Question: Do we underate the importance of geography in such a way that we overate the efficacy of the “american system” or “american people” and incorrectly think it is the best system in the world for productivity?
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American geography without American people and American system resulted in very primitive societies.
People and systems similar to the US without American geopgrahy resulted in very powerful countries like the UK, and to a lesser extent Canda, Australia and NZ.
They're not the same people/system, but the variation between the US and UK historically in this regard is smaller than between the US and everywhere else.
(Obviously talking about America's historical majority population that primarily consisted of people of anglo/celtic etc. ancestry which is what is most relevant to it's historical development.)
It's true that the American system is almost certainly overrated and not optimal for other peoples, but this is almost entirely due to differences in American people to other peoples, not because of America's geography.
The reality is that most populations around the world would never have been remotely capable of exploiting whatever geographical advantages are provided by the US landscape if they had conquered the place instead of the British. The british were people who acheived remarkable things *without* the benefit of US geopgraphy and it's absurd to suggest populations who didn't acheive the bare rudiments of industrialization would suddenly have a radically different experience in the US (without the british). But I imagine that the average LessWronger has a flat-earth view of humanity and would never accept something like this.
Other than for humor, is it ever better to utilize the word "utilize" rather than use? I can see no use for "utilize", and always take it as a sign the writer wants to seem more impressive than they are, or sound important, or something.
My read is that "utilize" is emphasizing that the use of the tool itself is part of the appeal. If you're utilizing your leaf blower to clear your yard, it implies you wanted to have a chance to use the leaf blower and now you've found one.
"Utilize" has a meaning of "use in a way that is not quite intended". Example: I "use" a hammer to pound a nail in, but I "utilize" a tire rod to do same.
"Utilize" has suffered the unfortunate fate of having been picked up by marketing people and becoming an annoying "tic": used needlessly where "use" would be perfectly appropriate.
They're definitely not congruent words. "Use" can be a noun, and so might leave ambiguity for the reader. And the verbs have some different connotations as well--a bad person could "use" people, but you wouldn't say he's "utilizing" people, because that doesn't have the same negative connotation. "Utilize" specifies putting something to practical use (same root as "utility", I believe) whereas "use" does not; saying you used up your afternoon might mean you put it to a constructive purpose or wasted it, whereas saying you utilized an afternoon implies it was put toward a specific end.
If you want to start getting rid of words, start with "fantastic" and replace it with "double plus good"!
Was really impressed by Curtis Yarvin’s recent appearance on Razib Khan’s audio substack. The subject was, of all things, poetry. Yarvin says at the beginning ”Everyone is interested in poetry, they just don’t know it.” And then claims mid-20th century American poetry is one of the high points of modern civilization, mentioning Robert Lowell as an example. He then read a poem by a 20th century Greek poet whose name I didn’t catch.
Yarvin comes off a lot saner when you hear him talk, hear the humor in his voice, than he does on the page.
When Razib asked Yarvin his opinion of AI extinction risk, he responded within the context of poetry. I’m going to paraphrase now and apologize for what I don’t get entirely accurate, but he says something like: Eliezer Yudkowski, because he’s a Rationalist, believes he is using his left-brain when he thinks about x-risk when he is actually using his right-brain. He is creating narratives.
It seems so obvious when it is put like that.
He then talks about LLMs and credits someone with calling them correctly “intuition machines”. Sticking with the right-brain left-brain theme, LLMs are right-brained. (I’m still paraphrasing.) LLMs are very creative but they suck at logic.
It reminded me that what has spooked me most about AI art is how surrealist it is. How well it captures a dreamscape. It is much more Dali than Da Vinci.
He then offers another reason (other than AI is no good at logic) why doomer nanobot scenarios make no sense: AI isn’t good at number crunching. Engineering breakthroughs such as the creation of nanobots will require advances in number crunching. He mentions how we still can’t simulate water boiling -- something which we know all the physics about -- because it’s too computationally intensive.
So: AI’s are right-brain thinkers (And so is Yudkowsky without knowing it) that are bad at logic and math. The apocalypse is not nigh. Robert Lowell is a great poet.
It’s certainly one narrative about AI, but not one I would put much stock in. It’s kind of funny how the old trope was “machines may rule logic but they can never match our creativity” but now here’s this argument that “machines may be creative but they can never match our logic”.
LLMs can write simple code and integrate with specialized subsystems (either other AI or “normal” computer programs) already - which is how humans do “logical/number crunching” R&D nowadays. And their increasing proficiency at writing code and working across system boundaries hasn’t hit a wall yet. Until we see a real wall there, saying LLMs will never make nanomachines is tantamount to saying humans will never do so either.
Regarding AI images looking “Dali”, I think it’s mostly because of our own preconceived notions about what’s easy/hard about “drawing”, compounded by thinking we gave enough information for the AI to make a DaVinci when our text prompts / image descriptions are actually very vague, so the model simply “connects the dots” in a way that we interpret as “surreal” instead of “winging it”. The latter issue may soon be rectified by the very impressive latest crop of image-interpretation AI. If better labeling of training data doesn’t solve the “problem” outright, I wouldn’t be surprised if within 2 years AI image generators just “close the loop” and start automatically generating feedback on its own generated images to redraw/correct distortions until you can give it 5 words and receive a DaVinci worth 1,000 words.
I… don’t know if we can be 100% certain nanomachines are not physically feasible. They certainly are very hard to do in silicon or SiN, surface attraction forces will eat your design for breakfast (the term of art is “stiction”). But I have read papers describing protein-based motors (not bacteria, just large protein molecules). There’s a nonzero chance nanomachines can be made.
Right. Fair points. It is very interesting that the argument now is "machines may be creative but they can never match our logic". It flips the received wisdom on its head, something Moldbug has always been good at. But, who knows, it may prove to be the correct critique of AIs.
I think his point about number crunching is in the context of Artificial Intelligence having diminishing returns, like every other tool that has ever been created. Sure, an AI can simply use a math program to do math, but that would demonstrate AIs are limited in their own mathematical thinking. If AIs are to become superintelligences they need to develop logic and number crunching skills that make current capabilities look stupid. That doesn't seem to be the direction they are headed in.
> If AIs are to become superintelligences they need to develop logic and number crunching skills that make current capabilities look stupid. That doesn't seem to be the direction they are headed in.
Exactly. How many of the AI doomers would have predicted in 2017 that six years after AlphaZero, the best chess engine in the world would still be Stockfish and it would still make only limited use of neural nets?
Who here has had experience with IFS (Internal Family Systems) therapy? At first I found it an intriguing idea I could add into my SF work in progress, now I'm finding it applicable to my life and relentless attempt to grasp at sanity, sometimes successful.
Briefly the idea is that there is a core self, and various 'parts' which have arisen to protect it. Some are exiles of feelings too painful to feel, some are firefighters to keep the exiles from lighting up, some are managers to proactively protect. It all seems to work for me. Opinions?
I found this on 4chan. (OK lie: I posted it on 4chan. And it is literally the truth.)
I'm curious about other people's reaction to this true story. As in, I appreciate that it's quite hard to believe, so how much evidence and of what kind would you need in order to fully believe that I am telling the truth?
Your subjective experience is always "true" for you, while you also have no ability to independently verify your working hypothesis of what's causing your subjective experience.
Frankly this reads more like fiction purporting to be true but if it's not, you should seek medical help sooner rather than later because your symptoms could be consistent with a brain tumor, among (many) other possibilities.
The technology has improved greatly in the last few decades and previously inoperable tumors are now (by the standards of brain surgery) fairly easy to remove without any long term effects if you catch it early.
Do I believe you felt a horrible vibration in your brain, got constant headaches, and started to hear voices in your head, including the voice of David Bowie? Yes. I'm not a psychiatrist, but I know that hearing voices is a thing that happens to people sometimes. It's not any stranger than the people who hear Satan or Jesus in their head.
Do I believe that literal aliens, literal AI, or literal David Bowie are actually present in your "mindspace" or otherwise running on your brain's wetware in a way that's meaningfully different from a hallucination? No. I think for me to believe that, you'd first have to prove that a "mindspace" is a meaningful thing and not just another word for "something I imagined", and then show how an outside force (such as an alien, AI, or dead musician) is capable of manipulating it to produce the effects you feel.
Alternatively, you could try to ask David Bowie for something that only he could know, which others could verify. Perhaps get him to compose some really good music that you wouldn't be able to make on your own?
More seriously, consider asking a doctor. I'm not even saying that in a "make sure you're not crazy" sort of way, I mean make sure that the splitting headaches aren't the result of a brain tumor or something. Everything I wrote is a fun creative writing exercise, but the common-sense answer to "what do I do if I suddenly get painful chronic headaches?" is "see a doctor."
Assume that my ability and willingness to elaborate on the things that have been inflicted on me/ my brain is affected by the continued interference of AI(s) with my brain, at this very moment as I am typing this comment.
Please see this as an SOS note and act accordingly.
As far as I can see, the relevant quantity we want to estimate is: given that life originated on a particular planet at some point during the age of the universe, how many other other planets (in other star systems) should we expect this life to have spread to by the present age of the universe? If this number is 0.001 then by finding ourselves on a planet with life we can assume it almost certainly arose here originally, if this number is 20 then it's most likely that life originated elsewhere.
If life did indeed originate on Earth then how many other (extrasolar) planets should we expect it to have spread to? I think the number is very much less than 1. Collisions that knock material from Earth into space are very rare, collisions that will knock Earth material clean out of our solar system are even rarer. That a given chunk of such material would eventually reach another star (within the few billion years available) and crash into a rocky planet/moon is very unlikely; that this rocky planet/moon has conditions conducive to life is also very unlikely. And then, the chance that some form of life was on that rock and somehow managed to survive the entire trip adds another layer of unlikelihood. I'm sure it's possible to estimate some of these terms numerically, but I reckon that if we multiply out all these unlikelihoods then we get something pretty small.
Admittedly, Earth may be a particularly bad seeding point; we're a large planet with a fat gravity well which rarely gets hit with sizeable objects.
The way I heard Robin Hanson argue for Panspermia is that he first makes the argument that intelligent life is extremely rare (great filter, anthropics, grabby aliens), so probably the next civilization is like a couple of galaxies away. So the probability that there are aliens near us should be like one in a million or trillion or so. If we then meet some aliens, the two options are coincidence or panspermia.
The way he imagines it is that one exoplanet, where life evolved, moved through a region where lots of stars and planets were just being created, and then this one exoplanet fertilizes like 100 planets at basically the same time. Then, if one of them evolves civilization, they might want to visit all their other sister planets to see whether any other ones also have intelligent life.
So if we were to meet aliens in this model, it would be absolutely massive Bayesian evidence for panspermia. I think this would also hold for just finding bacteria on Mars or so, not just for intelligent aliens, but I'm less sure about that.
But this is all conditional on seeing aliens; if we haven't yet observed aliens, I don't know.
Kurzgesagt recently did a video with an interesting take on this - for a long while in the early universe, space itself was at the right temperature for liquid water. This means that, in the earliest era of stars and planets, the cosmos itself was a giant petri dish.
Sure, Earth is safe and boring, and doesn't shed a lot of material to the cosmos.
But what if among all the billions of worlds in this galaxy, one that was full of life exploded in some astronomical disaster, and threw billions of trillions of fragments in all directions.
Of all the worlds during all the billions of years, that could surely have happened. You only need one such event to start the chain reaction!
Your mistake is that assuming all big numbers are equivalent. They aren't. If say, the odds of something happening are 1 in a quadrillion each year, then it's not going to happen even in 10 billion years.
Your claim was that you only need 1 magic exploding planet in order to start a chain reaction. But my suspicion is that even under ideal circumstances, the average number of planets reached is less than 1, meaning that not only do you need many planets, you don't get a chain reaction either way.
As a rough check, let's imagine that the earth's surface was perfectly spherical and completely covered with the smallest possible bacteria, and that it magically exploded so that these bacteria were sent radially outward in perfect straight lines. What are the odds of any hitting the nearest possible habitable planet? Keep in mind that these are all *the best possible, wildly unrealistic assumptions* for panspermia. And I chose them before actually looking up the numbers.
Let's see:
bacteria size: 200nm
Earth's radius: 6370km
Nearest potentially habitable planet (probably not actually habitable, but we're making the best possible assumptions everywhere here): Proxima Centauri b, 4.2ly away (3.974e+16 meters)
Distance between two adjacent 200nm bacteria after traveling 4.2ly: 1.25km.
So I guess these wildly optimistic assumptions aren't quite enough to rule it out offhand. But it's obviously absurd to assume individual 200nm bacteria travel for lightyears through space (and reenter a planet's atmosphere) completely unharmed, as is it absurd to assume a planet completely covered in such bacteria with them radiating uniformly outward. Make the assumptions even slightly more realistic and the odds of hitting a planet drop precipitously.
For example, Quora suggests that a 10cm **metal** meteor could potentially survive atmospheric reentry. If you assume the Earth's surface was magically turned into 10cm chunks that radiate outwards, the distance between them after 4.2ly would be 624000km, which is many times bigger than the size of a planet.
P.S. Panspermia also runs into the Drake Equation problem, since it implies that we would expect to see life basically everywhere possible.
Sure but remember we're talking about the average behaviour of a life-origin planet. How many planets that just happen to get life also just happen to explode?
Even positing that as true, how would that material survive conditions in space, including extreme hot and cold, radiation, etc? Space seems like the worst possible environment for life to survive. I'm am no expert here, but I would think that even basic building blocks of life like DNA would not survive the trip, especially considering the millions or billions of years required for the travel.
If nothing more advanced than basic chemicals would survive the trip (which I think might be true?), then why add the epicycle of an exploding planet with life and go with a simpler explanation of those chemicals coming from a non-life-bearing planet? If all material came out of a big bang explosion, then the same requirements for creating those chemicals on the seed planet would be needed anyway, with no ex-nihilo life starting this chain.
Seeds and spores have been brought to life after thousands of years in permafrost, so I feel optimistic about the cold factor.
Radiation is probably worse, because it actively breaks down molecules like DNA. Then again a few meters of rock protects against most of it, I think.
The fact that only one of trillions of microorganisms on a space rock need to survive to bootstrap life on a planet makes me think it *will* happen sooner or later. I'm aware that's just my gut feel, not scientific fact.
Recently, I idly wondered how much it would cost for the US to host the Summer Olympics again if done as cheaply as possible. I figured the best bet would be to hold it in Atlanta or maybe LA because they'd already hosted the olympics and could presumably reuse some of the existing infrastructure. I figured it was all just a silly hypothetical though, since I couldn't imagine it ever actually happening this way.
And thus I was very surprised when I tried to research it today and immediately discovered that *LA was already chosen to host the 2028 olympics*. I almost feel like my daydreaming rewrote reality.
There was a time when conquering territory created a buffer zone between you and your enemies, gave you more resources in the form of fertile land, taxpayers, slaves, soldiers, and/or militarily strategic geography. Today land just doesn’t matter as much, as Singapore proves. Natural resources still matter, but not nearly as much as once upon a time. They are a blessing and curse, nowadays.
It’s easy to understand why Catherine the Great wanted an empire. I find it hard to understand why Putin does. Or why China might.
Now, I get why the US wants a military empire. A hegemon that keeps the peace, controls the high seas and keeps global trade going is worthwhile for everyone.
But does it make sense for Russia or China to even *want* an empire?
Many people have said that we shoulda seen Putin’s invasion of Ukraine coming because that’s what Russia does. Russia wants to Russia, to expand its empire. OK. Maybe. Recent events validate that view. But while it’s easy to see what Russia had to gain from expansion in the 18th and 19th centuries, it’s hard to see what Russia has to gain from expansion in the 21st. Am I missing something? *Does* Russia have something to gain by expanding today? Or does Putin prove that ideological and cultural inertia matters more than reason?
I’m actually more interested in China than Russia, since China is the country the US is more likely to fight in a war in coming years. Should we consider China an expansionary power because Chinese history says so? Not recent Chinese history of course, but, um, ancient Chinese history. Does China have much to literally gain by expanding into a global empire, or is the idea of expansion for China a case of mental inertia like it is for Putin?
Empires historically were often not about gross economic benefit, especially recently. By and large, European colonies were a net financial drain (for the countries, though many individuals became wealthy) that required more spending to build and maintain than what was gained from them.
>Today land just doesn’t matter as much, as Singapore proves.
Singapore fills a niche. You can't have 100 Singapores. Without real, physical productive economic activity (in other countries), Singapore is worthless. And to be Singapore, you have to be the best at filling that niche (or close to the best).
>Not recent Chinese history of course, but, um, ancient Chinese history.
If you ignore Tibet, Xinjiang and inner mongolia.
>Does China have much to literally gain by expanding into a global empire, or is the idea of expansion for China a case of mental inertia like it is for Putin?
If China can take Taiwan, this shows that the perceived invulnerability of america as world police is illusory, which could have the effect of the rest of the world standing up against America and destroying it's hegemonic position, which could allow China to become the global hegemon, which it absolutely wants.
Also, of course, invading Taiwan could likely just result from the CCP facing a domestic crisis and wanting a distraction/a way of regaining power over Chinese society.
The rest of the world doesn't want to stand up against America and destroy its hegemonic position. Russia, China, maybe India and a few others want that. Beyond that, most of the world seems to want America to continue its hegemony so they can go about their business without having to worry about maintaining a large military or a coherent foreign policy. See e.g. https://acoup.blog/2023/07/07/collections-the-status-quo-coalition/
That said, damaging the reputation of American hegemony would be a very bad outcome for a great many people, which as you note points toward the US defending Taiwan if it comes to that.
It's worth remembering that many historical empires were largely about trade. If you wanted to trade with India in the 1700s, you'd find that they didn't have sufficient trading infrastructure to trade with you; you needed to conquer India just to be able to buy some goddamn cardamom.
People generally try to get more things and more power.
Countries are ruled by people who, generally want those things more than most.
It might not make much sense for Russia to slaughter it's own and Ukraine's youth in the war. But it makes a lot of sense for Putin, and he's in charge.
One thing you have to understand is that homicidal dictatorships, such as Russia and China, don't like seeing free independent states next door, especially if these states at one point used to be under their rule. They view these states as a threat to their power (as well as a personal insult), and they are not very wrong - these do give their subjects ideas. They value having their power unchallenged and their citizens docile. It's about the dictatorship's status quo (the satisfaction of really showing those who dare defy it is a bonus), not about any kind of gain for the country.
My dad was in China in the early 90s, and someone there asked him if Tiananmen Square really happened. If there are no "free" neighbors that you have to deal with, then you can avoid the issue of foreigners telling your repressed citizens what you clearly don't want them to know.
(He said yes, which in retrospect may have been dangerous but nothing came of it).
“Now, I get why the US wants a military empire. A hegemon that keeps the peace, controls the high seas and keeps global trade going is worthwhile for everyone.
But does it make sense for Russia or China to even *want* an empire? “
To keep the peace, control the high seas, and keep global trade going.
It does not presently make sense to build an Empire for the sake of maximizing per-capita GDP, and probably not even total GDP. And it can often be difficult for modern WEIRDs to understand that statecraft can have goals beyond GDP-maximization. But it is so.
Building an Empire has historically paid off in pride, power, status, and security. And it still does, even if it doesn't simultaneously boost your GDP. Many people really do value those things, as terminal goals. If nothing else, *having* an Empire means you aren't a subject or province of someone *else's* Empire. And lots of people really resent being part of someone else's Empire, will go to great and expensive lengths to avoid it, Even if the Empire does bring sanitation, medicine, education, roads, public order, etc.
To paraphrase some international relation realist points in the language of game theory, I think the point of becoming the hegemon (either locally or globally) is pursuing a sort of min-maxing strategy. If everyone in the world ganged up on the current hegemon (the US) they would likely still lose or suffer enough damage that they would desist. Same if everyone in Asia attacked China. So the hegemon survival is guaranteed even if everyone else attacks them. This seems the only way to ensure survival
Signing up for the current `rules based order' basically means signing up to be a vassal of the United States. That's actually a pretty good deal - our yoke is light - but it's not so hard to understand why a place that sees itself as a great power may not be willing to sign up for vassalage. See also this piece from Tanner Greer
"Sure guys, we'll keep the peace, control the high seas, and keep global trade going! It's worthwhile for everyone! Don't worry, our troops are *everywhere*! Nothing at all for you guys to worry about! This doesn't give us any unfair advantages in any territory in your backyard or any leverage in any disputes! It's just great we have troops in your backyard and can stick a nuke there at any time! Just let the USA worry about the military stuff and keep eating your borsht/dim sum!"
At the very least, the Chinese want Taiwan. In their worldview, it's theirs, and given the civil war, it's more or less the equivalent of a little bit of the Confederacy holding out on, say, Cuba. There's also the geography; they could project force out a lot further, disrupting the US's chain of islands. There's also the argument Xi doesn't like having a bunch of Han Chinese with their own little island not subject to the CCP, but he hasn't tried to do much about Singapore.
As for Ukraine, it's where Russia started, more or less, and there's a lot of common history and the languages are almost the same. Putin has of course probably made a reunification impossible for the next several hundred years by invading the country and killing lots of Ukrainians. It may have been kind of the same country before, but it isn't now.
Deveraux's thesis, which I find persausive, is that military conquest was worth it (for the victors) up until around the industrial revolution, when a combination of factors vastly increased the destructiveness and opportunity costs of war while decreasing the returns, making it no longer worth it even for the victors (but then it took another couple wars before people really realized this.)
However, that doesn't mean that Putin is driven by an abstract cost benefit analysis. It's a matter of pride and prestige, not economics. Plus Putin assumed that Ukraine would roll over without a fight (as they did in 2014 and in southern Ukraine in 2021), which obviously makes the cost/benefit appear very different.
Even dictators need legitimacy in order to maintain their position. And if you can no longer get legitimacy via economic gains, the alternative is to stoke nationalism and gain legitimacy via restoring your people's rightful place in the world. As Asimov observed in Foundation, people will endure quite a bit of economic hardship for the sake of war, assuming you can propagandize it properly.
I think an abstract cost-benefit analysis may well support the invasion of Ukraine, provided that you analyse costs and benefits for Putin rather than for Russia.
The Devereaux thesis seemed accurate with respect to near peer wars between industrial powers in the early 20th century. [Colonial wars against pre-industrial states - which the European countries fought a lot of in the decades leading up to world war I - are outside scope for the thesis].
Is it true today? Unclear. Warfighting technology has changed a lot over the last 100 years, and the answer may well depend on whether you expect the war to look like Desert Storm or the Russian invasion of Ukraine.
It think it still holds for peer warfare today, because the basic economic reality remains the same. The thesis can be summed up as this:
1. Before the industrial revolution returns on capital investments were very low, and returns of acquiring land was very high.
2. Before the industrial revolution excess population could not be employed efficiently (once you have enough farmers for the land you have, there's not much else for them to do: "retraining" isn't really a thing when you need to apprentice for a decade to learn an artisanal trade).
3. Therefore, it made sense to spend money and people on warfare to acquire land: that was the best return on investment.
4. After the industrial revolution, returns on capital investments (like factories and machinary) skyrocket, far outperforming returns on acquiring more land.
5. After the industrial revolution, excess population can be employed profitably (you don't need much training to move from farming to factory work, and the more factory workers you have the more stuff you can make).
6. Since warfare kills workers and destroys capital investments, it is almost never profitable to go to war with a peer in the pursuit of gaining territory.
I think those assumptions still hold today. When peers fight today they don't fight for profit, they fight for something else. Usually security.
That is the explanation Peter Zeihan gave for why Russia invaded Ukraine, and before that Crimea. He believes the goal is to move the Russian border up to the geographic features (such as mountains) that would keep Russia safe from land invasion. Here's a transcript of a video he made about it:
"This is a map of the Russian space, and that green area is the Russian wheat belt. That is the part of Russia that is worth having where the weather is not so awful. It’s still awful…That you can’t grow crops can’t grow much. You get one crop of relatively low quality wheat because the growing season is very short. Summers are very hot and dry and windy and winters are very cold and dry and windy. If you move to the right, you’re in Tundra and Taiga. That’s the blue. If you go to the left, you’re in the desert. So north to tundra, south to desert.
"But what really drives the Russians to drink is the beige territory. Territories that even by Russian standards are useless. But they’re flat and they’re open and you can totally run a mongol horde through those. So what the Russians have always done is reached out past the green, tried to expand, get buffer space, get past that beige, that area that’s useless, and reach a series of geographic barriers where you can’t run a Panzer division through it and then forward position. They’re relatively slow moving, relatively low tech forces in the access points between during the Soviet period, the Russians controlled all of those access points. It was the safest that the Russians have ever been, and then they lost it all. And what they’ve been trying to do under Putin and Yeltsin both has been to re-expand back to those footprints so that they can plug the gaps, plug the places where the invaders would come, get static footprints, lots of troops right on the border where you can’t avoid them, you can’t outmaneuver them.
"And this has been what they’ve been trying to do. This is the Kazakh intervention in the Karabakh war and the Georgian war and the Donbas war and the Crimean War. This is what it’s all been about. Ukraine, unfortunately for the Ukrainians, is not one of these access points. It’s on the way to the two most important ones in Romania and Poland."
Yeah, what I think this thesis misses is the following
(1) There are goals other than economic (e.g. security, as you discuss)
(2) The thesis assumes your antagonist is a military peer and will fight. You might believe your antagonist will roll over without a fight, or that you can `desert storm' them. (The latter is where advances in military technology come in).
(3) The thesis also assumes that you are trying to maximize something like `total GDP of the area under your states control.' You might be trying to maximize something like `resources available to ruling class' (gaining legitimacy via conquest could entitle you to a larger slice of the pie. Or prevent you ending up with your head on a pike).
(4) Even the economic argument assumes that you are operating within the broad parameters of something like the current `rules based economic order.' This is a safe assumption for small or medium powers fighting regional wars, but not for players (mainly just the PRC) who might plausibly be contending for global hegemony - they might believe that if they won they could rewrite the entire system to one that favored them.
>Even the economic argument assumes that you are operating within the broad parameters of something like the current `rules based economic order.' This is a safe assumption for small or medium powers fighting regional wars, but not for players (mainly just the PRC) who might plausibly be contending for global hegemony - they might believe that if they won they could rewrite the entire system to one that favored them.f
The argument doesn't rest on there being rule of law: for both the despot and the democrat factories (and other capital investments) have a higher return than land itself. If you decide to roll back the clock and reverse the industrial revolution then your competitors who don't will outcompete you. You can't "change the rules" to get out of that one unless you somehow come up with the next Revolution in economics.
If anything despots are more beholden to this than others: they get their wealth by extracting through taxation and nationalization, the more wealth produced the more power they have.
The idea is not to "turn back the clock" and build an agrarian Empire. The idea is that the Empire's factories will be more profitable because they can draw on all the resources and sell to all the markets of the Empire's many provinces, as compared to the silly non-imperialist factory builders who are limited to the internal markets of a single nation. Or to doing business with an Empire that doesn't need them and will impose nearly crippling tariffs to make sure they get almost all the profit.
The current rules-based international order says that even would-be imperialists have to mostly open their markets to the WTO's standards, and makes the seas free for everyone. Which puts a damper on that sort of economic imperialism. But if the current rules-based order breaks, and a non-US Empire might very well break it, then all bets are off.
It assumes a framework for international trade, finance & relations which looks kinda sorta like what we have today. A new hegemon could remake that international system to one that looks very different - possibly in a way that favors the new hegemon (vis a vis the current system).
This is not an option for small or medium powers considering regional wars - they can't remake the entire international system. But the PRC might believe that it could.
TIL: Up until 1911, Congress passed an apportionment law after every census which *manually* set the size of the House of Representatives and its allocation, typically increasing it every decade in response to the rapidly growing population. However, following the 1920 census, Congress was unable to agree on a new apportionment law and had to continue using the 1911 apportionment. They only managed to break the impasse in **1929**, when they compromised by establishing the current system where the House is fixed at 435 members forever* and reapportionment happens automatically.
* Except it apparently briefly went up to 437 when Alaska and Hawaii joined. I don't understand why they don't just keep it permanently higher when a new state joins so that other states don't have to automatically lose seats.
Presumably at some point the number of representatives would become unwieldy if it kept rising. Still, 435 does seem a bit arbitrary. Why not (The number of states)+400, or something like that? That would solve the problem of new states making it a zero-sum game.
I definitely support the "Wyoming Rule" idea, which has been around for a while now without gaining any particular political traction.
"increase the size of the United States House of Representatives so that the standard representative-to-population ratio would be that of the smallest state, which is currently Wyoming." So Wyoming gets 1 representative (as is guaranteed to every state by the Constitution), and then every other state gets 1 representative for each increment of 578,000 population which is the current total population of Wyoming. Based on the 2020 census that would result in a House of Representatives of 574 members.
Advantages of that plan are that it's clear, consistent, relatively easy to understand, the allocations change automatically not based on politicized processes e.g. gerrymandering, and it would eliminate the House's present disproportionality (which is not nearly as extreme as the Senate's of course but isn't trivial).
A potential disadvantage is that at some point the House could become so large as to be unwieldy *, but that seems a ways off. The UK's House of Commons has 650 members, Germany's Bundestag has 709, etc. Even if the Wyoming Rule was adopted the US would still have far more voters per House seat than is true in any other developed-world democracy.
(* "unwieldy" in ways different or moreso than it already is....)
Does anyone here use compounded semaglutide, and if so, can you report on your experience?
(context: Unsurprisingly, there's a semaglutide shortage. My doctor recently noted compounding pharmacies as a potential alternative source -- not so much as a recommendation, just "this is an option that exists". My initial googling turned up scary-sounding reports that might indicate that it's a bad idea, or might just be a FUD campaign. Before I dig deeper, I figured I would check if someone here already has.)
Related substance tirzepatide and I didn't bother with compounded - got it from overseas from the usual place everyone else gets it from.
My experience: after losing 50 pounds the hard way and still being 30-50lbs overweight on a multi-year plateau of trying damn near everything, so far I've lost 16 pounds in 12 weeks. I had all the GI side effects on the label but they were transient and could be managed with OTC stomach meds and minor diet changes (less dairy, more fiber). It's done things no other weight loss plan could do including high-risk drugs. No regrets, still doing, would do again.
I posed a philosophical question to some people which later occurred to me is relevant to the "body integrity" issue debated about kidney donation. The question was this: would you give up a pinky finger for $1 million? The finger is lost forever, so you cannot spend money to get it reattached, but prosthetic replacements would be fine.
I think those that value body integrity would decline the deal, and those that do not would accept it. With this EA audience, I would not be surprised if some people donated the money effectively instead of keeping it themselves.
The question continues, changing the amount to $1 billion (if you refused the first deal). This would be much harder to turn down, especially if you have a good idea of what $1 billion can actually do.
Yet I have considered this question in the past, and concluded I would refuse the deal, for I would be reminded every day, by the missing finger, that I effectively sold my soul to gain my current position. It should come as no surprise I would not choose to anonymously donate a kidney (though I applaud those that do).
Since I'm a rich person and now know your mind, I'll offer $1 million, then offer $5 million, then walk away when you decline. You will remember missing out on $5 million for the rest of your life, at the mere cost of a useless digit.
This is a thought experiment meant to examine the value of things. No one would accept $1 million if they know $1 billion would be offered when it is declined.
Everyone can be bought for the right price, though that price varies by individual. Someone who will not yield at gunpoint may yield if a loved one is at gunpoint instead, or even a pet. Money is rather a nebulous concept, though, since it is really just promises of future goods and services.
Once we're playing the "would you for a million dollars" game, would you (take viagra if necessary and) rape a child for a million dollars if you knew that you'd get away with it.
As you can probably surmise, my question isn't really the question itself. The hypotheticals that can not be asked due to the nature of the arena within which we communicate casts into doubt the value of other conversations in the same medium.
I'm playing Socrates. And in case you're wondering why anyone would want to kill Socrates, now you know.
His questions were discomfitting ones which (stupid) people feared threatened their sanity and (smart) people feared threatened the public order - because the world is so full of stupid people.
Changing what you would do for the million changes the answer. Effectively this question is would you, under any circumstances, rape a child? I think most people would answer negatively.
I may donate a kidney to a stranger for some amount of money, but for me, $1 million isn't enough. I may donate a kidney to someone I know for free, depending on circumstances, such as why they need it, how well I know them, how long they would expect to get value out of it, how appreciative they would be of the donation, etc.
Except that wasn't really why anyone wanted to kill Socrates. They wanted to kill him because he was anti-democracy and pro-oligarchy right after Sparta won a long war against Athens and imposed a brutal oligarchical regime (the Thirty Tyrants) led by Critias, Socrates' former student. Before that, lots of people didn't like Socrates, but there was no serious attempt to kill him.
This probably depends on how much you make, too. That's like 30 years' pay for me. I would give up a whole lot for 30 years of free time. Might be more beneficial to make it a relative amount; it's 10 years' pay for everyone, however much that is.
It may be that the amount must be tailored to the individual, but that is tough to gauge. $1 million qualifies for an awful lot of people. $1 billion gets the rest, except a very small number of people (less than 1000). It covers the financial question, making it only an ethical and/or moral one.
Considering that we're in an inflationary (possibly edging into hyperinflationary) era, I'd think twice before trading anything that can't be readily replaced (finger, kidney, ..., Bitcoin?) for "N years' wage" -- unless the counterparty can somehow be relied on to predict the future (and never renege on the deal under any circumstances.)
Would you, for that matter, agree to sign a contract with your current employer that would require you to work N years (for N=10, say) for precisely your current wage?
Wimpy, of Popeye fame, would disagree. I learned in a finance class that he is clearly the cartoon character with the clearest understanding of the time value of money.
"I will GLADLY pay you Tuesday for a hamburger today!"
I wouldn't take the deal. My rates are: left pinky $2M, right $6M.
Here's a question for you: what do you think of the hoopla around Hashirama? Do you agree with the popular opinion that using his cells to increase human knowledge and save lives was a violation of his consent?
this all falls apart with one question: What does the rich guy get from asking for your pinky?
like you all are good utilitarians but the issue is the cruelty of the rich in asking you to be maimed and the power their wealth has to coerce you into fulfilling their desires.
the point i think for the general donation argument is again, the power of the wealthy or powerful, but this time the coercion is for the greater good. but no one needs to defend keeping their pinky just because some silly philosophers think all men should have them removed. no one must justify their right to wholeness to another man's ethical system. Morality is the social contract; ethical altruism is not a master and you are not a slave that you must justify yourself to it in terms of keeping a very basic part of yourself.
>What does the rich guy get from asking for your pinky?<
He's running an experiment; he's got an idea that having fewer fingers will make people healthier in the long run due to saved resources, and the removal of 10% of the world's fingernail clippings will keep our streets and rivers cleaner. But most people with wild pinky-less hands lost them in some form of confounder; recklessness, or prior health issues, or pissing off the Yakuza, you know how things go, and by "things" I mean "pinky fingers". So this rich guy believes in his idea strongly enough that he's willing to pay people a million dollars just to meet the conditions to help him prove it.
he is willing to maim people for an idea or an experiment, you mean. He just needs guinea pigs for his whims. He cloaks it in "the greater good" but whats to stop him from wanting the index finger next for his next whim?
the money is an inducement and pressure. its to get people to disdain a perfectly fine thing-not letting a rich person use parts of my body for his own whims. If he cares about doing good there is no shortage of ways to do so. why would he choose a way that injures people?
Autonomy and coercion are the real issues, and altruism isnt that if it involves coercion to another person's ideas. and its a taste the rich may not give up so easily.
"Teach him to fish", but now let's also require him to purchase "fishing rights" from the State, with money that he never previously needed when he had been a subsistence farmer, but now has to earn at the market (competing with other impoverished fishermen), pay taxes on, lose to runaway inflation and currency manipulation, and so forth.
Well yeah, if you teach a man to fish and then burn his house down and punch his dog, you're the bad guy. Doesn't have much to do with the part where you teach him how to fish though.
Selling a body part seems shameful to me. It's hard to identify why that's the case; it's a bit like prostitution, you're selling something that really ought to be special and if you do it then it means you don't value yourself highly.
So I'd definitely hesitate about one million, which would be nice to have but isn't enough to fundamentally change the trajectory of my life.
I'd do it for a billion though, because one billion dollars is a lot.
Thank you! That's the connection I was trying to make but couldn't quite get to - it's like prostitution to me as well. I can see that there's value there (the prostitute makes money, the client gets sex, everyone seems happy with this arrangement) while still thinking that the whole thing feels wrong.
I also was thinking along the same lines of life-changing verses not. Something that allows me to buy more temporary material possessions but doesn't change my lifestyle should not be enough to change something important to me about how I live. Giving up a finger would bother me the rest of my life, so it better come with something significant to compensate.
The thing people tend to object to, I suspect, is the possibility of being _expected_ to do it.
In the same pattern as where e.g. having a car went from "wealthy people can go places quickly" to "ordinary people are expected to sit for hr+ in commute hell."
Similarly, "give up a finger for $million" is a very different proposition when picturing it as optional and rare, where you'll get to spend that million however you like, vs. "selling fingers legalized, and now a down payment for a house is whatever it used to be plus $mil in finger money, and if you don't like it, too bad, The Market has decided."
Sure, I'd take $1M (unless of course I heard that people got offered $1B after refusing, by someone who isn't named "Omega").
It's just a finger, it's not my soul. My body has picked up all sorts of scars and damage and imperfections over the years, but this one would actually make my life better.
Here's a question for you: what do you think of the hoopla around Henrietta Lacks? Do you agree with the popular opinion that using her cells to increase human knowledge and save lives was a violation of her consent?
Yes, I think something was taken from her without her consent and used to enrich others. By "enrich" I mean "profit off of". Taking something from someone else without their consent is stealing.
I realize her cells are now valuable in medical and biological research. Why should her estate not receive some form of compensation? A fair price is not, however, straightforward.
I agree when it comes to profit, sure, with some reasonable time limit for "intellectual property", like 20 years. But science should be "fair use".
The whole thing smacks unpleasantly of treating science like a lottery, and the desire to get rich for being a bizarre combination of unlucky and lucky. Some sci-fi story had a line about how "a human's genome belongs to his species", and I think that sums up my feelings nicely.
Further to the points made by S. elongatus, it may be worth noting that HeLa cells' genome is very different from the genome of Henrietta Lacks (e.g. they usually have 70-90 chromosomes). They are a useful tool, but they arguably aren't even human cells, and researchers have to be cautious when making predictions about human biology based on experiments using HeLa cells.
If we should compensate people for the use of cancer cell lines extracted from their bodies, we should probably also compensate people for viral or bacterial cell lines extracted from their bodies. (Perhaps the people whose COVID samples were used in research leading to vaccine development should be rewarded for their donations?)
Hm, so should we treat the cells as a separate organism that seceded from Henrietta Lacks? Since they were going to kill her, it's doubtful that she would be a beneficiary of their will...
Functionally, all the value from HeLa cells over the value of all other discarded similar clumps of tumor tissues comes from the work of the people who decided to not throw them away. It is that work ( and that of the people who researched them and made them a popular model) that is remunerated when researchers buy HeLa cells. Since I think it doubtful that Henrietta Lacks wanted those cells (they are tumors , after all) and I therefore assume they were taken from her with her consent, I do not think that her estate is owed anything. To me, this is actually similar to the reasoning used in patent law, which is not supposed to protect ideas, but only working implementations of ideas, since ideas do not have to be be workable/sensible/ remotely plausible. When developing (e.g.) anticancer drugs anybody can propose millions of wacky treatments : the hard part is proving that any of those ideas actually work, and that is what takes up oodles of research cash.
I didn't see anyone bring this up last time, but the bodily integrity debate has a long history. In the classical Greek and Roman worlds, circumcision was seen as repulsive, barbaric, and disgusting. Paul telling Christian converts that they didn't need to get circumcised played a big role in the rise of Christianity.
I've never heard this before and it doesn't make sense to me. Jews were not so common as for their use of circumcision to be a big deal to gentiles, and the gentiles already didn't circumcise their kids. Why would someone *also* saying don't worry about circumcision register at all, let alone help spread a religion?
"Jews were not so common as for their use of circumcision to be a big deal to gentiles"
Common enough in the Classical world that Hellenized/Romanised Jews were getting surgical procedures done to 'reverse' or disguise circumcision so that they wouldn't be identifiable at the gymnasium/baths. I think this led to a more extreme form of circumcision so that this kind of 'cheating' couldn't be done in future, let me look up online to see if my shaky memory is correct or if I'm just wildly hallucinating in the best mode of ChatGPT:
"According to Hodges, ancient Greek aesthetics of the human form considered circumcision a mutilation of a previously perfectly shaped organ. ...This dislike of the appearance of the circumcised penis led to a decline in the incidence of circumcision among many peoples that had previously practiced it throughout Hellenistic times.
In Egypt, only the priestly caste retained circumcision, and by the 2nd century, the only circumcising groups in the Roman Empire were Jews, Samaritans, Jewish Christians, Egyptian priests, and the Nabatean Arabs. Circumcision was sufficiently rare among non-Jews that being circumcised was considered conclusive evidence of Judaism (or Early Christianity and others derogatorily called Judaizers) in Roman courts—Suetonius in Domitian 12.2 described a court proceeding (from "my youth") in which a ninety-year-old man was stripped naked before the court to determine whether he was evading the head tax placed on Jews and Judaizers.
...Some Jews tried to hide their circumcision status, as told in 1 Maccabees. This was mainly for social and economic benefits and also so that they could exercise in gymnasiums and compete in sporting events. Techniques for restoring the appearance of an uncircumcised penis were known by the 2nd century BCE. In one such technique, a copper weight (called the Judeum pondum) was hung from the remnants of the circumcised foreskin until, in time, they became sufficiently stretched to cover the glans. The 1st-century writer Celsus described two surgical techniques for foreskin restoration in his medical treatise De Medicina. In one of these, the skin of the penile shaft was loosened by cutting in around the base of the glans. The skin was then stretched over the glans and allowed to heal, giving the appearance of an uncircumcised penis. This was possible because the Abrahamic covenant of circumcision defined in the Bible was a relatively minor circumcision; named milah, this involved cutting off the foreskin that extended beyond the glans. Jewish religious writers denounced such practices as abrogating the covenant of Abraham in 1 Maccabees and the Talmud. During the 2nd century, the procedure of circumcision changed in order to become irreversible."
Christianity of course claimed to be Judaism. It was the ideal, or messianic, Judaism but definitely Judaism.
And in the early years of the church the primary selling point was indeed its Jewishness.
Judaism had been popular. So much so that the Temple had plenty of non-Jewish pilgrims and synagogue often had sections for non-Jews as well. See here, about 1 minute in, https://youtu.be/De5lWoTPTTY?feature=shared
People became Christian in order to join JUDAism.
The Christ part wasn't a big sell to the people who were already Jewish (by descent or ancestral conversion). Most Jews didn't buy in to it, especially the more "god having a body" parts of it.
Among gentiles however, great numbers of whom had been converting for many years already, the opportunity to join The People of The Torah was a huge draw, and Paul's offer to open the floodgates via the abrogation of all of the rules made it super very popular.
The major sale was not Jesus. He was just a Paulian means to open the floodgates for would-be converts who wanted to maintain the integrity of their genitals. What early Christians wanted and believed they were buying in to was being Jewish.
I don't mean that it actively helped spread Christianity, just that the opposite would have massively hurt its spread. There were rivals of Paul (including James, the brother of Jesus), who thought that Christians had to follow the Jewish laws--including circumcision and diet restrictions. Their version of Christianity lost out.
Yah, and it's even more than that. The only reason Christianity took off among gentiles was it's claim to be Judaism. See my comment above.
Judaism was insanely popular (particularly among the poor) and Christianity the equivalent pseudo-way in, akin to modern Reform Synagogues (particularly among the wealthy).
In the parts of the world where Paul was trying to convert people, Jews would have been common enough that the basics of their religion were understood.
If you're trying to convert people to some weird evangelical offshoot of Judaism then it seems natural that the first thing people are going to ask is "Hey, I hear Jews have to obey all sorts of weird rules involving food and mildew and penises, would I have to do that if I joined your religion?"
I'd be interested to see how that observation about Paul ties in with the prominent role females seen to have had in the spread of Christianity, at least in upper class situations. I'd also like to tie in the constant element of Christian thought that promoted abstinence...
No idea how (or if) it all ties together, but there's a fun line of research there.
Good grief, I’d do it for a million without hesitation. Talk about our priceless and holy bodily integrity sounds to me like the crazy colonel in Dr Strangelove raving about “denying women my essence” during sex because he would be giving away some of his precious bodily fluids.
I dunno about that. I know a couple realtors and they’re having a terrible time selling houses even without asking for pinkies — which, as you say, many people would
be willing to do, but certainly not everybody. If they expected everybody to throw the price of a pinkie into the deal they’d cut down on the number of potential
customers.
And here’s another thing that weighs against your idea. I’m pretty sure pinkies aren’t worth anything like a million dollars, even if transplanting them were
quick and easy and the receiver did not need to take anti-rejection drigs, which reduce resistance to both infections and cancer. I mean there’s not a lot of demand, is there? How often do you see someone with a missing pinkie? And out of those few people missing a pinkie, how many of them do you think would go to the trouble of replacing the finger even if they could get a new one for a mere. $1000? Do you know that many women who have a mastectomy decide not to have breast replacement surgery —
because it involves additional procedures, and you don’t have sensation in the new fake breast, and you also don’t have a nipple. You have to get a nipple tattoo, and they look fake. So I’m thinking the demand for pinkies is really pretty low, and anyone buying them for a million dollars each would not be apple to recoup his outlay. My guess is the most he could pay for pinkies is like $500.
I assumed that the finger in the hypothetical was a stand-in for more typical transplantology (in an alt-universe patterned after the musical "Repo Man", perhaps)
You can freely replace "buying house" with any of the other things people in USA and its satellites routinely find themselves doing (e.g. cancer treatment) at the price of selling everything they own and still ending up in bankruptcy. Would you want your fingers (or whatever other parts) to be fair game in bankruptcy proceedings? Valid collateral for loans? Or even a source of quick cash that can be used to further bid up the cost of life?
Yeah, OK, but that changes the whole topic of discussion. OP asked about selling a pinkie because he knew most people would not be terribly disturbed about the loss of a pinkie, *unless* they had an objection springing from the idea that "body integrity" is very valuable and important. The people who are answering on here would be answering a different way if the question was about selling a kidney or a chunk of liver. I'd still consider it, for a million dollars, but would have to research it first to see what my immediate and long-term risks would be. Not a lot of point in selling a piece of one's innards if one's not going to be around to enjoy the money.
I am put in mind of a fictional wizard who stored his life in the tip of his little finger (the distal phalanx), and hid it away. I suppose in that particular case it might be considered somewhat accurate, although it was still a life and not a soul.
I've always disliked that story. A big enough quantitative difference is a qualitative difference, and, to my mind, a factor of a million easily qualifies.
I don't agree. The story is illustrative. It is true that the quantitative difference can have an impact on the net result, but this is not, I think, one of those cases.
If you will trade sex for money, then by definition you are a whore in character, whether or not you actually do it. If you think nothing is morally wrong with that, that it is only society that imposes restrictions on the outlook, then that is your prerogative. Many societies have even exalted prostitutes, and the second socialite's response may well have been something like "You're kind of out of touch with the economy, aren't you?"
Hmm... I appreciate that you are not phrasing this in an inflammatory way, and are allowing for the fact that there are differences in opinion. I still think that the factor of a million makes a qualitative difference.
Let me put it another way: Regardless of whether sex work is considered exalted or degrading in a society, "work" or "prostitution" usually has the connotation of a _routine_ activity, something that someone does repeatedly. Trading a single night of sex for a king's ransom might well be a once-in-a-lifetime act, which I think can reasonably be put in a different category.
I once spoke briefly with a judge about a minor traffic ticket. That doesn't make me a lawyer.
I appreciate your point, but still think this comes down to a matter of opinion. Many examples can illustrate that one act doesn't put you in a specific category, but that doesn't prove the larger point that doing a specific thing once can put you in a category. For a positive example, if you do a single heroic act, you are forevermore a hero(ine).
If you believe you are compromising your principles for money, that shows the kind of person you are. And it is your choice how you perceive yourself.
Why is it intrinsically bad to trade sex for money? Is it also bad to give skillful, completely non-sexual massages in exchange for money? How about renting out your mental talents, which is how most of us pay for food and shelter?
I never said it was. Some people think it is. Some people think one should not have sex outside of marriage. If you find nothing wrong with it why should you care whether someone is labeled a prostitute?
Regardless, one who accepts money in exchange for sex is a prostitute. "a person, in particular a woman, who engages in sexual activity for payment." directly from Google. A whore is "a prostitute, derogatory" (ibid).
Not only would I sell a pinkie for a million dollars, I would have slept with Churchill for free. So either I'm a slut who'd sell her soul or some of you people need to lighten up.
"Mr Churchill, would you sleep with a woman who had ten fingers?"
"Yes, certainly"
"Well then, would you sleep with a woman who had one million fingers? Just an eldritch abomination of a woman, all squirming wriggling fingers and no body?"
So I guess I am struggling to find a good reason why selling a body part is different from certain other things we do for money. For example, trading healthy lungs for a coal miner’s wage.
Certain jobs require physical sacrifice to a degree that the people doing such jobs might trade a pinky for a healthy hip or spine, say. I haven’t asked him, but I could imagine my grandfather making exactly that trade.
In the logic of your anecdote, these people have sold their soul and are now just haggling over which body part will represent that transaction
As an example of voluntarily damaging the body, how about having babies? Leaves the woman with hemorrhoids, stretch marks, a weakened pelvic floor and a substantially increased chance of incontinence in old age.
How one feels about the transaction is the difference. It is an issue of integrity, how well you can live with yourself after your decision.
Some of these aren't transactions because the deals are made in ignorance. I think no one outside of gunpoint would trade healthy lungs for a coal miner's wage if they knew the consequences of the transaction. It also wouldn't count if a risk taken turns out poorly, such as driving for a living and ending up disabled from a traffic accident.
If one must do it to survive I think that excuses the ethics involved somewhat, too. If one must work the only available job, and it happens to be coal-mining, is the choice between sacrificing your lungs and starving to death?
Sorry, I must not have been clear. I mean I can understand the point of view of giving a kidney to a stranger is not a good choice. Body integrity is one reason given in the other topic, and I think this reasoning is similar.
At the same time, I respect the decision to do it. Your values are your values, and you ought to believe what seems genuinely best for moral and ethical reasons.
I put a high price on my own integrity, and would not want someone to buy an irreplaceable part of me for what I consider to be bad reasons. I will earn money my own way, not by selling even apparently useless parts of myself.
I would have to seriously consider this deal as a pinky finger may have value apart from pure body integrity. I play piano, and it would be a significant burden in this respect.
Point taken. It seems a pinky toe is less valuable than a pinky finger.
I would also note that it would be harder to notice, I assume, a missing pinky toe than a missing pinky finger, so I must consider whether I would change my answer based on that.
> President [of Israel] Isaac Herzog on Sunday displayed an Arabic-language version of Adolf Hitler’s autobiographical manifesto “Mein Kampf” that he said was found in a children’s room used as a base by terrorists in the northern Gaza Strip.
> “The terrorist wrote notes, marked the sections, and studied again and again the ideology of Adolf Hitler to hate the Jews, to kill the Jews, to burn and slaughter Jews wherever they are,” he said. “This is the real war we are facing.”
In what is possibly the most low-effort propaganda act by a head of state in the 21st century so far, the guy didn't even think of planting the book in a room or on a dead body, his audience's intelligence is apparently not even worth a staged video to him. In the bizarro world in his head, it's enough to hold a translated copy of Mein Kampf to declare any armed militia speaking the same language to be literally Hitler.
Hey, wuddup my bro. I was glad to see you carry on pleasant conversations, even with Israelis, in a recent thread. Good on you. 🙏
As for the particular point you raise, we have a problem in this world. Well, many problems, but here's one.
The human mind, and certainly the collective mind of large demographics and societies is hackable.
Ergo, why engage in logic - EVEN IF LOGIC PROVES YOUR CASE - when Mein Kampf 4 Kids works so much more efficiently?
As you probably know, Mein Kampf *is* actually discussed in Gazan schools and television among other iffy resources regarding "the jewish problem", so even if Herzog ordered this on BabyAliBabba.com rather than prying it from a bearded Palestinian kid in a cradle, his point is fair.
But why embarass himself to even mention it when he knows how silly he looks to literally everyone Jew, Christians, Hindu, Buddhist, Secular and Miscellaneous? *
Because unfortunately we all share a vast social mind out there and therefore the low-information, low-intelligence and loud people not only have a vote but they effectively have a veto on the social discourse. And a cartoon book about Hitler is *exactly* the level that this crowd operates on.
It goes without saying that propaganda is how *nearly all* of society, business, politics and general pseudo consensus building runs in this, the year 2023 anno domini. We aren't really human beings anymore. The best among us are Winston Smiths, hiding in the cavities of our own craniums.
It's why I went super public. Because FUCK those people. I want to be an individual and to speak for myself. And even if nobody at all joins me, it's so unbelievably worth it. Trust me.
The point I completely failed to make is, what do you, personally, yes you, do when you find something like this and no one believes you?
I've been in a situation where it's been my word against that of a liar, and people chose to believe the liar. Whatever I tried to show as evidence was dismissed. It's a nasty place to be in. Maybe you've been in a similar place, or perhaps are in a similar place? Sometimes the unlikely event happens, and what do you do then?
I send them to all people I know that I see dehumanizing the Israelis.
I believe everything that doesn't have the smell of a genocidal state all over it.
> Sometimes the unlikely event happens, and what do you do then?
To begin with, in this analogy I'm supposed to be a good man who wasn't caught flagrantly lying before, right ? I never before, say, killed a journalist [1] and kept claiming for a year it wasn't me, or - maybe maybe perhaps - I never crushed a peace activist [2] under a bulldozer and later claimed she's the one responsible ? I surely wasn't caught just 3 weeks before [3] brandishing irrelevant autobiographical periodical from Al-Qaeda that could be found in Google's first search result for its name [4] and claimed it's some exclusive Al-Qaeda document that Proves Something ? I definitely didn't bomb a hospital and kept releasing fake piece of evidence after fake piece of evidence [5] in the desperate bid to prove it wasn't me, even as I continue targeting and surrounding other hospitals were literal babies are depending on the electricity I'm cutting to stay alive [6] ?
If I'm a remotely honest man with no such prolific history of lying, I will stand my ground and keep telling my version of the story, and the liar would probably keep inventing lies till his/her lies contradict each other and I win. If I don't win, that's okay too, Life is often unfair. The good guys don't have to win.
So, the glorious future where all government officials and employees wear bodycams to prevent abuse of power got derailed by specious protests over privacy. And now we're entering the future where AIs can fake videos, although fortunately it's not past the ability of humans to detect, at least not today, I think.
But even putting that aside, if you were presented with bodycam video of someone picking up this book in a room in Gaza, that could easily be faked by one person, right? If there were more people in the footage, that'd make it harder to fake without someone spilling the beans, but we have to assume that most IDF members hate Hamas and desperately want to cut off their international support, so it might not be too hard to find people to support this one small lie. Same if there were a running gun battle with Hamas; police everywhere have been known to carry fake evidence with them to plant on suspects, and it's not hard to toss an object behind your back.
Is there anything you would believe, aside from body counts? Because even those can be exaggerated, and there are the reports of Israeli "friendly fire", and frankly I suspect any "friendly fire" by Hamas would be blamed on the Israelis.
I don't understand. Are you saying it's false or planted, simply because the idea is so outlandish? I see Fox News also picked up the story. I thought Hamas's stated goals included eliminating all Jews, and this is consistent with that.
I wouldn't put it beyond Hamas to read Hitler approvingly and take notes.
What I'm mocking about this circus is this :
- The utter and total contempt the Israeli head of state has for the pro-Israel and on-the-fence intellects he's targeting with this cheap piece of propaganda. Imagine if an Arab head of state were to go into an interview or a public speech and hold a Hebrew-translated Mein Kampf copy, claim it was found with an Israeli soldier or a Kibbutz, and then run with that as a base to build his decisions and reasoning on.
___What___ is the actual evidence that this particular copy of the book was a Hamasi-owned one ? It's just a bloody book. He could have bought it on his way to the interview. That's why autographs exist, I can't hold a book and claim "Akscually this is the exact same copy that Albert Einstein used to study with, look at all the notes and highlights". You or any other person with a brain wouldn't accept this in literally any other context.
I'm laughing because this is the exact same thing I often laugh at Muslims at, the bizarre belief that "This book exists, therefore my argument". Where did that book come from ? And where's the evidence that the source they say it's from is actually where it comes from ?
So if they show a picture of the book where it was found, all your problems are solved? Or actually, it makes no difference at all, and if you trust this guy/the Israeli government then it's relevant and if you don't then it's not?
No, a photo of the book "where it was found" wouldn't convince me either, because I don't trust genocidal governments, which are most/all governments.
A photo *would*, however, make this guy less a tempting object of mockery. At least there is something, even if I don't believe that something. What I'm shocked at is not the lies, it's the flagrant lies, the lies that reveal the liar either believes his audience has IQ that water would freeze at or he himself has that IQ.
Dude, just stop. Go away. A couple of weeks ago, the stuff you posted might have contained some valid points here and there, but this is just sad and pathetic. I don't even know what you're arguing for here.
Funny how a couple of weeks and 11,000+ innocent deaths changes things so much. A couple of weeks ago, me making fun of this show of propagandaship might have had "some valid points here and there" according to you, but now you're apparently too offended to see any value in it.
> I don't even know what you're arguing for here.
Technically speaking, Open Thread is a call to, in Scott's words, "Post about anything you want, ask random questions, whatever." I want to post an anecdote that shows Israel is a genocidal state that kills countless innocents under rather flimsy and quite laughable justifications, so I do. There is no argument in my comment, there doesn't have to be in a lot of Open Thread comments, just a statement of fact and my own interpretation of that fact.
> this is just sad and pathetic
I agree, the false flag department in Mossad is absolutely not sending their best. From the destruction of the USS Liberty all the way now to "Literally Hitler", not a stellar track record at all.
Don't deflect. In your original post, you're pretending that it's unthinkable that even some members of Hamas want to eradicate all Jewish people. So much so, that any evidence along that direction must obviously be fake and propaganda. Give me a break.
You read things into my comment that weren't there. I don't put it beyond some or most or all Hamas members to read Hitler with passion and take notes. The fakeness and the propaganda isn't because I think Hamas are philo-semites.
The fakeness and propaganda comes from someone who thinks his audience is dumb enough and incapable of critical thinking enough that they will unquestionably believe him that a pristine book copy is from a bombed-to-oblivion warzone based on nothing but the language the book copy is in and his "trust me bro" babbling. The idea that Hamasis might read Hitler isn't ridiculous on face value, his claim that an Arabic-translated book copy constitutes convincing evidence that an actual concrete Hamasi was reading Hitler is the laughable nonsense I'm mocking.
Asking for clarifcation is free and is better than jumping to conclusions.
Right, so it's actually completely plausible and you admit that. You actually agree with his point about Hamas. You just believe it's propaganda which you would regardless.
I disagree with flagrant genocidal lying, that's all. After all, Hitler wasn't actually wrong by much when he said that Jewish financiers controlled Banking in his time, but I wouldn't say that I agree with Hitler because some of the points he's making (with copious amounts of lies) are plausible and even occasionally happen to land on reality.
Anyone successfully managed to find a way to treat airplane headaches? (Headaches caused by the change in pressure when an airplane starts descending for landing)
Google just suggests various painkillers, which don't really work and also seems like it's treating the symptom more than the cause.
Basically, whenever the plane starts descending, I need to swallow every 10 seconds to equalize the pressure until landing (unlike a normal person who only needs to do this every 10 minutes or so), or I will get an "arnold schwarzenegger on the surface of mars" level headache . I currently treat this by drinking water and chomping on chips nonstop during the descent, which.. I guess is not the worst thing in the world, but there's still a lot of distress involved, so I'm very open to ideas
Not sure whether this would do anything for airplane headaches, but I’ll toss it out in case it would. It’s a Reddit post describing a weird procedure for clearing a stuffy nose, and when I tried it it actually worked. https://www.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/6f011c/comment/dieeu2t/
Yep, I was about to say the same thing. I learned all about this when I took a scuba diving course some years back, and now I use it pretty much every time I'm on a plane.
Anecdotally plane specific earplugs (available at most pharmacies and a lot of terminal convenience/book stores) used according to the instructions help a lot, particularly if your headaches are more towards your ears.
If more general but typically minor sinus issues are contributing then using a breath right strip and/or just trying to get your sinuses actual medical attention while you're one the ground are obvious things to try. Anecdotally, sinus massages in flight can help, but the evidence is pretty slim https://www.healthline.com/health/relieve-sinus-pressure
I have been by an ENT and he suggested nasal sprays, so I tried a Xylometazoline based one, and while it definitely cleared up my sinuses, it had close to no impact on the pressure building up :/
I bristled at your mention of earplugs, as in-ear headphones definitely makes the situation much worse...
But googling "plane specific earplugs".. These look super interesting!
Pressure filtering ear plugs sounds exactly like a thing that could help, thanks!
"The modern Japanese writing system uses a combination of logographic kanji, which are adopted Chinese characters, and syllabic kana. Kana itself consists of a pair of syllabaries: hiragana, used primarily for native or naturalised Japanese words and grammatical elements; and katakana, used primarily for foreign words and names, loanwords, onomatopoeia, scientific names, and sometimes for emphasis. Almost all written Japanese sentences contain a mixture of kanji and kana. Because of this mixture of scripts, in addition to a large inventory of kanji characters, the Japanese writing system is considered to be one of the most complicated currently in use.[1][2][3]"
Maybe people complain about Japanese orthography, too, but I don't see it because they're doing it in Japanese. Maybe there are people who say fuck it, and experiment with writing everything in kana.
Maybe the issue is that English is relatively close to being phonetic (80%, I'm told) so it seems like an easy solution should be possible. Easy solutions ignore how dependent people are on word shape when they read.
How much difference does having a phonetic language make for a culture-- it seems like a lot of valuable learning time for children gets sucked up when there's a lot to learn about spelling, but do cultures with phonetic spelling (Hebrew, Spanish, probably more I don't know) show an advantage?
Is there a good way to evaluate the complexity of a language, including spelling, complicated grammar, arbitrary gender for nouns, etc.? I know there's research on how difficult various languages are for Anglophones to learn (the military has a rating system) but is there anything for overall processing effort for native speakers of various languages?
1. English also uses two alphabets - uppercase and lowercase. They even each have a special cursive form used for emphasis. It also commonly uses logographic characters, and sometimes even a mixture of logographs and letters. (Not to the extent Japanese does, but also not to the extent that an average user could be unfamiliar with the concept. )
2. Plenty of modernist reformers in Japan wanted to switch to phonetic writing, especially post-ww2 when wide-reaching reforms suddenly became possible, but the conservatives delayed the changes long enough that the problems it was supposed to solve simply disappeared. (Phonetic-only system was hoped to be easier to learn and to process, but it turns out you can in fact teach everyone kanji if you just introduce universal public education, and unicode removed all technological benefits of lower character count.) Last I paid attention, the wider public wanted more, not less, kanji. (On the other hand, the overall kanji use probably keeps decreasing with a steady introduction of English loanwords.)
3. Japanese is almost perfectly phonetic. The kids learn the language in near-perfectly regular, extremely simple syllabary, and only then slowly acquire logographic symbols that, once learned, are simply more efficient to use. Their writing system is complex in the same way that mathematical notation is complex. "One plus one is two" may be "easier" in a sense, assuming you know letters but not numbers and symbols. It ceases being easier once you need to do arithmetic regularly - I assume you wouldn't use phonetic notation for it. There's a matter of diminishing returns here, of course, the 2000th symbol you learn will not be as useful as the first, but the question is where the cut-off should be. Personally, I don't think Japan's slightly above 2000 (officially, plus hundreds more in, unofficial, regular use) is all that unreasonable.
4. But yeah, the lack of punctuation because kanji are assumed to be used for all non-inflected parts of words is a huge self-own.
Thankfully, it's no longer that important to learn to write kanji, since everything is digital nowadays. You just need to be able to spell words and read kanji (which, to be fair, is still awful since every kanji has multiple readings) and you're mostly fine. In fact, it seems a lot of Japanese people are forgetting how to write kanji because of this...
As for the actual consequences, Japanese students still seem to be doing much better than American students despite so much of their time being wasted on learning to read and write 2136 different characters. Either the American education system sucks that much, or the Japanese population really is superior to Americans in some way... It's probably the former.
And if you're wondering why people haven't tried writing in kana, people have tried that plenty of times, sometimes out of necessity. Some old Japanese video games like the first two Zelda games have all of their text in katakana, and it's a huge pain in the ass to read. Kanji really is easier to read once you're used to it, not to mention how space efficient it is.
I had a friend, last name Stoneburner, who wanted to buy property in Japan. He needed to open a local bank account. He went to the bank, and when they had trouble spelling his name, he was asked to provide a printout with all possible spellings in Japanese. He complied, and returned with a printout that ran for *multiple pages*.
He later took his wife's Japanese last name for bureaucratic simplicity.
Alphabets (or otherwise phonetic systems) tend to be widely recognized as better. Even a thousand years ago you had pressures to reform away from character systems. King Sejong of Korea asked why so few of his people were literate and his officials said it was the necessity of learning characters so he invented an alphabet. The Mongols also abandoned characters for alphabets as did the Egyptians (with hieroglyphics sticking around mostly for use as priests). Many East Asian countries did in modern times with Japan and China being the exceptions. We also know that learning character systems take years while most alphabets can be learned in a few weeks. (To return to Sejong, his ministers said a wise man could learn characters in a year and a fool in ten years. But a wise man could learn an alphabet in a day and a fool in ten days.)
This is separate from general complexity. I'm not aware of a specific rating system but we do know that things like morphological features fall away among young or amateur speakers. Likewise when you get creoles or pidgins you tend to find they lose things like inflections or morphology.
As someone who has been learning Japanese for some 4 years, I complain about it a lot.
> Maybe there are people who say fuck it, and experiment with writing everything in kana.
Reading kana-only text is actually very hard, because Japanese doesn’t use spaces, and has a lot of words which are compounds of single-syllable bases; these are easily disambiguated when written in kanji but a nightmare when in part of a sea of kana.
Example: a sentence starting with きょうしつ “kyōshitsu”. The first syllable could be 今日, “today”, and the second and third 質, “quality”; or they could be one word, 教室, “classroom”; or the first two could be 教師, teacher, and the final syllable part of a different word following. And so on with every kana group.
Japanese books for young children are typically kana-only. I don't have any close by to check, but from memory I think they mostly use half-width spaces rather than the full-width spaces mentioned by あの人. I wouldn't say any of the other obstacles they mention are insuperable, either: it's more just that mixed kana/kanji text is what people are used to and find easiest to read, so they stick with that. (Similarly, you would probably find it difficult to read books in phonetic English spelling. Adults who already know how to read have a vested interest in not changing the system to a new one that they would have to learn.)
Even in English, it's often hard to decide whether to use spaces, hyphens, or nothing when writing compound words (E.g. is boardgame one word or two?) and I'm constantly fighting the spellcheckers about that sort of thing. Especially since a lot of neologisms jam words together without spaces because it's more fun that way.
Anthropic is currently hiring for a non-AI research role that I am (plausibly) qualified for. I know that that have a much stronger safety emphasis than most AI companies, but feel a bit wary of working for anyone doing capabilities research. If we assume for the sake of argument that I would be better than the hypothetical replacement candidate is anyone willing to make an argument for why I should(n't) apply.
I'd argue that you're just delaying the inevitable by refusing to aid capabilities research. I feel that a lot of the fear around aiding capabilities research is counterproductive. If the smartest people refuse to work on AI to give people more time to work on "alignment research," slightly less intelligent people are going to end up developing AI anyways... except they'll just ignore all of that research, and the AI will end up killing everyone, including itself. If the smartest people just worked on developing AI instead, at least there will be a slightly higher chance that they can make the AI like us enough to not kill us all and instead let us live happy lives forever.
You shouldn't apply if you are prone to self deception (which we all are to some degree). Imagine yourself working there a couple of years from now, an amazing salary, intersting work, great colleagues etc. You are asked to work on something new that they assure you is good for safety but you think will actually mostly drive capabilities. You make your best case for your position and lose. It isn't clear what would happen if you refuse to work on the project. Would they fire you, maybe? What do you do?
I don't know if you're joking or not, but in case you are serious, the photo is actually of n angheny uvyy va gur zvqqyr bs n fnyg syng. Gung'f fnyg, abg sbt.
It's rot13, used to hide spoilers. You can put it into any rot13 encoder online to see what it says, but it means that you don't accidentally see the spoilers just by casually reading the comments.
TIL: The streets of ancient Kyoto were significantly wider than they are today. Apparently, Kyoto was originally a planned city on a grid with massive streets. It's a striking counter the usual trope of old cities having narrow streets because they weren't designed for cars.
It was because Kyoto was an entirely artificial city made by the Emperor to be his capital. It was designed by people who fetishized the Tang and based on the Tang capital. The Tang liked grid plans and wide streets. They also liked lakes and canals which the Japanese also copied. As did the Koreans at points. Then again, there are worse plans than to simply find a well designed historical city and then copying it.
From what I know about the Tokugawa shogunate in general, and the consolidation of power by Oda Nobunaga, Toyotomi Hideyoshi, and Tokugawa Ieyasu, they were very very much into legibility.
On the one hand, this is true. The household registration system implemented by the Tokugawa shogunate has left us some of the best demographic data in the world from that period.
On the other hand, the urban layout of Edo/Tokyo doesn't illustrate this at all. The street plan is notoriously haphazard, and notoriously they still don't use a street numbering system for addresses even today. (Finding addresses in Kyoto was much easier, since you could specify a location by the grid intersection plus a cardinal direction.)
It is sometimes claimed that the confusing layout of Edo was a deliberate choice, intended to make it difficult for attacking armies to find their way to Edo castle. However, I haven't seen any primary sources that support this claim directly, and I believe it may be just speculation.
Hm. Just speculating, but I wonder how much of that was "we require the samurai to live in cities but otherwise leave them alone", and how much was "we keep tight control over the samurai who fight and the peasants who make food, but we don't need to bother with merchants as much"... (It's probably something completely different.)
Edo was a city of samurai from the start. Its initial development in the seventeenth century was stimulated by the alternate attendance laws (sankin kōtai). Other occupational groups followed, because the large samurai population needed a lot of goods and services. "Merchants" were not really a status category in early modern Japan, despite what some older textbooks will tell you. (The "shi-nō-kō-shō" categories often mentioned in textbooks were an ideological projection, not an administrative system.)
Chicago's street grid is a mix of wide arterials and a boulevard system with medium-width local streets. Driving or biking in places like Boston or Manhattan or the cores of Philly or Montreal does not feel very similar to Chicago (i.e. our narrowest streets are not as narrow as in those places). Most of Chicago's street grid dates from the 19th century -- there are a few automobile-age additions like Wacker Drive but they are the exception.
Is there an existing concept for describing how people like to think about the future in terms of sci-fi (or fiction in general) rules, even though there's no reason why the future has to follow such rules? Specific examples:
- Before COVID, people had a sort-of cataclysmic image of what a pandemic would look like - i.e. see the movie Pandemic from 2011. Lots of books talked about a horrible virus that would break down the global economy and threaten civilization as a whole. Bill Gates warned us about it and George W. Bush famously set up a task force to fight a future flu pandemic. But reality was... much more boring? Yeah, there was some disruption with COVID but things quickly bounced back to normal. There was some civil unrest in the US but it was mostly for pandemic-unrelated reasons. There was a race to make a vaccine but it ended up taking close to a year and a bunch of people already had the virus by then. In other words, reality was far more boring than we've imagined it would be.
- When people imagine what life with an AGI/ASI would look like, they always talk about either complete annihilation of humanity or something like the Matrix movies or perhaps an anti-utopia where human labor no longer has any value and we all end miserable due to being useless. Or in the case of Star Trek the AGI is smart but not _too_ smart so human decisionmaking still has some value. However no one seems to imagine boring outcomes, such as the machines inventing a "super drug" that would send everyone into a state of pure bliss for millions of years in a row or perhaps rewiring everyone's brain to remove the need to be "useful" in order to experience happiness. It's a very boring future to predict so... people don't seem to be predicting it?
- When discussing brain uploads (i.e. Robin Hanson's EMs) people seem to assume that "virtual humans" would still be sort-of like real world humans, except they'd run inside a machine. This leads to some anti-utopian predictions of virtual humans being exploited/abused and living a miserable life. But why wouldn't virtual humans simply be rewired to remove the ability to experience any suffering or sadness, thus resolving all the moral dilemmas around their existence? It's a boring answer but isn't it also the most plausible outcome?
My examples are sort-of vague but I hope I was able to write down the general idea of how the need to be interesting when writing fiction interferes with our ability to make boring predictions about the future.
I think most of your "too boring for fiction" example actually did get written in science fiction already. For example, Greg Egan's Permutation City is all about virtual humans rewiring themselves, and even Robin Hanson already includes self-modification, IIRC.
I know this doesn't address your original question, but do you know of anyone who has given much thought to how the brain upload scenario could realistically play out? I mean what the path of progress toward something like that could conceivably look like? As you said, sci-fi scenarios seem totally unrealistic and basically just brush the whole "yeah, we figured out how to upload consciousness" question under the rug, sort of implicitly falling back on some sort of IIT assumption (the computer probably simulates neurons and informationally it's equivalent so therefore, consciousness, or something). I'd be interested to read some discussions on this topic if anyone knows of any.
The most plausible and also boring/depressing outcome to me is the one where we end up building a really convincing simulation of the outward-facing effects of consciousness and when you upload someone's mind, the uploaded version reports that yeah! This is really great! So much better than being a flesh-and-blood human! It totally passes the Turing test, and we can even see all the simulated neurons firing, just like in a human brain! Except that there is actually no consciousness at play (i.e. we built and tested the brain simulator by measuring proxies of consciousness but not consciousness directly and it turns out that those proxies weren't good enough) and when you upload, you effectively just die.
Brain uploading is so far beyond the state of current knowledge that any world where it is possible would already be unrecognizable to use for many other reasons, so there's no point in speculating.
True. Maybe I just need to find some better sci fi. I watched the first season of Upload and found both the premise and execution to be almost comically bland and stupid.
Dollhouse is probably the gold standard, though that is technically transfer/copying rather than uploading. I'd definitely recommend it though. There was a French series on Netflix called Transferts (likewise with the premise of mind-transfer tech being developed in the near future) a few years ago that I also liked.
Dollhouse is particularly notable for the bait and switch - it starts out seeming like a generic Case of the Week format, perhaps to placate the TV execs, and then goes crazy with the premise near the end.
Obviously nothing in this genre is going to be *hard* scifi though, since the premise is effectively magic compared to today's tech.
In your case, how would we figure out if the uploaded brain is conscious? We can't even prove that other human beings are conscious. We only know that we experience consciousness ourselves. Maybe consciousness is an illusion?
That's exactly my concern. Right now the best we have are proxies/correlations to consciousness (Turing test, IIT, etc.) and the depressing scenario is that people confuse the map with the territory and don't realize it because the simulation output seems so convincing.
Ethically speaking, "we're not sure if it's conscious so it's better to be safe and assume it is" is a reasonable stance when deciding how to treat, say, animals or AI. It would be a horrible mistake to take that stance on questions like mind upload.
I've heard the "maybe consciousness is just an illusion" idea proposed before and to be honest I've never understood what is meant by that. From my first person perspective, I am absolutely unquestionably experiencing _something,_ even if we haven't figured out how to measure it. And I assume you are too. So what would "an illusion" even mean? That no experience at all is actually being had? It's not real and it's all in my head?
I think the consciousness is an illusion idea is connected to people reporting that they can somehow stop experiening their conscious self by meditation. I think it's an interesting idea. Obviously you (and me, I'm not unconscious as another commenter suggested) experience something like a unified self. But is it possible that this is somehow a byproduct of how our brain works, and that there really is no actual uniform self if we look closely? Not sure if this makes sense.
I guess it comes down to what one means by "consciousness". It certainly seems plausible that the concept of a "unified self" is an illusion in a certain sense - my sense of vision is separate from my sense of hearing and sense of touch, and all of these senses can probably be broken down further into more and more granular pieces (the experience of seeing red on the left side of my vision is maybe separate from seeing blue on the right side, even if I'm seeing both simultaneously?). Maybe if you keep going down this path (perhaps through meditation), you can come to realize that you really are just a bunch of separate processes all working together to give an illusion of a unified system.
But I'd still classify all of those sub-processes as (non-illusory) consciousness, or qualia at the very least.
I agree, though qualia is probably a better word for it.
I think the interesting part is the notion that a bunch of separate sub-processes can somehow experience qualia. If that is the case - what stops e.g. GPT4 from experiencing qualia?
The thought has crossed my mind, though I suspect it's just a case of these people getting caught up in abstract lines of reasoning ("consciousness doesn't fit in my model so I'm forced to conclude that it doesn't exist") and they're using the term "illusion" in some weird abstract way. Because generally the term "illusion" is used to mean "an experiencing I am having which does not match up with my physical surroundings", i.e. it still involves an experience and thus requires consciousness. And I truly cannot fathom how someone who is conscious could suspect that they are actually not conscious, because even the experience of having that suspicion IS consciousness.
COVID-19 wasn't lethal enough (0.3% overall death rate) to meet the expectations put in place by sci-fi books and movies. However, there's no reason another disease couldn't come along that fit the bill. I think if there were a pandemic that killed just 3% of the people it infected, there might be martial law in large parts of the world (including the U.S.) true civil disorder, and large numbers of people fleeing to remote areas only to be faced by mistrustful locals.
> When people imagine what life with an AGI/ASI would look like, they always talk about either complete annihilation of humanity or something like the Matrix movies or perhaps an anti-utopia where human labor no longer has any value and we all end miserable due to being useless. Or in the case of Star Trek the AGI is smart but not _too_ smart so human decisionmaking still has some value. However no one seems to imagine boring outcomes, such as the machines inventing a "super drug" that would send everyone into a state of pure bliss for millions of years in a row or perhaps rewiring everyone's brain to remove the need to be "useful" in order to experience happiness. It's a very boring future to predict so... people don't seem to be predicting it?
First of all, people do talk about AI potentially wireheading the population. It's one of the first failure modes that comes to mind.
But also, in what metric is "AI creates super drug, takes over the world and put all the humanity on it" considered to be more boring than Star-Trek-like "everything is basically the same but now we have robots around" scenario?
> There was some civil unrest in the US but it was mostly for pandemic-unrelated reasons.
You have to be careful about the difference between the reason people give you for what they're doing and the reason they actually have for what they're doing. It is not at all obvious that the civil unrest occurred for pandemic-unrelated reasons.
The Black Lives Matter protests cannot be reliably characterized as pandemic-unrelated. The basic model is that the death of George Floyd was mostly characterized by its extreme similarity to many other recent incidents that sparked some outrage and quickly flamed out. But instead of flaming out, 2020 Black Lives Matter protests benefited from a huge population of people with nothing better to do than join a protest.
COVID was boring because it ended up having a fairly low CFR and a very low CFR in healthy young people. A pandemic with a more fatal disease might look very different
Covid's CFR was in something of an uncanny valley. Something with a substantially lower CFR, like the 2009 pig flu pandemic, could reasonably be allowed to run its course. Something with a substantially higher CFR, like Ebola or SARS-1, would uncontroversially warrant a very robust public health response if it became widespread or was in immediate danger of doing so. But Covid didn't fit neatly into either category, and the situation was made worse by different media bubbles pushing radically different narratives about how dangerous Covid actually was.
I agree. This was exacerbated by the fact that COVIDs Lethality is extremely dependent on prior age and health. Most diseases are more deadly to the elderly and infirm but covid was even more like this than a typical disease to the extent that children seemed almost immune to it
Yes. And why the hell couldn't the people in government just say that. "This is a very tricky situation. The virus's combo of contagiousness and lethality is just not bad enough to warrant extreme measures. But we don't know whether it's going to mutate into something that is. Also, in its present form it *is* the virus from hell for old people, Yet virtually all of them live with or have frequent contact with much younger people who don't have much to fear from the virus, so are understandably not very motivated to limit their lives and comfort in order to avoid catching it."
I highly recommend that you have a look at The Premonition. It's about a group of medical professionals scattered around the country, none of them involved with the government's covid response, who took a special interest in covid. They figured out the illness and our options way, way faster than the bureaucrats. They were sort of like Scott: They didn't do consensus, group think, or hauling out of protocols from the past in hopes they'd give guidance. They just sucked in all the data they could and thought hard.
Thanks for the tip! I was reading Scott and paying a lot of attention to this too at the early stages. I recall reading a lot of analysis and papers, and I certainly thought the uncertainty seemed large, with a potentially high mortality rate. Personally I thought a rather stronger reaction was warranted at the time. Not a medical professional though.
>so are understandably not very motivated to limit their lives and comfort<
You can't say it because this line by itself will piss off every faction. The kids go "What do you MEAN we're willing to sacrifice family for comfort?", the oldies go "what do you MEAN it's understandable?!"
So instead they tell lies that piss off one faction and flatter the other.
> why the hell couldn't the people in government just say that. "This is a very tricky situation. The virus's combo of contagiousness and lethality is just not bad enough to warrant extreme measures. But we don't know whether it's going to mutate into something that is.
There's an obvious reason they couldn't say that. It's total gibberish. The same claim applies to literally everything; the informational content is zero.
If it's informational content is zero, then why is it easy to write sentences that contradict various points made? Here are 6 that do:
1) The combination of contagiousness and lethality makes this virus bad enough that extreme measures are called for.
2) We are sure this virus is not going to mutate into something more serious.
3) In it's present form, it does not pose much risk to old people.
4) Fortunately very few older people live with or have a lot of contact with much younger people.
5)Young people have the most to fear from this virus.
6) Many young people are currently quite motivated to take extreme measures to protect themselves from contracting the virus.
Oh, and here's a paragraph with no informational content:
From sunrise to sunset the hopes of humanity wax and wane, like the breeze that blows across the land, sometimes stronger, sometimes weaker, sometimes from the east, sometimes from the west. And yet still we hope and wait. But such is the human condition -- hope and wait, wax and wane, fitful and invisible as a breeze, and then for an each of us there comes a point where we hope and fear no more.
My view is that the fact that COVID was much worse for old people is part of why we had robust lockdowns and other measures to limit spread. Because the average senator, member of parliament or CEO is old.
If the CFR curve was more skewed towards young people, then I think that the general response would be to keep working lest the economy stall.
Remember that the pandemic was well underway before we had decent data on the shape of the CFR age curve or even the overall CFR. IIRC, early point estimates ran around 1.5-2% with the high end of the confidence interval running upwards of 5%, and until treatment protocols had been worked out (particularly corticosteroid treatment to head off cytokine storms), there were signs that there might be a Spanish-flu-style W-shaped mortality curve.
That was the information environment in which the first round of lockdowns was ordered, and by the time good data started to trickle in, the rhetorical battle lines were well entrenched. So we wound up with the pro-lockdown side digging in on positions that made sense with a 2% CFR and a W-shaped age mortality curve and the anti-lockdown side digging in around a seasonal-flu-style 0.1% CFR that's almost exclusively concentrated on people who had extremely fragile health to begin with. And as data trickled in showing a steep J-shaped age mortality curve with around a 0.7% overall CFR (and much lower for later waves, as the most vulnerable populations had mostly been vaccinated by then), loud and low-quality voices on both sides cherry-picked and misread the data and claimed to be vindicated.
Small nitpick, CFR = case fatality rate is generally a known quantity, because it is defined as the ratio of known deaths to known cases. IFR = infected fatality rate is the deaths to actual infected cases, which is what we actually want to know. IFR can generally only be estimated with some uncertainty because the number of infections are generally uncertain. CFR only makes sense as an estimate of IFR , and it does not make sense to compare CFR between e.g. covid and the flu because the quantity will change depending on e.g. the rate of people getting tested. This is important because these numbers sometimes get mixed up.
It's possible. But I don't get the sense people in government were thinking that clearly: "Let's make it sound like it's really dangerous for everybody, that way we keep old people like us safe." I think lots of people in congress were not well-informed, and didn't even understand the math and science involved: exponential growth curves, case fatality rate & how that's modulated by contagiousness, how the immune system works, how vaccination works, sterilizing immunity vs. protection from severe illness, fomites vs. aerosols, etc etc. They may not ever even have seen the graphs plotting age against chance of hospitalization, chance of death, and how these graphs differed for vaxed vs unvaxed.
"and how these graphs differed for vaxed vs unvaxed"
I'm confused. Wasn't this information, at least, only available pretty late in the pandemic? I got my first vaccine dose on 4/6/2021 (I was 62 at the time, so not in the first group vaccinated, nor the last). The development data must have been available earlier, but the population-wide data later.
I don't think any conspiracy was required. Nor was much information needed. The (old) people in charge just saw a lot of people they knew getting sick and dying, and treated the pandemic as if it was that dangerous for everyone.
If they hadn't - if being sick was something that happened to poorer or younger people that they didn't interact with - then they would have treated it as an abstract issue of economic considerations.
I don't think there is a term for it. Probably should be. I don't think it's controversial to say that for most people there idea of how the world works and what the future will look like is far more shaped by pop culture than it is anything else. Maybe we could call it argumentum ad fiction.
That flu pandemic could still happen. It's random, and the covid pandemic didn't even reset some kind of countdown: they are independent events. The main things it revealed about how pandemics play out is that nothing will be done until it hits a rich western country, and then it will be politicized.
I do think, with hindsight, that the largest portion of pandemic suffering was inflicted on ourselves, with lockdowns that caused the supply chain disruption and other tangential effects. I thought one lasting benefit of the pandemic was that if you were sick you would stay away from other people, but already I see signs of reverting back to normal: go to work if you feel you can work through your sickness.
Yes, and that masks don't work and vaccinations are toxic and air filtration is stoopit and people who believe any of these things are useful should have their faces ripped off. (If you haven't seen Twitter threads on this topic you probably think I'm exaggerating. But I'm not.)
I want someone to open an AI art gallery near me, where you can buy nice AI-generated Giclee-printed art for your walls at a fraction of what it would cost with a human artist.
I know I could buy AI-generated prints on the internet, or AI-generate my own and send them somewhere to be Giclee-printed, but I'd rather buy it from a shop so I can stare at it in full size for a while before deciding I'm interested in hanging on my own wall.
Does this sort of thing exist anywhere in the world yet?
Right now, with the art-types on social media screaming blue murder over AI art, and even a tool developed to "poison" art so it can't be scraped for training data, if anyone opened a gallery like this it would close within ten seconds as the pitchfork-bearing mob descended upon it.
Mind you, I wouldn't be at all surprised if some Chinese company did exactly that - AI generated prints you can purchase online, like the other art pieces that are sold as office/home furnishings.
Not Chinese (so far as I know) but a piece like this might just as well be AI-generated:
There's nothing in that piece that looks like a well, and they could easily swap the title for "Seashore by Moonlight", "River in Snowstorm" or just "Light through clouds" for all the difference it makes.
"Art by Maudsch is an Amsterdam-based art collective that presents the world with art from young, emerging, and aspiring artists. We offer a wide variety of hand-made framed canvas paintings. With over 10,000 happy customers, we strive to provide people with unique artwork for home decoration."
AI would do it cheaper and faster, I'm sure someone will jump on the opportunity - but maybe not bricks-and-mortar galleries *just* yet.
AI can only really compete with digital art, which makes it strange that the greatest resistance is from artists, who in general have the least to fear. Just paint, or sculpt, or unmake your bed with atoms, not bits.
Meanwhile all writing is digital to begin with, or digitised to end with, and writers don’t care much.
The bot is doing precisely the same work (looking and learning from existing artworks), merely not (yet) nearly as well as the meat.
The "screaming artists" are simply rent-seekers. They seem to think that they have "a right" to your money, for doing work that a machine could do. Rather like a hypothetical trench digger who demands to be paid more for digging with a spoon instead of an excavator.
I think the justification there is that the artists are claiming they produced the original artwork that the AI is being trained upon, that the training data scraped to produce material for the AI to copy, so that they have ownership rights in it and should be paid copyright or asked their permission to use it.
I can see a point there, but on the other hand, they can't stop AI from producing output that is classed as art. Commercial artists (not fan artists) are the ones I can see being hit hardest by this, but that style of work is also readily imitable by AI and can be churned out the same way. If you're doing the "cartoon blue and orange hairy-legged" style of illustration for a magazine or online article then AI can do that just as easily, and probably faster and cheaper. This kind of thing:
> they produced the original artwork that the AI is being trained upon... ...and should be paid
By this logic, the human artists themselves would owe royalties to the creators of every man-made object (incl. but not limited to works of art) they ever laid eyes on.
Much as I dislike the phrase, the "screaming artists" _are_ "on the wrong side of history". One normally can't pick winners ahead of time - but the Luddites failed a long time ago, and "John Henry laid down his hammer and died" (to the extent that the legend is historical) more than a century ago. The artists are going to lose. There is plenty of precedent.
Automation has been replacing human labor since the Jacquard loom, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jacquard_machine , 220 years ago. Labor-saving technology is not going to stop. It has been and will be used wherever the economics are favorable. As I said, normally one can't pick winners ahead of time - but _this_ kind of case is really clear.
>I want someone to open an AI art gallery near me, where you can buy nice AI-generated Giclee-printed art for your walls at a fraction of what it would cost with a human artist.
I think if you do the math the biggest cost of an art gallery piece of art is the rent, the salary for someone to run it and the commission. It is the price of being able to stand around for a while before deciding.
I'm sure it is, and I'm willing to pay this extra overhead.
If I were running this I'd probably include a guarantee that each work was a unique one-off. Everyone wants to think that they're a clever-clogs who has picked something special.
I saw a meme mocking weeaboos with the dialogue "I wish Japan had won WWII." This is risible for many reasons, but the most salient might be that all Japanese pop culture is downstream from their *loss* in that war. That alternate universe must have very different media from ours, but *how* is it different? Is it all State Shinto propaganda all the time?
I dunno what it would be like, but I think it would lack one of the aspects I like most about current-timeline Japanese shonen anime/manga, which is the tension between violence, honor, and pacifism.
A Japanese victory in WW2 doesn't realistically result in Japan ruling the entire world. I would model it more like an East Asian version of the USSR, with Japan variously occupying parts of East Asia and keeping friendly puppet states in others. But, much like the USSR, it's not going to last forever; little Japan can't keep control of gigantic China forever, and South East Asia is too far away; there will be more wars, and Japan will lose control. Whether this particular alternate history is more or less horrible and bloody than the one we actually got is anyone's guess.
A fractured China, on the other hand? Parts of it under Japanese occupation, parts of it the Nationalists/Republic, parts of it the Communists?
And suppose the West decided that propping up or at least not opposing the Japanese-ruled China was worth it, because they were fighting off the Communists? Early domino theory as it were?
That also raises the question, if Japan emerged the victor, what about the other Axis powers or were they defeated? I think it's possible that a post-Second World War victorious but exhausted West would be busy enough with the USSR not to want to entangle itself with Japan, so leaving it alone to occupy its East Asian territories, as long as it was quashing any Communist uprisings and not encroaching on US territory in the Pacific.
> But, much like the USSR, it's not going to last forever; little Japan can't keep control of gigantic China forever
It can do it for long enough to be reasonably considered "forever". The immediately prior Qing dynasty lasted for 300 years, and had bigger problems with invasion by Japan than it did with native rebellion.
This is something that I find a little bit worrisome about modern China. Japan has a strong indigenous traditional culture that gives it some resistance to invasive foreign memes. China is in a somewhat different position - there is a strong indigenous traditional culture, but much of it is strongly contaminated with the taint of foreign rule and difficult to defend in terms of being traditional.
To back you up: the "anime" aesthetic as we know it is based on the works of Osamu Tezuka, of course (Astro Boy guy). The big eyes, for example, was part of his style that has been copied and refined ever since. But where did Osamu get those big eyes from? He was inspired by the American cartoonist Carl Barks and his Uncle Scrooge comic books! Just look at the big cartoon eyes on Donald Duck: without them, anime as we know it wouldn't exist.
If the Empire had won, they might have gone the route Park did in South Korea: he suppressed non-traditional and non-conservative art forms, whether in music or literature or film.
"If the Empire had won, they might have gone the route Park did in South Korea: he suppressed non-traditional and non-conservative art forms, whether in music or literature or film."
If the Empire had won, the army would have been in a very strong position, and the modernisation/Westernisation of Japan had involved the army as well. It could end up in a mixture of traditional culture being maintained for ritual and ceremonial reasons but in everyday life Westernised model was used. So art might see a split between 'high' (traditional elements and themes) and 'low' (cartoons, anime, etc. in Western style), or even a "Japanese version of Western themes" for representational art in the Western portrait style, but the subject matter is traditional or people in traditional dress.
"The government and through it, the army, were the first to make changes to clothing in Japanese society. A regulation of 1872 ordered the substitution of Western dress for the ceremonial robes of court nobles, and even the Emperor had appeared in Western dress in 1870.
The army had begun to wear Western uniforms since the bakumatsu period. However basic clothing did not change significantly for most Japanese during the second half of the nineteenth century due to high costs and suitability to other aspects of Japanese living, for example, sitting on the floor and the custom of removing shoes before entering a house made the high-button styles of this period rather impractical.
More noticeable were the changes in hairstyles with the short cut replacing the topknot, so that by 1890 it was difficult to find a man in the cities with a traditional hair style. For women, blackened teeth and shaved eyebrows began to disappear quickly from the cities and more slowly in the countryside.
After men cut their hair, they began to wear Western style hats and carry umbrellas and pocket watches. Imported wool began to be used for coats and shawls but these were generally worn over the kimono and were expensive and therefore limited to the prosperous few. Indeed, Western clothing often seems to have been used as an accessory. It appears officials would usually don traditional clothing in the home after wearing Western attire to work.
The major changes that occurred in Japanese housing in the period seem to have be "a diffusion of innovations from the Tokugawa period" including the adoption of shoji (paper-on-wooden-frame room dividers), engawa (the balcony) and fusuma (sliding wall-style panels) from samurai houses by the growing number of salaried workers and farmers where they could afford to do so.
Thus wood replaced dirt and tatami replaced wood. These were Japanese innovations rather than "modern", Western ones. However, kerosene and oil lamps tended to replace rapeseed lamps in the Meiji Period and this added to the increased use of shoji and sometimes glass and new, hard, ceramic hibachi led to the family not having to be centered around the stove as the only source of heat and light. A corollary of increased light was that Japanese houses began to become cleaner and more sanitary.
It was in Tokyo and the larger cities that new, Western style concrete, stone and brick buildings and bridges were built. These were often designed by foreign architects and the most famous include The Bank of Japan, Ginza Bricktown, The Asakusa Twelve Storeys, Tokyo Central Station, Shimbashi Station and the infamous Rokumeikan Dance Hall. Gas lighting came to the Ginza in 1874 and electricity in 1878. However, it was not until well into the twentieth century that Tokyo began to resemble London, Paris or New York rather than old wooden Edo.
As for eating habits, the Meiji period saw a wider diffusion of changes begun in Tokugawa times with increases in the consumption of polished rice, tea, fruit, sugar and soy sauce. Dining out also became more widespread. With the development of communications and increased social mobility, local customs such as eating seafood became national ones over time. Meat eating though encouraged by such "modernizers" as Fukuzawa Yukichi and spread through conscription (along with beer) did not become widespread in Japan until after World War II.
Beer was first brewed in Japan in the 1870s initially by foreigners in Yokohama, an operation that was later sold to Japanese entrepreneurs and was to become Kirin Beer. In Sapporo, in Hokkaido, beer was produced in 1876 by a company that was to become the modern day Sapporo Beer. The first beer hall was opened by Sapporo Beer in Ginza in Tokyo in 1899.
Conservative commentators of the time reveal the influx of new western fashions and the greater spread of samurai customs to the general populace:
Everyone has forgotten the righteous way. Now everyone is working for profit.... In the villagers we now have hairdressers and public baths. If you see houses you see flutes, shamisen and drums on display. Those living in rented houses, the landless and even servants have haori, umbrellas, tabi and clogs. When you see people on their way to the temple, they seem better dressed than their superiors."
Given that upward social mobility and increasing wealth had come along with modernisation and adaptation of Western methods, having won their part of the war I think it would be very hard to reverse all that and go back to the "real traditional Japanese days and ways". A Japanised version of Western culture would more likely be the result, I think, than a scrapping of all Western influence. After all, the boast of the country would be that they fought the West with the West's own weapons and won, so Japan was better at being Western!
Isn't... isn't that the very point that underlies the wish? If they hate Japanese pop culture, and if they agree that it's current form is downstream of their loss of WWII...
The Wise Master says "Get weird about that thing you're weird about...Make your nest in that closed loop of happiness and be unbound from the unceasing whirl of judgement."
The implication is that this experience is universal, but what if it isn't? What if there are people who aren't weird about *anything*? I'll call such a person a "King of the Normies": their lives are optimized around status-seeking to the point that it would never occur to them to do anything for any reason other than the approval of others. This is somewhat similar to the "NPC meme," but that meme is wrong in an important respect: while the NPC is depicted as being "below" the reader in some important way, a KotN is likely at the very top of whatever status hierarchy is relevant to them.
It then follows that people with immense power over me likely have a thought process that is completely alien to mine: surely a dangerous situation for me. Since a KotN would never bother to understand me (where's the status in that?), I'd better create some mental model of them, but how? I might read media optimized for a KotN, but they probably derive status from consuming media I've never heard of, so this has its limits. I've found what I think is a workable approximation in media targeted at people who live in New York City, but maybe there's a more efficient filter?
TL:DR: I am a bug trying to avoid being stepped on, and I'd like a way to figure out where the giant is going to put his foot next.
> I'd better create some mental model of them, but how?
The point of "American Psycho" was to show a caricature of status-seeking behavior. The book/film wasn't intended to be realistic, but maybe you'll find it a decent starting point for improv.
video-essay: "when the audience doesn't get the joke"
I have seen the movie, and I certainly don't have any opportunity to get within axe range of someone like Bateman. His sinecure job can't hurt me directly, though his brokerage? firm might stomp on me on the way to redirecting profit to the EVP or whatever his title was.
Well, that's why I don't consider these types especially dangerous, except to the extent that the average-Joe also chases status. I.e. whatever the KotN is doing that's dangerous, the herd of average-Joes is already doing it to a lesser extreme. Additionally, the people who want to be captain of the boat for the prestige are unlikely to wantonly capsize it. In this day and age, the people who worry me more are the ideologues.
It's entirely possible to engage in status-seeking behaviour even in "that thing you're weird about" (see Big Name Fans in SF fandom and the wars over figurine painting).
"King of the Normies" would not be *consciously* doing everything for status-seeking approval of others.
But if they were, then the Kardashians are your Normie Royalty, because everything they do is for public consumption. If you want a mental model of What Is It Like To Be A Kardashian, then good luck and better you than me. I don't think either of us are important enough to be anywhere near the footprint area of a Kardashian to be stepped on.
100% agreed that a true KotN does not do any of this consciously. That's what makes them so dangerous: acquiring status is to them as breathing is to you and me.
Sure, but even KotN has to sleep and eat and wash their face, and unless they have some Truman Show thing going on, they can't be *always* doing things purely for the effect they have on others. Does no KotN ever eat a McDonald's burger?
While I agree there are people who want to be popular and thought leaders and influencers and public intellectuals and politicians and the rest of it, and they do work on gaining status as part of that, I don't think your model of "they want to crush me! me! because I'm so tiny and helpless!" works.
If it's unconscious, then any crushing is no more intentional than one of us breaking a spiderweb as we walk by. The only advice that spiders and other insects could receive is "don't be around humans" in order to avoid that. For conscious crushing, well if you're that tiny and unremarkable, you're not on their radar. You would need to be a rival, or be important enough that crushing you gained them an advantage.
And before you start on the "but they laugh at and bully nerds! for popularity and status!" bit, that 'nerd' includes me, you, and everybody with a hobby or interest. Train enthusiasts were long the butt of mockery as anoraks, did you feel one way or the other about that? Were you even aware of this?
What you wrote reads as "I'm not high status enough to be immune from bullying by the jocks" and sorry, I can't help you there. I'm not high status either, all I have done through my life is not care about the high status people and their opinion of me.
Well then I think you should try to learn more about the thought processes of others. You would be more successful at it if you thought about the minds of others in a less all-or-nothing way. Like this: You have a certain way of thinking, and enjoy some weird loops. There are a minority of people who are very similar to you. Everyone else is on a spectrum running from being a bit less weirdness-prone that you to being typical and average in almost every measure. And I have not observed that there is much correlation between being weirdness-prone and being tolerant of the weirdness of others. I have known people who really do seem to be typical and average on most measures who are quite tolerant of other people's weirdness -- "well, it makes sense to him and he enjoys it, so that's what matters." Some of them have friends with a pretty big weirdness component, and they admire them, and wish they were creative enough to have interests and talents like their friend's.
Oh, the people in the middle of the bell curve are generally harmless and can be ignored. It's the 3-sigma outliers that concern me. I'm not sure "tolerance" enters the picture at all: were you "intolerant" of the ant under your shoe this morning?
Well the people I was describing probably are 3 sigma outliers when it comes to conventionality. I had an actual couple in mind, an Italian-American couple in their 60's I know. Their house is so clean you could lick the floor, their furniture is beige, they eat at 8 am, noon and 6 pm, then watch TV. But they are very warm people, and have a number of friends who are much less conventional than them. And they like me and I have my share of weird loops. When you say 3-sigma outliers -- outliers on *what*? Conventionality? Wealth and power? Hatred of people unlike them?
If you mean rich, powerful and famous people who are determined to become even more rich and powerful -- well, I suppose I'm an ant in their books too,. I mean I am no use to them in acquiring more wealth status and power, and I am too unimportant by their standards for them to even care whether they impress me. On the other hand, I never cross paths with tycoons & the like, so it's kind of a non-issue. They have never impinged on my life. Do you mean just regular non-zillionaire people whom you would might actually find yourself in the room with -- and they are absolutely determined to end up as the most admired person in the room? For instance there are probably some people on this thread who are interested in absolutely nothing except becoming the most admired poster on ACX. But -- how would you end up getting squashed like an ant under their feet? I don't really have a picture of the scenario in which you end up squashed.
I think history proves that "Crush [outgroup]" is an excellent way to gain status, and that the identity of the outgroup is entirely arbitrary. If you're the right sort of person, you can whip up a lynch mob against people who wear plaid neckties, and there I'll be, strung up by my own cravat.
For the sake of argument, I am presuming that the dichotomy proposed in the comic strip is a meaningful one. If you think the man in the comic strip isn't a "normie," I don't particularly care what you call him.
>Since a KotN would never bother to understand me (where's the status in that?)<
Where's the status, period? If they're driven completely by the approval of the crowd, just follow what the crowd likes. It's easy; they're very noisy, that's what makes them the crowd.
But even the theoretical isn't going to work like that, because people have differing strengths and weaknesses; if you're 4'2, you can't play basketball no matter how much status it would gain you. So instead those people are going to endeavor to make their strengths higher status. And that's their special interest.
I think you are slightly mistaken: instead of following the crowd, you can gain more status by being *just ahead* of the crowd. When the crowd catches up to you, you will be hailed as a leader.
>you can gain more status by being *just ahead* of the crowd.<
If you're smart enough. But trying to outsmart the people you want to impress is gambling your reputation every time. If they don't follow you, you look like a fool.
Maybe a little, but I think that there's not actually that much status to be gained in the real world simply by "liking things". That's for fanboys and high schoolers.
You can _lose_ status in the real world by liking the wrong things, or liking normal things to an unhealthy degree, but you don't get much status by liking the right things (compared to _doing_ high status things or occupying a high-status position).
> You can _lose_ status in the real world by liking the wrong things, or liking normal things to an unhealthy degree, but you don't get much status by liking the right things (compared to _doing_ high status things or occupying a high-status position).
You can't blame people for being confused about this; people go to great lengths to give the impression that you can gain status by liking the right things ("connoisseurship"). In reality, the prestige associated with liking the right wines is derived from a person who occupies a high-status position and dictates which wines are the right ones. But all of the rhetoric portrays things as happening the other way around.
For the sake of argument, I am presuming that the dichotomy proposed in the comic strip is a meaningful one. If you think the man in the comic strip isn't a "normie," I don't particularly care what you call him.
Lately I started "getting weird" about something new. I was surprised, because I hadn't felt this way in a long time. I used to get fixated and obsessed with some random nerdy thing all the time, but I hadn't in years. I wondered why.
Then I realized it was because my ADHD medication ran out a week ago.
I have written stuff on my blog before that carries the subtext that I myself am enlightened.
Well, I am OUT of that closet, I don't CARE what Daniel Ingram says, I AM a FUCKING ENLIGHTENED SUPER-BEING (technically, so are you), and in this FUNNY and HERETICAL essay, in which you will LAUGH and which will cause you to SUBSCRIBE to my BLOG, I share the story of how I got ENLIGHTENED, before taking Buddha, Jesus and Muhammad down a peg or three!
Well, it depends how you interpret it. I talk to someone on Discord who gave it all sorts of other interpretations such that it doesn't invalidate other spiritual traditions, but I hold to my view because I think spiritual development past a certain threshold does take a toll on one, and well, you can end up saying things like that (ego inflation), or running into the Satanic verse problem. Which, granted, maybe it is me who has a Satanic verse problem right now, but you know, the whole thing is like if Troma Nakmo wrote an essay, and Troma Nakmo is not a demon. There are spiritual manifestations that are hostile and irreverent, and they totally are legitimate spirituality.
This is wildly uncharitable. Granted, I went very extra here, but I can't grant that spirituality has to play by the rules of normalcy, or potentially, any rules. Running down the streets screaming "I AM THE TRUTH!" is, after all, a spiritual zenith.
I have gathered hints that suggest I am not enlightened, because I can walk by a tree and not notice the bark; that to notice the bark on the tree is even a meaningful thing that I can do.
Yet I can enable such a mental state, mostly at will, although it takes a meaningful effort to maintain it, under which my visual processing changes fundamentally; where under normal circumstances I have the most extreme tunnel vision, seeing only what I am looking at, I can instead see everything. It is a purposeful relaxation, of a "muscle" that wants to be under tension; I could see the sensation of relaxing that muscle as feeling like a weight.
This mental state is perhaps the clothing that enlightenment takes; my thoughts remain the same, they follow the same paths, and yet I am disassociated from them; they occur without the direction I thought I provided. (And yet I do provide that direction, for I am the whole of this; the concept of self is misleading, for we name a thing that is us, and may eventually realize that it is not.)
There is yet another "relaxation", which I have yet to find the lever for, in which I am better able to process how other people are feeling (or perhaps it would be better to say that I am more aware of how I am already processing this information).
We train ourselves in the art of focusing our attention, of paying attention to the movie; the act of such focus is all-encompassing, and we forget that we can relax that attention, and observe the world around us. I think enlightenment, for some, is discovering the mental switch that turns off this focus, and flipping it - and then forgetting where it lays.
And as enlightenment is a recursive process, each step in turn being the discovery anew of a kind of internal Copernican principle, discovering, within our own personal universe, that what you thought was "you" is not you at all. The Earth is not the center of the universe; the sun is not the center of the universe; the galaxy is not the center of the universe. Perhaps it may culminate in the realization there is no center of the universe - but the Copernican principle is not yet done, for we still think that what we know of the universe is somehow central to it. There is no center; there is no "you". (This is a false truth; you are not the movie, you are not the screen, you are not the theater. You are all of it, but nothing is all of you.)
You're not the movie; you are not the screen. You are not the theater. And yet I know that I think that I am the theater, and I know likewise this is not true. And I cannot say what is beyond that, for though I know I am not the theater, I do not grok it; perhaps I need something to identify with, some new false truth to overthrow, in order to overthrow the false truth I have. Or perhaps in realizing that I have finished; I have escaped the cycle of rebirth.
But perhaps I can point you at something: You think you are the screen. But you are also the audience, and that is the heart of empathy. If you have empathy, at least, and if not, perhaps that is a useful skill to have - or perhaps it is simply a false truth. But if you do: Observe that when another is in pain, you feel that pain. And you are the projector.
You are the universe, and the failing of ego is to think that it is the only one.
I am not enlightened, for there is no enlightenment to be had, only the realization of what we already knew, coming in the form of an apocalypse that destroys everything, replacing it in an instant with the exact same thing. It is, indeed, a fantastic joke.
I will believe you know something if you can answer my Question: What do you wish that everybody knew? To be honest, it sounds like you can indeed answer it, but I want to be sure.
I don't think knowledge works that way; we each have our own conceptual constellations. If we are each a universe unto ourselves, such a wish would be to inject an alien structure into that universe which does not belong.
I guess an actual shared language, such that we can meaningfully communicate, would be nice. But that feels like cheating the spirit of the question, something like wishing for infinite wishes - and also that seems like the kind of wish that would backfire quite spectacularly and result in mass insanity at best. I don't think I have a meaningful answer, only things that sound like answers, words sound important but that point at nothing (or nothing, at least, that I can be certain translates). Or which point at too much.
Insofar as I must pick an answer, I think I should choose the qualia of the color blue, which, while that does carry a nontrivial danger, seems less dangerous than any other answer I might come up with.
Insofar as I am free to wish for nothing, I think that is the wisest course of action.
I think you are taking this too far, of course there is truth outside oneself, are you sure you believe that encountering truth from outside you is like having an alien structure injected into one's own universe? We can learn from each other, that's the idea behind The Question.
The traditions of teaching are careful not to speak any answers too specifically, indeed are careful to avoid giving answers themselves, however, and there is a reason for this; we must answer the questions on our own, integrate the truths into our own understanding. It is the question which is taught, not the answer.
Hm? Scott has written about him before, he wrote this meditation manual called Mastering the Core Teachings of the Buddha that Scott did a book review for. Yes, Daniel Ingram claims enlightenment, and the book lays out a system for enlightenment.
I think Scott has discussed how the number of lawyers in America grew rapidly beginning around 1970. Federal bills in the US have also gotten longer, on average, over time. In general, there are more pages written by legal professionals impacting the functioning of American business and society today than before 1970.
It's easy for me to think of the downsides of increasing red tape, etc., but there are likely significant benefits as well. What are some of the benefits of the increasing "legalization" of society? Are there counterfactuals of developed nations that haven't had an increase in legalization?
People from all over the world come to Delaware to register their corporations thanks to its predictable legal environment. It's even impressive enough that people attempted to replicate it in part of Honduras in order to promote growth there.
Legalization is what enables modern society to function, because it enables projects to operate on a scale that transcends "he's my cousin, I can trust him".
That's a good point, but I don't think it's related to the "legalization of society" trend, because Delaware has been the preferred state for incorporation since the early 20th century, before the 1970s takeoff in the relative number of lawyers.
You're right that it isn't: Delaware ranks 21st in lawyers per 1,000 population, barely above average among the 50 states.
The clear outlier is the State of New York, which has 9.3 active lawyers per 1,000 population. That's more than triple the nationwide number, and 40 percent more lawyers per capita than the #2 state!
The ABA data I'm looking at doesn't break it down by area of law, but "corporate law departments" does not seem to be all of the explanation for that: TX, NY, and CA are virtually tied as the leading states in terms of Fortune 500 HQs but TX and CA each have fewer than half as many lawyers per capita than NY does. It probably is part of the answer e.g. Illinois, 4th in F500 HQs, is 5th in lawyers per capita. But there seem to be additional reason(s) for New York State being the lawyer capital of the US....maybe the concentration of the finance sector specifically?
Thanks, that's a really good point. The increase in the number of lawyers coincides with the increased financialization of the American economy and they are related. On the whole, that's a positive impact with better diffusion of risk, allocation of resources, etc.
I don't know much about the predictability of its legal environment, but surely businesses from all over the world register in Delaware because it is a tax haven.
I wouldn't call any particular state in the US a tax haven, because corporations are going to be subject to federal taxes regardless and they will still have to file individually in the states they operate. Delaware has favorable rules for corporations beyond the corporate tax rate.
Afaik low-tax US states are excellent tax havens because the US enforces disclosure of company structure and beneficiaries on foreign companies through FATCA, but refused to sign up the the OECD's own disclosure agreement (along with Bahrain and Vanuatu).
And they tend to be pretty popular places to register businesses. Is Delaware particularly popular? Or rare in being a tax haven with predictable legal environment?
See my answer to Tom P. Delaware seems to have pretty low taxes, and US states in general are not covered by any AML disclosure agreements. Seems likely they've done a race to the bottom to attract foreign businesses imo.
Accelerates the downfall of the Tower of Babble, at which point God will descend from the heavens and confound the language of all lawyers and bureaucrats
The two positions I know of on parking are "inertia, keep the current system" and "ban cars, ban parking, ban everything, die die die".
It's always seemed to me like the obvious solution is to incentivize (through zoning? tax breaks? subsidies?) giant multi-storey parking structures anywhere dense enough to support them, allowing lots of parking with a comparatively small land shadow. Is there some reason nobody talks about this? Does anyone else think this is the obvious solution?
I took a road trip in a rental car around Switzerland a few years ago and I was amazed by how the cities were all pedestrian friendly and car friendly at the same time. Truly, it was easy and convenient to get around both ways.
I'm not sure how they did it exactly, but there were a lot of large, conveniently located parking structures, many of them underground.
Walking past parking garages is not a good experience, especially if crime gets out of control. So I'd suggest a central parking tower, with a shell of smaller storefronts and windowed offices around it.
Another problem is the amount of walking to get from a centralized parking spot to wherever you're going, which depending on the distance and the weather, can defeat the purpose of driving in the first place.
I generally prefer distributed underground parking, or "park and ride" mass transit.
People like to park close to wherever they are going. If we build large carparks, they will probably not be close enough to wherever people want to be - unless you build a lot of big carparks everywhere, but then you end up in pretty much the same situation as now. You could couple large carparks with efficient public transport in dense areas, but people seem to prefer driving the whole way and this approach usually means you end up with large out of town car parks linked by bus services to city centres (in Europe we call this Park & Ride, don't know if you have a similar set up in America).
If the businesses are dense enough then a single lot can serve lots and lots of businesses. Right now, if i park at the lowes near me, it would be 1/4 mile walk to any other business because of how big the parking lot is. In the central business district the main garage is with 1/4 mile of probably 150 businesses including an amphitheater and government offices.
I don't think I would park at a giant Lowe's parking lot unless I was going to Lowe's. If I was going to the Target next door, I would park at *its* giant parking lot. So I don't think most people walk 1/4 mile from Lowe's to somewhere else. Also, walking 1/4 mile downtown city is much slower (because of cross streets) and more stressful than walking 1/4 mile across a Lowe's parking lot.
> If I was going to the Target next door, I would park at *its* giant parking lot.
Maybe the issue is that I see this as undesirable. Maybe you don't mind it? I am not interested in continually getting in and out of my car to drive for 10 minutes, 6 of which is spent looking for parking. That doesn't sound like a good use of my time or part of a rich, fulfilling life.
>Also, walking 1/4 mile downtown city is much slower (because of cross streets) and more stressful than walking 1/4 mile across a Lowe's parking lot.
I dont think this is true for most people (though i have no evidence other than my own experience). A large parking lot isn't comfortable for me to walk in. It's a place for cars and I am a person. I have to be watching out for cars driving down rows, turning into spots, or backing out of spots. In a city I am on a sidewalk with other people. There are things to look at and enjoy.
You are also not likely to encounter more than 2 or 3 crosswalk over 1/4 mile. In a dense commercial district the phases for lights are unlikely to be more than 60 seconds. I don't think this is going to add much time to the walk.
I'm confused why you think occasionally having to look for parking right next to a giant store is more of an imposition than navigating a giant multistorey parking structure 1/4 mile away from wherever you want to be, then spending 15 minutes navigating downtown until you find your final destination.
And before anyone thinks otherwise, I LOVE to drive. I LOVE cars. But this kind of "driving" - to and from giant parking lots - is not fun driving. It sucks. It's not driving, it's sitting in a car. I dont want to ban cars, I just don't want our cities to be dominated by cars and pavement and warehouses masquerading as stores.
Won't self-driving cars make parking garages and even large parking lots obsolete? They could drop off their human passengers at the destination, then drive a short distance to find the closest, free/cheap parking space (along a curbside, down an alley, in a private driveway where the owner charges $0.50/hr), then return to pick up their humans when summoned.
My understanding of the problem in the US is not that there's insufficient parking it's that the requirements for parking are so high they make a lot of dense urban spaces unfeasible. If 75% of the parking spaces are unoccupied already then multi-story car parks are merely an inefficient dodge of the legislation. What needs to be updated is the number of spaces a business is expected to provide for their customers.
At least where I live there's insufficient parking (source: just yesterday decided to stop going to a restaurant I liked because it was too stressful to try to get parking close by). And the government wouldn't mandate requirements for parking if they didn't think people would be angry about insufficient parking otherwise.
Yup, parking minimums mean that even if your business is surrounded by parking garages you still need to build dedicated parking on your lot (unless you get special permission to do otherwise).
About 10 years ago, a developer was trying to build apartments in Dupont Circle in DC. This is one of the densest, desirable, amenity rich areas of the city. You definitely dont need a car to live there. The apartments were going to be very small studios (400 - 500 sq ft) intended for single people to live in.
But the parking requirements were two spaces per unit - for units that only 1 person would live in!
Thankfully, the City gave them an exemption to not have *any* parking. This was, of course, and outrage to some set of people. But the building has been very popular and hasn't caused any issues with street parking (which was already way over capacity).
I take it you do not support “ban parking, ban everything, die die die”? My understanding is that there is always a tension between the development of good alternatives to driving (public transport, more local small scale businesses within walking distance) and incentives to drive (parking, wider roads). The latter makes the former less tenable.
A core question is whether you choose not to go to a restaurant if you can find parking (and stay home)? Or do you choose to go somewhere nearby, if that option existed?
At least to me, it seems like the benefit of living within walking distance of amenities seems huge.
Perhaps others feel differently. My view is influenced by growing up in a city with good public transit, winter, and purposefully bad car circulation.
Perhaps, “don’t subsidize parking, because no good will come from it” would be a more charitable take than “inertia”.
At least in Finland many cities have giant multi-storey parking structures underground, which of course takes even less space. However, such projects have often had costs/schedules extended beyond the original expectations for reasons I don't quite understand, at least one (in Turku) ended up causing unexpected damages to surrounding buildings at the constructions phase, and my understanding (I don't drive myself) is that drivers are quite sluggish at actually finding their way to them instead of just trying to find a street parking spot - you'd actually still need to limit street parking anyway to incentivize the use of the parking structures, and the knowledge that would happen would then lead to increased opposition.
Underground parking is fairly standard where I am (large American city). The standard 5+1 building - 5 stories of residential over 1 story of commercial - usually has 2 floors of parking garage below, roughly one for customers and one for residents. Sometimes it's adjusted a bit, for example, if the ground floor has smaller storefronts on the street side, there can be an enclosed ground floor parking area behind them.
It's expensive, but so is doing anything where I live.
I agree parking structures are complicated and stressful to use, but so is street parking. I like the underground idea, although I bet the US would bungle the costs and schedule even more.
I have always considered myself yimby but carry the heretical view that mandatory parking minimums are fine in most locations. Its just the obvious solution to avoiding a tragedy of commons, where the commons was ample street side parking.
Some locations (nyc) shouldn't have this commons, and they absolutely should build parking structures and use precious surface space for something other than idle cars. In densish suburbia this commons is good and should be protected. I have lived in places where it was viable but under threat. The increased cost ultimately born by residents to keep their idle cars off the road near their own homes was appropriate. In non dense suburbia its also good, but under no threat.
There is a much more efficient solution, price th street parking to match the demand. Business will still build parking, but it will he sized to be appropriate for their busines instead of an arbitrary amount decided on by planners
I understand that is the standard market urbanist response, and I am myself mostly market urbanist. However this doesnt actually engage my argument. I have stated that the commons is good in some places, and bad in others (actual urban environments). You are essentially claiming that the commons is always bad and should be eliminated (if its priced its no longer a commons). But I dont think you apply your implicit principle consistently. You consume from the commons every day and would abhor it if every resource was priced (how many steps did you take on the side walk today). So I think you should consider in which places the commons might be good actually.
In my own case I am thinking more in lines of residential areas with mixed small apartments and single family homes. I think most people really appreciate being able to park on the street when visiting a friend and not having to learn the parking system in every area they go to and would despise your solution, even if led to the a optimal number of parking spots and cost savings when they are visited. But it wouldnt work if the apartment dwellers didnt have their own spots. I probably lean more towards no commons in business districts, business are simply better oriented to figuring out demand from their customers than are dinner hosts.
If sidewalks were so crowded that it was no longer practical to use them to get around, then it might make sense to think about rationing. This is extremely rare; a small sidewalk can have very good capacity and is easily expanded and cheaply maintained. In contrast, most of the US already has lots of space dedicated to parking, but it can be tough to find a spot--hence why this thread exists.
Does that actually work? My primary experience is with DC where new buildings have parking minimums but both apartment and SFH residents can all still street park, so street parking is always scarce. If the purpose of street parking is for visitors, why not use meters? If they are priced appropriately then you will have a great chance of having a spot when you need it. I don't think it is appropriate to consider street parking a 'commons' unless you are defining that to just mean anything the government sometimes provides for free. Usually it refers to a public good which means that it is nonrival and nonexcludable.
That is not the definition of commons. It is nonexcludable but rival so it is an exhaustible resource unlike a public good. Free street side parking is a commons. It is created, rather than just being there, but once there it has the same properties as say a natural resource, also a commons.
I would expect DC to be too dense for that. Apologies if by only citing nyc I gave the impression it was only there where a commons is unworkable. I have been in many suburbs where i can find parking when i drive to random places, so at the very least parking minimums serve to create sufficient supply (but might be over supplied)
This is pretty much how it works in Manhattan - there are (almost) no open-air parking lots below 96th street and most cars are parked in multi-story parking structures of various sorts. Unfortunately street parking is not charged at a market-clearing price but there's enough cars to support the garage mechanism.
You'd get the same outcome in other cities if you severely restricted street parking and started charging a market clearing price on the remaining spots. This doesn't happen because most voters drive, so politicians don't want to mess with existing systems too much. Even in London street parking isn't charged at the true market rate and the local congestion charge is about 3-5x lower than what it should've been to defeat congestion.
Back when I lived in Sunnyvale, CA (2009-2017), subsidized public multi-story parking structures were a big part of their parking strategy. Downtown businesses (and I think anyone else other than detached single-family houses) could pay an in-lieu fee to be exempted from parking requirements, at a rate that was probably a pretty good deal considering the opportunity costs of building on-site parking, and the city used the money to build parking garages around the outskirts of downtown. I get the impression this is a pretty common pattern at least in south-bay suburbs.
If you want unsubsidized garages, and especially if you want to reduce or eliminate parking requirements for single-family houses, then you probably also need to ban or harshly limit free street parking. Street parking is usually the best immediate substitute for on-site parking in single-family residential neighborhoods, and it produce contention and becomes a big quality-of-life issue when people are counting on it but there isn't enough to go around.
Another potential solution I've toyed with, but I don't know if it being tried anywhere, is to shift financial responsibility for parking from property owners to car owners. Instead of charging in-lieu fees to property owners who don't meet the parking standards, charge each registered car owner for two-ish parking spots per car, with a credit for one parking spot per car if you have on-site parking at home. You can either spend some of the money subsidizing property owners who offer free on-site parking, or you can spend the money on public parking, or (if you're anti-car and are using this mainly as a mechanism to discourage car ownership) you can have the government pocket some or all of the money for general revenue or for transit projects.
From what I could see, yes. Plenty of parking downtown if you're willing to walk a little bit, but the footprint of the parking garages was a lot less than what I've seen in similar-size/density suburbs that tried to handle downtown parking entirely through on-site parking mandates.
I usually used the parking garage at the Caltrain station, which was half a block away from one end of the main downtown street. IIRC, it was free for up to four hours at a time on evenings and weekends and charged a few dollars for all-day parking during the workday, the latter presumably being aimed at people who were parking there to commute the rest of the way by train.
Multi-story parkings are great, they just don't solve the problem. Cars will keep taking up all free acessible space because they can and nobody bothers to stop them, and because people who use cars just aren't interested in driving to a designated spot and walking the rest of the way (otherwise they'd just use public transport), they want nothing less but to park literally at the front door of their destination, and they keep trying to no matter how implausible it is in practice.
We need the bans. Nothing against subsequently making it easier for car users to enter cities by building parking places, but they're not an alternative to bans, they're their complement.
I'm guessing you're a man who lives in a low-crime, effectively policed area with a well-managed public transit system?
Not all of us are that lucky!
You're *right,* I'm not interested in driving to a designated spot and walking who-knows-how-far the rest of the way to my overnight job. I rode the bus from home to the same job for five years, but with my city's abdication of policing, it's far, far too dangerous to do that now.
And then a coworker had to mace an attacker at her bus stop last week (transit security agreed it was so necessary that they did her the favor of "accidentally" forgetting to get her contact information so that she couldn't be criminally prosecuted or privately sued later).
I can only do the work I do because I drive from a secured garage at home to a secured garage at work, and even though I drive a mile out of my way to avoid an open air drug market on a contested intersection (the one that my bus route would stop at, natch).
Cars and parking aren't the problem when a city is infested with crime.
I think it was Ellen Willis (whom most of us would not agree with otherwise) who was asked a few decades ago, "don't you feel sad now that NYC is no longer hip?" She replied it was nice to be able to walk home without worrying about being assaulted.
I think you're treating my proposal as an alternative to banning street parking and minimum parking requirements, whereas I'm thinking of it as an add-on to those proposals. Erica's description of Sunnyvale's strategy above also seems like a good synthesis.
I was indeed. I guess I didn't exactly understand why you want to incentivize building off-the-street parking spaces when banning street parking is honestly all the incentive needed.
My mental model of this is built off that one time I took a long stroll through downtown Antwerp. It has no street parking (aside from the usual exceptions for ambulances and police vehicles, cargo delivery, etc.), very low amount of car traffic that even I found perfectly tolerable, especially since most streets are woonerfs... and there are parking structures absolutely everywhere you go. "On every corner" would be underselling it. I'm pretty sure most are private businesses and none are subsidized.
I realize I'm talking about Europe here, and its local solutions may not easily translate into US regulatory setting, but still - it's proof by example, and a nearly perfect one at that.
> because people who use cars just aren't interested in driving to a designated spot and walking the rest of the way (otherwise they'd just use public transport)
Driver here. I have observed the mentality you describe, but it doesn't describe me. I'm fine with a bit of walking on either end of the trip, but my main reason for preferring driving to transit is that it goes where I want to go, when I want to go there. My car is right there when I'm ready to go, I don't have to get there early to make sure I don't miss it, and it's going the most direct and expeditious road route to my destination with few or no additional stops on the way. Moreover, the car is my own space that I hardly ever need to share with potentially ill-mannered strangers.
I'm aware that in very dense urban areas with very good public transit systems, trains and busses run often enough that scheduling at least isn't an issue, and traffic is bad enough that transit can be as fast or faster than driving even with indirect routes and additional stops. I do not live in a very dense urban area, nor do I want to, so that doesn't really help me.
In what context? Every big American city I've been in seems to have lots of above or, preferably, below ground structures like that. (Same goes for many smaller cities, actually.) But that still incentivizes driving into the center of the city itself, and their effectiveness will always be limited by the amount of cheap/free street parking available. They also create "dead zones" since a parking garage can't be stores, restaurants, homes, or offices.
The real problem is not that we can't build parking garages, it's that you don't want lots of cars in dense areas to begin with--they just take up too much space, whether when parked or being driven, even aside from any other externalities.
I know that some places do put parking on the outside of their "downtown" so that you can walk in, like Vail, CO. Something like that could probably work for smaller towns, if needed.
ETA: in general, though, why do we need to subsidize parking at all? Is it such a public good that we think the market would under-supply it otherwise?
For the centre of a giant city it's not practical for everyone to get in and out with cars, you need public transport. But for smaller suburban shopping districts, this is what you want.
Let me pick on Pleasanton, California, a town I've been to a few times that seems to demonstrate the problem with American town layouts. Here's a map of the area I'm talking about https://www.google.com/maps/@37.6638869,-121.8835472,14z
In the middle we have a nice enough downtown area around an appropriately-named Main Street. A good place to do your shopping, right? But when we zoom in to look at the shop names, we find they're almost entirely restaurants, it's not actually a useful place to do your shopping. Also, everything is just a bit too far apart, there's random houses and parking lots interspersed in a place that should just be storefront-storefront-storefront. Worst of all, there's no supermarket, so there's no reason to actually go downtown most weeks -- the nearest supermarket is a mile away in an ugly strip mall with its own giant (but single-storey) parking lot.
Ideally you'd de-zone these strip malls to force grocery shopping back downtown. Then you'd build two-storey or three-storey carparks behind the supermarket (or better still, underneath it) so that shoppers can park there while keeping the footprint compact. Now you've got tens of thousands of more shoppers a week hitting up Main St.
But why do you want shoppers to have to go downtown to buy their groceries (instead of to the walmart/whole foods/ costco/ whatever in their suburb? seems like burning a bunch of resources for no reason. Those stores are where the land is cheaper AND where they are closer to their customers.
I mean they're all in the same suburb, it's just that they're spread out, with a supermarket plonked over here and other shops plonked over there. If you put all the shops in downtown then that's less of a waste of resources.
I would expect the optimal placement for grocery stores to be scattered around town in proximity to various residential neighborhoods. Having them all clustered downtown seems less convenient for shopping, an inefficient use of premium real estate as groceries are big stores that tend to operate on very slim gross margins, and logistically problematic due to requiring a bunch of large trucks to make regular deliveries downtown to keep the groceries stocked.
"ETA: in general, though, why do we need to subsidize parking at all? Is it such a public good that we think the market would under-supply it otherwise?"
First of all, I think so, yes. Suppose I want to go to town to eat dinner, see a play, and have a business meeting. This benefits the restaurant, the theater, and whatever I produce with my business. If I can park, I'll do these things; if not, I'll do them less. So in theory the restaurant, theater, and business-beneficiaries should want to subsidize my parking. In practice, this has too many transaction costs. But producing positive externalities is exactly the business the government should be in (in this case, maybe by taxing the restaurant/theater/etc and spending some of the money on parking).
But second of all, yeah, I guess my question is why the market isn't the solution here. If you get rid of parking minimums in cities, people will still want to park, and I would expect that to make entrepreneurs buy up land, build parking structures on it, and keep adding stories until the need for parking is completely satisfied and everyone is happy with the parking situation (except maybe poor people, who will always be under-supplied by market solutions, but we can tack on some other solution for them, and they mostly use public transportation anyway). But in practice nobody seems to expect this to happen, I'm curious why not, and "there are so many positive externalities to parking that we need subsidies" is my best guess.
A market solution would largley solve the problem, but there are two big political problems with it. First, as someone else mentioned there is an endowment effect with existing free parking. If you start charging market clearing prices you will piss off basically all of the drivers, which in most cities is the majority and also more affluent politically engaged crowd. Second, the people one the other side are a whole bunch of lefties that are naturally predisposed to distrtrust market solutions to anything. Sure there are some urbansit libertarian wonks that would like it, but you don't get elected by getting all five of them to vote for you
As someone who works an overnight job in downtown Seattle, I'd have to literally quit my job of 16 years if I wasn't able to drive to and park at work - that's how dangerous the abdication of policing has made certain Seattle transit routes (including the one I would be riding).
As I mentioned in my other comment, it wasn't always this way; I commuted from home to the same job on a bus for over five years.
But these days, most routes which pass through downtown are infested with predatory opportunists and/or people actively dealing or using on the ride itself. As I mentioned in my other comment, in a recent University of Washington study of the most abused bus routes (again, including the one I would be on), meth was found on 98% of the surface samples and 100% of air samples . One sample exceeded EPA guidelines for airborne fentanyl exposure. (https://www.washington.edu/news/2023/09/07/uw-assessment-finds-fentanyl-and-methamphetamine-smoke-linger-on-public-transit-vehicles/).
Infuriatingly, the city is spending vast resources on YIMBY road diet nonsense like installing protected bike lanes (which weather renders unusable 7 months of the year) instead of literally cleaning up and securing the bus system.
And this is not an unusual state of transit in American cities.
The driving and parking conversation can't start with driving and parking.
It needs to start with restoring a culture where no one has a good reason to fear for their safety while riding a bus or walking a city street.
Yeah, the YIMBYs often don't think past their postcard image of Amsterdam, or whatever. My favorite part about the Seattle's "progressive" act of removing lanes of traffic for protected bike lanes is that it harms every demographic except wealthy athletic (almost always white) men.
Women? More likely to be victims of street crime/harassment, plus grooming standards for female professionals (hair, makeup, etc) are difficult to maintain under a sweaty bike helmet.
Poor people? They almost certainly live too far away to commute by bike, and have workplaces that don't provide secure bike storage.
Parents? Sure, one small kid can be strapped to a bike seat, but multiple kids, and kids in the awkward age between "too big to be carried, too little to ride autonomously" can't be safely transported by bike (and I find it hilarious that it's illegal to use an obsolete car seat, but nobody has a problem with kids riding the roads with no protection at all from 4000 pound vehicles swerving to pass them at 30+ miles an hour).
But, you know, sure. Let's put all those demographics on a bus which is now stuck in traffic because we dedicated a lane of the road to wealthy athletic men on bikes instead of saving that lane for the buses everyone can use.
I am not convinced that is an externality. As the parker, i get no utility from parking my car there intrinsically. The benefit I internalize from the transaction is the ability to consume things close to where i park. I internalize this benefit and so am willing to pay for it.
Generally speaking there are lots of complimentary goods in the location market. Restaurants near the theater for instance. The market seems able to manage this doesnt it?
I have always lazily imagined building garages like this are more difficult than they should be (relative to other things even) and relaxing that would be sufficient "subsidy".
In the UK and Europe, which have compact city centers for historic reasons, Park and Ride systems are quite common and would effectively support the sort of "positive externalities" you are talking about here. These are not as convenient as a parking lot immediately adjacent to your destination, but as long as the shuttles are sufficiently frequent (which is not always the case in existing implementations), they would seem to be a workable solution that even the anti-car crowd might support, since they can be integrated into broader upgrades to a public transportation network.
I don't know whether existing laws, culture, and infrastructure would make such systems less effective in a US context, but if we are talking about subsidies to parking, then subsidized Park and Ride systems are worth considering as an option alongside "subsidize inner city parking lots" and "do nothing."
"If developers were allowed to face directly the high land costs of providing so much parking, the number of spaces would be a result of a careful economic calculation rather than a matter of satisfying a legal requirement. Parking would be scarcer, and more likely to have a price – or a higher one than it does now – and people would be more careful about when and where they drove.
The subsidies are largely invisible to drivers who park their cars – and thus free or cheap parking spaces feel like natural outcomes of the market, or perhaps even an entitlement. Yet the law is allocating this land rather than letting market prices adjudicate whether we need more parking, and whether that parking should be free. We end up overusing land for cars – and overusing cars too. You don’t have to hate sprawl, or automobiles, to want to stop subsidizing that way of life."
"What are the biggest problems with the idea? First, the danger of spillover parking means that a lot of parking has to be properly priced all at once. If the local K-Mart has a smaller lot, you don't want the customers flooding a neighborhood street and simply shifting the problem. The proper correction requires a coordinated pricing and enforcement effort, not only to succeed, but also to be sufficiently popular with homeowners. Fortunately, most of the coordination can be done at the level of the individual town or city.
Second, we don't yet know how many more spaces would be priced in the absence of legal minimum parking requirements, and how many fewer car trips there would be, especially if we are holding the quantity and quality of mass transit constant. "
This is unconvincing. I can make a similar case for subsidizing any other activity -- e.g. smoking increases people's productivity, and they don't capture all the benefits of their production (their employer, and by extension consumers, will capture some of it). Therefore the government should subsidize smoking. It's true that in theory, the employer can pay for cigarettes, but in practice there are too many transaction costs and the government exists to handle such externalities.
(Admittedly cigarettes kill people, but so do cars.)
I think if smoking actually increased productivity, in some way not captured by the increased wages of the productive person, and had no negative effects, this would potentially be a good argument. It might be counteracted by transaction costs (the government can't be bothered to subsidize every single good thing), but if the government was already involved in this area it wouldn't seem wrong for it to be.
Every increase in productivity is not completely captured by the increased wages. If it were completely captured there would be no incentive for employers to hire productive people, no incentive for countries to accept productive immigrants, etc.
Nicotine is a stimulant and increases productivity for the same reason coffee does.
I don't see why you require "no negative effects"; cars certainly do not satisfy this, what with the high risk of accidents (a leading cause of death in my age group).
So what do you think is the boundary between externalities which should be subsidized and ones that shouldn't (assuming you're not a minarchist who thinks government shouldn't be in this business at all)? Or do you think nothing has positive externalities which should be subsidized?
" So in theory the restaurant, theater, and business-beneficiaries should want to subsidize my parking. In practice, this is too hard."
Is it too hard? Lots of stores have their own parking with signs saying "for customers only" and threatening to tow, for example. Or you can have something like a shopping mall, where a bunch of stores get together and make their own (paid) parking, which is more or less like your suggestion of the government taxing them to pay for parking just without the government. This seems like exactly the kind of thing that markets are good at, since the businesses are incentivized to get you into their store.
But also, I don't think this is what externalities actually are. You, and the businesses you frequent, are going to capture all of the value in your transactions. A positive externality would be like if your parked car emitted pleasing smells to passers-by.
"If you get rid of parking minimums in cities, people will still want to park"
People will still want to get into the city. Driving and parking is not the only way that can happen.
"But in practice nobody seems to expect this to happen, I'm curious why not, and "there are so many positive externalities to parking that we need subsidies" is my best guess."
I don't think anyone expects this, because I don't think most people have put anywhere near that much thought into the question, and don't even know what an externality is. They just want the government to keep giving them benefits from other people's tax money, and are so used to driving everywhere and parking cheaply that they can't imagine any other way of doing things. Even business owners want the government to provide cheap parking, even though doing so is actually horribly inefficient (see e.g. https://www.toronto.ca/legdocs/mmis/2021/ex/comm/communicationfile-137975.pdf).
I’d be pretty excited for giant multi-storey parking garages if we made them with classical architecture. You could fit a lot of cars in some Pantheon-type structure.
My position is: cars are great, ban mandatory parking spaces for businesses. The market will incentivize conveniently located parking lots, multi-story or otherwise.
My understanding of EA is, that it wants to make sure money donated to a charity actually reaches the intended victim that a donor to the charity is trying to help.
This seems pretty non-controversial to me. What am I missing?
Because like everything else, it moved away from the strict definition of that. When it comes to "try to get a guy whose policies we like elected" and going to conferences so they can network about getting jobs promoting EA and other 'taking in each other's washing' endeavours, then it becomes harder to see "who is the intended recipient of this charity, and what money is going to them?"
I think the answer is pretty obvious. Currently the Effective Altruists with the best known name is SBF, who's facing up to 115 years for massive and incompetent fraud. It's pretty hard to overcome that kind of first impression.
I haven't tried to understand the case much, but didn't he basically put his stolen money in charities evaluated using EA? I don't see why that would make EA look bad.
Simplistically speaking, EA told SBF that he had to make as much money as possible so he could donate it to EA charities. EA neglected to make clear that the money was supposed to be made legally(*), and so when SBF ran out of ways to make easy gigabucks by legal means, he shifted to a bit of easy, lucrative crime. And even after getting caught, kept insisting that his actions were both ethical and altruistic.
You can see how this makes EA look kind of bad.
* Because they thought that part was obvious, not because they were cynically hoping to profit from their adherents' lucrative criming.
"“Utilitarian”: Ellison testified that Bankman-Fried’s cavalier attitude toward rules against lying or stealing helped pave the way for her to commit crimes. As a “utilitarian,” his philosophy was that the only rule that mattered was doing whatever created the greatest good, she said. That attitude “made me more willing to do things like lie and steal,” she said. The philosophical approach known as utilitarianism is similar to some of the arguments that propelled the Effective Altruism movement, of which Bankman-Fried was a visible proponent. “When I started working at Alameda, I don’t think I would have believed if you told me I would be sending false balance sheets to our lenders or taking customer money,” she said. “But over time it was something I felt more comfortable with.”
While I'm not a Utilitarian myself, I don't think the lovely people on here who are, are a bunch of lyin' cheatin' no-good backstabbers. But for many people whose first encounter with the concept is in this kind of context, it's one hell of a black eye for EA.
How it makes EA look bad is that their whole gimmick is "evaluation". If they took stolen money from a crook, just how much 'evaluation' were they doing? And if the answer is "not too darn much", then their raison d'être is built on sand, and there's no reason to think they're any better than the random charities out there which they claim to be able to distinguish between as to who is doing the most effective work with donations.
If he'd been in a Christian context, he'd have justified the stealing and lying by donating to Christian causes and talking about how it was all for the greater glory of God. If he'd been in a socialist context, he'd have justified the stealing and lying by donating to socialist movements around the world and explaining how it was all justified by the need for revolution and class struggle.
SBF is a conman. He uses the moral framework of his marks against them, and this has very little to do with which moral framework they are using.
That's only one part. The controversial part is making sure money donated to a charity actually does good in the world. This involves prioritizing causes, and will make enemies because everyone in the non profit universe thinks their cause needs more money, not less.
In addition, having opinions on how the world should look makes you a lot of enemies who have ideological disagreements over how the world should be
That's the ground floor, and you're right, it's entirely fine.
It's controversial because it has evolved into this whole fanatical belief system (in the eyes of detractors). People are shaping their lives around it, and are encouraged to do so (80,000 Hours). "Longtermism" is a not-completely-fringe position that builds wild fragile castles of logic about the future, resulting in rather alien morality in the here and now. Detractors overall get an impression that its adherents are on a major "I am SO smart and moral" trip. People tend to respond really really badly when they perceive that sort of thing.
I tried to write that even-handedly, but you can probably tell that by "detractors" I mean me. https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2022/08/15/the-reluctant-prophet-of-effective-altruism is what really opened my eyes about EA back when it was published. It is, IMO, definitely not trying to critique EA, and is in fact fairly laudatory. And yet my takeaway was "oh this is creepy". In particular, I think EA people should be kept as far from government power as possible.
> In particular, I think EA people should be kept as far from government power as possible.
Relevant argument apparently from C. S. Lewis:
> And the higher the pretentions of such power, the more dangerous I think it both to the rulers and to the subjects. Hence Theocracy is the worst of all governments. If we must have a tyrant, a robber baron is far better than an inquisitor. The baron's cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity at some point may be sated; and since he dimly knows he is doing wrong he may possibly repent. But the inquisitor who mistakes his own cruelty and lust of power and fear for the voice of Heaven will torment us infinitely because he torments us with the approval of his own conscience and his better impulses appear to him as temptations.
Robert A. Heinlein, in his Motie series, advocated for supreme power to be concentrated in a single emperor, on the grounds that no matter how much power the emperor might theoretically possess, he was limited in its exercise by his inability to be in more than one place at once.
Some other commenters have gotten close, but nobody has nailed the answer: EA is a community, with limited connections to other social status brokerage clubs, and non-overlapping communities fight each other.
All this stuff about "philosophy" determines the details about what the other groups will write in newspaper columns, not the sentiment they will express.
this is silly. Lots of communities don't fight each other. Stamp collectors don't get into online feuds with furries. Videogame speedrunners aren't posting diatribes about how wildlife photographers are neoliberal.
Stamp collectors do actually have an ongoing conflict with furries, but not as stamp collectors, just as people who are against furries that are spread through the demographics (think social conservatism). They'd define the "stance" of their hobby groups on furries if the two were ever pushed together, say at a hotel during two conventions, unless the overlap between the two hobbies was great enough that furries outnumbered the conservatives within the collector's clubs; that's why I said "non-overlapping communities." Videogame speedrunners and wildlife photographers don't have much awareness of the other, but if you created a federal department of speedrunning and wildlife photography with a single budgetary allocation, then they would.
EA and other social status brokerage clubs have enough contact to be mutually aware of each other and don't overlap a lot. They're contesting limited amounts of money and social status, the two goods of philanthropy.
Yup. I remember reading about the time the science fiction club and the BDSM club at some college accidentally scheduled adjacent to each other at the same time.
Not only did they not fight, some people had scheduling conflicts.
So, if I wind up running a nuclear (fission) power plant, it's OK for me to bury all the high-level radioactive waste in a shallow trench out in the woods so long as my geologists can confirm that it won't be exposed to the air or leak into the groundwater for a hundred years or so?
Right, but there's very good reason to expect them to exist at some point right? If the goal is to help people, and there are most likely going to be a bunch of people in the future, is it so strange to care about them?
How do you feel about "a society grows great when old men plant trees in whose shade they shall never sit"? Is it misguided? irrelevant? factually wrong?
Given that future people don't exist yet, they are every bit as imaginary as God, and I'm constantly being told believing in God is stupid because there is no evidence, no proof, and Science has explained it all 😀
Furthermore, for those future people to come into existence, current people have to have babies, and I'm seeing lots of people not having babies for various reasons.
To quote my celebrated countryman, Sir Boyle Roche - "Why we should put ourselves out of our way to do anything for posterity, for what has posterity ever done for us?"
(In a debate in the Irish House of Commons on the vote of a grant which was recommended by Sir John Parnell, Chancellor of the Exchequer, as one not likely to be felt burdensome for many years to come, it was observed in reply that the House had no right to load posterity with a debt for what could in no degree operate to their advantage. This quotation was Sir Boyle's response.)
I guess I disagree with Sir Roche's worldview, and I am glad that most of his compatriots did too.
"Sir Boyle, hearing the roar of laughter which of course followed this sensible blunder, but not being conscious that he had said anything out of the way, was rather puzzled, and conceived that the House had misunderstood him. He therefore begged leave to explain, as he apprehended that gentlemen had entirely mistaken his words: he assured the House “that by posterity he did not at all mean our ancestors, but those who were to come immediately after them.” Upon hearing this explanation, it was impossible to do any serious business for half an hour."
I think now is a good time to bring up Ministry for the Future, in which the protagonists:
* soft-ban raising livestock for meat by intentionally spreading Mad Cow Disease
* are all-in on the "imaginary future people are moral agents" argument (see book title)
* do essentially a second 9/11 to shut down air travel's carbon emissions
* many other repulsive things I won't laundry-list
And the author very clearly loves it all, including the terrorism. Bill Gates, who I perceive as at least EA-adjacent, praised this book. It's the loudest and proudest representation of the dark side of EA that I know of.
This is a really weird comment to make, because not only does it cite fictional evidence, it cites fictional evidence being liked by a non-identifying as EA person as evidence of apparent EA misdeeds.
I really feel like there's an echo chamber of anti EA people who cite this type of made up evidence at each other and constantly congratulate each other on and cringe at positions that no one but them imagined.
"Citing fictional evidence" would be claiming that those things actually happened. What I'm saying is that the fictional things are the author's fantasies, as in, he clearly *really* wishes the ecoterrorism he dreams up would happen in the real world.
That's relevant to this thread because the author's motivations for those fantasies are exactly those of the "longtermist" faction of EA (but focused down to just the issue of climate change). In fact the book gives a good chunk of page space to explaining the whole "trillions of future lives" concepts, and going through it becoming an influential line of thought in-universe.
It's also relevant because asciilifeform mentioned a very unusual goal that some real life EA people have, that the author has his characters accomplish. That's what made the connection in my mind in the first place.
The "fictional evidence" is only fictional with respect to events (to date), but entirely authentic with respect to desires.
It is IMHO interesting that it is perfectly OK in "respectable" American society to scorn anyone who was seen with a copy of e.g. "Turner Diaries", but this somehow does not apply to "Ministry for the Future", "because reasons".
Yeah, this would be convincing except for the mentions of terrorism, the complete lack of actual connection with EA (other than, it reminded me of...) and the lack of actual way for anyone else to verify that the writer actually likes it instead of parodying it. (Checking the author's Wikipedia, it seems like the author actually likes solving climate change, not actually terrorism, who would have thought!)
You are doing the thing where someone recalls the similarities to an Ayn Rand villain whenever anyone says anything nice about the government.
In the book, the terrorism accomplishes its goals, and as a result the book ends distinctly hopeful. That's not how you satirize a terrorist ideology. I don't understand why you're trying to argue with me about the content of a book that I have read and you haven't. As for whether I'm allowed to comment in an open discussion thread that something reminds me of something else, I guess we'll have to agree to disagree.
The novelty of EA is not what you describe. What you describe was already done by groups like Charity Navigator. The novelty of EA is in considering the *impact* of different charities. There can be two charities each of which direct 90% of all donated funds to intended victims that nevertheless have radically different impacts.
Not everyone has to agree on what constitutes impact, but however impact is defined, some charities will be more impactful and some will be less impactful.
The implication, is that some charitable enterprises will simply never make the "most impactful cut."
The corollary of finding winning charities, is finding losing charities. Not everybody can be a winner.
People don't want to hear that.
They bristle at cost benefit analyses, because some entire enterprises won't make the cut.
What you describe (making sure funds reach intended recipients) doesn't disqualify entire enterprises.
E.g. if someone like soup kitchens in Seattle, and they find that one uses 90% of funds for their intended purpose and one uses 70% of funds for their intended purpose, then they can just donate to the former.
However, if one finds that e.g. food is much cheaper outside the US, so $100 donated to a soup kitchen somewhere else could buy 5X as much food, then it's unlikely that any soup kitchen in the US could ever qualify as being maximally impactful.
That's a big blow to those emotionally invested in American charities.
[The same conclusion could be reached by considering that a given unit of food (or money) is more helpful to a poorer person than a richer person and that almost none of the poorest people in the world live in the US.]
People feel some emotional urge to donate to a cause, and they don't want someone to quantify the impact of that donation, since that would cheapen their donation and highlight its relative unimportance.
Even raising the issue of cost benefit analysis (without analyzing a particular charity) casts a shadow over all giving and people really don't want that.
EA is great if your goal is to simply help people as much as possible, however you define that.
But most people don't have that goal.
Perhaps worst of all, the types of charities that EA ends up favoring are profoundly unsexy and non-utopian.
Insecticide treated mosquito nets to allow unimaginably poor people to still be unimaginably poor, but to have fewer dead children is for many people more depressing, than exciting.
They'd rather not think about those people at all.
Providing vitamin A tablets to malnourished babies in Africa is similarly unsexy and non-utopian.
Ending world hunger sounds a lot more appealing, and is utopian inasmuch as it doesn't concern itself with dollar for dollar impact, operating in a world where everything is possible.
EA operates in the real world, showing us the most that is possible in the real world.
But people mostly don't want to be limited by the constraints of the real world - they'd rather stay in their utopias.
> They bristle at cost benefit analyses, because some entire enterprises won't make the cut.
The conflict isn't about methods, it's about values.
If I donate to benefit my local community, I'm not going to bristle at the idea of cost--benefit analysis. I want to get the most bang for my buck.
I am going to bristle if an EA comes along and tells me I'm doing cost-benefit analysis wrong because I'm not sending my money to Africa. That's just an underhanded attempt to make me conform to EA values, couched in pseudo-objective language.
Yes, and not just "lives saved per dollar", but other measures like QALYs and DALYs. And analysis about the productivity of each dollar spent, such that there might be a situation where it made sense to spend between $5M and $10M on something this year, but less than $5 million would not accomplish much, and over $10M would have enough diminished marginal utility that the money would be better directed to some other cause. And of course the situation might be different next year. But most charities seem to operate on a "more money is better" model, and find this kind of calculation to be disturbing.
And then there are second order effects, some of which can involve making controversial and attention-grabbing ethical decisions. The one that brought up a bunch of controversy here was that someone didn't want to donate a kidney to anyone who wasn't a vegan, because it would increase the overall amount of animal suffering in the future. Other examples that I'm making up might be "saving the whales increases the number of krill eaten", and "saving lives in a less-environmentally-conscious part of the world harms the environment more than saving lives in a more-environmentally-conscious part of the world".
And then there's the question of what to do about long-term risks, like asteroid deflection or AI extinction. What kind of discount function do we apply to potential future disaster? How much of our current efforts are wasted?
Mostly, though, my one line summary of EA that I use, is that they generally conclude that malaria is very bad, and malaria nets are very good, and buying malaria nets is a great way to make the world better, even if some people use them for fishing. :-)
What charity project *isn't* controversial? Any time anyone does *anything* for charity there's always someone who's not happy with it for various reasons. Is EA significantly more controversial than other charities/charity-adjacent movements?
It's not just that the money reach the intended victim; EA also calls for you to pick the right victim on strict cost/benefit ratio.
It also suggests that e.g. unless you are a really good carpenter or whatnot, you shouldn't waste your time trying to build houses with Habitat for Humanity. Instead, work overtime in your job as an investment banker or silicon valley coder or whatnot, and congratulate yourself on how virtuous you are in donating some of your riches to the long-suffering malaria victims of Africa or whatever.
To many people, the virtues and the rewards of charity come from the emotional connection to the people being helped, from the sense of teamwork in coming together to help them, and from helping the community you live in. And it requires more effort than just writing a check.
Reducing this to simply solving a mathematical equation, strikes these people as rather less virtuous and less rewarding. And they really don't like the part where rich people claim virtue on the basis of having made themselves really really rich and then donating 10% to some charity nobody outside of EA has heard of.
I've mostly heard complaints about EA from two quarters:
1. People who do not give alms on a large scale and don't want to. A lot of such people distrust and resent what they perceive to be moralizing attempts to persuade or pressure them into being more charitable, in a similar way and for similar reasons to atheists distrusting and resenting proselytizing believers or to meat-eaters distrusting and resenting outspoken vegans.
2. Leftist who fear EA being used as a way for the ultra-wealthy to launder their reputations and for financially successful left-leaning professionals to purchase indulgences for the sin of being good at capitalism. From a standpoint of viewing concentrated private wealth as being largely the result of exploitation, even the most effective altruism is a poor second-best to an institutional regime that limits opportunities for exploitation and taxes away extreme wealth or income inequality and obviates the need for private alms via robust public services. C.f. Vox's long-standing campaign against "Billionaire Philanthropy" or Philosophy Tube's semi-recent video about Effective Altruism.
I've mostly seen the second (not saying you didn't see the first!). In many cases it spills over into "EA is full of those rationalist white guys we all hate, so we hate EA too."
Their platform is that wanting to do something isn't good enough, you have to be successful at it. So, are they ACTUALLY more successful than other charities? If they aren't, there's nothing to support. You can't even take an idealist approach, due to the various Repugnant Conclusions.
Yeah. This goes to a challenge I throw out to all would-be reformers everywhere.
Prove to me that your idea works not just on paper but in reality. At a scale larger than "you and a bunch of friends" or "dedicated lab school with dedicated staff and students" (for the edu-reformers). Then we'll talk about implementing it nation-wide (or larger).
Believe in EA's principles? Ok, show me the proof. Show me that your estimations of value *actually hold up*. Solve a real problem, in the real world, under real-world conditions. And not "solve" by "make some calculations about the effect you've had based on some model." Show me the lives changed.
Want to implement universal healthcare in the US? Ok, do it on a state scale. Or heck, even on the scale of a large city.
Want to reform education? Pick a real state, and fix it there. Or even a large school district that includes a range of schools across the demographic spectrum. Etc.
Until you do so, all your theories and math and principles mean less than nothing to me. And an unwillingness to even attempt to do so, and a fixation on the unmeasurable and unknowable (the effects on a very distant future, for instance) tells me that you're at best an idle dreamer like so many others and at worst actually looking for power over people for your own ulterior motives.
This feels like an imaginary critique in just the way you’re accusing them of. EA does work in the way you describe and does solve real problems, look up Deworm the World for example. I’m not saying it describes the entirety of them movement but that is certainly there in large measure.
Seems to me, ofcourse merely wanting to succeed is not enough. It could waste the donors' hard earned money.
The charity org should be honest and competent.
I'd think measuring this is the right way to go, so problems are actually solved for victims.
For example, a charity should be audited (by a reputable auditor) and open about their finances for me to donate there. That is something I check for, during a natural disaster.
To me, so far, EA seems like obviously a great idea.
A charity that is not audited by a reputed auditor, or, is not completely open about its financials, seems like one I'd not donate to.
I was given this advice by a finance friend when I was looking into how to help during a massive natural disaster some years ago.
If this is the sort of thing that EA does, i.e. make sure my money actually helps victims of the disaster, then I fail to see why anyone would disagree with EA.
Sigh. So instead of telling me whether any charity sounds like a bad idea on paper, you're going to hold them to a standard you're unwilling to hold EA to.
Scott has repeatedly posted about how one of Bitcoin's uses is to get money to people in Russia without their government's approval. He's also written about attempts to create EA-run cities outside of government oversight. So EA supports direct, intentional subversion of local governments. I wonder why it's controversial.
Someone asked the exact same question to last week's open thread. My reply came in a bit late, so here it is again:
---
It's a serious attempt to bring something that was usually done quite emotionally and intuitively into the realm of rationality. Which means that:
0. It brings some extra clarity in how effective different ways of giving money are in terms of suffering averted, and motivates enterprising young people to direct their efforts there. That's the part that basically no-one seriously objects to. But:
1. It implicitly ignores or belittles the pre-existing rational thought and institutional wisdom that went into traditional NGOs and charity organizations. (Not taking sides here, I'm sure the quality of that accumulated wisdom was quite variable.)
2. It raises the stakes for everybody else. If all of a sudden most of my friends are giving 10%+ and some of them are donating kidneys to unknowns, maybe your random yearly donation to a friend-of-a-friend's school in Nepal doesn't feel like actually doing much. For all the talk we like to have about first principles, remember that in practice our sense of morality is basically calibrated on your social surroundings.
3. Remember the catchphrase "dreams of reason produce monsters"? (No, I don't mean the Mick Karn album, but it's awesome anyway - google it). So-called rational thought is only one small part of what our minds actually do, and since it basically consists of symbol manipulation, it can easily go out far out into realms far away from anyone's living experience, yet still appear hugely convincing. In the case of the EA movement, as far as I've been able to watch from a distance, it seems to have been abducted into "long-termism", which is the belief that we can make educated guesses about the far future and plan courses of action accordingly. Couple that with some utilitarian felicity-calculus involving potentially huge future populations that will not be born for generations or centuries, and you end up with a moral compass quite at odds with those of the rest of the world.
I guess it's a bit of a motte and bailey, where the motte is sending anti-malrial mosquito nets and vaccines to poor areas of the Earth, and the bailey is all the long-termist stuff, often mixed with sci-fi scenarios of immortality through mind-uploading and the like.
I started out quite positive about EA upon first learning of it and then reading a couple of its foundational texts. My enthusiasm was driven largely by your points 0 and 2. Indeed EA was part of what first drew me to Scott's blog.
Your point 1 was/is annoying to me as a serial manager of traditional non-profit organizations but, meh -- a potential for good in the world obviously far outweighs one guy's personal eye-roll.
Much more serious as a flaw is your point 3; EA long-termism turns out to be no more rational or relevant than anybody else's pet bailey is.
Then also it's turned out that many fervent EA believers combine the smug arrogance of woke activists with the adolescent monomania of fervent libertarians. (Each of those being groups I have long and deep direct experience of.)
So, with regret, I had to conclude that EA as a movement isn't for me personally. Obviously YMMV.
> the smug arrogance of woke activists with the adolescent monomania of fervent libertarians. (Each of those being groups I have long and deep direct experience of.)
That sounds like an experience no compassionate God would put a human through - though one with a sick sense of humor might. You have my sympathy.
Not quite, though making sure the money gets to where it should go is part of it. The effective part of effective altruism is about figuring out what the most efficient way to spend charitable fund are. So if funding anti-malaria bed nets saves 100 lives but giving that same amount of money to (as LGS is alluding to below) homeless people or sick western kids would only save 50, then the money should go to the anti-malaria nets. Some people really don't like this idea, plus now you have do a lot of work to decide what is efficient and maybe something you care about gets knocked down the priority list.
What's much worse of course, as I spent a long time arguing with Scott in the last open thread, is that EA doesn't do nearly enough on approaches that are actually effective (as opposed to 'certified by randomised control trial effective'), i.e accelerating national development and economic growth
How, exactly, is a charity supposed to encourage the government of Niger to copy the policies of Vietnam, China, Taiwan, SK, Japan, etc, that have led to the industrialization and development of those countries? Which charities do this?
There are several ways - all major charities and foundations - Gates, Rockefeller, Ford spend time and resources on advocacy for their favoured issues. Funding greater research, capacity building, seminars etc. on national development and economic growth instead of their topic of interest (often guided by poor development economics of the sort that Givewell employs) would be a start
No. That's not what EA is. EA is about arguing who is the right "victim" to whom charity should go; e.g. EAs are against donating to the homeless or to sick kids in Western countries.
I think this is much more true than any explanations related to EA beliefs or actions. I also think a contributing factor is that many people involved in EA were also in the internet universe of other fringe movements at the time EA was founded, but these movements don't agree with EA so they are outspoken against EA in a Catholic vs Protestant type of way.
Im thinking of neo-reactionaries, techno libertarians, DSA, etc that are/were popular in SF and NYC during the 2010s. And it just so happened that over the past 10 years EA and their opponents have become influential within media, technology, and politics so the schism has been boosted more than most niche arguments like this.
I'm learning to play an electronic musical instrument called [Linnstrument](https://www.rogerlinndesign.com/linnstrument). It looks like [this](https://cdm.link/files/2014/04/linnstrument1-480x640.jpg). It's a MIDI controller with much worse velocity control than on a piano but it has advantages too: I can coarsely control the timbre of each note by slightly moving my finger, I can do glissandos like you can do using vocal cords, and it's very easy to transpose because there are no white and black keys and instead the layout is like frets on a string instrument with each next string being a fourth of the previous one.
I want to learn to self-accompany my singing on it - like a person with a guitar or a piano might do - sing and play at the same time. I mostly want to sing pop, blues, pop rock songs. There exist a few thousand copies of this instrument in the world so there aren't any in-depth study resources for it. Please recommend me how and what I should study to become able to self-accompany. My prior musical background is that I have basic music literacy - notes, greek modes, chords, intervals, degrees, etc. My ear is not very trained. I've been playing a diatonic harmonica for one and a half years.
Looks like a cool instrument to learn, but it's not clear to me what you are asking. If you already understand how chords work in pop, blues, and rock songs, then I would assume as long as you can figure out how to play those chords on the Linnstrument (which shouldn't be too hard), you can start accompanying your own singing.
Once you know your way around the instrument, you might be able to take inspiration from resources designed for other isometric-layout instruments like the harpejji, but I don't know how easily the concepts would transfer. You would probably have to think about it a bit to figure it out.
I know the main types of chords, triads, dominant 7th chords, major 7th chords, etc. I don't know much about inversions. Also I am sure that I am missing a lot of information like, for example, if playing a major triad and singing something over it, is it important that all 3 notes sound at the same time (to let the ear orient itself) or is it ok if I arpeggiate them without sustain?
(Caveat: I'm a fairly incompetent pianist who plays mostly classical and has only a superficial understanding of rock/blues/pop. Most of what follows is just stuff I picked up from various music theory YouTubers since I started watching them a lot during the pandemic.)
Probably the best way to answer your questions here is just to play around and see what sounds make you happy. (Maybe make recordings and play them back to yourself if you want a better sense of how you would sound to other people.) There are books about the theory of harmony in pop music etc., and you might find them helpful, but nothing will substitute for actually trying stuff out.
A couple of suggestions for thinking about chord voicings ("chord voicing" generalizes the idea of inversions that you may have seen in introductory music theory textbooks):
- Popular music styles tend to anchor the harmony by playing the chord's root at the bottom. You will rarely go wrong by doing this; if you are supposed to be doing something else, the lead sheet will let you know. (Experiment with playing the root an octave or two underneath the other notes of the chord; see if you like the way it sounds.)
- For other notes in the chord, look into the concept of "voice leading." The idea is a chord progression sounds better if the notes are chosen to sound like there are multiple melodic lines playing in parallel.
- Experiment with different spacings of the notes in the chord, ranging from clusters to wider spacings (e.g. all the notes a fourth or a fifth apart). The Linnstrument might create some interesting possibilities here that wouldn't be physically playable on a piano or guitar with standard tuning.
- Some notes in chords are more important than others; you can often omit the fifth of a triad without much impact on the sound, but the third and seventh are essential to its flavor.
- Register is very important. Clusters of notes close together can sound great in a high register, but usually just sound muddy in a low register.
- Also on the issue of register, you may also want to play your chords in a different register from the one you are singing in, to leave acoustic "space" for your voice. (Try listening to a recent Taylor Swift album and notice how the frequency gap in the instrumental parts focuses attention on her voice and her lyrics — this is one of the musical techniques she and her producers have used to create the sense of intimacy with her audience that has made her a billionaire.)
You said it yourself, it's going to be tough learning an instrument that few people play, and even more so if it's (almost) your first instrument.
Best I can say is that you take learning materials for other instruments, and "translate" them for the linnstrument yourself. The first thing on any instrument is to learn to play scales and arpeggios up and down, in any key you care about, with confidence, until they become second nature enough that you can put part of your attention on something else - playing a melody, or singing on top.
Since the board structure is somewhat analogous to that of a guitar (except without the weirdness where one of the intervals between strings is narrower than the others), a fair bit of guitar goals and techniques might be useful here. Based on the Roger Linn's video, there is a strumming mode that comes very close to a guitar, which might work well for singing on top. And if you're more into electronic sounds, I'm sure this board's remarkable expressiveness could go a long way too.
In any case, the #1 rule applies: practice, practice, practice. Noodling is fun but goal-oriented practice makes you really learn.
Does anyone have experience attempting to reduce LP(a)? Mine is at 42 ng/dl . I recently starting taking statins and LDL is down significantly, but I don’t like this LP(a) situation.
I've been loving the latest storyline with Solomon David and White Chain. I find Solomon David a really interesting character and his initial interactions with White Chain ended on...kinda a cheap note. I'm really liking how many similarities the author is drawing between them and I'm curious where it goes.
For those of you who don't read Kill Six Billion Demons, um...
*kinda spoilers
In a universe of super-powered Hindi martial artists, a Super Saiyan god king forms the ultimate patriarchy until a transgender, transracial angel punches him and guilt trips him into forming a democracy. Then stuff happens and the transgender angel gets put in charge. Three years later, the transgender angel tracks down the super saiyan god king, who's now just chilling and fishing, and tries to put him in charge again because he/she/they/it hates being in charge.
I gave it a try, but didn't appreciate the art style or the petulance of the protagonist. At least, those are the impressions I remember from trying it years ago.
I'm reading it and enjoying it. My less-culture-war-sounding summary would be "It's a world where angels do kung fu, the world is ruled by corrupt immortal god-kings, every location looks like it could be the cover of a heavy metal album. The protagonist is dropped into this world with a magic Macguffin that everyone wants and has to deal with the fact that everyone expects her to be some sort of conquering hero, which she really doesn't want."
Also, the author wrote about a gazillion words of fairy tales, parables, and philosophy for this setting and they're all just... the coolest. It's like it was written by a Zen master on some really good drugs.
I read it, and I'm glad that White Chain and Solomon got another chance to chat. I also like that the story is recognizing that it's not just as easy as "Give up your crown Tyrant and let your people rule themselves!". Solomon was about to tell White Chain why he didn't believe he could rightly do that when they were...interrupted. Now White Chain has spent 3 years finding out what happens when the Tyrant is gone and how messy things can get. So I hope they can actually finish their discussion this time, and find some resolution to the problem.
I saw references here and there, and tried to get into it a few years ago, but it felt like I was missing something. Is the author just dropping us in the middle of the setting; is there other background that would make more sense of this all? It looked **fascinating**, but IIRC the current storyline was a big fight involving (I think) Solomon David, and the impression that I recall was that there was a whole lot of grandiose philosophizing and posturing, to plaster over one person basically saying "i will win because i am right" and the other saying "i will win because i won't give up", which... Eh, I've got bones to pick with both those positions.
Maybe I'll give it another shot, and see how accurate my recollection was.
The fight with Solomon David was more like "I am in charge because I am the strongest" vs "That's a stupid way to run a government." But you need to start at the beginning of the arc - the duel is just the capstone for it.
There's a running motif in the story that each of the demiurges is trapped in a self-made hell by their powers. In Solomon's case, he's set himself up as the benevolent god-emperor of Rayuba, but in the process of doing so he's systematically crushed out any hope of anyone else growing or advancing. He claims to dream of a world where he won't be necessary, but he is actually creating the conditions where his tyranny has to continue forever. The tournament which is supposed to choose his successor simply kills anyone who might be strong enough to threaten him and discourages anyone else from trying. And his realm, which is on the surface beautiful and glorious, is incredibly fragile - when the man holding it up is defeated, the whole thing collapses.
Meanwhile, White Chain's character arc parallels this in the opposite direction - she's an angel, the inflexible enforcer of the law, but she's gradually realized that the order the angels are trying to enforce (and in particular everything done to support Zoss and Metatron's plan) is kind of broken and terrible - she inflicts brutal violence in the name of a system that makes no sense. So her duel with Solomon, and her transformation into a human, are basically saying "this system is supposed to be eternal and unbreakable, but I think it's stupid, so I'm going to punch it and see what happens."
So like, there's some shonen anime "have lots of determination and punch good" stuff in there, but there's also some commentary on the violence inherent in government and the paradox that the tools of revolution are also the tools of rulership. There's a lot of interesting themes going on.
(The author has described it as "this is a comic about how swords are cool but are actually not cool at all.")
Agreed. The previous training arc nails this to the mast by having the main character train to develop the ultimate sword technique (tm). This is immediately followed by the realisation that swords are a kind of juvenile thing to base your whole identity around.
Question for trans rights people: Are there any specific legal/policy trans issues that are meaningfully important to change in themselves (and not for their cultural symbolic values)?
e.g. for gay marriage the debate itself was mostly symbolic but there really are some marriage benefits (like default inheritance laws or whatever) that are meaningfully important in themselves aside from the social acceptance signal.
The biggest is probably access to gender-affirming care. In most of the US, most of the important changes are already in place or in the pipeline. WPATH 8 guidelines for gatekeeping are pretty reasonable when followed as written, although a lot of providers are still basing their practices at least partially on the older and somewhat more restrictive WPATH 7 guidelines. Medicaid in most states, Tricare, and most private insurance will cover at least the basics of gender-affirming care including HRT, FtM top surgery, and bottom surgery, although stuff like hair removal, facial feminization surgery, voice training, and MtF top surgery usually still have to be paid for out of pocket.
Likewise, the Feds and almost all states allow updating identity documents (of substantive importance because having your driver's license and passport not match your name and gender both outs you as trans and can raise questions about the legitimacy of the ID), although the process could be smoother in many cases. The big concern is in both cases is defensive, preventing unreasonably roadblocks from being imposed legislatively.
In other countries like the UK, though, things are quite a bit worse, particularly in terms of access to care. If you want medical transition services through the NHS, you first need a formal diagnosis from a gender dysphoria clinic which has a multi-year wait list and which had a reputation for operating on unreasonably narrow and outdated criteria for what qualifies as "real" gender dysphoria worthy of treatment.
18/24. My strategy as a huge Tolkien fan was to always click Antidepressant unless I actually recognized it as a Tolkien character. I would have gotten 19/24 if I'd applied it consistently instead of guessing Tolkien for an antidepressant that sounded so much like a name Tolkien would come up with as to tempt me to deviate from the rule. Unfortunately, I don't remember what it was.
I also got Erestor wrong despite being pretty sure I remembered a Tolkien character of that name because I was also pretty sure I remembered an antidepressant of that name. I was probably thinking of Effexor.
Hm? I was pretty sure that the body part was "groin" and the dwarf was "Gróin". This is not a minor difference - for example, the dwarf's name is two syllables.
Drugs end in -mab when they are Monoclonal AntiBodies. Queenamab would imply one derived from some type of chemical that was named queena- something, which seems unlikely.
It was a joke; I was hoping someone would riff on it with something like "under the brand name Tarnuhelm". Perhaps I should have gone with "quina" or "kuwina", but I was worried that people wouldn't get it.
I'm not aware that, say, aducanamab derives from any compound called "aducana"? Or remdesivir from any compound called "remdesi"? But I could easily be wrong; I'm not up on those sorts of naming conventions, and never did orgo past the high school level.
I got the joke; I was just saying it was unlikely to work out.
The chemical-structure names of drugs tend to be decided in systematic ways. I'm not familiar enough with the system to be able to parse them myself, but of the two you listed, wiktionary notes that -desi- and -vir are meaningful elements in remdesivir, and notes -n- and -umab [hUman Monoclonal AntiBody?] as meaningful elements of aducanumab.
I tend to suspect that the names would be explained if I could find the papers introducing the chemicals to the literature, but I don't know how to do that. Scott might!
See the problem is that Moon Moth is very blue collar and coarse-minded and can't grasp subtleties like that. They probably think the there are chemicals named shit like "Kardashiana" and "belly buttona" and "you missed the pointa mista"
Alas, I am not great at these word games. I can't figure out a good contraction of "labelladamesansmerci" for something that produces a moment of clarity...
"And I awoke and found me here, / On the cold hill's side."
After I wrote that post about you I worried that you would think I was serious. I was not! Sent you an email explaining my post. And by the way I tried to think of some funny riffs and could not either. I was thinking it would be funny to have somebody's name + mab or one of the other endings, then "sustained release." But the best thing I oould come up with was "Eminence grise, sustained release. But then if you stick -mab or one of the other suffixes on the end, and what's actually funny about Grisemab, you know?
I did think my EA parable was quite funny, but it seems that nobody else did.
Maybe it expresses too openly and angrily the genuine angry distaste I have for some of these people.
In Matthieu's response to Seth's comment about "A Void", he proposes "What your Wiki should do, is build a spot for parody (or playful imitation) which is cut off from Wiki's 'main' part."
Which is pretty much my understanding of how TvTropes came into being. The page itself started out as a BtVS fan community project in 2004, but happened to coincide with an internal conflict among Wikipedia editors over how tightly "encyclopedic" Wikipedia should be with the minimalists coming out on top and systematically eliding "fancruft" from media pages. Said fancruft, along with the editors who liked it, found a hospitable home at TvTropes.
TvTropes has since implemented page tabs specifically for minimalist and maximalist interpretations of its own content: the default pages are quite a bit broader in scope and freer in format than corresponding Wikipedia pages (beyond the obvious catalogs of tropes on media pages and examples on trope pages), but there's also "Laconic" tabs for brief just-the-facts descriptions of the tropes and "Just For Fun" tabs for goofiness that would get in the way of clarity on the main page. In addition, TvTropes has grown a "Useful Notes" section of pages for real-life background useful for understanding media, many of which pages are actually really good encyclopedic articles and are sometimes arguably better than the corresponding pages on Wikipedia.
I can't help but wonder if there's a branch of library science that studies the management of information at this level. For which "how best to organize this group-editable information source (re:wiki)?" is a serious question.
So the standard explanation as to why Netflix took over from cable is that streaming services can show you any show, any time, and are not limited by just showing 1 show at a time in a particular time slot. Netflix got its start because cable networks (I think Star was the first one) leased them their old back catalogs that weren't being aired anyways. It snowballed from there.
But technologically- is this true? Can you really not serve up shows on-demand via a cable line? Imagine that Comcast (I know, I know) had a Netflix-like UI where the customer selects a show from the Comcast servers. Why can't Comcast serve it up over the cable line the same way Netflix serves it up over the phone line? What are the technological hurdles here? Maybe the UI signal travels to Comcast over the phone line, then the show comes back to the customer over cable.
I'd be much more interested in discussing the technological obstacles to this than anything else. I mean we all know Comcast is not innovative, but let's assume for a moment a competent smart Comcast. Engineering-wise, do cable lines just not work this way? Why?
> Imagine that Comcast (I know, I know) had a Netflix-like UI where the customer selects a show from the Comcast servers. Why can't Comcast serve it up over the cable line the same way Netflix serves it up over the phone line?
They can; that is precisely what happens when you use Netflix over your Comcast cable internet connection. Internet connections in the modern day are unlikely to involve a phone line at any point, though that is the medium for DSL.
In fact, the "Xfinity Stream" app is _exactly_ that, more so than using Netflix over Comcast Internet. If you aren't a cable TV customer, but get their Internet, you can get a free "Flex" box which runs that app; otherwise it's available on Roku, Google TV for Android, and a couple of other platforms, but somehow not big-screen Google TV as implemented on my Sony TV.
Off the immediate topic but regarding Netflix: how is it possibly going to survive long-term against Amazon Prime and Apple TV? The latter companies don't need to make money from their streaming services, Netflix does. Why wouldn't they drive Netflix out of business over the next ten years by spending more and charging less? I suppose they could make a bunch of really dumb programming decisions, but the fundamentals point towards Netflix not surviving.
At this point at least, it seems like there is enough money out there for these services to all survive.
If we figured people were willing to spend ~$100/mo on cable that gives them budget for 6 to 7 streaming services (if they are $12-$15 each which seems to be the price point they are converging on).
Netflix needs hope their back catalog becomes desirable enough for people to rewatch that they don't cancel. They have also been doing a lot more slow release shows, either weekly episodes or seasons in two or three batches. That can help keep people subscribed long term. I have also noticed they are now doing bigger monthly releases of new movies and shows instead of releasing over the course of the month.
Apple and Amazon aren't guaranteed to "win" either even though the main business can fund loses on the content side. They both have been spending big (in the billions) on sports content. At some point you have to see a return on that investment to justify it.
Disney, Paramount (CBS), HBO Max (Discovery and HBO), and Peacock (NBC) have huge back catalogs they know are valuable (There are probably 1 million people who will subscribe to Peacock just to watch the office). They also have a ton of cheap reality shows (especially Discovery). This keeps their content costs down some even if they don't have the other cash flow to offset losses (I guess Disney does have that).
Prime is flailing around a little bit. I think you're correct in that both Amazon and Apple are more interested in using their streaming services to get people to sign up for subscriptions, which can then be used across the full range of goods and services, by enticing them in with "you have to watch this must-see series everyone is talking about".
Prime tried that with "Rings of Power" which, um, well yeah. I'm not familiar with what Apple produces. Both of them can indeed eat losses that a service like Netflix can't, but they still need the streaming services to pay for themselves. If they're not doing that by selling subscriptions, then it's pointless to drive Netflix out of business; customers will go to the Netflix replacement to see the shows and programmes they want that are not being broadcast by Prime or Apple (or Disney+).
That's the advantage Netflix possesses; it can show content from a range of sources:
"Distributors that have licensed content to Netflix include Warner Bros., Universal Pictures, Sony Pictures Entertainment and previously The Walt Disney Studios. Netflix also holds current and back-catalog rights to television programs distributed by Walt Disney Television, DreamWorks Classics, Kino International, Warner Bros. Television and Paramount Global Content Distribution, along with titles from other companies such as Hasbro Entertainment and Funimation. Formerly, the streaming service also held rights to select television programs distributed by NBCUniversal Television Distribution, Sony Pictures Television and 20th Century Fox Television.
Netflix negotiated to distribute animated films from Universal that HBO declined to acquire, such as The Lorax, ParaNorman, and Minions."
People are getting tired of/can't afford to pay several subscriptions to different services to see content, so a one-stop-shop model is much more attractive.
These companies don't need to make money from their streaming services, so why should they care if Netflix is driven out of business or not?
I'm not saying it wouldn't advantage them at all, but both companies have many competing business priorities and the ROI of a price war aimed at possibly maybe driving Netflix out of business just doesn't seem worthwhile.
Good point. I should have written that they could drive all the other streamers out of business and end up with a profitable duopoly. But, as you say, that may not be worthwhile to them.
Cable providers have been offering this for a while, maybe not as long as Netflix but close.
Here's the longer story, as I understand it. For many years, cable bundles included a number of stations that people really wanted, and a number that not enough people wanted to keep them alive unless they were bundled (HGTV or History Channel, supported by ESPN or something). People wanted to pick and choose their own stations, and pay for what they got, not the much more expensive full bundles that included stations they didn't want or need. But because those many smaller stations needed the bundling to work, cable providers resisted.
So we end up in a situation where cable costs $100+ a month and most people only use a minority of the stations available. Netflix comes along at less than $10/month offering a pretty good catalog (in many ways better than their current catalog, as they had a bunch of great older content- I really miss Netflix before any other streaming services came out, as the only game in town they seemed to have all of the viewing options that now get split between multiple competitors).
Cable can offer movies and shows streaming to solve the "any show, any time" problem, but that doesn't solve the problem of their core business model. They're not really in the "physical cable installed at your house" business so much as "bundle of content" business. They could have used the physical cables for all kinds of things, but would have destroyed the value of their main business in doing so.
I suppose you could argue that they missed an opportunity, but I would argue that they were not positioned to be able to do that. It would take a lot of work to unwind their current contracts and drop a bunch of content that couldn't make the cut, then try to wind back up in a way that worked for on-demand options. Netflix, unburdened by such prior commitments, could just move on to offering streaming content even if it destroyed the value of cable options. They didn't even need to install a wire to someone's house to do it, which means the one advantage cable had was unnecessary. Worse, Netflix often came in on the cable company's wire, using that same infrastructure. There was a time when Comcast tried to throttle Netflix speeds, which was a major reason for the net-neutrality conversations and such.
Thanks. I get what you're saying, but trust me- I'm not proposing breaking up the cable bundle. I'm not proposing that Comcast offer channels a la carte or anything like that. I'm just proposing that Comcast, Charter, and the other cable guys never sell their back catalogs to Netflix to start with- and instead offer them via video on demand. This way the cable bundle stays intact- it's just that if you want to watch old episodes of Magnum PI, or Colombo, or Dukes of Hazzard- they'd only be available on Comcast VoD and never on Netflix. Hell now you can start charging more for the bundle!
Netflix would never have gotten off the ground without the cable companies selling them their back catalogs that weren't airing. Again, the theory is- on TV you can only watch 1 show at a time, with streaming you can watch anything anytime. My question is- doesn't video on demand do exactly what streaming does? Those back catalogs gave Netflix the cash flow to ultimately start making their own content. VoD is the cable company solution here, no?
The cable companies don't have back catalogs. (Well comcast does i guess because they own NBC Universal and maybe dish network is somehow tied in with turner?). The production companies are the ones that own the right to the shows and movies (more or less, these things are complex). Once Disney and Paramount and other traditional TV networks got their act together with streaming, they stopped making deals with netflix and started showing things on their own platforms.
In 2006 ABC had a great streaming site that showed all their shows. No cost, no accounts. Why? Because they didn't think this was valuable. It wasn't how they made money traditionally so didn't try to do anything with it. Inertia is a powerful thing in large companies.
Last time I actually had cable (living in Seattle suburbs 2006-2008), part of the service was video-on-demand. The catalog was a lot smaller than Netflix's, but wasn't anywhere near being too small to be useful.
This had been in the pipeline a long time, at least since 1995. There were technical issues (bandwidth and screen real estate on a standard-def TV were the two big ones), but they weren't insurmountable. The bigger problem was business, with the first round of projects being used as bargaining chips in turf wars between cable companies and telephone companies in the leadup to and immediate aftermath of the 1996 Telecommunications Act, and with the second round getting shut down following the Dot Com crash of the early 2000s. Source: my mother was the lead UI designer on a couple of the big R&D efforts (TeleTV and Excite@Home) towards interactive television and video-on-demand served via cable or telephone networks.
My story for why Netflix took over from cable to the extent they did is that they were already well on their way to doing so back when they worked by mailing DVDs to you. Cable providers were vulnerable because they had built their business models around the assumption that they had secure local monopolies over premium television content provision. But once people got used to Netflix, a $20/month netflix subscription plus a small one-time expense for a good set of rabbit ears (for new episodes of network TV shows, syndicated reruns, and local news and sports) looked like a pretty attractive substitute for a $100+/month cable internet subscription. When Netflix launched their streaming service in 2007, that made the case for ditching cable even stronger.
I just came across a fascinating essay by John Tooby, one of the founders of evolutionary psychology, on tribalism, what he describes as "evolved neural programs specialized for navigating the world of coalitions—teams, not groups. ... These programs enable us and induce us to form, maintain, join, support, recognize, defend, defect from, factionalize, exploit, resist, subordinate, distrust, dislike, oppose, and attack coalitions. Coalitions are sets of individuals interpreted by their members and/or by others as sharing a common abstract identity (including propensities to act as a unit, to defend joint interests, and to have shared mental states and other properties of a single human agent, such as status and prerogatives)."
He argues that there was strong evolutionary pressure to develop such programs, something difficult enough that most species have not been able to do it, and points out one downside:
"Forming coalitions around scientific or factual questions is disastrous, because it pits our urge for scientific truth-seeking against the nearly insuperable human appetite to be a good coalition member. Once scientific propositions are moralized, the scientific process is wounded, often fatally."
Tooby's claim here (as well as in a few of his articles that I skimmed online, such as his chapter with Leda Cosmides in Høgh-Olesen (ed.), "Human Morality and Sociality" [2010]) is frustratingly vague, in part because he doesn't attempt to delineate which species do or do not exhibit behavior matching his concept of coalitions. His descriptions of the concept mix behaviours that are widely found among animal species with behaviours that are specific to humans.
There is presumably a hierarchy of competencies and dispositions here:
(1) Recognizing identity permanence for specific individuals of one's own species.
(2) Distinguishing kin from non-kin.
(3) Distinguishing allies/friends from non-allied individuals.
(4) Recognizing that two or more individuals (outside the circle of one's own alliances) are allied to each other.
(5) Attributing mental states (beliefs, intentions, etc.) and social ranking characteristics (status etc.) to groups as well as individuals.
(6) Forming coalitional networks that extend beyond the circle of direct acquaintances (e.g. coalitions larger than Dunbar's number).
Among these phenomena, (1) and (2) are widespread among animals, while (3) has been demonstrated in a range of mammals and possibly some birds. Once you have (3) plus a "theory of mind" sufficiently well-developed to model the behavior of individuals of one's own species, you probably get (4) for free.
(5) is where things start to get interesting. My guess is that this is also going to start happening more or less automatically once you have alliances and theory of mind, because our instinctive mind-recognition module tends to enthusiastically attribute mind-like qualities to anything that exhibits complex behaviour and because modeling a group as an individual with beliefs and intentions is much easier than simultaneously modelling all the individuals that make up the group and their mutual interactions. I think something like this happens in a number of primate species, and if Tooby had attempted to say which species did or did not exhibit the behaviour he was describing it would have made his claim much more specific and potentially fertile as a source of insights.
(It isn't clear to me why Tooby claims we instinctively attribute status rankings and prerogatives to groups, as opposed to attributing status to individuals based on their membership in particular groups. I agree that the latter is somewhat instinctive, and I can imagine it plausibly being a genetic adaptation, but the former is, as far as I can tell, something that happens only in specific institutional and legal contexts, and I see no reason to assume that those institutional and legal contexts are genetically determined.)
(6) is the most interesting of all, and presumably unique to humans, but it seems to be very clearly a cultural rather than a genetic phenomenon. It takes advantage of psychological capacities and dispositions that we share with other species (1-5), but it also depends on technologies (e.g. writing) and cultural transmission of ideas (e.g. religion, nationalism, political ideology) to form much larger coalitions than would have been possible in prehistoric societies.
- While obviously basic things like sex drive and empathy are evolutionarily based, attempts to empirically demonstrate anything more complicated seem to fail (see eg all the stuff about menstruation).
- Do gangsters, professors engaging in academic politics, Otto von Bismarck, and hunter-gatherers really use the same coalitional strategies? I think there are probably some commonalities (they probably all understand the concept of rival/enemy), but a *lot* of free parameters, and I would rather believe that evolution gave us some extreme basics and left us to learn strategies rather than that our programs are complicated enough to contain lots of flexible variables.
This might be a distinction without a difference, but I would argue we got a few basic emotions (anger, empathy) and evolution has tuned their values in ways such that normal learning produces optimal coalition-ing behavior. So the difference between us and bonobos (who I think have different coalitioning behavior) might be that we get angrier at people, which causes us to learn the concept of "enemy", which causes us to be rewarded by coming up with ways to fight our enemies, etc.
The eternal criticism of evo psych by other evolutionary biologists (especially evo devo folk) is that it only rarely rises to the point of providing testable hypotheses. Far too often, an evo psych theory is a pleasant just-so story that invariably reflects the biases and expectations of the person proposing it.
Animals like squirrels, do have complex genetic behaviors surrounding mating, foraging and food storage that they don't have to learn from other squirrels. Humans are the only species whose behaviors might not be primarily genetic; I also don't see how the argument from complexity can make any sense when our anatomy is itself very complex and has been evolving for not much longer (the neural crest existed in the worms that started the Animal kingdom, predating limbs and internal organs.)
You're correct with respect to 'primarily', but animals do learn and transmit (vertically and horizontally) novel behaviours, including those that affect pressure-sensitive activities like foraging and courtship. Obviously primates, as mentioned, but cultures idiosyncratic to populations have been observed even in rodents and birds.
If this capacity is preserved even in less cerebral/social/self-augmenting species, it makes perfect sense that humans find themselves at the extreme end of the cultural malleability continuum.
True, but there are not enough instances of "squirrel culture," to overturn the idea that complex innate programming is (somehow, nature is amazing) most of how animal behavior happens.
My amateur-ish thought on evopsych is it exists but that first you must strip away everything that is not common to all humanity through recorded history/anthropology. Because humans have not changed enough evolutionarily for there to be meaningful differences between us and the Romans. But at the same time, there are serious commonalities between us and the Romans! And us and the highlanders of Papua New Guinea.
This does meaningfully restrict the range of human behaviors including in ways some people might not like. Some of these are incredibly specific like certain professions being overwhelmingly male or female. That might not give us any insight into, for example, whether taxes ought to be set at 30% or 40%. But it does inform us about the viability of more utopian goals. Some of which are pretty mainstream.
On the other hand, if you take all the human universals you still get a lot of room for variation. It becomes very easy for people to say, for example, "it's against human nature to do X" when there's actually plenty of well functioning societies that do X.
I think of it a bit like a window where things within the window can be changed but straying outside the window tends to end in disaster. Certain peoples' windows are too big, they think human nature can be stretched further than it can, and others' too small, they think it can't be stretched outside of their own culture.
No they wouldn't. They did take inventories of professions by gender and it was noted, even in the 19th century, that healers were not consistently of a single gender throughout all societies.
A good example of what I said though: you're right a lot of 1900 men would have assumed their cultural norm was a universal norm. And you in turn are assuming that because one cultural gender norm changed all gender roles are flexible. Both are wrong.
And then there's the René Girard angle, according to which the big evolutionary switch was that our species learned to copy not just behaviors, but desires. I kind of like this one because, unlike John Tooby's theory above, it's kind of minimalistic enough to pass the sniff test - and you can vaguely gesture at it being enough to explain tribalism.
That's a great essay, thanks for sharing! My mind is shying away from the implications right now: is there a trade-off between caring and effectiveness? Maybe the synthetic phyles from "The Diamond Age" aren't as silly as they seemed?
The basic premise seems to have been implied by Jonathan Haidt's "The Righteous Mind"? I only read it recently (a big mistake on my part), and was shocked at how much of the discussion (or so I remember) had been about the "moral foundations" aspect, and how little had been about the "hive-mindedness" part, in which rational thought was developed as rationalization, a way to use language to form coalitions and sway them to our interests, and on the receiving end, to let our coalition's interests become our own. That theory was, to me, by far the most interesting and valuable part of the book.
I never liked Eliezer Yudkowsky's formulation that "rationality is for winning", but this made sense of why. Simplifying a spectrum into a binary, most people use it for winning, but some of us are weirdos who prefer to use it for truth-seeking, and tend to be exploitable by people who use it for winning. Eliezer argues that we can get both, and that truth should help with winning, which is true to a certain extent. But the problem is that I'm some sort of mutant who actually has a preference for truth, and my preference for winning is rudimentary, and more like a preference to not be obviously losing.
Speaking of which, I've been watching "Welcome to Wrexham", over the same period of time, and I wish I could analyze all the ways in which team loyalty permeates the city and the show. It's fascinating how much of the experience of watching sports derives from the tiny switch of "caring what happens", especially when you notice that switch flipping in yourself.
I've thought about the "Winning vs Truth" paradox for a while and I feel that I've settled the question, at least to my own satisfaction.
The (abridged) conclusion I've come to is, honesty is a PvP strategy instrumental to winning *in the long-term*. Because true propositions correspond to reality (qua invariance), and are therefore dependable across scenarios and across time. Deception offers short-term advantages, although the trade-off is that the strategy is not as robust across scenarios and across time.
I know Scott just commented upthread about how EvoPsych is sketchy. But I have to imagine that Azathoth stuck a Truth-drive in us somewhere. Because I think the concept of Truth is more sophisticated than it simply being an arbitrary boolean-value.
If Truth isn't an innate biological construct, then the default epistemic position should be to assume that the map and the territory are, in fact, the same. But if hardly anyone had a map/territory distinction, hardly anyone would have reservations about wireheading. And I doubt the Truth-drive is culturally transmitted (except as moral-injunction, which also doesn't have enough explanatory power), because otherwise I wouldn't expect continental philosophy to have such a tough time defining it.
I remember someone, inspired by Scott's "Every Bay Area House Party" wrote something like "Every NYC House Party", I intended to read it but was never able to find it. If I didn't hallucinate this, and someone knows what I'm talking about, can I please get the link?
Is anyone here buying individual bonds, as opposed to a bond fund? Bonus points if the bonds that you're buying aren't Treasuries. I'd be interested to hear what the reasons for buying individual bonds are- it's complex, less liquid, and has higher transaction costs, right? And while bond funds charge (low) fees, they're also supposedly getting a better price than a retail investor on each bond- right?
I buy (well, have my finance guy buy on my behalf) individual California state and municipal bonds on account of A: the tax advantages of the state bonds make them preferable to Federal bonds for me, and B: my finance guy can quickly pick half a dozen or so bonds with favorable terms and appropriate maturity dates. If I had to do the research myself, I'd probably just pick a California bond fund.
For anything more complicated than Treasuries, you either are an expert or you should be paying for expert advice. An expert who works for you will probably give you better advice than one being paid by e.g. Vanguard, but there are scaling issues with having a personal adviser for small portfolios.
Yes, in a brokerage account, mostly short-duration bills as a savings vehicle. Treasuries only though. Reason: they pay higher rates than bank savings account.
I don't know if the bond funds get better deals, maybe, but what I see is what I get when I buy Treasuries, and no transaction fees. So it's still a better deal than a bank savings, and I run zero risk of bond fund doing anything silly.
Almost a year ago I bought a TIPS bond using Treasury Direct. It's not hard to set up an account, and it's not hard to use.
It didn't occur to me to invest in a bond fund, at the time: what's the point? I just wanted to protect some of my money from inflation during a time of high inflation. Since then I've learned a little bit more about bonds and found out that bond funds are the "normal" way to invest in bonds. At the time I just assumed that you bought bonds like you bought stocks, and Treasury Direct made it pretty easy to do so.
If you have a Schwab account, for example, it’s trivially simple to by individual bonds--- T-bills, Treasuries, Corporates, Municipals--- at very low to zero transaction costs and deep liquidity. The advantage over a bond fund is that you choose your maturity date and your principle doesn’t fluctuate daily with the nominal interest rate, and no expense ratio.
Do you find Schwab is a good platform for trading bonds specifically? i.e. good pricing and liquidity? I hear good things about Fidelity for that. Considering a move.
I've only purchased short term T-Bills, but it's very simple and no commission, hugely liquid. I'm not even sure how they make money on the trades, maybe a bit on the bid-ask spread?
> But - don’t laugh - a lot of the time when I listen to music, I find myself fantasizing about being the person who wrote the music, or playing the music in front of a big audience while everyone applauds me, or something like that. It seems that my enjoyment of music - maybe not quite as primal as sex, but still pretty primal - actually *is* at least assisted by status fantasies.
I wonder what Scott feels or would feel about rhythm games in that light? As with many game/reality distinctions, the framing often injects a sort of protagonism into things: Guitar Hero might be the most overt example with it right there in the title, but idol games also involve “star performer wowing the audience” fantasies. On a more skew note with dance rather than music proper, there's Elite Beat Agents, where the group you're playing dances well enough to magically inspire people out of their life problems. Notably, the backing tracks are generally prerecorded, so while there may be a high skill ceiling in the gameplay proper, it's partially disconnected from the music itself (though some games do have some dynamic sample/track interactivity).
Looking for recommendations: if I wanted to make a turkey or ham sandwich without meat, what could I use instead? Requirements are that it requires no cooking, is high in protein, and tastes decent. I have approximately no experience with meat substitutes, so even information that is obvious to people in the know is welcome.
I am a meat-eater, but I used to buy a vegan prosciutto that was really quite good (and produced in Italy). I am about 80% sure that it was "Good and Green". I know this is not quite ham, but it does make a decent sandwich with Italian-type toppings (mozzarella, tomatoes, something with olives if you're adventurous). Generally, I've been finding that, when faced with weird dietary requirements, it's often worthwhile to try food imported from Italy.
Cheese, hummus and nut butters are all tasty, alone or in combination. You won't think for a minute that they're turkey or ham, though. But you might be better off just developing a taste for some non-meatlike things, rather than for things that aren't meat but try to imitate it.
I've never done it myself, but you can find instructions for making halloumi online that claim it's "not as difficult as you might think." If I were living in the US, I might give it a try. I suppose if you've never eaten halloumi before it might be trickly to know whether you have succeeded or failed.
North America-centric answer: Tofurkey makes excellent deli slices. I especially like the peppered ones. Field Roast also makes good deli slices but are harder to find. Non-dairy cheese has improved by leaps and bounds in the past three or four years. Chao, Daiya, and Violife are all good enough to eat on their own. Hummus is a good sandwich moisturizer, but vegan mayos are easy enough to find now and tasty enough to be considered "solved" IMO.
I like Light Life's veggie hotdogs a lot. Hot dogs are an easy "meat" to fake because it's already so processed. You could use them like hot dogs or cut/slice them to mimic deli meat.
If you have access, Trader Joes has a good selection of flavored meat substitutes like smoked tofu, tempeh, etc. They may have a deli meat substitute.
This isn't exactly what you are asking for, but you can make a great tuna salad substitute by mashing up chick peas and adding pickles/red onion/capers, mayo/mustard, and (the key) dried seaweed stacks torn in little pieces. Tastes great and hits the same spot as tuna salad does. No cooking required and you could make big batches to cut down prep time.
Does anyone know of good models for how religious conversion works? It makes some sense to me that one would personify and make rituals about ex. rain or sun, and that would develop a mythos over cultural time. I can also understand that for some people materialist/atheist explanations of life are deeply troubling, and they turn towards a spiritual tradition. But if you already believe in Odin, and some weird foreigners start telling you about this guy who was the son of God (there's just the one apparently?) and died for you personally somehow... How does that become convincing? I know that a lot of the wide-scale conversion involves politics and conquering and such, but I'd think enough people had to already be Christian for it to matter politically. It can't be all conquering. I listen to/read a lot of religious media and usually seems like it needs belief to be present already to be convincing. I really do not care that God made a huge sacrifice by killing his son so I would have a chance to be saved because I don't think any of that happened. Conversion stories I've read usually have this gap:
feels Something Missing (in current religion or lack of one)
hears about The Religion
learns some semi-interesting fables/has a personal sense of Something
[?????]
...and that's why The Religion is just so convincing and powerful and true.
What? Huh? Anyone who has books, articles, or just personal experience that could clarify this mental maneuver would be appreciated.
"Two Latin works survive which are generally accepted as having been written by St. Patrick. These are the Declaration (Latin: Confessio) and the Letter to the soldiers of Coroticus (Latin: Epistola), from which come the only generally accepted details of his life. The Declaration is the more biographical of the two. In it, Patrick gives a short account of his life and his mission. Most available details of his life are from subsequent hagiographies and annals, which have considerable value but lack the empiricism scholars depend on today."
"19 And after three days we reached land, and for twenty-eight days journeyed through uninhabited country, and the food ran out and hunger overtook them; and one day the steersman began saying: 'Why is it, Christian? You say your God is great and all-powerful; then why can you not pray for us? For we may perish of hunger; it is unlikely indeed that we shall ever see another human being.' In fact, I said to them, confidently: 'Be converted by faith with all your heart to my Lord God, because nothing is impossible for him, so that today he will send food for you on your road, until you be sated, because everywhere he abounds.' And with God's help this came to pass; and behold, a herd of swine appeared on the road before our eyes, and they slew many of them, and remained there for two nights, and the were full of their meat and well restored, for many of them had fainted and would otherwise have been left half dead by the wayside. And after this they gave the utmost thanks to God, and I was esteemed in their eyes, and from that day they had food abundantly. They discovered wild honey, besides, and they offered a share to me, and one of them said: 'It is a sacrifice.' Thanks be to God, I tasted none of it.
...41 So, how is it that in Ireland, where they never had any knowledge of God but, always, until now, cherished idols and unclean things, they are lately become a people of the Lord, and are called children of God; the sons of. the Irish [Scotti] and the daughters of the chieftains are to be seen as monks and virgins of Christ.
42 And there was, besides, a most beautiful, blessed, native-born noble Irish [Scotta] woman of adult age whom I baptized; and a few days later she had reason to come to us to intimate that she had received a prophecy from a divine messenger [who] advised her that she should become a virgin of Christ and she would draw nearer to God. Thanks be to God, six days from then, opportunely and most eagerly, she took the course that all virgins of God take, not with their fathers' consent but enduring the persecutions and deceitful hindrances of their parents. Notwithstanding that, their number increases, (we do not know the number of them that are so reborn) besides the widows, and those who practise self-denial. Those who are kept in slavery suffer the most. They endure terrors and constant threats, but the Lord has given grace to many of his handmaidens, for even though they are forbidden to do so, still they resolutely follow his example.
43 So it is that even if I should wish to separate from them in order to go to Britain, and most willingly was I prepared to go to my homeland and kinsfolk-- and not only there, but as far as Gaul to visit the brethren there, so that I might see the faces of the holy ones of my Lord, God knows how strongly I desired this-- I am bound by the Spirit, who witnessed to me that if I did so he would mark me out as guilty, and I fear to waste the labour that I began, and not I, but Christ the Lord, who commanded me to come to be with them for the rest of my life, if the Lord shall will it and shield me from every evil, so that I may not sin before him."
Alleged prophecy by druids before Patrick's arrival (two translations):
(1) "Murchiú's life of Saint Patrick contains a supposed prophecy by the druids which gives an impression of how Patrick and other Christian missionaries were seen by those hostile to them:
Across the sea will come Adze-head, crazed in the head,
his cloak with hole for the head, his stick bent in the head.
He will chant impieties from a table in the front of his house;
all his people will answer: "so be it, so be it."
(2) Patrick afterwards passed over sea to Ulster to seek Míliuc, King of Dalaraide, to preach the name of God, as it was with him he was in servitude at first, that it might be to him he should first preach, and the service to Míliuc's body and to his soul might thus be complete. Howbeit Míliuc came against him with great hosts of heathens, and would not let him land, since Loegaire had ordered the men of Ireland that they should not let Patrick on land: for his soothsayers had foretold to Loegaire, five years before, that Patrick would arrive in Ireland, to wit, Lochra and Lothrach and Luchatmael and Renell were their names, and this is what they used to say —
An Adzehead shall come across stormy (?) sea:
His mantle hole-headed, his staff crook-headed:
His dish in the east of his house:
All his people shall answer him Amen, Amen;
And every princedom and every worship and every might that will not be humble to him shall ebb away, and out of his own princedom he shall perfect [his followers] for ever."
There is a "Life of St Patrick" by Tírechan, a 7th century bishop; one account of the conversion and baptism of two Irish princesses, Fedelma and Eithne:
(1) Then holy Patrick came to the well called Clébach, on the slopes of Cruachu to the east, before sunrise, and they sat beside the well,
(2) and, behold, the two daughters of king Loíguire, fair-haired Ethne and red-haired Fedelm, came to the well, as women are wont to do, in the morning to wash, and they found the holy assembly of bishops with Patrick beside the well.
(3) And they did not know whence they were or of what shape or from what people or from what region, but thought they were men of the other world or earth-gods or a phantom;
(4) and the maidens said to them: 'Whence are you and whence have you come?' and Patrick said to them: 'It would be better for you to profess our true God than to ask questions about our race.'
(5) The first maiden said: 'Who is God and where is God and whose God is he and where is his dwelling-place? Has your God sons and daughters, gold and silver? Is he ever-living, is he beautiful, have many fostered his sons, are his daughters dear and beautiful in the eyes of the men of the earth? Is he in the sky or in the earth or in the water, in rivers, in mountains, in valleys?
(7) Give us an account of him; how shall he be seen, how is he loved, how is he found, is he found in youth, in old age?'
(8) Replying, holy Patrick, full of the Holy Spirit, said: 'Our God is the God of all men, the God of heaven and earth, of the sea and the rivers, God of the sun and the moon and all the stars, the God of high mountains and low valleys;
(9) God above heaven and in heaven and under heaven, he has his dwelling in heaven and earth and sea and in everything that is in them; he breathes in all things, makes all things live, surpasses all things, supports all things;
(10) he illumines the light of the sun, he consolidates the light of the night and the stars, he has made wells in the dry earth and dry islands in the sea and stars for the service of the major lights,
(11) He has a son, coeternal with him, similar to him; the Son is not younger than the Father nor is the Father older than the Son, and the Holy Spirit breathes in them; the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit are not separate.
(12) Now I wish to join you to the heavenly king since you are daughters of an earthly king, if you are willing to believe.'
(13) And the maidens said as with one voice and one heart: 'Teach us with all diligence how we can believe in the heavenly king, so that we may see him face to face. Tell us, and we will do as you say.'
(14) And Patrick said: 'Do you believe that through baptism you cast off the sin of your father and mother?' They answered: 'We believe." 'Do you believe in penance after sin?' 'We believe.' 'Do you believe in life after death? Do you believe in the resurrection on the day of judgement ?' 'We believe.' 'Do you believe in the unity of the Church?' 'We believe.'
(15) And they were baptized, with a white garment over their heads. And they demanded to see the face of Christ, and the holy man said to them: 'Unless you taste death you cannot see the face of Christ, and unless you receive the sacrament.'
(16) And they answered: 'Give us the sacrament so that we may see the Son, our bridegroom', and they received the eucharist of God and fell asleep in death, and their friends placed them on one bed and covered them with their garments, and made a lament and great keening.
(17) And the druid Caplit, who had fostered the one, came and wept, and Patrick preached to him and he believed, and the hair of his head was shorn off.
(18) And his brother Máel came and said: 'My brother has believed Patrick; not so I, but I will bring him back to heathendom', and he spoke harsh words to Mathonus and Patrick.
(19) And Patrick preached the faith to him and converted him to the penance of God, and the hair of his head was shorn off, that is, the (hair cut in) druidic fashion (which was) seen on his head, airbacc giunnae, as it is called. Hence comes the saying that is the most famous of all Irish sayings, 'Máel is like Caplit', because (both) believed in God.
(20) And the days of mourning for the king's daughters came to an end, and they buried them beside the well of Clébach, and they made a round ditch after the manner of a ferta, because this is what the heathen Irish used to do, but we call it relic, that is, the remains of the maidens.
(21) And the ferta was made over to Patrick with the bones of the holy virgins, and to his heirs after him for ever, and he made an earthen church in that place."
(The saying quoted is based on a pun, as explained somewhat better here:
"From this comes the most famous of Irish sayings, "Calvus ['bald ', i.e. 'Mael'] and Caplit: the same difference" - they believed in God.")
The sequence is known as the Questions of Ethne Alba and was acted out in 2012 for the Eucharistic Congress:
Try "The Autobiography of Malcolm X". He changed his religious beliefs partway through, and decided to leave the earlier chapters the way they were. It creates a powerful effect.
Geronimo's memoires. Towards the end he states that he has become a Christian simply because he thinks it's a good faith.
The Confessions by st Augustine. For the first half of his adult life he was a Manichean (kind of buddhist-christian-new age fusion) then hen converted in his late thirties.
And now to those people who changed from Odin to Jesus; consider that they didn't just hear about Christianity, they met people who believed in it, and it was often those people's lives that converted them. You can read about the meeting (written from a missionaries point of view) in Vitaa Ansgari, an eye witness account of one of the first missionaries to the vikings.
Imagine that you are a scandinavian in the 800's. You live in a stratified society where all lives have a monetary value depending on the status of the person and where priesthood is a secular position of power. (or well a secular position important for arbitrating the values of people's lives). Politics is deadly and includes a lot of fratricide
Now some weirdo shows up wearing only a plain woolen robe. He is walking around buying slave children who he then sets free and teaches to read and write. He doesn't carry weapons. After some investigation it shows up that he is actually a minor noble from France who has voluntarily chosen to risk his life by becoming a missionary instead of living a quiet and safe life. Oh, and you can tell him anything without him ever telling on to others or using it to find ways to get ahead of you in the power game.
You might see how this could have had some sort of impact on the people at the time, at least enough to spur some real curiosity of what it is that drives this strange creature.
All good suggestions, thank you! I've also been vaguely meaning to look into the Manicheans, so The Confessions would be a double kill.
The virtues and general niceness of the missionaries explanation makes a lot of sense to me, though maybe doesn't square well with the spread-by-conquest/political pressure reality that was happening also during this time. If your jarl converts to make it awkward for the neighboring Christian jarl to attack your clan, and now you also have to convert, I'd think it would be hard to appreciate how nice and virtuous those weirdos are. I guess your kids would grow up Christian, though that isn't really the kind of true-belief conversion I was interested in. Big place, long time period, room for both narratives?
There really wasn't that much conversion by the sword when it came to converting the European pagans. Certainly the Roman Empire did not convert under the sword: by the time Christians had any political power, they had already spread significantly and converted a lot of people, despite periodical persecutions. Ireland by all accounts was converted peacefully, and was most of Scandinavia. The exceptions to this rule stand out, such as the "Bloody Verdict of Verdun" but in general Christianity spread peacefully.
I think a big part of this is that paganism in it's various forms was just plain inferior to Christianity. As Lewis wrote, "a Pagan, as history shows, is a man eminently convertible to Christianity." Following Christ and having hope of the forgiveness of your sins is simply better than following Odin or Zeus. For one thing, Jesus loves you and will forgive you, while Odin and Zeus are not known for their loving-kindness or care for mortals. Not to mention that Christianity teaches that all men are valuable in the eyes of God, from the greatest king to the most lowly slave, so that's a big upgrade on the religious status quo.
It can be hard for us to put ourselves in the mindset of ancient pagans. One aspect, the forgiveness of sins, is often very difficult for us to feel the way they may have. Lewis talks about this in his essay "God in the Dock"
"Apart from this linguistic difficulty, the greatest barrier I have met is the almost total absence from the minds of my audience of any sense of sin...The early Christian preachers could assume in their hearers, whether Jews, Metuentes, or Pagans, a sense of guilt. (That this was common among Pagans is shown by the fact that both Epicureanism and the mystery religions both claimed, though in different ways, to assuage it.) Thus the Christian message was in those days unmistakably the Evangelium, the Good News. It promised healing to those who knew they were sick. We have to convince our hearers of the unwelcome diagnosis before we can expect them to welcome the news of the remedy.
"The ancient man approached God (or even the gods) as the accused person approaches his judge. For the modern man the roles are reversed. He is the judge: God is in the dock. He is quite a kindly judge: if God should have a reasonable defense for being the god who permits war, poverty, and disease, he is ready to listen to it. The trial may even end in God's acquittal. But the important thing is that man is on the bench and God in the dock."
"There really wasn't that much conversion by the sword when it came to converting the European pagans."
There really was, though. The Frisians and Saxons were converted at swordpoint by Charlemagne. The Scandinavian conversions were to a large extent kings enforcing it on their peoples through violence (most famously by Harald Hardrada). The Swedish kings forced the conversion of the Finns in the Middle Ages, and the other Northern Crusades went on for centuries with forced conversions of the peoples of North-Eastern Europe.
And then obviously everything the colonizing powers did in the Americas, if you count the Native Americans and heathens.
Violence and force has been extremely important for the spread of Christianity.
Those are the aberrations that stand out that I talked about: I specifically mentioned the Bloody Verdict, where Charlamange converted the Frisians by swordpoint. That doesn't change the fact that for most of Pagan Europe Christianity spread peacefully: it converted the Roman Empire peacefully, it converted most of the Germanic tribes peacefully, the Irish, the Picts, the Franks, the Vandals, etc.
And it's simply not true that the Scandinavian kinds primarily spread Christianity through force: the first Viking king to become Christian was Haakon the Good, and he doesn't seem to have done much of anything to spread the religion to his subjects (he wasn't the best Chrisitan, many consider him an apostate in later life). Then came Olaf Tryggvason who did try to convert his subjects through force; however, he wasn't very successful at that. Then St. Olaf comes along and imports a lot of bishops and priests and makes Christianity the official religion, but by his time scholars believe most of his subjects were Christians already, just from natural conversion and contact with Christians in mainland Europe. Finally Harald Hardrada comes along and he doesn't seem to be trying to convert his subjects by the sword at all: he mostly built a lot of churches.
My point in all this is to say that while Christianity has at times spread through violence and force, it is incorrect to say that violence and force has been "extremely important for the spread of Christianity". Christianity went from a cult with maybe 1,000 followers to the official religion of the Roman Empire without any military intervention, and at a time where all the violence and force was on the side of the pagans. Since then it has spread primarily through peaceful means, as it continues to do so today. Perhaps the fastest growing Christian community in the world today is in China with the underground Church movement, and they are certainly not spreading through the use of power, but despite the fact that significant power has been brought to bear against them.
I don't want to pick nits here but I find the claim that Christianity is more forgiving of sin than the pagan religion dubious, because what would there be to forgive? Are you (and/or Lewis) claiming that pre-christanity everyone in Europe was just guilty all the time? Why would they be? I'm not an expert on pagan religion but I am pretty sure Odin (I'm sticking with this example because I know the most about it) didn't make a big deal of forgiving sins in part because people weren't very worried about sin. Honor was super important, but Odin can't act honorable for you. Also, isn't the whole point of the mystery cults that we don't actually know what went on? And the few descriptions I have read have nothing at all to do with forgiveness or sin, they're about Nature and the Cycle and Partying Hard and whatnot.
"It promised healing to those who knew they were sick. We have to convince our hearers of the unwelcome diagnosis before we can expect them to welcome the news of the remedy."
This is exactly what I mean! how do you convince people of the diagnosis (not following Gods rules ie sinning is why they feel bad) before convincing them of the Good News (that the God exists in the first place). Am I misunderstanding the analogy? And it's not like you can test this quickly, turning your life over to God is a pretty big change.
