(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:
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: