be called stimming now Etc. And whether or not I'm think the diagnosis is important, having that theory of mind for myself has been really helpful in understanding my own behavior. And a lot of it feels reaching because I don't know that I have struggled more than the average person with relationships or communication. Ie. Where is the line between masking and having good communication skills that take into account what someone else's experiencing? I would love to see nuanced discussion on this and I'm not finding anything.
What you are describing is quite relatable. When my girlfriend started self diagnosing herself, scoring high values in all kind of online tests for autism I thought that it didn't mean anything because I scored high in them as well. Am I autistic too, now? Took me some time to figure out that the answer to this question, as a matter of fact, is yes.
I live in a country where its virtually impossible to get diagnosed as an adult. So self diagnosing is the only option. I suppose it also makes the stigma of self-diagnosis to be less severe. I think your current stance - noticing how the framework of being autistic is relatable and what explanation power it has, without wholeheartedly committing to the label - is good. It's your journey of self discovery, first of all, not an exercise in identity politics. Even if your autistic-like symptoms are below some kind of threshold that needs to be passed, it doesn't really matter if you learn useful skills in the process of figuring it out.
In general I think what we call autism is a multidimensional thingy. The category we use probably doesn't carve the reality too well. So just keep it in mind and see what works or doesn't work for you. In my observation, there is a huge difference between autists traumatized into being socially conscious, and autists who had supportive and acceptive environment, thus managed reaching adulthood, preserving the "don't care what other think of me" attitude.
My personal hugest quality of life improvement was figuring out that I can be sensory overwhelmed. Previously I just thought that I occasionally feel bad for no reason, especially on sunny days. No I just wear dark glasses all the time and can notice other stressing factors.
This is a weird question, but have you ever had someone sit on you to calm you down?
I had a friend do that once for me, and it worked like a charm. To paraphrase, "there's no allistic explanation for this".
No, for me it works in the opposite way. I'm quite sensitive to situations where my movements are restricted and pressure is applied.
It sounds like a weighted blanket, but ever so much more so.
I only heard about those later. I still haven't tried one, but now that I know such a thing exists, I can occasionally feel the pull.
Thanks for the kindness in this reply.
Have you read any of Simon Baron-Cohen's books? He's a (probably the) leading autism scholar.
Only skimmed at this point. I will look more closely. Thank you.
It's worth noting that the claim that autistics (all) lack a theory of mind is AFAIK complete rubbish. It's possible autistic children gain this ability later than non-autistic children, at least on average. But every person on the spectrum I know can reason about what other people might intend by their behaviour, what they might know that others don't (and vice versa) etc. etc.
The other thing worth noting is that the metaphor of an autistic spectrum isn't a great one. People tend to think "rainbow" and look for each individual's position on the rainbow, with a sense of "more" or "less" autistic. That's not how it works. There's a decent article about this on the net, which says this better than I can; if I can find it again I'll either add the URL to this message or put it in a comment.
Edit: it might be https://neuroclastic.com/its-a-spectrum-doesnt-mean-what-you-think/ but that's currently refusing to load, so I'm not sure.
Also, you might find more nuanced discussion in groups made by autistic, for autistics. There's a certain amount of identity politics - we're human too - but some of us have autism as a "special interest" and research it in depth.
It seems to me that the "theory of the theory of mind" is a confusion of two different things.
1) Yes, for autistic people, the predictable objects are somewhat more interesting to observe, and other humans are somewhat less interesting to observe, and as a consequence they develop the theory of mind later (and the theory of trains or computers sooner).
2) But also, our theories of humans start with "what would *I* do in the same situation", so it is easier to predict someone similar to you, and difficult to predict someone very different. And this is true whether you are autistic or not, except that autistic people are judged by how well they predict non-autistic (i.e. different) people, while non-autistic people are judged by how well they predict non-autistic (i.e. similar) people, which is an unfair comparison.
In other words, we judge autistic people for failing to correctly model non-autistic people. But when non-autistic people fail to correctly model autistic people, that it excused because "of course it is difficult to model *weird* people -- that doesn't mean that you don't have the theory of mind, it only means that they are weird". I mean, I know that I have a problem understanding other people, but I also know that other people have a problem understanding me (they told me so themselves), and yet somehow *both* of that is my fault? Rather than both sides having the same kind of problem understanding someone truly different?
Also, let's not forget that the non-autistic people made the social *norms* where some things cannot be communicated explicitly and must be figured out by observing other people and disentangling their webs of lies. (Everyone says X, but everyone actually does Y. To be successful, you also need to learn saying X and doing Y.) If we instead had a social norm of calling things exactly what they are, perhaps the autists could learn the theory of mind the same way they learn math.
My resentment about claims that autistics lack "theory of mind" would be a lot less if the so-called experts defined it the way you do. Sure, autistics aren't as good at predicting non-autistics, on average. Non-autistics seem to average even worse than that at predicting autistics, so that's hardly a unique problem.
Instead we're told that autistics are incapable of predicting _people_, or even conceiving that they should. Meanwhile, non-autistics who are particularly bad at dealing with autistics are lauded to the skies for their brilliant social skills.
When I first encountered this, I got to chose between meanings for praise of a person who routinely made me uncomfortable. I was told she was, unlike me, particularly good at making people comfortable. Was the person who told me this wrong? Were they lying? Or was this social skills expert intentionally using her real skills _in reverse_ so as to make me uncomfortable. (I didn't consider that perhaps I was not in fact included in the set referred to as "people", which, in retrospect, is the most likely explanation - not as a rejection and de-humanization of me per se, but as a shared theory of mind that agreed that no person like me could possibly exist.)
Theory of mind, as described by those who claim autistics don't have it, makes no distinction such that you did above. It claims understanding _of people_. Not of people-most-like-you. Sometimes it's so blatant that it plainly demonstrates the author's lack of a remotely accurate theory of any autistic mind.
It is possible that the expert was doing some X that many people perceived as comfortable and you as uncomfortable.
Again, we have 2 possible meanings of people skills. First, it could be that someone is good at observing people, and can figure out what makes a specific impact on each individual. Second, it could be that someone has a standard set of actions that make the desired impact on maybe 80% of people, and has practiced those actions to perfection. From outside, it could even seem quite similar -- each of them tries to achieve something and gets a 80% success rate. But the 20% failure of the latter is caused by lack of flexibility; trying the same thing, whether it works or not. (And the 20% failure of the former could be a lack of practice; figures out the right thing to do, tries to do it, not always succeeds.)
And again, what is the "theory of mind"? A theory of *average* mind, like a list of actions that statistically work on most people? Or having a lot of experience with minds in general, so that the person can figure out what works on you (i.e. can learn from feedback)?
Archetypes: a psychoanalyst or a salesman. (The former can figure out anything about anyone, but it would take a lot of time and individual attention. The latter has practiced a simple routine that works on a typical person, and can do it efficiently.)
I tend to regard a person whose "theory of mind" is "everyone reacts just as I would" as having a deficient theory of mind.
They are still ahead of someone who thinks that everyone else knows and feels exactly what they do, in spite of different experiences - i.e. if they know where the candy is located, so does everyone else. (That person doesn't really know that other minds exist, seperate from their own.)
Next up would be someone with a theory of average mind, who doesn't know it's average - they believe that it applies to everyone, and aren't aware of its frequent failures. If they also happen to have a mind that matches the average they believe in, they are probably just a lucky example of the same deficiency as the first one.
To have a real "theory of mind", if the term means what I've regularly seen it claimed to mean, you'd have to understand that people are different - it's not just that they have different knowledge and experiences.
A person with an actual theory of mind might be more or less competent at hypothesizing what might be going on in other people's heads, and how those other people might react to their behaviour. The salesperson/robot with a script might even do better than them _on average_. (Though I've never seen anyone this inept.) But they have a far better chance of learning.
I wouldn't count someone as having "good soft skills" unless they understood that people were different, and could deal reasonably with most people regardless of those differences. Certainly the sales-robot has lousy soft skills, even if its programmed patter regularly tricks its targeted personality type into buying things they don't actually want or need.
I agree with your hierarchy. Also that people who talk about "theory of mind" way overestimate the abilities of non-autists -- they talk as if non-autists have the "real theory of mind", i.e. can understand different people, while most of them probably can only understand similar people with similar experience, and are just lucky that their mind/experience is typical.
That said, I suspect that the "robotic" skills are quite powerful in real life. In the sense as reflexes are way faster than thinking. Like, if you see someone do something really fast, it is a result of training, not thinking (although thinking may have preceded the training). Similarly, if you see someone extremely socially successful -- like, sells lots of expensive stuff, gets lots of votes, etc. -- you are more likely to see a robot in action (though it can be a person with the true theory of mind, who figured out the stuff that works on most people, and then practiced it a lot).
What I mean by this is that people with the best "real theory of mind" will probably not be famous for it. It is a skill that makes the greatest difference in individual interaction with different people (while the famous people are good at interaction with lots of people at the same time). Possible exception: someone who is famous for successfully negotiating e.g. with terrorists (interactions with different people, 1:1, high probability of success required).
Probably less good, but currently accessible: https://ablelight.org/blog/why-the-autism-wheel-is-replacing-the-spectrum/
Thank you. I will look at both, if I'm able. The identity politics in the sphere are definitely confusing to me, and some of it seems... just factually incorrect.
I highly, highly recommend Dr. Amy Lutz's new book
Could you make a basic thesis, or maybe provide a link to a blogpost explaning the idea how people with severe autism can be harmed by the existence of hype around autism as less severe autism cases are revealed to be quite common?
My intuition is that it can be the case when the resources to treat for autistic people is in fixied supply, an this supply starts to dwindle as people who need these resources less get access to them. But this really doesn't seem to be true for market economy, where increased demand naturally leads to increase in supply and lower prices due to economy of scale.
Thank you, Freddie. From the title of the book (Chasing the Intact Mind: How the Severely Autistic and Intellectually Disabled Were Excluded from the Debates That Affect Them Most) and from what you have written (that I've read) about serious mental illness, this is indeed part of what I care about and am concerned about.
And at the same time, I think if I had had, as a child, an understanding of my sensory needs I could have spent my teenage years using a compression vest, for example, or knowing how to recognize overwhelm and isolate and avoided years of intense self-harm. And in that way an autism label would have been helpful.
I really like her book (n.b.: have a distant personal connection to Amy Lutz/have met her) but I think it would only be of limited use in understanding your position. It mostly covers the history of severe autism and how such individuals are perceived, and only touches on high-functioning autistics insofar as they are opposed to functioning labels.
I don't have any concrete suggestion, but I'd like some clarification to your question.
Autism vs non-autism is almost certainly some sort of continuum ... being autistic or not is not like having type-O blood or not.
We (society, individuals, doctors) draw a cut-line somewhere in the continuum and say, "On this side one is autistic, on the other one is not." The line is fuzzy, but still.
Are you hoping for a nuanced discussion of where one should draw the (moderately arbitrary) line? Or something else?
yes, I am looking for and thinking about where to draw the line. The element of difficulty with function in (modern) society is one place, though still somewhat vague. In general I agree with the basic premise I've seen Freddie deBoer put forth about distinguishing serious mental illness from ...not as serious possible mental illness or maybe just normal humanness. Not having read Amy Lutz book that he mentioned--Chasing the Intact Mind: How the Severely Autistic and Intellectually Disabled Were Excluded from the Debates That Affect Them Most--the title seems to imply a similar message.
I am, for example, technically visually impaired. With glasses I have less than 20/20 vision. However, I am clearly not on the "spectrum" of blindness. I am not at all impeded by my vision. But if I lived in a society where visual aides were only given to people who experienced something that we consider to be on the spectrum of blindness, and therefore I had no glasses as a mildly impaired person, my condition would be a lot worse... In the reading I've been doing some people do suggest there is a clear distinction between autistic and not, though those who are autistic will be on a spectrum within that. Like, we are all on a visual ability spectrum and within that is a distinct and separate blindness spectrum (I'm sorry if this is ableist as a metaphor or otherwise offensive to compare the two, I was looking for something that all people have a version of and that has a distinct set within that not all people belong to).
Anyway, yes politically and socially we decide the definition of things and I am concerned about over generalizing with the label autism. I'm definitely confused by the people naming themselves autistic and then saying that the idea that autism is defined by trouble reading other people, or trouble with communication is outdated and wrong (mostly see this in the late-diagnosed women high functioning group). This seems explicitly counter to what the DSM5 says as diagnostic criteria, and what the foundation of autism is (of course I know the DSM is a social and political tool and product but still--also, I didn't read the DSM just a summary elsewhere). This is also the subgroup of people naming themselves as autistic who are making a case that autism is what has otherwise been called "highly sensitive person or empath."
I fit the criteria of this group much more closely than parts of DSM, AND I am highly skeptical of this group, and what I have read there I so far don't put much stock in. And YET, I think if I had had, as a child, an understanding of my sensory needs I could have spent my teenage years using a compression vest, for example, or knowing how to recognize overwhelm and isolate, etc and I could have avoided years of intense self-harm. And in that way an autism label would have been helpful.
So I'm looking for a place to talk about or read about this kind of nuance, or a place that has a basic rational level of precise language use and self-awareness.
I recall some book with a name like "Shadow Syndromes" that basically promoted the idea that various (mental) disabilities remained in the gene pool because it was good for human groups to have some members that tended in that direction, but not too far. And also good for the individuals concerned.
So a person with a little bit of schizophrenia might have a richer-than-normal spirituality, and make a great priest or shaman, but not be out of their mind, crazy, or unable to function in normal society. A person with more schizophrenia might be able to function as clergy, but be otherwise impaired. Still more, and they're just stark raving mad. (Contrived example mine, not from this barely remembered book. And yes, I'm using a stereotypical soundbite version of schizophrenia here. This example is not to be taken seriously.)
That book didn't discuss the autistic spectrum - and in fact it predated the term "autistic spectrum disorder". But one could imagine those "highly sensitive people" (lacking other autistic attributes intense enough to notice) as being perhaps an example of a desirable "shadow syndrome" version of ASD.
And there, I think, is the problem. I believe it's not *A* continuum, but several. (At least as the term is used. Perhaps there's some medical definition that's more precise.)
I think of it as a network of filters and amplifiers, with different filters tuned differently. The network has both lots of feedback and feedforward connections. Autism (as commonly used) can result when any of several of the filters are maladjusted, or when the associated amplifier doesn't work properly.
(Note that there are lots of different tunings that are considered normal. Only a small subset of misconfigurations are called autism. Othere tunings can yield other collections of symptoms with names like paranoia, schizophrenia, etc. And there can be multiple causes of the misconfiguration.)
This isn't a very useful model, as it lacks sufficient detail to be applied. Generally we work with things that adjust global variable setting. But it's better in that it avoids the assumption that you're going to find everyone along a one dimensional line. Things don't work that way.
Not a problem per-se as I have no strong opinions here. But *you* seem interested in discussing/exploring the model (or model-space). I don't know if this is what Jordan19 wants to do. Thus my question.
Happy 300th Open Thread everyone! Recently I made a temporary commitment, neither related to my professional life nor a personal obligation to anyone else, that had me doing an estimated 3000-4000 miles of driving in my car alone (I get a little over 40 miles to the gallon). Does anyone have any idea where and how I should go about offsetting this carbon footprint, and how best to calculate roughly how much money that would cost?
Climeworks offers the option of paying money for carbon capture; according to Wikipedia, the captured carbon then gets handed over to Carbfix for injection underground where it will mineralize (so, actually captured). They operate on a subscription model (I assume you can cancel the subscription), and the going rate seems to be $28 / 20kg of CO2 (where one gallon of gasoline produces ~20lbs CO2, per NASA Science Kids). Taking all this at face value, an upper bound on the money involved is 100 gallons * 10kg / gallon * $28 / 20kg = $1400. My understanding is that direct carbon capture is one of the most expensive methods of CO2 reduction, but also the most certain of actually reducing CO2.
How can a gallon of gasoline produce 20lbs of CO2 when it weighs about 6lbs? Are additional factors other than the pure production of CO2 involved?
Burning fuel involves, very roughly speaking, taking an atom of carbon from the fuel, adding 2 atoms of oxygen from the atmosphere, and getting a molecule of CO2 as a result. There are also other atoms in the fuel so the net weight increase isn't just the straight added weight of the oxygen atoms, but the basic answer is "the combustion product should weigh more than the input fuel because burning is taking stuff, usually oxygen, from the atmosphere".
By mass, CO2 is mostly oxygen. C = 12 g/mol, O = 16 g/mol (by atom)
Gasoline is a hydrocarbon, thus mostly carbon by weight (since hydrogen atoms are much lighter than carbon). CO2 is mostly oxygen by weight, since it has two oxygen atoms per atom of carbon.
Gasoline has ~0 oxygen in it, being pretty much a pure hydrocarbon. Every molecule of CO2 has 32 atomic units of oxygen to 12 of carbon. Thus, you get much more (by mass) CO2 than fuel burned because the extra mass comes out of the air that must be supplied.
I suppose, then, that they mean mass instead of weight, as CO2 is a gas and despite the extra mass weighs less than the gasoline, which is more compact, being a liquid.
Still, to capture the carbon would mean releasing the oxygen. I'm not sure this is the correct solution for the world, as oxygen is abundant in the atmosphere, and everything needs carbon; plants get it from CO2 and release the oxygen.
Environmentalism is hard.
The CO2 gas has more bouyancy than the fuel, but I don't think the bouyant force counts as part of the weight (maybe coloquially, but not technically), so the volume increase doesn't affect the weight, which is still just proportional to the mass as usual in a pretty much fixed gravitational field.
I recently purchased an app called Stellarium. You can use it to view in real time the constellations and planets by pointing your phone at the sky (or even the ground, to see the view from the other side of the earth).
Absolutely love playing with this and highly recommend it to anyone who looks up at the night sky and wishes they knew what a certain star, constellation or planet was.
*I have no affiliation with this app or anyone who worked on it
It's a lot of fun, absolutely. Stellarium even has axial procession; try going back in time 2000 years and looking at the Southern Cross from Athens, Greece.
Have you ever used an app called Star Walk? It sounds very similar and I’m curious if you feel that stiellarium is an improvement.
I've been using "Google Sky Map" because it's free, but it's not the greatest. Maybe it's time to shell out a few bucks.
Is there something like a medical detective in the rationalist sphere?
What I imagine is that I give a bounty of like 10,000$ for a diagnosis that leads to a substantive reduction of my symptoms.
I can provide a list of symptoms and health stats for someone who might want to take this on.
CrowdMed may have qualified, but apparently the website has been down for the last two weeks: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CrowdMed.
Another website that seems related, is SelfDecode which claims it will provide personalized medical advice based on your genome: https://selfdecode.com/en/about/.
I can't vouch for either site.
Lol, I am an MD, and could have a go, but diagnosis over the internet is not widely considered Best Practice. I presume you’ve been to a series of doctors and specialists in real life already?
Indeed, probably north of a 50 over the years. The problem is: most are either GPs with only superficial knowledge or specialists that do their 2 standard tests and then discharge you.
My issues are mostly related to my digestion and inflammation. I now have a new functional medicine doctor that seems to have some relevant knowledge, but it's hard to tell what is legit and what is just pseudo-science.
If it makes you feel better it really doesn’t matter how sound the scientific basis is. Have you ended up with a diagnosis of IBS from the mainstream medical establishment? That’s what seems to happen to most people with generalised digestive issues
Yeah, well, I've have all kinds of weird disgnoses, IBS, MCAS, :D But that does not really help all that much.
I am not a doctor, but I work in a relatively related field and I think I have good experience with a small but not insignificant number of pathologies. On the off chance that yours falls within the ones I know, feel free to MP me.
Any familiarity with digestive problems perchance?
yes, with a few of them
How can I message you privately? Is there a way over substack?
The easiest for me would be on rddit, Emma_redd, would that work for you?
Didn't Sarah Constatin used to do medical research for hire? Does she still do it?
Apparently, she does: https://www.sarah-constantin.org/freelance-consulting
I will try to reach her.
As Metamed is apparently no longer a thing, you might want to try a concierge doctor. These are primary care medical practices which take a lot fewer patients than the standard model so they can give each patient a lot more time and attention, but they charge you an annual membership fee of a few hundred to several thousand dollars. A lot of these especially on the high end overlap with direct-pay primary care, where they don't bill insurance and your membership includes a certain number of office visits and in-house labwork.
In my experience, concierge doctors even at the lower end of the scale (e.g. OneMedical, which I'm with now) tend to be more responsive to patient concerns and a lot less likely to brush off difficult-to-diagnose symptoms with a PRATFO, and you get more 1:1 time with the doctor than most traditional practices.
that is a good idea, I will check if such services are available in Germany :)
That's what metamed tried to do, but they didn't work out. You could probably still hire Zvi to do it, he has an hourly rate for general work, but 10k would buy you like 10-20 hours at it and no guarantees he'd find anything.
Thanks for the reply! Too bad that it's shut down :(
I am trying bountied rationality, maybe there is someone that wants to take up the challenge.
I don't know if prediction markets can help in such a case XD.
Agree with someone's suggestion of Sarah Constatin. I don't think Zvi is a great choice. I'm sure he could do excellent research, but you need someone who has more background knowledge in biology and medicine.
As a lurker , I will tell you that Bountied Rationality seems to have had an impressive success rate.
Have you got a way of measuring the failure rate? I've got a strong suspicion that selection bias is in play here.
A Call for Compassion: A Kidney for a Lifesaver
Hello fellow rationalists and compassionate souls,
I am reaching out to this insightful community following my inspiring read on Scott's altruistic kidney donation. Life has a poetic way of intertwining our stories, and today, I find myself reaching out on behalf of my father who's in dire need of a kidney transplant.
My father, a 68-year-old dedicated radiologist, has been extending his expertise and care to a marginalized community in the rural southeast of Turkey, near the Syrian border. His relentless service continued even as he battled Polycystic Kidney Disease (PKD), a condition I inherited from him and him from my grandpa whom we lost after a couple of years of hemodialysis in 1996. However, the relentless march of time and disease has cornered him into a four-year-long ordeal with periton dialysis. His medical indicators are not painting a promising picture and the waiting list for a transplant seems to stretch beyond the horizon.
His life is a testament to the positive ripple effects a single individual can generate within a community. Now, as his health deteriorates, I am compelled to seek a beacon of hope that could promise him more years of service and love to his family and community.
I have been encouraged by Scott to share our situation here, with the hope that among you lies a potential donor, or someone with the information that could lead us to one. While age might be a factor of consideration, the spirit to give and save lives transcends numerical boundaries. We are willing to travel wherever necessary to make this transplant a reality.
It's a long shot, but a shot nonetheless. In a realm of rational thinkers, I find my plea swimming against the tide of statistics and medical advisories. Yet, within the logical fabric of this community, threads of compassion run deep. It’s a test of altruism, spurred by Scott’s own journey, nudging the world, one kidney at a time.
The rationalist and EA community's endeavours always echo with logic entwined with empathy, and today, I seek that blend in saving a life that has saved and enriched many.
Should you wish to discuss this further or need more information, feel free to reach out to me at emdincerext@gmail.com.
Thank you for your time and consideration. Your thoughts, prayers, and any leads are immensely valued.
Warmest regards,
E Dincer
At one point there was a donor pool , set up I believe by some tech person who wrote software for making the best set of matches been members of a donor group and members of the recipient group: Everyone in the pool had found someone who was willing to donate a kidney, but was not a match for them. Then their donor gave to whoever in the pool was a good match, and the person who brought the donor into the pool received a kidney from some other donor in the pool. If that still exists, it seems like a great idea.
Now we started exploring avenues for a transplant in Iran, which is interestingly the only country with a legal and state regulated free market for kidneys. I hope that works. Otherwise we'll see about the donor pools.
I read a book by someone who had helped his cousin get a kidney in China. Cousin got advanced medical care, and a kidney from a criminal who had been executed. Book was written at least 10 years ago, though: Larry's Kidney, by Daniel Asa Rose. It's not a practical how-to, more a loving and funny memoir, but you do pick up a lot of info about how one gets a kidney. It's s great read, by the way.
I emailed you. Letting you know here in case it got lost in spam.
See my post in response to OP about donor pools.
I've come to the idea, perhaps not conclusion but close, that our civilization took a long detour to the notion that we could re-program human beings to behave in very different ways. In that detour we not only lost the thread of our culture but also the thread of our species' evolution. To what degree does human evolution impact our behavior? Rob Henderson in a recent substack post wrote this:
"To be sure, there are socio-cultural influences involved here.
But environmental factors do not operate on blank slates. To understand young men and young women, you have to take into account not only the cultural context but also evolved sex differences."
My question is has the fairly new study of evolutionary behavior brought us full circle to an appreciation of human nature that was once foundational to western culture? I tried to make that argument here: https://falsechoices.substack.com/p/the-human-heart. Would be interested to know what this group thinks???
I'd suggest that human nature is always there, but it's more of a pressure. And that the re-programming can work on some levels (look at religions, cults, and political movements), but there's always the pressure underneath, an undertow pulling people back into the ocean of raw human nature. Lasting religions take this into account.
A lot of the top-down "re-programming" feels like it comes from a line of kings, philosophers, and merchants, who were used to applying their favorite tool and getting results, and who were used to viewing large numbers of people as uniform undifferentiated "masses".
The piece was well-written and somewhat poetic in tone. I enjoyed that.
As for the idea, there may be an interesting perspective there. I’m not sure. I don’t think you explored it deeply enough to make me truly interested, convince me that there’s anything there, or give me a perspective I might come back to later. If there is a there there, maybe you relied too much on people’s knowledge about the thinkers you reference? I suspect some more specifics, examples and your own interpretations – maybe an acknowledgment of the value of the thinkers’ contributions, rather than framing it only as a “detour” – would have gone a long way toward convincing me the idea has real legs. (It would probably be a challenge to pull off that style of writing in a deeper exploration, though.)
I hope you end up writing that version of your idea. I think I would enjoy reading it.
Thanks Chris for taking the time to respond. You lit a fire under me and I wrote again on this subject. https://open.substack.com/pub/falsechoices/p/the-aggressive-male?r=27s0s&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web
Thanks. I think was right: The ideas gained a lot by being fleshed out more. 😀
"Human nature" is an annoying half truth. People, I suppose because they're human, both over-and under-estimate its effect. More specifically, people may claim that their ideal society will comport with "human nature". They're probably wrong.
For example, there seem to be differences on the average between men and women, but some men want the quiet life and some women are ambitious. Neither are unnatural, and my ideal society would have room for both.
That is to say, I'm probably going against human nature because people are naturally cruel and censorious.
One strong example of intractable human nature is that it doesn't work well to raise children communally.
Hi Nancy, thank you for your comment. It was very useful and I tried to explain my idea a little better here: https://open.substack.com/pub/falsechoices/p/the-aggressive-male?r=27s0s&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web
I think we are on the same page, more or less. What do you think?
I'm less on your side than you might think. I probably haven't been aggressive enough to make that clear.
Here's a big change in human nature. Most people, or at least most people in places where I hang out, think they have an innate moral revulsion against owning slaves. I'm reasonably sure this the result of a long propaganda campaign.
Looking at human history, slave-owning was pretty normal. The extraordinary thing was a middling-successful campaign against slave-taking and then slave-owning. I was surprised to find out that outlawing slavery in western Africa was a motivation for colonialism because there were African empires who were *very* fond of owning slaves and fought back against threats to take their slaves away.
I consider it possible that cultures that didn't want to own slaves were wiped out or conquered.
I also think it's possible that a least one person reading this owns a slave, and the slave is someone with no or uncertain right of residence who's trapped into domestic labor.
The very existence of racism is what I'd call a big change in human nature-- I think the natural unit of trust is ethnicity. I'm not sure what it covers, but at least similar language and accent. It can include skin color, but it's definitely finer grained than a sketchy similarity of appearance.
The thing is, human nature is somewhat malleable, the question is how much rather than yes or no.
I forgot to mention, yes, I agree that the neglect of boys and general negativity about men is a real and serious problem.
I'm concerned that a significant proportion of both genders can only get through the day by having practical dominance over the other gender.
I’ve seemingly developed a bad bout of tinnitus in the last month or so. My noticing of it lined up with a particular bad upper respiratory illness, but I’m long since recovered and still struggling with the tinnitus. I do go to loud music shows but I wear earplugs and I’d be surprised if the 1-2 shows I went to in the last month were the tipping point, but fear I may have to accept that reality.
Anyways, it’s really disturbing my meditation ritual. As I try to relax and just notice sensations, it quickly becomes the loudest and dominant wavelength in my consciousness. Does anyone have any advice or know of others who have had similar struggles?
I had some amount of tinnitus since my thirties. Ok, I once slept a bit in a large loudspeaker and went to some loud music shows. Over the years I got accustomed to the tinnitus and it doesn't really mess up my meditation.
That’s encouraging, thank you for sharing. Did you approach the tinnitus (specifically during meditation) with any particular focus? Or was getting used to it less intentional
Definitely not intentional. I had enough worse nuisances to take care of. Just speculating, maybe the sometimes intense pain in group zazen during the first years helped, too.
I had this same problem with tinnitus and meditation.
I mostly relieved this problem via a special kind of meditation I stumbled upon while I was meditating.
It essentially involved keeping the body extremely still and relaxed for a long time, and meditating on releasing the desire for the tinnitus to go away.
Not sure if this explaination was sufficient, but it worked very well and the experience was life changing
Thank you for sharing, that makes a lot of sense to me. In fact, I’ve had similar ideas, and it seems quite supportive of the direction I’d like to take my practice anyways (not assigning good or bad quality to any experience). Not quite there yet, but your example is encouraging!
There are lots of ways of getting tinnitus without noise exposure - for instance, your respiratory illness might have caused too much pressure in the ear when it can't equalize properly (pollen allergies are a known cause of tinnitus for the same reason).
I am hopeful that is the case!
Your bout of upper respiratory illness may have something to do with this by, e.g., causing Eustachian tube blockage. If possible, a visit to an ear-nose-throat specialist may be useful. For a low-risk intervention, you may try heat around the area and, to exclude the easy-to-treat external blockage as a contributing factor, use an ear wash kit to flush out ear wax. Like this one: https://www.walgreens.com/store/c/walgreens-ear-wax-removal-kit/ID=prod6214109-product
Thanks for the suggestion, trying this out tonight!
Some things I've found that help with tinnitus, including massage and relaxation.
https://nancylebov.dreamwidth.org/tag/tinnitus
Thank you for sharing, that is interesting and helpful. I had a bit of a theory myself that a particular practitioner of myofascial release might be able to help me under a presumably similar mechanism.
Try opening the NIOSH app or another sound meter in one of your shows. Almost certainly you will find that earplugs alone are insufficient to render the amount of noise “safe” if you measure correctly; the NRR of the hearing protection (unfortunately, deceptively, stupidly) does not reduce your exposure linearly by that amount of decibels. 100 dB concert wearing NRR 33 ear pro (some of the best available without doubling up) only reduces exposure to 87 dB which is still in the damage range. And many concerts sustain well over 100 dB.
I know this because I go to an indoor range quite often these days and after taking some basic measurements with a NIOSH meter I realized I have to double up on ear pro. Anybody in there with anything less than foam + over-ear is certainly getting damaged and on a busy day, probably severely.
Most pop music concerts are going to be much worse for this. The discrete peaks aren’t as bad as gun peaks, but the sustained volume is way higher than the range (where between shots it’s as quiet as any empty room), and will very quickly take you over recommended exposure levels even with good ear pro if you’re close to the sound system.
Good to know, thanks. Even if my current blight is from respiratory illness, I plan on upping my ear protection going forward.
White noise (test to find the frequencies you need) is the absolute boss to mask tinnitus. For me, rain and shower sounds work the best.
Readily available all over the place, including YouTube.
I'm not surprised it messes up meditation - distraction instead of focus is what takes your mind off of it.
Thanks! I’ll give this a try during my next meditation session.
It's annoying when the last half an inch or so of shampoo in a bottle won't flow to the nozzle and thus can't be used. It isn't miserly to want to use the whole bottle, but a commendable wish to avoid waste. But fear not, I have a solution!
Just add some water to the empty bottle and shake, I hear you say. But it isn't as simple as that, because watery shampoo is very likely to pour straight down one's face and into one's eyes. And it isn't worth using the last drop if you end up looking like a red and blinky eyed Nosferatu for hours afterwards!
No, the trick is to put aside the nearly empty bottle and start using a new one. Then when the new bottle is around three quarters full, pour the diluted remains of the previous bottle into it and shake. The result will be slightly less viscous shampoo, no more likely than the original to flow freely, and a completely used previous bottle!
If a half-inch of shampoo cannot easily be shaken out of the bottom of a bottle, either your preferred shampoo is inordinately viscous, or there is not really half an inch left, but just a thin layer clinging to the walls!
A lot of shampoos are that viscous.
There's also storing the shampoo bottle upside down. Some of them even have flat tops to make this easy.
Agreed! ( More precisely, I do this for a liquid soap, which is also quite viscous. )
I haven't tried your method, but for accessing the last drops shampoo as well as toothpaste, moisturizer etc. I highly reccomend the method of cutting the container in two near the top. Use the top part as a makeshift lid. I'm often suprised at the amount actually left in the container.
I feel like whenever someone says this, everyone in the comments gives alternative methods. But I see you and I think this is brilliant!
Unrelated but related: You can open any hard to open jar by stabbing the lid to let the pressure equalize.
There's also a lot be said for those grippy tools which mean you don't need your unaided hand strength.
Run hot water on metal lids.
Thump the lid (not too hard) to break the seal.
Pushing a small screwdriver in under the edge of the lid works too, and is easier than stabbing hard metal lids.
You can also just use a knife under the lid. Work it under and give a little twist. This has yhe advantage of not damaging the lid.
Or one of these little doodads, basically a bottle opener but bigger.
https://mobilitywarehouse.co.nz/wp-content/uploads/2021/07/Jar-Opener.jpg
"Unrelated but related: You can open any hard to open jar by stabbing the lid to let the pressure equalize."
I have a protocol question. Are you supposed to say something like: 'Hello, my name is Inigo Montoya. You killed my father. Prepare to die.' before stabbing the jar?
You can but it will have little effect. You do you.
I have been stabbing difficult jars for years, and can attest to this methods efficiency.
This does require having more than one bottle of shampoo handy. I just shake the bottle in an arc motion so that the centrifugal force makes all the leftovers collect inside the cap.
Store it upside down?
I just rediscovered Rainmeter - a piece of software that allows you to create your own custom widgest for Windows and I've been having tons of fun costumising myy desktop. It's way cooler than it sounds and the community is quite big with tons of people creating skins and widgets that you can use
Thanks, was looking for this functionality.
I would recommend the Rainmeter Subreddit for inspiration, people often share what they have done
What have you learned recently?
I've taken the MSG-pill and have become enlightened. Started adding a bit of MSG to my pasta sauces and it's an instant and highly effective flavor enhancer. Would recommend that my fellow readers also try it.
A hypothesis. While I don't think MSG itself is directly unhealthy, I think it's possible that by adding MSG to foods we increase the chances that we pick up unhealthy habits like overeating. It basically makes food so much tastier that it becomes easier to keep eating. I haven't seen this exact dimension of health impact explored very much when MSG discussions come up and I would appreciate any thoughts.
Congratulations on the 300, Scott.
I heartily recommend Trader Joe's Mushroom & Company multipurpose Umami seasoning blend. It does what it says: make everything umami, even your finger when you sample the stuff. All natural ingredients but based on postings here, sounds like plenty of natural MSG.
An unrelated thing I learned: after the US retreated from Vietnam, Vietnam invaded Cambodia and occupied it for a decade. I never heard about that until recently (I tried asking some people and none of them had heard about it either).
The morality of this is complicated since, in fairness, the government Vietnam replaced was the Khmer Rouge, probably the most evil government in history. But it doesn't seem like Vietnam was super great either.
I think the reason this got so thoroughly memory-holed is that it showed the domino theory (and thus America's reason for being in Vietnam in the first place) wasn't actually totally wrong. The Vietnam war is super discredited in modern culture, so no one wants to mention the negative (or controversial) effects abandoning it had.
It’s no more memory holed than anything else about Vietnam. Most young people would have very little idea of what went on.
Also Vietnam invading Cambodia doesn’t justify the domino theory as both were communist.
Other fun fact - the domino theory was itself a historical Marxist teleology.
Yes, that and the war Vietnam fought with China around that time is not much discussed in the states. When I was in high school the last thing history classes would cover was US involvement in Vietnam before they ran out of time. I'd count those events as a strike against domino theory (communist movements/countries had rivalries with one another) but I gained a lot more sympathy for the domino theory and anticommunist policy making in that period after I read Maoism: A Global History. There were revolutionary movements all over the world and especially in southeast Asia working quite closely with Mao in that period.
The domino theory is about communism spreading. How is one communist government overthrowing another communist government evidence supporting domino theory?
Was it necessarily about it spreading by influence rather than conquest? Laos also went communist at around that time (and iirc Vietnam backed communist guerillas in Thailand as well), so it does seem like there was contagion.
The rise of the Khmer Rouge in the first place is a better data point in favor of the domino theory. KR was heavily supported by the Viet Cong and the North Vietnamese Army during the Cambodian Civil War, and it sounds like KR's final offensive to secure power was roughly simultaneous with North Vietnam's final conquest of South Vietnam.
The subsequent Vietnamese-Cambodian war seems more in the nature of a falling-out between victorious allies once their common enemies were out of the picture, or perhaps a suzerain suppressing an unruly vassal state.
While Vietnam may have provided some support to the Khmer Rouge, their chief benefactor was China. This is one of the key dynamics underlying the eventual Vietnamese invasion - Vietnam was Soviet-aligned and the Khmer Rouge was China-aligned, and this was the era of the Sino-Soviet split.
Also, the Khmer Rouge instigated the conflict when they conducted multiple failed attacks on Vietnamese territory.
Yeah, that's what I thought. Any use of "communist" that implies that two communist countries are on the "same side", stopped being meaningful at that point, but discourse still hasn't caught up.
In fact in its final years, the Khmer Rouge's main sponsor was none other than the good old USA.
And under the leadership of the very same Vietnamese-installed government, Cambodia is now rapidly becoming a Chinese vassal state. The more things change...
Sometimes they all struggle together to overthrow Capitalist Imperialism. But sometimes they just struggle together.
Was the domino theory specifically about communism spreading by convincing people or could it have also included conquest?
I mean, both? You convince some people, enough to start an insurgency, that insurgency turns into a civil war, and then you send along troops to help out the Communists in the civil war. That's how it spread from Russia to China, to Korea, to Vietnam, etc. Get the job started with propaganda and finish it with troops.
I think it was about convincing, but I'm not sure. Either way, Vietnam taking over already-communist Cambodia doesn't fit.
In the sense that no one I talked to had ever heard about it despite it being a pretty big deal. I'm sure actual historians of the area have lots of opinions about it, but most normal well-educated people have just never heard of it.
While I don't think MSG is in itself harmful, I try to steer away from using the purified stuff and instead just get ingredients that contain lots of it (tomatoes, mushrooms, kombu, fermented stuff like Vegemite), plus it's close relative inositic acid (sardines, seafood). One reason is culinary - I find straight MSG a bit flat, and most things that contain MSG bring more layered flavours, which avoids the artificial chicken flavour taste common to instant noodles and chips. Second is because I recently learned that there's a lot in food, chemically speaking, that is still a mystery - if you ran a gas chromatograph mass spec on basically any kind of plant based food, tomato, carrot, anything, the vast majority of the peaks would be an unidentifiable compound. I'm worried that we crave MSG because it usually occurs with some specific micronutrient (which we haven't discovered yet) and using purified MSG might trick my system into not craving/ getting enough of it.
So my suggested substitute is freeze dried mushroom (you can break them into bits, rehydrate, and cook, or you can simply powder them straight into the sauce), Vegemite/Marmite, and perhaps an anchovy or two. You could look up what ingredients contain a lot of glutamic acid (the ionic form of MSG)
You are correct in thinking we enjoy MSG because it is associated with an important nutrient. It is however not a micro nutrient, it is protein. Glutamic acid is an important part of protein synthesis.
the combination of mushrooms, vegemite, and anchovy sounds like you're most of the way to inventing a new sauce in the style of worchester sauce.
Worcestershire and fish sauce are both also great ways to add umami.
My understanding is MSG is an excitotoxin that kills brain cells. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/7854587/
Yes, it makes food taste better. I understand the reason for that is the taste interpreters in the brain keep firing and firing, and get overstimulated and then die. To be safe, I try to avoid MSG.
So on that basis, I should stop using pepper sauce, because my taste interpreters will be firing like Gatling guns and dying in droves!
I was going to point out that capsaicin isn't an excitotoxin, but it turns out that it is. https://www.mdpi.com/1424-8247/9/4/66
So some excitotoxins apparently aren't as harmful as I thought. Killing brain cells doesn't sound like a good idea, but it apparently isn't always widespread enough to do significant damage, the brain cells get replaced, or other factors are at work. Capsaicin is so widespread I can't believe it is significantly harmful.
Nonetheless, a relative of mine has what I consider an allergic reaction to MSG, and has as long as I can remember. I withdraw my blanket statement that everyone ought to avoid MSG, but my family still will.
I'm a bit addicted to balsamic vinegar, and I use it in much the same way as you to spice up pasta sauces among other things. The most expensive balsamic vinegar has a thick dark consistency, almost like molasses but not as viscous.
Despite its name. it doesn't taste acidic. But that could be because sugar or something is added to disguise a vinegary taste. So it could be every bit as acidic as normal vinegar, and I sometimes worry that if I overdo its use then my teeth will start falling out and I'll get stomach ulcers!
I just want to wish everyone well.
You too!
Clever, Mr. Meaning Well.
Or Ms.
You too! :)
Does someone have a link to a nice primer on how various things in history are dated? Here are types of questions I would like to know answer to.
(i) Websites are full of estimates for Euclid's date, but I couldn't find what the "hard" upper and lower bounds are, what the "confidence intervals" or "epistemic status" of these datings are etc.
(ii) Say some prehistoric population has made cave art or pottery (e.g., Chinese pottery from apparently 20000 years ago), an ancient king has got letters scratched into a rock or a pillar, or there is a copper plate from a medieval king recording some grant. I guess these can mostly not be carbon dated. How are they dated then, and how reliable are the estimates?
Why does wikipedia typically not give "hard" upper and lower bounds for various dates?
When dating historical events during written history, it depends on what we have in writing and how well we can connect it with other known dates.
For instance, if someone wrote that an event happened during the reign of some king, and we know when that king reigned, then we can at least date the event to a range. This range is generally considered very set, since the dates of kings was often well known and written about. If we have additional dates, we can hedge it in further. For instance, if the record includes the names of people who were alive at the time, and we know when they died, then we can further narrow our search. If Mary was alive from until 855AD, and Tom was alive until 847AD, and an event happened while Mary was alive but Tom was not, that tells us the event happened between 847 and 855. And sometimes sources just tell us what year it is, either in whatever calendar system they used at the time, or in reference to something - "In the fourth year of the reign of King Harry IV."
The problem with "hard" upper and lower bounds is that there's a level where we're not very confident in what we have, especially if we have to relate it to something else. This is especially true the further back in time and the fewer sources we have. We often have a secondary source that's our only remaining source (Homer in the Iliad, Herodotus) for something that *probably* happened, but maybe not the way it's told or with the details that are included. And if this secondary source wrote dozens or hundreds of years after the events it depicts, then we're counting on them being right about the events and also trying to work backwards from what they describe to try to get a date. It's not unusual for some writing or reference to be the only source we have about a person or event. Some king may only exist as a reference in a secondary source writing about something completely unrelated and to an audience who was just assumed to know who the writer was talking about.
Thank you very much. Implicit in the question about "hard" upper or lower bounds is the question of whether existence is known at all. The uncertainties of the sort you mention are typically acknowledged in some standard reference, but a lot of other references simply seem to give "estimates" that are much more optimistic than "hard" bounds, and for any given person it seems often difficult to make out the "epistemic status".
Yes, a lot of the hedging has to do with lack of confidence in our source(s) for a particular person or date. It's often a "if this source is accurate, then the date should be between X and Y" but not really knowing if the source is all that dependable. Herodotus, for instance, is one of the major sources for our knowledge of lots of events from the ancient Mediterranean, and also includes various supernatural events and details that are extremely unlikely to be true. The Persians attacking Greece with a million man army comes to mind - logistically that is almost certainly not possible with their level of technology. So do you cut out our only source, that's probably got a lot of good and accurate information? No, but you hedge pretty hard on the epistemic status.
Thank you. My problem is precisely that I don't see enough hedging; epistemic status is so systematically erased in most writing, that the odds of finding epistemic status on searching any given document seem low (e.g., how many randomly chosen "historical" writings on Euclid does one have to see before seeing one with epistemic status?). Hence the question of whether one can do such a thing as an epistemic status search.
That also bothers me a lot. You will see concrete non-hedging descriptions of ancient peoples, customs, whatever, and think that we must have a lot of evidence about it. If you dig further, we might have found a few pieces of pottery in a dig site or a bone that looks like it was shaped into a tool, and that's about it.
Maybe academia doesn't allow people to admit we don't know (won't get published saying that) and so we don't see people admit it.
(i) Dates of historical figures are based on written historical sources. Trace back the footnotes in secondary sources and you will eventually get to the primary sources. (If you don't get there, find better sources.) "Confidence intervals" aren't really meaningful for this sort of thing; "epistemic status" comes down to how much you trust the sources you are relying on.
(ii) Any introductory archaeology textbook will cover this. Here's one you can read online:
https://socialsci.libretexts.org/Bookshelves/Anthropology/Archaeology/Digging_into_Archaeology%3A_A_Brief_OER_Introduction_to_Archaeology_with_Activities_(Paskey_and_Cisneros)/08%3A_Dating_Methods__Relative_and_Absolute_Dating/8.01%3A_Introduction_to_Dating_Methods
As mentioned on that page, ceramics can be often be approximately dated using thermoluminescence methods. (Note that this wasn't what was used for the 20,000-year-old pottery sherds from Xianrendong — those were dated stratigraphically by radiocarbon dates of associated materials.)
I don't know if there is any good physical dating method for copper, but some metal objects can be dated by radioisotopic methods. The age of objects made from gold, for example, can be estimated using uranium-thorium-helium dating. But as far as I know, this isn't super reliable: I think it is mostly used to distinguish genuine ancient objects from modern forgeries. The archaeological context will usually provide better clues to the actual date.
Awesome. Thank you very much for your very helpful comments and pointers.
Carbon dating is a subset of radiometric dating. Carbon isn't the only radioactive isotope! I'm no expert on such things, but can say that because radioactive isotopes decay predictably into other atoms, some of which are also radioactive, you can look at the proportions of other radioactive atoms and, knowing their half-lives, make a reasonable estimate of how long it took to decay to the current state.
Thank you very much.
Hidden threads are no longer a thing that happens?
They’re around here somewhere, just gotta keep looking...
I keep forgetting them, sorry.
I like them a lot, please keep them coming!
(This said in hopes that a clearly expressed preference might help you remember things you want to remember, not in an attempt to put pressure on you.)
In the UK, the Shadow Chancellor Rachel Reeves just published a book, she is a smart economist having worked at the Bank of England a successful parliamentarian and she was a top chess player in her youth.
Her book has whole paragraphs copied and pasted from Wikipedia, the Financial Times found 20 instances in the book of plagiarism.
How common is this kind of thing? Are politicians and economists regularly doing this but no one notices? Is there anyone who does plagiarism checks on books? This case was just spotted by the FT book reviewer.
Selina Meyer's memoir was full of stuff like that:
https://www.amazon.com/Woman-First-Deeply-Personal-President/dp/1419733532
But it probably only counts as indirect evidence, because she's fictional and the whole book is an extended joke. Except that part of the humor is that it's taking a normal thing and exaggerating it, so...
I don’t know this case in particular but there are similar ones from other countries. (Where theses are plagiarized for example)
My personal opinion about this kind of thing in general is that many ambitious people in high positions are not particularly conscientious and they are more willing than the average person to take on tasks that they are not qualified for and to try to gain qualifications by doing a shoddy job. Like getting phd’s by doing a minimal amount of work or delegating it to other people.
Why would anyone bother plagiarising from Wikipedia when ChatGPT is much less detectable?
At least it's much more reliable. That seems like a pretty good reason.
Not an answer, but my guess is that this is what happens when you have a high profile full time job or two and two kids, decide to write another book in the side, and put in copied chunks of text making the same basic point you want to make and that "you'll get around to reworking and/or referencing properly later" and... probably just forget you did that.
From memory, I don't think any of the passages taken were particularly distinctive/interesting/valuable text, they were fairly bland summaries of historical points. To paraphrase the saying, never attribute to malice what can be explained by carelessness or laziness. (She is, clearly, not stupid.)
My guess is she hired someone to write it for her, and that someone was lazy. Maybe the person hired decided to outsource his own job to a college freshmen for 50$ and a 12 pack of beer.
Yes. Kennedy got someone decent to write "Profiles in Courage", but the kids nowadays have no work ethic!
I would say rare, if this is kind of thing is easily spotted by the FT book reviewer.
British politicians are a lot dumber than they used to be for sure. Why didn’t she use chat GPT if she wanted to summarise wiki.
What makes you think it was an easy spot?
My impression is that it was a lucky spot, based in serendipity and none of the other reviewers noticed.
Well the burden of proof is on you here, on your claim that was a “lucky spot based on serendipity. “. I am not sure what that means exactly. What was serendipitous.
Recently Scott made a post speculating that more building activity and less strict zoning laws (YIMBY) might actually *in*crease housing prices. He got a lot of push-back, especially from economists, and updated accordingly.
An important example was Tokyo, where housing is cheap. This was mostly attributed to high building activity. Now Tyler Cohen has argued that this is attribution may be wrong, and that the main factor is not (only) building activity, but rather peculiarities of Japan which makes Tokyo unattractive for new residents. He doesn't go so far to share Scott's original interpretation (that building more houses mean larger prices), but he does propose a weaker version: that some informal "housing restrictions" may decrease housing cost.
I was sympathetic to Scott's original argument, and updated together with him when the push-back came. But after reading Tyler's arguments, I think that perhaps I updated too much.
https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2023/10/is-tokyo-really-a-yimby-success-story.html
Added: here are the comments on Scott's original article:
https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/highlights-from-the-comments-on-housing
This link was totally worth reading about that subject:
https://www.conradbastable.com/essays/japans-housing-crisis-what-the-yimbys-dont-understand
Yes, that's a great article! Could have been shorter, but it has a lot more meat than most other sources.
Really, the graph with the yearly housing prices and the line showing FT's analysis was almost enough by itself!
> make Tokyo unattractive to new residents
But the population of Tokyo has grown even while the population of Japan has shrunk, so this doesn't seem right.
Isn't Japan losing population while having very high restrictions on immigration? I wouldn't have updated too much on Japan either way, since it's not like SF (the example Scott was looking at the most), and the trends are in reverse.
I thought Scott was wrong and pushed back at the time - what he's noticing is true, but isn't based on city size or population, but how many people want to live there but don't now. Detroit seemed to me the clearest refutation of his point. Lots of population loss and a tremendous drop in land values, despite still having a fairly large population.
> An important example was Tokyo, where housing is cheap
I thought housing was cheap in Japan generally because what with regular earthquakes, and possibly termites not helping, houses are not long-term assets but have a rough (quoting from memory) expected lifespan of little more than fifty years. So they build mostly in wood, and their houses start going downhill from the outset, whereas for example my house was built in 1756 out of stone, and is still as good as new (apart from some pointing, which needs redoing!) But if housing in Japan is cheap, I also thought land there was expensive!
Scott’s arguments are to small amounts of construction relative to the housing stock in desirable areas. A nice city that has plenty of amenities but bad housing, or housing too far away from where people want to work or live.
Build more housing there, where people want to live, and prices for these desirable houses will be expensive pushing up average prices. This is possibly true at the margins.
I mean, unless I am missing something, Tyler Cowen this just says that formal and informal immigration restrictions decrease housing prices for domestic population? Which, duh. It doesn't actually in any way refute an argument that housing prices are also decreased by allowing more construction.
I think Cowen is also saying/implying that there are formal and informal systems in place that act as de facto rent control, though it was a bit unclear what those are.
Regardless, if you propose “Yimby = lower rent, just look at Tokyo” then all alternative explanations for Tokyos supposedly lower rent are relevant, even if they don’t entirely refute the argument. It’s enough that they complicate the picture.
(For the record, I’m skeptical of Scott’s original argument, but would also be surprised if demand for housing didn’t have feedback loops that made it at least partially self-reinforcing.)
I realize that I am splitting hairs, but I just find Cowen's style of engagement with YIMBY argument somewhat, um, unconstructive. Like, various other than construction factors are everywhere? I hear there is a lot of crime in San Francisco, which surely lowers rents compared to where they would be had SF had same level of crime as Tokyo. Whole YIMBY argument is based on the fact that other factors being constant, rents would be lower with more construction. Of course we all know that housing isn't like oil, with almost single price set on the international market, amount of construction being the only thing causing prices to diverge in different locations. This doesn't mean that an example of successful urbanization policy from a foreign country should be ignored on the grounds that Japan is somewhat different from.... US or EU (where I live), or Canada or wherever.
I think we might generally agree. I guess I got the impression you were being overly dismissive of TC’s argument, which (even if it doesn’t work great as a stand-alone argument in the overall YIMBY/NIMBY debate), seemed particularly relevant in context of debating Scott’s original theory. But I may have read too much dismissiveness into your first comment.
Does anyone have an intuitive explanation of why integration is generally so much harder than differentiation?
I get the kind of practical reasons – the need to cancel terms that would appear when differentiating back again, the fact that there's an infinite number of possible antiderivatives, etc. And I have a hand-wavy sense that you're going "up a dimension" and this implies that the antiderivative encodes more information.
But I haven't seen a clear conceptual reason why finding a derivative is essentially an algorithmic process, while integration often requires a lot more creativity and strategy, and is frequently not possible at all except numerically.
There's already good answers ITT by people more erudite than I. But the way I've answered this question for myself is: differentiation "loses information" in the specific sense that it subtracts the bulk of the height away from any given coordinate. Whereas integration from a to b "adds information" in the sense that it sums the heights of coordinates over the entire history of the interval a to b.
Instead of thinking of a graph as a squiggly curve, it's better to think of a graph as a bar chart. For any given x_i, f'(x_i) represents the height of a bar of f(x_i), minus the height of the bar f(x_i - h) to its left. Differentiation then represents compression in that it deletes the height-information that gets repeated between any two neighboring points. You can see this directly encoded in f'(x) = lim (f(x) - f(x-h)) / h.
For integration, thinking in terms of barcharts is already made more explicit in the form of Riemann-sums. int{f(x)} represents taking all bars over an interval, and stacking them together in a single bar. Instead of deletion, this results in duplication. Because a single bar in the original function shows up not just in a single bar in the integral, but in several bars in the integral. It's like a convolution in the sense that it smears history.
And so if you think of an algebraic expression as a tree, differentiation results in deletion of nodes, whereas integration results in duplication of nodes. Wrestling with a bigger tree is obviously harder than wrestling with a smaller tree, ceteris paribus.
edit: I messed up the formatting of the subscripts e.g. f(x_i) being f(x)_i.
Very interesting. I'm gonna need to think about this interpretation some more.
Maybe this story will make it more concrete.
There's an old Shtetl Optimized post where Aaronson mentions in passing that in highschool, he found a pattern: the differences between consecutive integers is 1, the difference of the difference between consecutive perfect squares is 2, the difference of the difference of the difference between consecutive perfect cubes is 6, etc. And then he speculates in hindsight that this was probably similar to Newton's train of thought while inventing Calculus. Several of the commenters said they had a similar experience too.
I too had a similar experience. Which for me, was born out of a lazy desire to find a shortcut to graphing parabolas. More specifically, I observed that the difference between consecutive perfect-squares was always 1, 3, 5, 7, etc (assuming a = 1) and then attempted to generalize to higher powers of x. This observation seems trivial with the hindsight of calculus, since f(x) = x^2 entails f'(x) = 2x. But it sure didn't feel that way when I was busying calculating with pencil and paper "which non-zero constant does x^5 recursively diff to? (assuming x is set of consecutive natural numbers)" in the middle of precalc class (or was it trig? I can't remember).
So while I don't have the etymology on hand, I wouldn't be surprised if "differentiation" was named so because it involves taking the differences in height between consecutive bars. And similarly, "integration" was probably named so because it "integrates" a bunch of bars in the original graph into each bar in the output graph. And I get the feeling that "differentiation/integration finds the slope/area of a curve" is an abstract explanation that only makes sense in hindsight. During the process of inventing calculus, the process probably had a more numerical flavor.
In any case, try to solve the x^5 question without resorting to calc. It might give you a better feel for what differentiation is actually doing (and maybe why factorials show up in taylor series, etc).
They're often presented this way, but I wouldn't think of differentiation and integration as inverses. Rather, the fundamental theorem of calculus relates the two as follows: integrating the derivative of a function over a region is the same as integrating the function over the boundary of the region. IMO it follows that the proper way to think about differentiation is as a sort of boundary-taking that can transform the function instead of the region, and integration is not the inverse but a distinct operator that performs continuous summation.
In that frame, there's no reason to think that differentiation and integration should be comparable in difficulty. Differentiation and boundary-taking are algorithmic for many functions and regions likely to be of interest. Integration involves lots of numerical computation unless you're clever and/or lucky enough to be able to use the fundamental theorem to shift the integration into a lower-dimensional space. If you are, you still must integrate but you might have an easier time with it (in the 1-D case, the boundary of a 1-D region is a signed pair of points, over which integration becomes taking the difference, which is obviously a win).
I don't know if this is a good explanation, but... All functions are integrable, but not all functions are differentiable. So maybe when we start with an arbitrary function and integrate it repeatedly, we are climbing up a ladder of complexity, and the reverse process tends to be easier.
[Edit: reading on, this looks like a rough intuitive version of some of the answers given.]
Taking it a stage further, solving a first order ordinary differential equation (ODE) can be thought of as a problem of implicit integration, and finding a symbolic general solution amounts to manipulating it into a form where the integrand is an explicit function of an independent variable.
Even if the success of this symbolic manipulation is elusive or (perhaps in some cases?) impossible, every ODE should have a numerical solution in the form of a family of curves parametrized by as many constants as the order of the equation i.e. the highest order derivative occurring in it (besides singular solutions, which sort of span the entire family in a suitable way).
But partial differential equations (PDEs) are generally vastly harder to solve than even ODEs, because the latter relate only a single variable to one other independent variable, whereas for a PDE more than two variables interact and there may be whole classes of solutions above and beyond simple equations in terms of explicit functions with a few constants thrown in.
The general solutions of some PDEs, where these are known, can involve literally "any function(s) you like", subject to the boundary conditions of the problem, e.g. (off the top of my head) something like f(x + y) + f(y + z) + f(z + x) = 0 where "f" could be anything!
And then there are *stochastic* PDEs!
A while back I had the chance to meet Martin Hairer, who has made huge inroads into that field. I had to produce a layman's description of his major work, for the general public. When I sent it to him he said, "Congratulations. It seems you have learnt enough mathematics to say things that are definitively false, not simply meaningless."
This is a general pattern of inverse operations and problems in general (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inverse_problem):
> it starts with the effects and then calculates the causes
Subtraction is harder than addition (not by much, but it's not just counting up), Division is harder than multiplication. Roots and logarithms are harder than powers and exponents. Integration is harder than differentiation. Solving an equation is harder than substituting a number in it. Proving a theorem is generally harder than checking if the proof is right. P is probably much less than NP.
Quite often solving an inverse problem consists of repeatedly applying the forward problem (long division is one of the first examples students encounter), and in general one has to search a much larger space of possibilities.
Try thinking up forward problems and their inverses, and you may notice the reasons why inverse problems are harder.
yes, although "easy" differentiation is conceptually an extension of "hard" division. And "hard" integration is conceptually an extension of "easy" multiplication. So I'm not sure whether this is the most useful framework of answering the question. Or at least, it lacks an explanation for this paradox.
The way integration is usually defined is, in contrast to those other examples (with the partial exception of logarithms) not simply as the inverse of the more basic operations, but it gets its own definition (Riemann or Lebesgue style), with a theorem to prove that integration and differentiation are to some extent inverses. Looking at it this way, the definitions of integration are still much more complicated than differentiation though. With differentiation defined as lim (f(x+h)-f(x))/h, there are reasonably simple algebraic reasons for the chain rule, product rule etc. but with the more complicated definition of integration, whether that's as the Riemann integral, Lebesgue integral, antiderivative or any other variants (of which there are probably many), it's not too surprising that a complicated definition yields a complicated result.
A mildly related fun fact: there's a version of differentiation which is defined as sort of the inverse of an integral, the Radon-Nikodym derivative.
Anecdote. But I observed this in myself and a few other friends - those of us not so good in spatial awareness struggled more with integration
Getting out of a parking space certainly tends to be easier than getting in!
Here is my personal hand-knitted explanation.
Differentiation is a local operation. Assume you want to compute f'(x_0) for some value x_0. Then it suffices to know how f looks in a neighbourhood of x_0. If you have another function g that coincides with f in a small interval around x_0, then they will have the same derivative at x_0. More important, if you have a function g that looks "roughly" like f on this interval, then f and g also have the same derivative at x_0. I don't want to go into detail for what "roughly" means, but there are tons of ways to make this precise, and I hope you already have some intuitive (or rigorous) understanding.
Integration is not a local operation because it always has a reference point. The inverse derivative F(x_0) of a function f is "integral from 0 to x_0 over f(x)". Even if a function g is identical (or similar) to x close to x_0, their inverse derivatives F(x_0) and G(x_0) will not coincide. For that, we would need f and g to coincide in the whole interval from 0 to x_0.
If you would define integration as a local operation, which only describes the part of the integral around x_0 (something like lim_{\eps \to 0} \integral from x_0-\eps to x_0+\eps f(x)), this is again a local and very simple operation. In fact, it is too simple: it just gives you back the function f if we scale it properly. That's the main theorem of integration and differentiation. We don't consider this "local integral" because it doesn't give us anything really new.
Now, the real reason why differentiation is easy: (almost) all functions that we ever consider are locally really easy. Locally, they always look "roughly" like a straight line. (That's pretty much the same as saying that they are differentiable.)
This also explains why we have something like the product rule: for a product like f_1 * f_2, in order to compute the derivative at x_0, you only need to know the two functions close to x_0. Since f_1 and f_2 look locally like a straight line, you only need to compute the derivative for the product of straight lines. If you work that out, that's the product rule.
Same for the chain rule: to compute the derivative of f_1(f_2(x)) at x_0, you only need to understand f_2 in a small interval around x_0, and to understand f_1 in a small interval around f_2(x_0). (Assuming that the functions are nice and continuous and smooth.) Since both look locally like a line, we only need to compute the derivative for the case that f_1 and f_2 are a line. This gives you the chain rule.
So in a nutshell: local operations are easy, non-local operations are hard. This is not just true for differentiation and integration, but extends to almost all of math.
That makes a lot of sense. Thanks for taking the time.
By the way: if you are familiar with a bit more math, there is a scenario where you do consider integration in a close environment of a point x_0: if you can write f as a power series around x_0, then integration of this power series is really easy, and (with a bit of luck) you get a true formula in some environment around x_0. For that to work, you usually need the power series expansion *around x_0*, so you force the problem into a local framework.
Do you mean like when a Taylor series expands to higher powers and "hugs" more of the function it's approximating, you can integrate easily over a wide range?
Yes, kind of. I meant that if we have a Taylor series expansion, we can easily integrate it term by term. For example,
exp(x) = \sum_{n=0}^\infty x^n/n!
The inverse derivative of x^n/n! is x^{n+1}/(n+1)!, so an inverse derivative of exp is
\sum_{n=0}^\infty x^{n+1}/{n+1}!
which is again just the exponential function, shifted by an additive constant.
I think the explanation is pretty much what you say. By adding more terms, we are locally much closer to the original function, so our approximation is really good. Sometimes it's so good that it extends not just to the close neighbourhood of x_0, but beyond that. For example, for exp the approximation happens to converge super-good, and the integration formula extends to all real numbers. For the function log(1+x), the Taylor series converges moderately well, and the formula for the integral works for |x|<1. And for some functions the convergence is poor and it doesn't work at all.
There is a whole theory on how far exactly it extends, called "complex analysis".
It's still more complicated than differentiation (and doesn't always work), because we need a much better approximation of the original function f to make it work. For differentiation, approximation with linear functions is good enough. For integrations, we need the whole Taylor series, so we need to approximate it by polynomials with larger and larger degrees to even have a chance.
Awesome.
This is always a fun question! See https://mathoverflow.net/a/66381 for one good perspective, which I'll try and expand upon here:
Really, when people ask this question what they mean is "why are **elementary functions** expressed as formulae easy to symbolically integrate and hard to symbolically differentiate?", where elementary functions are those which are constructed by composing some familiar operations: +-*/ exp and log.
These are easy to symbolically differentiate because they are closed under the operation of differentiation and things like the chain rule allow an easy algorithmic construction of the derivative.
These are harder to symbolically integrate because they are not closed under the operation of integration: some things integrate to non-elementary functions. In fact, in an appropriate sense almost all elementary functions have non-elementary integrals. (For example, to any f(x) which happens to have an elementary integral, add c*g(x) where g(x) does not. Now only the special c=0 case has an elementary integral. All the rest do not.)
Since almost no elementary function has an elementary integral, any approach to finding one when it does exist must depend very sensitively on the details of the function. Therefore it's no surprise that basically the approaches to integrating symbolically amount to "try and see if it fits a special case you understand" - because only some special cases can possibly be integrated at all!
(But is there an algorithm to compute the symbolic integral if it is elementary or else tell you there isn't one? There is in fact a (semi-)algorithm called Risch's algorithm, which is a true algorithm IF you can always tell whether certain expressions that comes up in the process is identically zero - no general algorithm for this subproblem is known, but in many practical cases this may not matter. But it's complex and very fiddly to implement so AFAIK nobody uses it in its full generality.)
I'll add also that as soon as you start considering functions not defined by formulae, or otherwise going outside of the elementary functions, it's a different ball game, which also helps give a different perspective on things. If I define a special function like the Riemann zeta function, in what sense is it "easier to differentiate than integrate?" I don't think this really has a useful meaning.
That's a very clear answer, thanks.
I would say that even when the integral involves elementary functions, it still tends to be much harder than the equivalent differentiation. For instance, beyond the simplest cases trigonometric substitution seems to me to be a bit of an art form, or at least involve some educated guesswork. But maybe I'm just not experienced enough at them.
Absolutely, it is harder (though with Risch's procedure technically it can be made mechanical - but still excessively complicated). I'm suggesting that's intuitively because
- any given algorithmic technique which actually tries to construct the elementary integral can only work in very specific cases (because in 'most' cases we know it will fail)
- it's easy to construct arbitrarily complicated functions which CAN be integrated to something elementary (just pick a horrible elementary function and differentiate it)
- therefore there's a need for either a huge number of simple techniques which almost always fail (how we teach the subject practically) OR a single forbiddingly complicated technique (Risch's 'algorithm').
Yes – I'm surely being obtuse here but... the very fact that it's easy to "just pick a horrible function and differentiate it" compared to the opposite, even in those (as you've explained proportionally few) cases where the opposite is possible, is the thing I'm still struggling with. Why does it follow from these cases being proportionally small in number that even most of these cases depend very sensitively on details of the function, rather than being easily generalisable in the way that the reverse chain rule and integration by parts are?
The key change of perspective I think might be helpful here can be seen by reflecting on your statement that "even most of these cases depend very sensitively on details of the function". What I'm saying is that if you let me tweak functions in any elementary way, then I can ALWAYS "slightly" tweak the function to make it not have an elementary integral. For example,
sqrt(1-x^2)
can be integrated using arcsin etc. (elementary, can be found with a trig substitution trick), but
sqrt(1-x^2.0001)
can only be written in terms of hypergeometric functions (not elementary, none of your tricks work).
(I won't try and formalise "slightly" here. This is only an intuitive argument to try and make things seem more natural, after all. But as I said before, I can always add a tiny multiple of a badly behaved function to your well behaved one and thereby break things.)
On the other hand, it's true that if you restrict the space of functions you're trying to integrate very heavily (more than to elementary functions), e.g. to polynomials, then we might find the integral is in fact always elementary. Indeed, however I tweak a polynomial, the function can always be differentiated and integrated equally easily.
Got it! Thanks
Not a mathematician, just a lowly engineer with a long standing obsession with mathematics.
I think the difficulty of integration as compared to differentiation is a persistent illusion generated by 2 facts :
1- Integration is not closed on the set of elementary functions. Elementary functions are just a made-up set that people sometimes don't even agree on its exact membership, I think the minimal one can be defined recursively as :
[base case] I- The set of all functions of the form : x^a where a is any real number, sin(x), a^x where a is any real number, and log(x) are elementary functions.
[recursive step] II- Every addition, subtraction, multiplication, division, and composition of 2 elementary functions is itself an elementary function.
There is no real reason why this set of function is special. You can perhaps argue that its base case feature extensively in physical laws, but its not the **only** one that does. Why do Green functions, which feature extensively in Physics as far as I'm aware, not included ? Why not the litany of other special functions that Physicists like to call after funny German/French/English names ? It's just an arbitrary set. The (II) clause of the definition is even more arbitrary, the 4 "natural" arithemtic operations are not natural at all when extended to functions instead of bare numbers, addition and subtraction can sorta kinda look natural when you look at them through the plot of the 2 functions they act on, multiplication less so, division and composition contort the plots in outright demonic ways. Furthermore, other very natural operations, like the max and min operations, are extremly natural on graphical plots, but they're not included in the operations listed in (II).
For some reason, might be a deeper mathematical reason that I'm not aware of, it turns out that this arbitrary set is closed under differentiation : start with an elementary function, differentiate till the cows come home, and you will end up with an elementary function. For yet another reason, also not sure if it's deeper than coincidence, this set is not closed under Integration.
That's it, really. People are simply taught to look at functions a very specific way. Mathematics says that functions are arbitrary black boxes that takes something and give you back another thing. They aren't even restricted to numbers, but mathematical *curriculum*, after paying lip service to the set-theoretic general definition, almost exclusively focus on the made-up set defined by (I) and (II). As a result of the 2 curious facts about the closedness of this set under differentiation and integration, the latter "seems" harder than the former.
But if you adopt a more open-minded view towards functions, say you view them as programs (still a lie, some functions can't be expressed as programs), Integration is actually vastly more straightforward than differentiation. All it requires is repeated evaluation of the program and accumulation of the result it gives back. Yes, differentiation also becomes just 2 evaluations of the program in this view, but that's not because it's "easier", that's because it gives you inherently less information than integration, an integration is a summary statistic that digests all the values of a function, while differentiation is just... a differe-nce between 2 of its values, preferably close together. Differentiation is hard in Floating Point, which the way the vast majority of computers today try to represent real numbers, because it involves subtraction and division and those are hard in Floating Point. There is something called Automatic Differentiation (alternatively, Differential Programming) but this re-imposes the constraint that your program has to be composed out of elementary-function-like instructions, and introduces a whole bunch of headaches and complexities of its own.
2- The algorithm for differentiation of elementary functions fits on a postcard in mathematical notation. Translated into a pseudocode right now, a text file 237 bytes in size, roughly 50 words of English assuming the average English word is 5 letters. Meanwhile, the algorithm for integrating elementary functions [1] is described in more than 100 pages, presumably in the mix of English and math notations used in math papers that tends to be substantially shorter than the equivalent programs in whatever real programming language you choose to translate them into.
I think this is much more interesting than (1), (1) is just a random factoid about some made-up set, but this is a Computational Complexity thing, there is some hidden structure in differentiation of elementary functions that makes it extremly easy, and there is some hidden devilishness in their integration that makes it extremly hard. The "algorithm" in [1] is not even a proper algorithm, meaning it always halts with the correct answer, it's a so-called "Semi-Algorithm", meaning it can hang forever for some inputs, neither outputting a yes or a no.
For all I know, (2) might be just a consequence or a corollary of (1), or both of them might be completely unrelated factoid with no deeper reason, but (2) appears much more interesting to me, possibly because I'm biased.
In all cases, the "harder" perception is a fully self-inflicted one, only because you're biased to think of elementary closed-form formulas as the only functions that matter. Integration is easier (though more expensive) numerically, and purely mathematically it's actually a more "lenient" operation than differentiation : its conditions are less strict, more functions are integrable than differentiable. Using Fourier Analysis, the difference between those 2 operations melts away, they become multiplication and division of the same factor.
Imagine you're an alien who thinks that only positive numbers are true numbers and your brain hates elementary Algebra so much that it requires more than 100 page to explain to you, you will hate Subtraction more than death. Not only is the result of the Subtraction not gauranteed to be a true number, but the algorithm for obtaining it is so utterly convoluted and alien.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Risch_algorithm
I disagree that the difference comes from our definition of elementary functions. That is arbitrary to some degree, yes. But the point is that differentiation is closed under multiplication and concatenation. If you start with a different set of "elementary" functions, and take products and concatenation of those, then you get into the same trouble.
I just wanted to point out that Green’s functions are not really eligible for inclusion in the canonical list of “elementary functions.” This is because they are not a class of mathematical function (like e^x, the Riemann Zeta function, etc.) but rather a class of physical functions which are solutions to differential equations. What makes a function a Green’s function is that it gives the response of a physical system (expressed as a system of diff eqs) to an impulse (delta-function) input. Lots of Green’s functions are elementary functions like sin(x); many are not.
My first instinct was to answer "I guess it's a bit like how factorizing a polynomial is harder than expanding a product of polynomials: expanding a product of polynomials is always straightforward, but there is famously no algorithm for factorizing quintic or higher-order polynomials."
After a little googling, I came across something called "Differential Galois Theory," which apparently allows the analogy to be stated more precisely:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Differential_Galois_theory
But explaining this in detail would be way above my pay grade.
The generalization of the "factoring is hard" observation is called a trapdoor function:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trapdoor_function
In general, math is full of instances where calculating some function f is easier than calculating its inverse:
* integer multiplication vs division in base 10, as learned in elementary school
* evaluating a real function g for some x versus finding x so that g(x)=0
* squaring numbers versus calculating square roots
* evaluating boolean formulas vs finding booleans so that the formula becomes true (SAT, famously NP-complete)
* matrix-vector multiplication versus Gaussian elimination
If you sit in school and the teacher introduces some operation which seems straight-forward, "the inverse operation will probably be harder" is not an unreasonable heuristic.
I think that's trivially true, to the extent that which function is identified as "inverse" is somewhat arbitrary and you'll learn (or discover) the easier direction first.
I would argue that it is in some cases not arbitrary. Addition, Multiplication, squaring and exponentials all seam neater to me than there inverse operation. (It might be possible to define square roots and logarithms without squares and exponentials, but just in the same way as it is possible to walk through a wall rather than a doorway.)
Of course, if you asked my guts (which do not have training in real analysis) if calculating the slope of a function or the area beneath it should be more difficult, they would be completely lost.
But if you told them that one operation is the inverse of the other and asked them if both should be equally hard, they would probably opine that often, one direction happens to be much harder.
That's a very interesting connection. It does intuitively feel like a similar asymmetry.
I don't know if there's any intuitive reason to expect it to be so. It's not that integration is unreasonably hard, it's just that differentiation happens to be unreasonably easy.
Two things make differentiation unreasonably easy: the product rule and the chain rule. These two rules between them give a simple analytic form for the derivative of pretty much any function that you can possibly compose out of other functions. There is no direct equivalent for integrals, nor is there any intuitive reason to suspect that there might be. Indeed, there's reasonably simple analytic functions that do not have an analytic integral.
The point I want to emphasise is that there's no intuitive reason to think that differentiation should be easy; it's only because the product rule and the chain rule just happen to pop out once you sit down and start doing the maths that it's easy at all.
"Indeed, there's reasonably simple analytic functions that do not have an analytic integral"
Actually all analytic functions have analytic antiderivatives (if the domain is simply connected). See for example https://math.stackexchange.com/questions/3783816/integral-of-an-analytic-function-also-analytic for the real case.
The term you may be looking for is "elementary functions".
There are direct equivalents – there's the reverse chain rule, and integration by parts is essentially a reformulation of the product rule. They just seem to be very limited in their applicability. There must be a reason why.
Maybe something like:
"You see a ball moving towards you, you can take a pretty good guess how fast it's going, and where it will land, but working out where it came from has many more possibilities"
The fundamental difficulty with working out its history is to do with gathering all the information. So maybe my "hand-wavy sense that you're going up a dimension so need to encode more information" is along the right lines...
What are the best ways to make a bet on AI being a 'big deal'? Most ppl in the world seem to underestimate how drastically it could change everything (good or bad) so there must be lots of financial low hanging fruit, right??
I've been told to buy stock in NVIDIA (already very highly priced because everyone has the same idea, unfortunately) and other companies in the semiconductor chain. If anyone has better ideas, let me know!
Could you tell me a story of how stock in NVIDIA could plausibly be a good investment? I mean, here are the scenarios I see over any significant timeframe:
1) Uncontrolled singleton. Ur ded.
2) Controlled singleton. Singleton seizes the means of production; your shares are worth nothing. Or singleton kills you (humans are capable of genocide too, y'know).
3) Butlerian Jihad. NVIDIA's stock price craters (as do all the AI companies'), and you still care about money.
4) AI not such a big deal after all (scaling hits a wall?). Investment in AI slows down, NVIDIA's stock price goes down (though not cratered), and you still care about money.
I mean, I guess it might continue to go up in the extreme near-term before it goes down in scenario #3 or #4, but to actually, really make money off that you need to sell before the collapse to a Greater Fool. Do you have a good idea of what sort of events are likely to cause such a collapse conditional on scenarios #3/#4, so you can sell before them? Do you trust yourself not to HODL out of FOMO and to instead sell while the price is going up? And for that matter, isn't one of those events in like 2 days (the AI safety summit in Britain)?
5) It becomes quite to very important without the world ending. Almost certainly the most likely outcome.
Doesn't seem MECE to me...
This is a problem with AI evangelists. Three of those options are very very low probability.
4 isn’t the only option if we aren’t doomed or become luddites. AI can still scale up or hit a wall. If it continues to scale up then nividia might be worth a punt. If not it don’t be.
Most people fall in the middle: they think AI is going to boost productivity, but it's still going to be very limited. For those people, nvidia is a good choice because they have a quasi-monopoly on AI hardware because the most popular AI packages use CUDA (though that may change now with pytorch supporting AMD ROCm).
Gwern's review of the MIT media lab [0] is what informs my worldview in this. The basic summary is that timing things is really difficult because you only earn the upside when you predict success correctly. However the earliest success is going to happen right after the last big bottleneck is solved, which means that's exactly at the point where solving the problem is the most difficult and unpredictable, and so even if you are directionally correct and even have good enough timing to get within, say, a year of timing your investments correctly, you are still likely to go bust in one of the failed run ups to the successful product!
This is not including more outside view argument, like how technology forecasting has almost always been a crapshoot, and there is no highly liquid market betting on new technology success or failure.
[0] https://gwern.net/timing#nor-riches-to-men-of-understanding
Thanks for the share! Directly answers my question
Sorry for Necroing but this just came out:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/CTBta9i8sav7tjC2r/how-to-hopefully-ethically-make-money-off-of-agi
Skimming it, one high level takeaway is that getting in early matters a lot more than getting in precisely correctly, because of how the US treats long term cs short term capital gains.
You could buy property in New Zealand and remote Pacific islands on the basis that lots of rich people will start fleeing there when it goes out of control?
Hard to say. If it's a big deal in the "good" direction, you'd hope that everything benefits (e.g. the general stock market skyrockets - not individual stocks, necessarily). If it's a big deal in the "bad" direction then the general market would tank.
So the question about low-hanging fruit is less concerned about the bigness of the deal, and more about the direction of the change.
Unless I've misunderstood your question
I think you have understood! A follow up: can one bet on there being high variance over a time period?
I guess an analogy is putting money into bitcoin in its early days. Is there any equivalent to that for AI?
Yes, such a bet would be called a 'strangle' strategy in options markets.
Essentially, suppose the stock price of A is currently at £100, and suppose you believe that the price of A will be either above £120 or below £90 within the next 6 months. You can purchase both a call option (betting the price will go above £120) and a put option (betting the price will go below £90). If the price goes outside of the range £90-£120 you make a profit.
(In reality you also have to consider the cost of both options contracts in your calculations, but you get the gist of it)
The inverse of this (where you bet that the price of A will stay between £90 and £120 for a given period. Is called a 'Iron Condor' strategy.
Often this kind of thing is priced in, for example if a newly formed pharmaceutical company is releasing the efficacy results of a trial of its sole drug/product, its pretty clear that the price will skyrocket or plummit depending on if the drug passes its trial. Hence the options market will sell these contracta at a higher premium to account for this.
I think generally there are derivatives which trade based on volatility (or predicted volatility - like VVIX) - but I don't think there's an AI specific volatility index.
I wouldn't be surprised if some funds have their own internal composites based on prices of NVIDIA + other companies along the semiconductor chain + the tech companies working in the space
Let's keep re-reading Scott's old blog: what better time than now when you're hungry for more Scottish content?
"Stuff" https://archive.ph/5CgGN discusses what not to name your kids, and the Anti-Tyrion Principle is introduced.
(https://pastebin.com/JmxL4LcE link for those who can't open archive for some reason, index of all the archived posts: https://archive.ph/fCFQx)
I don't have the link for it but at one point read "The Library of Scott Alexandria"--curated essay collection from SSC that I could download to kindle, for a much more accessible reading experience.
One side benefit of the trans rights movement is that this isn't an issue anymore. Anyone can have a non-legal preferred name recognized in all but the most formal of contexts, and nobody bats an eye. I knew a fundamentalist Christian woman who goes by Amadaia because she thinks her legal name of Brandy was too associated with immoral actions.
I don't see why she thought that. I would think she would be a fine girl, and make a good wife.
DAMMIT, I did not need that 50-year-old ear worm this morning
LOL
Over at Themotte.org people discuss culture war issues. If you are looking for discussion with people that you ideologically disagree with on a reddit style forum you might find it interesting.
It is descended from slatestarcodex via the slatestarcodex subreddit culture war thread which was discontinued and moved to another subreddit called themotte, and then there was some worrying levels of reddit censorship so themotte moved off of reddit entirely.
Warning: there are people you disagree with there. And often not just light disagreement. Like full on "our world views are incompatible" disagreement.
DataSecretsLox.com also holds CW discussions, and is (obviously) also a SSC descendant. Discussion there bears the same caveats.
Hi ACXers. Last week I asked for your thoughts on Marc Andreessen's Techno-Optimist manifesto.
Over the week I've compiled everyone's responses on Substack. I've also added a few thoughts of my own - more pragmatic than rational - but I'd appreciate your thoughts and comments.
https://zantafakari.substack.com/p/compilations-and-thoughts-on-marc
The more I think about "techno-optimism", the more I think it's quite parochial and probably not worth a manifesto. Tools and technology literally defines homo sapiens capability. So the interesting thing isn't about being optimistic about it really - we're going to build stuff because that's just what we do.
Seems unconvincing, especially since the idea is to shift the attention margin. See eg https://danwang.co/definite-optimism-as-human-capital/
interesting - what do you mean by attention margin?
I'd like to talk with someone who lives at the Rationalist group houses in the Bay Area, or ideally several such someones. I'm looking for on-the-ground information about their locations and disaster preparedness; essentially, I'm concerned for your safety in case of either WWIII or US civil war.
Replying to me here would work. If you want some degree of privacy you can email me (same handle @gmail.com). You have my word I'm not out to do anything untoward; I'm just trying to help.
I'm assuming that anyone living in a city isn't that well prepared for a disaster, though being stocked for a week or two isn't unreasonable.
I'm curious why you're concerned about them in particular. Do you suspect that they are less prepared than most? care particularly much about them being prepared? think that you are particularly likely to be able to make a difference to them?
Mostly #2, but also shades of #3.
Regarding #2, I'd rather have Rats differentially survive a nuclear war than differentially die in one; gives us a better chance of pulling off an AI stop, among other "raising the sanity waterline is good" things.
Regarding #3, in a situation where order breaks down, an intentional community that preps is much safer than anyone else who preps (in particular, a food stash is not all that useful without the ability to defend it, and numbers and ingroup loyalty help a lot with that), improving the EV of prepping. Also, my read is that Rats have far-weaker absurdity heuristics than normal and are thus more likely to actually listen to me.
(To be clear, I spent the last election cycle here in Oz trying to single-issue vote on civil defence - I failed, because all parties' policy was the empty string, but I tried. The amount I'm trying to reduce casualties in general is significantly above zero. But yes, I am putting in some amount of Rat-specific effort.)
I have a sense that the conversation in Western countries around the Middle East is gradually changing to the point where most unbiased observers agree that Hamas is an awful terrorist hive of scum and villainy and eradicating them would be for the benefit of Israelis, Palestinians, everyone really. I say this as an Australian after a joint statement this morning by six of our former prime ministers to this effect. What's the vibe out there?
Huh. I'm not particularly hooked in to most news, but the general vibe I pick up has been shifting toward pro-Palestinian, as far as I can tell simply because Israel is currently doing most of the killing, and there's some sort of time-based discount function applied to atrocities.
I could easily be wrong about this, and my sampling of news sources may not give me a clear view of the current range of opinions. But since you ask, that's what I pick up.
What's an "unbiased observer"? If we're talking about an ethical question, different ethical systems may lead to differing conclusions about who is right and wrong, without anyone being "biased" in any way but using the same ethical framework as the speaker.
I think I share your ethical framework at least in matters like this. And I think most of the political leadership of the western industrial democracies do as well. So we're in good company, but I don't think it's fair to say that all the unbiased observers agree with us and all the ones who disagree are biased.
There are definitely a lot of people out there, including a good fraction of the political leadership of the not-western-industrial-democracies who see the Israelis as basically the equivalent of the Nazis, Hamas as basically the French Resistance, and the IDF as basically the equivalent of the SS and Gestapo thugs sent out to crush the French Resistance. Overall, this is looking like a Scissor Statement.
Yeah, I suppose we're all biased - much as I would wish to be a disembodied all-knowing mind effortlessly perceiving the whims of the universe, I too am a generic citizen of a Western democracy with all the values that that entails. I guess when I say "unbiased observer" I mean "person who is neither Israeli or Arab."
I think there are three things going on. Pro-Israel and anti-Hamas, pro-Hamas and and anti-Israel (sometimes also antisemitic), and people who really want peace and can't figure out how to get there.
I’m sad about the UN. I feel like the path to peace, or at least less civilian casualties, involved the first resolution passing (the one that condemned Hamas as a terrorist organisation). Then you could at least have some international agreement on who’s responsible and that’s the first step to getting aid to the right places. Instead you had the second resolution pass that called for a cease fire which obviously Israel is never going to agree to. Like Hamas is somewhere between partially and completely responsible for the deaths of innocent Palestinians
I think Hamas optimized heavily for being atrocious, and as a consequence should be wiped of the earth. I mean, even the fucking 9-11 attackers could claim that they did especially intend children causalities or causing excessive pain to their victims. Hamas behaved like the bloody Nazis, so their regime should meet the same fate.
If instead Hamas had limited themselves to executing IDF personnel or even murdered 1400 adults of Netanyahu's West Bank settlers, that would still have been a violation of the laws of armed conflict and I would still consider that bad, but not to the point that I would automatically support waging war against the perpetrator.
Urban warfare in a heavily populated area is an ugly affair, but Hamas needs killing, which in turn means the occupation of Gaza. I think that the IDF has every incentive not to target civilians (even if one assumed that Netanyahu would prefer the Gazans genocided, civilian causalities make for terrible PR long before they make a dent in the population).
Of course, I feel that my position is far from universal. From these infamous US student organizations which released statements that Israel is fully to blame before the bodies of the Hamas victims were even cold, to quite a few on the left (including Greta Thunberg) who think that the attention caused by Hamas slaughtering kids would be the perfect opportunity to campaign for "free Palestine" (optionally with the "from the river to the see bit", which makes the genocidal intend quite explicit) to Muslim majority states (which are not generally a shining beacon of pacifism and human rights) loudly protesting casualties in Gaza. (I guess Yemeni or Syrian civilians are just unlucky in that the people dropping bombs on them are Muslim instead of Israeli, so nobody cares about their plight.)
Agreed on all points. Many Thanks!
The history is that views will increasingly become more pro-cease fire as time goes by with an almost guaranteed series of Israeli bad behavior "trigger events" shifting opinion. It is noted that this bad behavior amounts to mostly run of the mill messy war execution mistakes and Israel is being held to an entirely different standard than their opponents.
What is different this time is Hamas has set a new standard of barbarianism from which the opinion needs to come down from. Dark days ahead for Gaza.
If the people who executed 9/11 were the government next door and they wore GoPro cameras to celebrate it on social media then the US would have leveled the place three times over. It's hard to remember the rage from that long ago, but it was very real.
I would have assumed that the pro Israel sentiment was going to fall off the further we got past the original atrocities and into the Israeli campaign.
Perhaps it’s less about immediate events as they unfold and more about sustained attention to both sides of the conflict and historical context beyond one line speaking points?
In Australia’s case it’s not even pro Israel - our prime ministers have expressed equal concern for the civilians suffering now as the victims of the initial attack. Just against those who seek to spread division and hatred for profit.
Well I spend no time concentrating on Australian politics but your first claim on this was that Australian politics has changed in its attitudes to rooting out Hamas and are now saying that there is equal concern for the victims of Israeli incursions. That’s a bit contradictory as Hamas cannot be rooted out entirely without significant civilian casualties.
You can read the full statement here if you like -
https://www.theage.com.au/politics/federal/ex-prime-ministers-condemn-hatred-spread-by-hamas-call-for-humanitarian-access-to-gaza-20231030-p5eg37.html
I can’t say I’m an expert in the region, but I hope that you are wrong. Ideally a safe haven for civilians fleeing the conflict could be established, by the UN or by NGOs. Then Israeli forces can safely enter the region and dismantle terrorist infrastructure without incurring civilian casualties. We would need international agreement on who the instigators are and who is thus responsible (Hamas.) The will and the humanitarian aid is there.
Where would that be?
Well the two candidates are Israel and Egypt. Obviously neither of them have agreed so far. What I would hope for is international pressure to aid evacuation. Right now international pressure is all over the place. I feel arguing for a cease fire is a wrong approach, unless it’s temporary to allow for civilians to move to safety
The inability to root out Hamas without heavy civilian casualties is by design, Hamas design. Everybody tends to forget that Hamas has agency, they can separate their fighters from civilians and wear military uniforms. Their military installations can be outside of civilian areas.
This would result in a short war and Hamas being decimated so they choose to fight asymmetrically. It's understandable but they shouldn't get a free pass for this when it is also their responsibility to protect their own civilians as well as themselves.
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If it's vibe we're considering, based on my mainstream news consumption and the lack of comment from most of my social circle (aside from both sides ing), I've personally gone from sternly critical of Israel to deeply sympathetic - and disgusted by most of the chatter about what it should or shouldn't be doing. In my mostly liberal mainstream news sources the war is very largely being reported from the perspective of Hamas and its subjects. (I'm in France, reading mostly AFP, Reuters & AP sourced copy)
Yeah, same. The mainstream press here in Australia as in most Western countries tends to lean left, so I think the default is to sympathise with the oppressed, but the statement this morning has changed the tone somewhat.
I also agree that lecturing Israel is not really helpful - they are going after Hamas and they have every right to do so. It would have been nice to see the UN agree that Hamas is a terrorist organisation and commit to evacuating and sheltering civilians trying to flee the conflict. The civilians are really the ones suffering here, it's so important that humanitarian aid gets to them and not to Hamas.
I'm honestly convinced this is a conflict of wicked leaderships, with most of the ammunition harming innocent people.
I'm hardly a fan of Netanyahu but I think with regards to wickedness there is a difference of degree.
What I would like to see is Netanyahu gone at the next election, and Hamas wiped off the face of the Earth.
Agreed. Just wanted to remind, before natural outrage about terrorist atrocities gets used to sweep that point under the carpet.
I am fine with pacifist protests, but deeply skeptical of pro-Palestinian protests.
In my opinion, if one uses the attention generated by the Hamas atrocities (and the inevitable Israeli response) to campaign for Palestine, that is deeply distasteful.
If a card-carrying NRA member committed a mass shooting and the NRA did rallies in response, I would also consider that much more distasteful than them doing rallies at literally any other time.
I agree with this
I recently put out a podcast where I talk to Giles Milton about his book White Gold. It is about how Europeans were captured and taken into slavery in North Africa and tells the story of one such slave, Thomas Pellow, who was captured at the age of eleven.
It left me with a few slightly uncomfortable questions about my enjoyment of the story.
It is an exciting and exotic tale. The Sultan of Morocco of the time (Moulay Ismail) seems to have been a Caligula like figure. Cruel to the point of psychopathy but with intelligence and wit as well. He liked to drive around his palaces in a chariot pulled by some of his wives and eunuchs. And he had plenty of wives - apparently around 500. And maybe unsurprisingly he is high up in the league table of men with the most children in recorded history.
The story is packed with ironies. Pellow (a slave) is sent as part of a slave raiding expedition across the Sahara into West Africa. He hopes to escape by contacting French or British slavers who have operations there. They do come across a French ship but before he can do anything the Moroccans have boarded the ship, captured the slavers who are sent north in chains to join their compatriots in slavery.
One question I have is at what stage does history become an interesting/exciting ’adventure story’? These were real people who suffered terribly yet from this distance (at least to me) Moulay Ismail is almost a figure of fun. But his cruelty was just appalling. One of his favourite punishments was tying someone to a board and having them sawn in two lengthwise.
So why do I enjoy reading this stuff instead of feeling nauseous? Is it just the passage of time?
Anyway here is the podcast. Giles Milton is a great storyteller and best I can tell it is all true.
https://www.buzzsprout.com/207869/13699590-britons-never-will-be-slaves
> So why do I enjoy reading this stuff instead of feeling nauseous? Is it just the passage of time?
Anecdata point: Putin's war has ruined the music of Sabaton for me.
Warfare (mainly ~1700 to ~1970) is the major theme in their songs. Which was a-ok with me in Europe in 2019, when I was confident that large scale conventional warfare was a thing of the past at least in the Civilized World and hopefully on it's way out globally. Call me squeamish, but now with tank warfare happening in Europe again I would prefer to listen to metal songs about horrors safely confined to the past instead. (I also quit playing world of tanks for similar reasons.)
Lords of the Atlas: The Rise and Fall of the House of Glaoua 1893-1956 by Gavin Maxwell will appeal to you if you want to read more about cruelty and political shenanigans in Morocco. An example among soldiers (quoting an earlier book):
> ‘The man was badly wounded, the camp was a long way off, and his “pals” didn’t mean to have the trouble of carrying him there. So they dug his grave, and began to push him in. He naturally protested. “I am not dead,” he cried; “don’t you see I am living?” “Be quiet,” said a companion; “you were killed at least an hour ago. Don’t you realise that you are dead?” The poor man still cried out till the earth covered him and put an end to his protestation and his life. The soldier who narrated the incident added, “The Moorish soldier is an ungrateful and unbelieving individual. This man, for instance, had no confidence in us, his comrades, when we assured him he was dead. I hate ingratitude,” - and he filled up his little “kif” pipe and handed it to us for a whiff.’
The unforgettable story of one of the pretenders to the throne, who fancied himself a magician, and his hundreds of slaves (one per magic trick) is even worse. I won't quote it here because it might induce nightmares.
For the record, I suspect (and hope) some of these stories aren't true. Apart from all the disturbing stories, there are a few funny ones, and some insight into the difficulties of French imperialism.
This is what I love. A good book recommendation!
Not an answer, but Dan Carlin's "Wrath of the Khan's" series begins with a discussion on this idea; when we talk about the Mongols, a lot of modern history emphasizes the long term effects of the Mongols while kind of glossing over the whole "killed 10% of the planet" thing.
Meanwhile if somebody wrote about the Nazis that way: and emphasized how Hilter ultimately led to the modern UN and propelled technology forwards and led to the modern states of Germany and Japan, it'd be a huge controversy. *Most* of us are far enough removed from the Mongol invasions that we aren't emotionally connected to them, so we can be more clinical about them... but we're not that way with more recent history. And it's going to vary from person-to-person and culture to culture.
Morbid question: Which is the oldest atrocity that still feels emotionally connected to a large group of people? The eldest surviving grudge? I had wrongly thought that Greece v Turkey went back to Troy, but was corrected - that I was conflating several different grievances, separated by millennia.
Until relatively recently (hopefully), some Christian anti-Semites called Jews "Christ-killers". Does that count?
I was thinking in terms of larger events, closer to wars (or, as in the pogroms Mallard cites, massacres).
Hm.
The Koreans still exalt their defeat of the Japanese invasion in the 1590s, but that's probably inflamed because of what the Japanese did in WWII, so that might not count.
The Japanese still celebrate the divine wind ("kamikaze") that stopped the Mongol invasion in the late 1290s, but that's more about preventing a potential atrocity.
Vlad the Impaler was 500 years ago, and children still have nightmares from the legends that spread about his deeds. But that probably fails the "connected to a large group of people" criterion.
Europe had a lot of extraordinarily bloody wars of religion in the 1500s and 1600s, most particularly the 30 Years' War, but also stuff involving Huguenots. But that's mostly faded away over the last century, at least in America. I don't know what it's like in Europe. My rough understanding is that the French "freedom of religion" policy, laicite, is more of a "don't ask don't tell" policy designed to prevent that sort of thing from happening again.
Deiseach might be able to tell you more about the horrible stuff the English have done to the Irish since 1169, but as far as I'm aware, most of what gets people angry these days only goes back over the last 200 years?
Attila the Hun, the "Scourge of God", was active in the first half of the 400s, but as late as WWI the British called the Germans "the Huns", and in the 1800s Verdi wrote an opera about him.
Many Thanks!
Some Jews still feel a visceral horror associated with Ukraine not only because Ukrainians collaborated enthusiastically with the Nazis in their genocide of the Jews, such as at the Babi Yar ravine, where tens of thousands of Jews were killed over two days: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Babi_Yar, and not only because the Ukrainians were the main perpetrators of the pogroms that killed hundreds of thousands of Jews after the fall of the Russian Empire: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pogroms_during_the_Russian_Civil_War, but also, because of the earlier massacres in 1648-9 that probably "only" killed tens of thousands of Jews: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Khmelnytsky_Uprising#Jews, but which are often remembered with even more horror than the 20th century pogroms, and the perception that they killed hundreds of thousands, perhaps because the Ukrainians very suddenly killed such a large percentage - around half - of the Jewish population there. Like a child's scar that grows with age, the memory of the 17th century Ukrainian Jewish genocide in some ways eclipsed the actual event, and even the later Ukrainian Jewish genocide.
I think the pogroms after the fall of the Russian Empire may have been the bloodiest for Jews before the Holocaust since the massacres after Siege of Jerusalem 1900 years earlier: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Siege_of_Jerusalem_(70_CE)#Deaths,_enslavement_and_displacement which may have killed hundreds of thousands (Josephus says 1.1 million killed, 97,000 enslaved) and the massacre of the Judean populace after the Bar Kokhba revolt 1800 years earlier which probably killed at least the better part of a million people: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bar_Kokhba_revolt#Casualties_and_widespread_destruction.
Those catastrophes also remain emotionally relevant to many Jews, but I suspect that that is mostly because they - particularly the Siege of Jerusalem / destruction of the Temple - are inexorably associated with the subsequent exile from Israel (this association is somewhat ahistorical, as first of all, the end of Jewish life in Judea was more a result of the aforementioned post-Bar Kokhba massacre, and second of all, because Jewish life in Israel was far from eliminated even after the revolt, mostly moving north from Judea to the Galilee, and surviving there for another century, and to a lesser extent, later) and later oppressions and genocides of diaspora Jews.
Thus, this latter example may itself be an example, to some extent, of the conflation of grievances separated by (almost) millenia.
Many Thanks! That is certainly a grisly and extended history.
My pleasure!
Is the Khmelnytsky Uprising something stories about which actually get handed down in families, or is the memory (or "memory" of it) just a product of Jewish Literacy books/the Israeli school system/some bad play by Elie Wiesel/etc.?
A combination of the two, I think. [Notably, the query was about "the oldest atrocity that still feels emotionally connected to a large group of people" and that didn't specify that the transmission of the event had to be exclusively oral.]
Literary works can shape how an event is remembered, with the event remaining emotionally resonant.
If I had to guess, I'd imagine that had survivors of those massacres and their contemporaries not discussed the events in writing, then by now, they would be vaguely remembered like other historical events, but would lack emotional resonance.
But the centuries of literary references cemented the event's place in the collective consciousnesses of "a large group of people."
As far as my general claim that the Khmelnytsky genocide "still feels emotionally connected to a large group of people," Wikipedia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bohdan_Khmelnytsky#Jewish_history) corroborates that, citing a historian who states:
>Between 1648 and 1656, tens of thousands of Jews—given the lack of reliable data, it is impossible to establish more accurate figures—were killed by the rebels, and to this day the Khmelnytsky uprising is considered by Jews to be one of the most traumatic events in their history.
Well, I doubt that wins the contest, as the Spanish conquest still feels emotionally resonant to lots of people in Perú and México - and it's not just an outcome of history class at school, or public discourse: there is folk poetry in Quechua recorded in the 19th and early 20th centuries about the last Inca king, there's the myth of the Inkarri, and so forth.
I've never heard of similar folk material on the Khmelnytsky massacres. Does it not exist? Furthermore: one might say they remained in Polish cultural consciousness due to popular 19th literary works; is there nothing of the sort in Yiddish literature, say, and, if it exists, did it have a comparable reach? Otherwise I'm a bit skeptical - it may be an atrocity that was made to "resonate" in the 20th century, for political reasons.
I don’t feel it is the passage of time. I find it just as potentially unpleasant to read stuff like this about people hundreds of years ago as right now. I think it depends partly on how the book is written.
It's in the eye of the beholder. The afghan adventures of Lord Miles, or the reports of Talibans despairing as they have to do office work and spreadsheets is fun if you want them to be, and they're from last year. The insane lifestyle of Gaddafi, setting up a huge tente on the lawn of western government buildings, having an all-female amazon honor guard, etc, is hilarious. And so is his gruesome end, if you're callous enough to laugh at shovel mis-use (I know I am).
And the politicians in democracies? Trump? The libertarian in Argentina? France's most hardcore far-right candidate in 20 years being a berber jew? Shinzo Abe assasinated with a handcrafted weapon that looks like it comes from a post-apo game? That's all great comedy.
Everything is as fun as you want it to be. Or as much as you can let it be.
I will listen to this. Pellow's story has been on my list of things to learn more about for several years. (Also, good question, which I'm now pondering too)
I can recommend this episode if anyone is on the fence, one of the better ones of an already very enjoyable podcast.
About empathising with historical people, I'm in my twenties and have noticed the tragic elements of WW2 aren't as sanctified or as salient for the typical person my age as it is to older people, and even amongst them the tragedies of the Eastern Front are neglected compared the parts of the war Britain was involved in. Then again the moral aspects of the transatlantic slave trade and colonialism have risen in salience over the last couple of decades despite being even further removed in time.
Personally I'd say the 18th century is well past the point of concern.
I guess ultimately if you want to commit an atrocity, do it a long time ago and maybe spread a rumour you were wearing a funny hat.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uJqEKYbh-LU&ab_channel=DavidMitchell%27sSoapbox
The farther we are from someone in space and time, the harder it is to conceive of them as persons in the same way we experience the people around us.
If the child down the street dies, you might feel terrible. It might ruin your week and you might feel echoes of the occurrence for a long time. But if your own child were to die, the pain would be orders of magnitude worse and could send your entire life into a spiral. Conversely, if you hear about a child dying from war or natural disaster on the other side of the world, you might feel bad but on a fairly abstract way.
I think we have something approximating concentric circles of caring. The closer other people are, the more real their lives are. People from the distant past are way out in orbit.
I think that’s right. I suppose the other way we feel close is if there are continuing effects. The can understand even an event as long ago as the fall of Constantinople being upsetting to Greeks give the miseries that followed not least the population exchanges (ethnic cleansing?) of the early 20th century.
Anyway I thoroughly enjoyed hearing about Moulay Ismail, horror though he was!
The perception of continuing effects seems highly salient. An example, my native country underwent a brutal suppression by William the Conquerer known as the Harrowing of the North. It was, by all accounts, as cruel and immiserating as any colonial invasion undertaken outside of Europe. Nobody cares, because we obviously went on to amass great influence and wealth. It is simply not considered an injustice, even though it obviously was.
I shared this last time in an open thread comment, we received quite a few positive emails back. Sharing it again (for the last time? don't want to be spammy)
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It's free but would love feedback as we're developing the MVP.
Curious -- how are you collecting data from Linkedin? They are notoriously hard on bots & scraping.
We are part on the Microsoft for Startups programme and we are careful to stay within the terms of use policy.
The key difference between us and some of the other businesses out there is that Visible is built for people to see themselves, not for businesses to spy on people.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but the sequence to get to Yud's ~60-80% chance (actually >90%)³ of AI extinction by the end of the century appears to be as follows:
1. There will be no AI warning shots
2. Even if there are warning shots, we won't be able to develop controls because humans
3. Even if we do develop controls, the warning shots aren't going to be sufficiently representative, by definition, of PCMs (paperclip maximizers)
4. The technological path to ASI continues unabated
5. A PCM emerges
#1-4 have reasonable priors (as do their complements, although not as compelling¹)
But #5 doesn't. There is no experimental evidence for PCMs, and if they're defined so as to be disconnected from weak AIs, then we won't get any of that evidence. When I go through the arguments for PCMs, I concede that I can't find a logical reason for why they wouldn't emerge.² But if I step back, I realize that any confidence in PCMs should remain theoretical, for now.
Shouldn't we assign <<50% to #5 on priors by virtue of this argument alone?
UPDATE: added note 3
---
[1]: Interestingly, the complement is a polar opposite story, one that requires some anthropic-y reasoning. For example, the majority of my <<5% estimate comes from the fact that we've survived atomic self-annihilation. But you can reach the opposite conclusion if you put Occam's razor in the hands of a Rationalist, who would likely say that our survival has been due to luck.
[2]: https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/open-thread-299/comment/42326398
[3]: Per comments below, and indirectly cited by Scott: "Eliezer Yudkowsky seems to think >90%" https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/why-i-am-not-as-much-of-a-doomer
Point of protocol, what are the accepted ways of referring to Eliezer Yudkowsky? (Asking because I find "Yud" somewhat grating, but it's plausible that the unsavory echoes I hear in it are the product of my non-English linguistic background, and not only not intended but also not commonly heard.)
I consider "Yud" to be ugly-sounding, and I'm a native English speaker.
"Eliezer" is shorter than his full name-- perhaps convenient enough.
Fair point. I probably tend to use the most concise term that is comprehensible to regular readers of these Open Threads. I call Scott Scott, for example, and thus Eliezer, Yud. So, probably Eliezer, then. :-)
He didn't say 60-80% though. He didn't say any probability figure in fact, which has annoyed some folks as it seems evasively vague in a context of people seemingly all-too excited to share and debate their own "p(doom)s"; he's just deathly worried about the lack of traction (by his lights) relative to the scale of the potential downside.
Where'd you get the 60-80%?
He's trying to play all angles on the prediction, so that he can't be called out as wrong at any point.
He's pretty much said that the chances are extremely high, giving the impression (but not certainty) that he might be above 90% on p(doom), but has also been very cagey on the dates. I would be more surprised that he said by the end of the century, as he *implies* we're talking less than ten years, maybe less than five.
I find zero value in predictions set to take place after we're all dead. 77 years from now might as well be never, in terms of predictions at the moment.
Lack of experimental evidence is not an argument against a scenario where if you get experimental evidence you're dead. Theoretical confidence can be pretty strong too. Which of course doesn't mean your confidence in this specific argument/scenario should be strong, only that evaluating it does require engaging with it at the gears level.
Circling back here, if that's okay. (I just learned what gears-level means). Is it necessary to engage the PCM argument at the gears level in order to win the debate? For example, we wouldn't agree with someone who said I can't convince them that religion doesn't exist because I hadn't read the New Testament.
I agree that some forecasts can only be grounded in gears-level understanding. But don't we just call this the inside view? And even in the case of gears-based forecasts, the gears should be grounded in some experimental data. So, for example, arguments around whether or not atmospheric ignition would ensue at the Trinity Test were grounded in theories of physics, not experiments. But those theories themselves were still grounded in experimental evidence, such as the ability for gases to ignite.
I don't know what, if any, experimental data the PCM argument rests on. If anything, the PCM argument appears to be designed such that it can't depend on any experiments we can do before.
Eliezer seems to be violating his own sequences, such as Burdensome Details and Make Beliefs Pay Rent.
Yes gears level is roughly the same as the inside view.
No you shouldn't need to read a specific holy text to argue the general case for or against religion. Although if a particular adherent tells you they're aware of your general argument and they don't think it applies to their specific case then you should at least update ever so slightly in their favour if you're not going to engage with the gears (and conversely should expect some people not to engage with your inexistence argument).
I would, however, argue that you should have some gears knowledge of at least a couple of religions if you're going to make that argument. Generally, if you dismiss a class of arguments without engaging with any specific one, then you risk arguing only with strawmen. (Note dangers of inoculation in choices here too.)
Eliezer's stuff is not detached from experimental reality. It is just hard to test because it focuses on stuff that doesn't exist yet. But it is something people are actively trying to build and it seems significant that the toy models he uses are not that easy to dismiss even when they're not knock-down blows.
Good points. Thanks. I've been doing my own search, but I haven't yet encountered these experimental models. I'm aware of the basics of the orthogonality thesis and instrumental convergence. As far as I can see, they're still theoretical.
As you have pointed out, being theoretical doesn't mean being divorced from empirical reality. I don't want to overstate the case here, they are definitely theoretical. But when lots of classes of toy models share a property and it's hard to build a toy model that doesn't, then it's at least a little concerning
That's a good point, thanks
Could you point me to where Eliezer said 60-80%? I was under the impression he was significantly more pessimistic than that.
You're right, it's more than that, and he doesn't state so directly. Here's the indirect citation: "Eliezer Yudkowsky seems to think >90%" https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/why-i-am-not-as-much-of-a-doomer which references the same link from magic9mushroom below.
Yes, it's basically 100% for him, isn't it? It's so bad that there's not even any point in trying to stop it because that won't work either?
No; his notorious "Death with Dignity" post (https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/j9Q8bRmwCgXRYAgcJ/miri-announces-new-death-with-dignity-strategy) quite specifically makes the case "if we cannot stop AI Doom, we can at least die an honourable death *trying* to stop it". Then he wrote that TIME article arguing for Butlerian Jihad, which certainly seems in accord with that idea. He does not want to vanish without a fight.
But yes, that post implies P(Doom|Yudkowsky right) = 1 - epsilon.
Like I said, "not any point" - I don't think a pointless valiant death counts.
I think Yudkowsky believes a PCM is the default outcome if you take any sufficiently-powerful optimisation engine and point it at all but a very very narrow subset of possible goals (and we don't know how to specify that subset). The argument is mostly theoretical, based on (a) the size of the space of possible minds, (b) the orthogonality thesis, and (c) the difficulty of specifying vague goals like "human flourishing" so they can't be misinterpreted in horribly wrong ways. But the "PCM by default" claim matches the behaviour of pre-DNN AI paradigms like genetic algorithms very well - I've worked with GAs, and they will indeed exploit any loophole in your specification given the slightest chance. This is the context for Quintin Pope's recent post (https://twitter.com/QuintinPope5/status/1709363036849618983), in which he argues that when it comes to DNNs all three points of this argument are false:
- NN training does not sample uniformly from the space of possible minds (that match the input data), but rather from the space of possible *parameters*, and when mapped to mind-space this forms a much smaller and more tractable set,
- Everything about DNNs depends on the data they're fed, falsifying the orthogonality thesis (he doesn't say this explicitly, but I think it's what he means),
- DNN training tends to produce ensembles of simple, fast rules. This (he claims) means the set of likely DNN-based intelligences is less likely to contain deceptive mesaoptimisers than a randomly-picked element of mindspace, and so precisely specifying the goal is less important.
I'm least convinced by point 3, to be honest: humans are certainly capable of being deceptive.
Thanks. Your comment reminds me of the concept that sci-fi always says more about the present than the future. Is the interpretation here that these doom scenarios were founded in a more mesa-optimizing pre-DNN world, and that the dumber, "embarassingly parallel" GPU world is where we're at now?
Also, I'm curious if you'd consider the term "proxy optimizer" as an alternative to "mesa-optimization." I refreshed myself on mesa-optimization via Scott's post, but it strikes me as jargon creep:
https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/deceptively-aligned-mesa-optimizers
> Is the interpretation here that these doom scenarios were founded in a more mesa-optimizing pre-DNN world, and that the dumber, "embarrassingly parallel" GPU world is where we're at now?
Pretty much, yes. Which does not mean that the doom arguments no longer apply at all - some of them are very general - but intuitions formed under the old paradigms should be treated with more suspicion.
> Also, I'm curious if you'd consider the term "proxy optimizer" as an alternative to "mesa-optimization."
I'm not a huge fan of "mesa-optimiser", but it is at least unambiguous: "proxy optimiser" could mean several things.
The classic doom, foom doom, argument involves an agentive Ai that quickly becomes powerful through recursive self improvement and has a value/goal system that is unfriendly and incorrigible (ie there's an assumption that we only have one chance to get goals that are good enough for a superintellgience, because the seed Ai will foom into an ASI , retaining its goals, and goals that are good enough for a dumber AI may be dangerous in a smarter one). It's not all that applicable to LLMs, which aren't very agentive.
Sure, though Gwern's essay "Why Tool AIs Want to Be Agent AIs" (https://gwern.net/tool-ai) applies - there are plenty of projects trying to build agent-like behaviour on top of LLMs (often in horrifyingly insecure ways).
Usual disclaimer: I'm not arguing against all forms of AI unsafety, but against the claim of mass extinction with high probability.
I agree with this. All AGI alarmist arguments begin with the assumption that there is a continuous path from ”90 on mnist ” to ”AGI.” They never argue for why this is, because doing so would force them to operationalize the term ”intelligence,” and then the discussion becomes the boring work of the engineer rather than fun armchair philosophy.
I don't see where you get this at all. The path from "90 on MNIST" to AGI doesn't need to be continuous or straightforward; for AGI to be concerning, there only needs to be *some* path from our current tech level to AGI and for people to be willing to research it (which they are currently doing, eagerly). And I'm pretty sure Yudkowsky has repeatedly said that he considers "intelligence" to mean something like "optimisation power" - not sufficiently operationalised to go out and build an AGI, sure, but enough that you can then start to think about things like the orthogonality thesis.
EDIT: I agree with your broader point that Yudkowsky et al rely too much on armchair reasoning, but I think it's much more detailed armchair reasoning than you give them credit for!
> The path from "90 on MNIST" to AGI doesn't need to be continuous or straightforward
It does if you intend to use some growth curve to make predictions about the timeline - which all these guys are doing.
To your main point, yeah, I was being a shade uncharitable - Yudkowsky is a lot better than eg Bostrom at defining his terms. There is detail in these guys’ arguments, but it is distributed all wrong. If you want to convince me to worry about AGI and spend tax dollars and our leaders’ political capital on it, you can’t do any hand waving when you’re articulating the problem. More detail needs to go into the massive chasm between current systems and cross-domain optimization (again, not a bad starting point for a definition, but not sufficiently operationalized to convince me).
> It does if you intend to use some growth curve to make predictions about the timeline - which all these guys are doing.
Yeah, fair, all that stuff is very shaky.
> More detail needs to go into the massive chasm between current systems and cross-domain optimization
I think a lot of this arises because Yudkowsky started raising the alarm *before* deep learning, when optimisation was a bigger paradigm in AI research - I've actually become less worried about AGI x-risk since the rise of deep learning and LLMs, because current AI systems are such a poor match to the x-risk scenarios. But I think there's a broader point that's sound: that creating an artificial superintelligence would by default be dangerous unless we manage to solve a hard-seeming technical problem which we currently don't even know how to specify. Personally, I'm on Team "let's try not to create an artificial superintelligence": fortunately (as you say!), we don't currently seem to be on track to get there any time soon.
I'm sorry for your loss, Lars.
Thank you. Hard days ahead.
Agree. May your loved one rest in peace.
See http://unsongbook.com/interlude-%D7%92-cantors-and-singers/
Yeah, but no one sees Jesus as a paragon of rationality: he literally got mistaken for a demon-possessed lunatic! He was a very passionate guy, and he just told you what's true, with no argumentation.
I await Robin Hanson's inevitable post about how kidney donation is obviously just signalling because you could save more lives by selling your kidney and spending the proceeds well.
EA's have this robotic quality. If everyone in the world was an EA, but you were, say, a benevolent alien, would you want to donate something to save the EA's? My motivation to donate to save strangers grows out of the feeling that they, like me, have people and things they love and they want to have more time to enjoy. I don't see the EAs having people and things they love -- or, maybe they do, but they ruthlessly disregard any preferences based on personal affection, and follow the algorithm. The hard core EA life doesn't really sound like a life worth living to me.
Well, EAs will save lots of other people, presumably? Although I might have just created an EA Maximizer.
Selling kidneys is illegal. Otherwise there'd be no need to donate.