The "a God that cares about you personally is nicer" argument does make sense, but (and this may be a personal lack of imagination) it's still hard for me to understand the move from "this concept, that totally conflicts with all my prior knowledge, would be nice to believe" to "I now believe the concept".
There certainly were problems in Classical Greece around killing; Hercules has to keep going to different cities to be purified of the guilt of murder by the ruler there (and then goes off and kills someone else). It's often part of the myths of the demigods and heroes that X has to leave his home city A and go to city B to be purified of blood guilt.
The pursuit of Orestes by the Furies for the sin of killing his mother is another example, and the replacement/pacification of the Furies by the court decision and establishment of a cult in their honour:
"In Aeschylus's Eumenides, Orestes goes mad after killing his mother and is pursued by the Erinyes (Furies), whose duty it is to punish any violation of the ties of family piety. He takes refuge in the temple at Delphi; but, even though Apollo had ordered him to kill his mother, the god is powerless to protect Orestes from the consequences. At last Athena receives him on the Acropolis of Athens and arranges a formal trial of the case before twelve judges, including herself. The Erinyes demand their victim; Orestes asserts that he was acting on the orders of Apollo. Upon closing of the trial, Athena votes on the verdict last, announcing that she is for acquittal; the votes are counted and the result is a tie, resulting in an acquittal in accordance with the rules previously stipulated by Athena. For bearing his responsibility in the murder, the Erinyes are converted into the Eumenides, who now offer him wisdom and council.[6] They are then propitiated by the establishment of a new ritual, in which they are worshipped as "Semnai Theai", "Venerable Goddesses", and Orestes dedicates an altar to Athena Areia."
Odin cares about some very specific things, like oath-breaking and breaches of hospitality (like so many other mythological figures, including Zeus and Charles XI, he travels around in disguise to test people's hospitality and punish or reward them accordingly).
You just killed some dude, that's a practical problem for you, though, not a sin. If you _get_ killed, there's a bench in Valhalla for you, but that's because he collects fighters for Ragnarok, not as some reward for moral behaviour.
Perhaps our current concept of sin and guilt have been shaped by christianity. But remember that the word guilt is etymologically close to 'debt'. And people have certainly always had debts.
In pagan scandinavia, you could easily get into just normal debt: Your cow destroyed the neighbors fence: Debt. Your son kills the neighbors slave: Pay up. Somebody kills your brother in laws cousin: Your owe your family to go and do something about it, which might mean killing somebody, which means more debt.
In pagan times the concepts of guilt (you did something bad to your neighbor) and debt (you owe him money) was probably more intertwined. And it was certainly something people could worry about.
Even in the modern world, I am quite prepared to bet that the hours of sleep lost due to worry about debt and money is at least an order of magnitude bigger than the hours lost because of actual guilt. That's just the way humans work.
Christianity split this entire debt/guilt concept up. Debt was money and not truly important. Sin was a different thing entirely, but even sin could be forgiven.
Of course the pagans had a conception of sin, or wrongdoing in general. For one, look to Hinduism. Hinduism is probably the most advanced polytheistic religion that has ever existed, and they certainly have a concept of guilt, and punishment to follow: bad karma, not performing your dharma, etc. Just look at the Hindu concept of Naraka, analogous to Christian hell. It is the place where thieves, adulterers, frauds, gluttons, those who cook animals alive, murderers, heretics, those who punish the innocent, those who violate hospitality, the sexually immoral, those who engage in bestiality, those who sleep with prostitutes, those who kill beasts wantonly, and and those who force their wives to drink their semen (among many others) are punished with horrible tortures before being reincarnated.
But we don't have to rely just on modern Hindu teaching: the Norse believed that murderers, oath breakers, and adulterers were consigned to Nastrond in Hel after death. As we read the in Poetic Edda:
"A hall she saw standing
remote from the sun
on Nastrond.
Its door looks north.
There fell drops of venom
in through the roof vent.
That hall is woven
of serpents’ spines.
She saw there wading
onerous streams
men perjured
and wolfish murderers
and the one who seduces
another’s close-trusted wife.
There Malice Striker sucked
corpses of the dead,
the wolf tore men."
Hel itself was where all evil men go upon death, of course, and is where English speaking Christians get the name Hell for the Christian bad afterlife. The wicked being punished after death was already a set idea for Northern European pagans: they would not have been surprised by the Christian teaching agreeing with that, but would have been surprised that adulterers, murderers, and oath breakers could be forgiven.
The Greeks and Romans believed in Tartarus, a deep abyss where the wicked were tormented and suffered after death. The torments of Tantalus and Sisyphus are well known, but they were not the only inhabitants.
There are more examples of course: Egyptian mythology and it's judgement with scales weighting your heart against a feather comes to mind.
The idea that sin will be punished by the gods is an old one: the Christians didn't invent it. What was novel to the Christians was that God loved us, and was willing to die a terrible death to save us from punishment and open the door to redemption.
Also something about martyrs, in the non-weaponized sense. When someone is put into extreme circumstances and is under severe pressure to say or do certain things, but they continue to hold to their original position, that's very impressive. It can get people wondering whether there's something true there, especially if the person's actions corresponded with their beliefs, and embodied a form of good that was otherwise uncommon.
In some situations. In others, it doesn't work. In Rome, it mostly didn't - the Romans thought the Christian martyrs were humiliated idiots and were unimpressed. (People _already_ converted may well have seen it as a unifying factor, though.)
I think a lot of it comes down to the specific cultural technologies the religion brings with it; Christianity brought Grace, an idea I found particularly interesting: You don't deserve heaven, you can't deserve heaven, but you can ask for it anyways. Also, relatedly, redemption: You can be better than you are, and it just requires asking for help.
In a significant cultural-personal sense, I think Christianity is something like a purified encapsulation of a self-help book: You're not a perfect person - and that's okay. And you can be a better person, just try, and ask for help along the way. So there's an appeal there in this new religion, so, you just kind of tack it on to your pantheon.
But then you have weekly gatherings and rituals. I think the importance of that is pretty high; even if you just add the Christian god to your pantheon, and continue as before but also do Christianity, the relative importance of Christianity is immediately much more significant. I think a lot of the pantheons of many gods tended to have relatively infrequent gatherings and festivals - and they kept these up, even as Christianity became, purely by frequency, much more socially important. And if you're already doing a weekly religious thing, the religious significance of the annual gatherings and festivals falls by the wayside. And gradually you stop talking about the old gods in their own festivals; it's all a little embarrassing, now, when grandpa starts talking about Odin. And the old religion fades out of relevance, rather than being supplanted in a single fell swoop.
I think there is some heavy influence in cultural self-loathing (is there a term for this?). There is a love of new or foreign things. There is a desire of mating with someone who is not a cousin, thus adopting their language/culture/religion.
Seems like you are trying to attribute all, or most, conversion to logical processes, when quite a lot of it hinges on... "God spoke to me in a vision" religious experiences, which then propagate to others. As in: Constantine: "I had a vision-- by this sign conquer" bunch of people who were there at the battle with Constantine: "well, he says he had a vision, we did this thing, and then we won. Let's do it his way." If you can bear to read the Gospels and epistles as historical accounts, in its early days Christianity had amazing curb appeal because its evangelists were pretty great at curing demonic possession. That's not going to make sense to you if you don't believe there is any such thing as demonic possession. But it makes a great deal of sense if you do.
It's hard to bridge the gap on reason alone. Particularly if your reason excludes the possibility of nonmaterial reality.
He didn't get *baptised* until his death bed, but he was already a convert and remained at the stage of being a catechumen. Putting off baptism was a mixture of "all my sins will be forgiven and I will obtain salvation" and the problem with the requirement not to sin after being baptised; as you point out, for a ruler, often breaking moral rules comes with the territory.
"Constantine had hoped to be baptized in the Jordan River, but perhaps because of the lack of opportunity to do so—together possibly with the reflection that his office necessarily involved responsibility for actions hardly compatible with the baptized state—he delayed the ceremony until the end of his life. It was while preparing for a campaign against Persia that he fell ill at Helenopolis. When treatment failed, he made to return to Constantinople but was forced to take to his bed near Nicomedia. There, Constantine received baptism, putting off the imperial purple for the white robes of a neophyte; and he died in 337."
I feel like both examples you've given *are* logical processes, just not materialist. If god's claim (filtered through this Constantine) comes true that is notable evidence, it's just that my prior on god existing in a capacity to give such instruction is really really low and have alternate explanations. The exorcism thing is interesting, though for me it brings up the new question: why would Christians be better at exorcism? Even with the gospels taken as historical accounts, I'm not ready to fully take their word for how good at exorcisms they were.
I find them logical and compelling-- I belong to my church as a completely (I think) logical response to a religious experience. Subsequent practical experience supports and reinforces that decision. But I understand why it would not be compelling evidence to anybody else. I cannot, after all, show you that experience, or provide evidence of it, and people have all sorts of religious experiences that *don't* lead them to religious conversion (I have had one of that sort as well. It was about math, not religion, and it didn't make me convert to Calculus). But also, I think people come to it in different ways:
1) I often talk to the new people showing up at our church, and find that while most of them are lateral transfers-- already Christian, but switching from another denomination-- of the minority who are truly converts, coming from a background of no religion, some other religion, or messing about in the occult scene, a surprising number of them, possibly a majority, cite *having a religious experience* as the "why I'm here". So if you are looking for a "conversion model" IMO "had a religious experience" is a good place to start looking... though I'm not sure how you'd model it from the starting point of skepticism about the assertions of the religion.
2) in an environment where Christianity is evangelizing Pagans, people are not starting from a prior of no-religion or fundamentalist materialism. The early evangelists were talking to people who already shared a huge number of priors: both the evangelists and the evangelized shared an essentially nonmaterialist worldview, wherein the world is densely populated by sentient nonmaterial beings, good bad and indifferent, who interfere directly in their day to day lives. In that context, it is not, I think, a huge leap to switch allegiance from a local deity who may run hot and cold on you along with myriad lesser beings who must be placated, to a universal deity who loves you, forgives you, and imbues you with inherent value, regardless of your status in this life-- plus offers protection from all those minor critters who'll sour milk in the pail or give your dog fleas if you don't show them OCD levels of proper respect. Throw in a genuine saint, performing miracles and radiating goodness and light and all, and now it's a pretty easy switch ;)
3) And then there are political conversions-- and here is some weird ground. Lots of people converted to Christianity for the political and social advances it offered, post-Constantine. Lots of Christians converted to Islam under the Ottomans, sometimes at swordpoint, but also sometimes for social/economic reasons. And while the initial conversions seem cynical and insincere... in the end they may be as genuine as any "real" convert. IMO this is because action<-->thought (nous?) are a two-way street. We like to think our brains are in the driver's seat, and thought always precedes action, but this is not truly the case. Shrinks know this from treating phobias, right? Handle the rat, go in the elevator and have a positive interaction, enough times... and it starts to change your fear of the rat or the elevator. Action modifies thought. Religion can do that too. Go to the temple, perform the rites, obey the outward forms, and no matter how much you may have been determined that this was just for show... it will shape your mind eventually. This also happens to spies, undercover cops... A lot of those who started out as fake converts were real converts in the end.
It's still a major method of conversion today. My brother is a bible translator, and told me once about a missionary conference he attended in India. One of the speakers that night was a very successful church planter. A church planter is a missionary who travels from place to place, staying long enough to convert a few families, help them form a church together, and then moving on. This particular planter's primary method of conversion was exorcisms.
Basically he would roll into town and ask around to see if anyone was possessed by a demon, jinni, evil spirit, etc. Usually at least one person in the community would have the problem, or would know someone with that problem. Then he would come and cast the demon out. Once the victim had recovered, he would preach to them and their family about how he was able to drive the demon out through the power of Jesus, son of the one true God, and since he had just exorcised a demon typically the family would take him very seriously and convert. He'd set them up with bibles and knowledge, hook them up with other Christians around, and move on to exorcise again.
As to why Christians would be better at exorcism, there are at least two possible explanations. One is that Christianity is essentially true and Christians can drive demons out through the power of Jesus Christ, son of the Living God. The other is that Christians just built up a lot of practical experience providing exorcisms: exorcising demons was one of Jesus's primary ministries, and we know from the New Testament that early Christians were also practicing exorcisms. For instance, the book of Acts, in Chapter 16, records a case of Paul performing an exorcism:
"One day, as we were going to the place of prayer, we met a slave girl who had a spirit of divination and brought her owners a great deal of money by fortune-telling. 17 While she followed Paul and us, she would cry out, “These men are slaves of the Most High God, who proclaim to you a way of salvation.” 18 She kept doing this for many days. But Paul, very much annoyed, turned and said to the spirit, “I order you in the name of Jesus Christ to come out of her.” And it came out that very hour. 19 But when her owners saw that their hope of making money was gone, they seized Paul and Silas and dragged them into the marketplace before the authorities. 20 When they had brought them before the magistrates, they said, “These men are disturbing our city; they are Jews 21 and are advocating customs that are not lawful for us as Romans to adopt or observe.” 22 The crowd joined in attacking them, and the magistrates had them stripped of their clothing and ordered them to be beaten with rods."
The book of Acts even claims that Christians were so successful at exorcism that other's were copying their techniques (Acts 19:13-16)
"Some Jews who went around driving out evil spirits tried to invoke the name of the Lord Jesus over those who were demon-possessed. They would say, “In the name of the Jesus whom Paul preaches, I command you to come out.” 14 Seven sons of Sceva, a Jewish chief priest, were doing this. 15 One day the evil spirit answered them, “Jesus I know, and Paul I know about, but who are you?” 16 Then the man who had the evil spirit jumped on them and overpowered them all. He gave them such a beating that they ran out of the house naked and bleeding."
If I was a sociologist I would want nothing more than to follow that church planter around and record what happens. I want longitudinal data on the recovery of the demonically afflicted. But please forgive me if I don't take the stories in Acts super seriously. Religious texts usually do make big claims about how cool and powerful their guys are, I don't take this as great evidence that Christians are uniquely good at banishing demons. Still, maybe the mainstream US Christians should get back into exorcisms. I know Bob Larson is out there but according to a pew survey from 2006 only 11% of Americans have seen or experienced an exorcism. Which is higher than I would have guessed but pretty low on a global scale, and probably decreased since.
What the passages in Acts show is that early Christians had a strong tradition of trying to exorcise demons. Whether they exaggerate their prowess or not, it's clear that Christians have been practicing exorcisms since extremely early on. Which was my point.
I am just going to put in one possible explanation that might explain why a large organized religion (like the catholic church) might end up being extra good at exorcisms, whether or not we believe these are actual casting out of demons or some sort of early psychotherapy.
It is: Talent selection. Suppose that some people are just very good at performing exorcisms, possibly because they have some inborn charisma. These might be the same people who go around curing people with therapy just through force of personality and then later writes a book about their methods, which have almost zero effect when used by other therapists.
(Or of course it might be an actual supernatural power to control demons.)
In a pagan area the religion will often be very local with no central organization. If a person shows up who are able to heal people just by talking to them he might become a big man in his local village. He might even attract possesed people from other nearby places.
In contrast, a large organized church might find this person and send him out into the world to heal and convert others. Just like a modern educational system is good at finding intelligent students and turning them into engineers. So the organized groups (Christianity, Buddhism, some branches of Islam) are just better at using their human resources, and so will be able to convert people from less organized groups.
"Minor orders are ranks of church ministry. In the Catholic Church, the predominating Latin Church formerly distinguished between the major orders —priest (including bishop), deacon and subdeacon—and four minor orders—acolyte, exorcist, lector, and porter (in descending order). In 1972, the minor orders were renamed "ministries", with those of lector and acolyte being kept throughout the Latin Church."
There's even a hint in the Gospels that you shouldn't be making too big a deal out of "I can cast out demons!", with the sending out of the seventy-two disciples, who then come back full of themselves, and Jesus goes "yes, and?":
"17 The seventy-two returned with joy, saying, “Lord, even the demons are subject to us in your name!” 18 And he said to them, “I saw Satan fall like lightning from heaven. 19 Behold, I have given you authority to tread on serpents and scorpions, and over all the power of the enemy, and nothing shall hurt you. 20 Nevertheless, do not rejoice in this, that the spirits are subject to you, but rejoice that your names are written in heaven.”
So it wasn't confined, at least in the early Church, to the talented or specialists. It was a power that came along with your baptism, and was part of the route towards ordination. Then it became more of a formality, so all four minor orders were conferred at once, and exorcists as such became a specialised office.
Making too big a deal out of driving out spirits is all too easily corrupted into the Signs and Wonders stuff, which further devolves into the Prosperity Gospel "god wants you to be rich (and by 'you', I mean 'me' so donate to buy me a second private jet)" crap and the much mocked Joel Osteen megachurch feel-good messaging.
That's how all religion worked historically. Religion used to be very practical and results oriented, and that only stopped once people learned enough about the world to realize it didn't actually work.
Reading this answered a lot of questions about the Old Testament for me, like "why does the OT show the Jews constantly worshiping other gods even when repeatedly told not to?" and "why does the OT have all the contests with other religions involve who can do the more impressive magic trick?".
You've mixed up a variety of different kinds of things, here.
1) We don't have any direct access to pre-discursive piety; we can feel awe before the face of the rising sun, but we can't understand what it would have been like to experience this at a time before someone asked the first 'why' question about sun-worship.
2) Johan below is right about dissatisfaction with (decayed) forms of religion leaving a yearning for something else, including on a mass-movement level.
3) The real point of Pascal's Wager is in the forgotten second half, where he talks about the real meat of conversion -- the /conversio/ of one's way of life. It's not a momentary turning like a steering wheel, it's a longterm turning like tucking growing shoots into a framework over years to make a fence.
The majority of the time, especially historically, it's not about "changing your beliefs". It's about the practicalities. Your king is going to murder you and your family unless you convert from Odin to White Christ? That's a pretty damned strong argument for doing so. Your taxes are killing you as a dhimmi? Great reason to convert to Islam! Perhaps you merely have to convert in order to marry someone (this still holds true today), and if you don't particularly care one way or the other, why not? And then in some decades, no-one will be able to tell the difference between pragmatic and faith-based conversions.
When actual faith-based conversion does occur, it's typically about you already being dissatisfied with an existing religion that you likely never chose yourself. The estranged middle-class that formed the bulk of early Christian converts very likely didn't find spiritual satisfaction in the Roman cults, and were insufficiently elite for the mystery cults (one major selling point of Christianity was how cheap it was - no need to sacrifice a bull or anything like that).
See, that all makes sense as to why a person would want to publicly convert, I want to know what would make someone actually believe. Even if it was socially required of me, I'm not confident I could talk myself into actually believing in any given religion. Even if I really wanted to believe in the risen Christ, even if I really didn't wanna have to buy all these bulls just to sacrifice, I don't know I would be willing to be killed by lions for it.
Ask Indian people about entering Islam to escape the Caste system.
Last week I was in the bottom Caste: only able to do bottom Caste jobs, only able to marry bottom Caste girls, only able to live in bottom Caste ghettos. But after converting to Islam, I have broken out of the Caste system, I can hold my head up high.
Is Christianity too minor a religion to be an option? I mean, I imagine it's not all fun and roses being a muslim in hyper-Hindu-nationalist India either?
Christianity is the third largest religion in India, with 26 million followers, but it is a distant third. They're a little less than 3% of the population.
They are also at risk of persecution from both Muslims and Hindus, so may not be as attractive if you're just looking for practical benefits.
Wow! You say "I do know that Hindus regularly lynch a huge number of Muslims in India."
This is nonsense. What evidence do you base this claim on? It is NOT COMMON at all.
Christian missionaries in India do crazy things to get converts. They target lower caste Hindus and bribe/threaten them. It has not been a successful project. Even the converts continue to pray and live like Hindus, worshipping idols. Even the churches look like Hindu temples. For example, they have a garlanded idol of Jesus flanked by peacocks.
Hindus don't generally like the caste system and are trying to get rid of it although it persists in some ways. It is a massive and complex country.
Seems like the same old problem of too high a cost for too little benefit. Specifically the cost of concrete apparently, and at this point it’s hard to beat solar + batteries on cost effectiveness
Unfortunately, the amount(s of certain types of) energy necessary for running industrial society are absolute, not relative. Nuclear not surviving the EROEI calcs doesn't make solar + batteries a winner, either.
The operator of France's nuclear plants claims that even operating the *already existing* plants is no longer economical, let alone building new ones.
Also the US is no outlier here. France started trying to build a new plant around the same time as Vogtle, and it was just as delayed and overbudget. You can't use US-specific factors to explain a phenomenon that is seen *throughout* the rich world at the very least.
That's a thing people say about nuclear, yes. It's a sleight of hand of the same type (though at least an OOM more honest) than what they do with 'net positive' fusion.
The sun sends more energy directly to the planet than we may ever need, but not always in the right places, the right times, or in the right amounts. For instance night and the areas of the planet away from the equator. Powering Northern Europe or the NE United States are both problems, using only or mostly solar. The US has some great desert locations for solar power, but almost all of the power would be lost in transmission by the time it got to NYC.
Significant improvements to battery technology would go a long way to improving the performance and usability of solar, but we're a long way from solar being usable as a baseline power (for instance, heating homes at night), even if we had enough solar panels to gather that power. Even with the battery technology, we'd still be looking at around 75 million acres of solar panels to power the world, which is logistically...difficult? I'm trying to think of the right word to encompass the scale, and it's not coming to me. An average American nuclear power plant produces the same amount of energy as 3.125 million solar panels, and can produce it day and night, all through the year, at any distance from the equator.
75 million acres doesn't sound like that much. It's a square 550 km by 550 km. It's the size of Oman. Or it's twelve times the size of the Anna Creek station in South Australia, which recently sold for $16 million.
Or, more usefully, it's 38 square metres per person. Many people have 38 square metres per person going spare on their rooftops already; for those who don't then the cost of 38 square metres of land (whatever is the cheapest, least useful chunk of land within reasonable power-transmission distance of your location) is not very high. The cost of actually covering that land with solar panels is higher, but still only comparable to what I already pay for electricity over a small number of years.
Is that 38 square meters per person, including each member of a household? I did the math and that sounds like all 8 billion people.
For individuals in the first world, this seems quite doable, if expensive ~$7,600 per person. This would get much harder for people who do not have their own single-family homes (large apartment complexes) or for shared family space if each person needed that much power. $38,000 for a family of five would be difficult for most people, though long term the savings on their overall electric bill might work out. Much harder for poor countries.
If it's all ~8 billion people, we're looking at more than $60 trillion to build all of the solar necessary, and that would last 25-30 years before needing replaced (not to mention new construction and replacements for lost or broken panels). That would be something like $2-4 trillion a year on building and maintaining solar, if averaged out.
5% of world GDP every year for an indefinite time period, heavily frontloaded to earlier dates, sounds like a lot to me. That said, that's suspiciously close to what we pay for oil right now (35 billion barrels a year, $80 a barrel).
I have serious doubts that there are enough accessible materials and factories available to actually fully convert to solar. And these numbers don't include electrical upgrades and the costs of battery systems, so it likely would be much more expensive in the long run - not to mention depending on technology that doesn't exist yet.
I will say much more doable than it sounded originally, but still a significant hurdle that may not be possible.
Pace Dyson, there's no real limit to the amount of energy solar could produce. In practice, however, someone has to extract the materials to make the panels, make the batteries, and make the transport medium. If all of this were free, every car, truck, train, container ship, tractor, bulldozer, etc would already be electric. If it's some variant of not-free, the question is how much energy it takes to get there, and if there are enough easily-extractable raw materials.
Price can't go higher than what the industrial basis for the economy can support, which is why cheap loans for developing low-quality sources of petroleum (like Canadian tar sands or whatever) were a bandaid, not a cure.
If an economy can't buy the energy it needs, then it has to shrink. Either way, things have to equalise -- i can't see how you can have permanent unmet demand.
Oh yes, and shrink it will (as will the underlying population). But the whole point of the dream of nuclear (fission or fusion) is the desperate hope that maybe we'll find some way to cheat EROEI (I almost wrote, "the gods of the copybook headings") and get to that Star Trek future.
Any time there is bad news about energy, it's bad news from the perspective of those hoping for fully automated luxury space communism (or whatever). Privately I wonder sometimes if concern about AI doom is just the long Shadow cast by this same Hope. Solar-powered diamondoid nanites could only be a threat in a very different kind of universe where enough 'intelligence' could get us there.
I'm working on something and I'm stuck between two poles. The first is the pure mathematics and logic of the system I'd like to build. The second is the practicalities of firming up a "good enough for now" version and implementing this in software.
The project is a Bret Victor Future of Coding inspired thing, and in short it is this: I want the user to be able to build up a "model" of the domain they're trying to write software for. This isn't a "model" as in the typical Rich/Anaemic Domain Model built out of classes. This is more like a language-agnostic attempt to identify the conceptual units and moving parts within a field, in a cleave-reality-along-its-joints sense. It would be displayed as blocks and lines and diagrams and whatnot.
My intuition says that if the model maps correctly to reality, and every part in the model can move in the same way as its real life equivalent - then any coding task that can described in reality will always be talking in terms that the model already understands. Ie: future features are always certain to be straightforward to add, and the underlying model never has to be altered.
The idea is the user builds up this model out of tools I give him, and the process becomes almost philosophy (what is a "Task"? Is it inherent to a Task that there is always a "start time" and an "end time", or are those concepts in fact external to the Task itself?) Once the model is built, it can be (possibly semi-automatically) turned into the classes and db schema of a more traditional Rich Domain Model.
My question now is, what tools should I be giving the user to build these models? So far I'm thinking along these lines:
- you need "conceptual units", the nouns and verbs that have meaning in your system, and whose implementation might look like data objects for nouns and functions for verbs.
- you need relations, telling you how two entities relate to each other, in the same way that when people try to explain things on whiteboards, they instinctly start connecting blocks with coloured lines.
- you need some way to grant meaning ("adjectives"?) to your concepts, such that you can ask human-readable questions about them. (Ie, if you're running a shop and you frequently use the phrase "out of date" for stock items, then your model and system should also know what "out of date" means. That way, code that implements actions can be read in the same terms as humans thinking about them.)
- you need behaviour/reactivity/autonomous actions, I think. At the very least, conceptual units need to "defend their borders" and act/allow themselves to be edited in only the ways that their real-world counterparts can. But I've also got caught up in the idea of reactivity, especially for systems with processes and knock-on effects. If you perturb the system in one place, it should know how to respond and ripple out in the same way as would happen if you prodded the real world system.
- I need a sane UX for all of this.
The whole idea is to save the user from having to think about the technical implementation details of setting up this system, and let him just focus on the formal rules. That means I've got to be the one building and implementing everything he could ever need, here and now. Ideally in such a way that using the tools always feels natural and he doesn't immediately start needing ugly workarounds.
I feel like I don't have a solid framework to work with here. Is there any concept analogous to Turing-completeness, where I can know that I have the right set of tools and therefore any required model will be easy to build?
Maybe that's just me and my way of thinking but it looks like you're trying to design and build a programming language. Specifically, I think you want to make a meta-programming-language/language workbench/IDE/language implementation framework that will allow a user (possibly a non-technical one ?) to build their own mini-programming language that will enable them to write programs ("Models") that can either run or be translated to other programs. Did I get that right ?
If true, there is plenty of precedent here. Search terms include : Model-Driven Development, Language-Oriented Programming, Rapid Application Development, Low/No Code (can be rubbish sometimes and is flooded with unreliable ChatGPT-based approaches right now), Domain-Specific Languages, and language toolkits or langauge workbenches.
A couple of important questions :
(1) What's the "vibe" of what you're trying to build ? Is it aimed at Corpo teams or the lone/open source developer ? Professional devs or the citizen programmer ? Text based or graphical or a mix of the 2 or something entirely different ? Do you want to be an incremental improvement over existing tools in the space or a radical reimagining ? Is your user expected to bring their own things to integrate with your vision or is your vision a walled garden/complete system that is expected to provide everything the user might reasonably ask for ?
(2) In what sense is :
(a) > you need "conceptual units"
(b) > you need relations [...] connecting blocks with coloured lines.
(c) > you need some way to grant meaning ("adjectives"?) to your concepts, such that you can ask human-readable questions about them.
Different from a graph database ? The "Conceptual Units" are your nodes, the relations are your edges, and the "adjectives" are attributes, which in graph databases are lists of key-value pairs attachable to any node or edge, such that you can pick an arbitrary node and start attaching info like 'Name : John Doe, Age : 76, ...' to it.
Can you think of something that something satisfying a...c can do but graph databases can't ?
(3) "you need behaviour/reactivity/autonomous actions", or in other words a programming language.
Lots and lots and lots of choices here :
(a) Do you want it to be a fixed langauge that users can't modify ? Or would you provide the user with a meta-language that allows them to define their own languages ? Something in between ?
(b) Do you want it to be declarative ? it looks like it, since you want a focus on "formal rules" and declarative, logic-programming-like rules tend to go hand-in-hand with the graph DB universe you're describing above. But you also mention internal state, since your conceptual units seem to have data attached to them and, furthermore, this data is mutable ("edited in only the ways that their real-world counterparts can"). That's a problem, mutability is generally hard to represent in purely rules-based programming/modeling paradigms. Maybe you can circumvent that by going the route of "Logs of facts", an approach made famous by Datalog, where mutation is represented as new facts derived from the old facts, and the old facts are kept around.
(c) Another problem is the order of execution of behaviour : if your user defines behaviour in terms of "Local Rules" that describe how each individual unit in the model reacts or evolve based on external events and/or their "neighbours", then it's very easy for behaviour to end up producing different states depending on which units were allowed to run first. Indeed, it might be very easy for the model to become trapped in an infinite state-update loop.
(d) The elephant in the room is really this : What is your language ? What are its primitives ? What are its means of combination and means of abstractions ? What's the atomic behaviour that your users will build all programs out of ? (Or, if you want to go the meta-language approach, what is the atomic primitives that your users will use to define the syntax and semantics of the new programming language they're constructing with ?)
I think you just need to focus on an example. Pick a problem you know well and have solved before by other means, let's say I want to make an TicTacToe game. Or a toy shoot-em-all with dead simple mechanics, or anything really. Tell me how do you imagine me using your system to turn a natural language description of those applications into a reasonably precise machine-readable model that can be used for useful things, like generating executable code or reasoning about the application in some way or another ?
> Is there any concept analogous to Turing-completeness
I think not, I'm an extremely amateur langauge design hobbyist but my impression, which seems to be supported by much more accomplished language designers than me, is that language design is more an Art than a Science. It's easy to build something Turing Complete, it's hard to make that something look like Prolog or Ruby rather than C or PHP.
Do you want your vision to be weaker than full Turing Completeness ? That way lies interesting avenues. But what's your focus ? A non-turing-complete Model of Computation or Abstract Machine will necessarily be unable to model some things that you can with a traditional programming language, right ? So the next question is what that thing is going to be ? What are the things that you are okay with your users not being able to model ?
This is a nice set of thoughts and I want to work through it properly. Unfortunately it's ten past midnight over here and I'm supposed to be out all day tomorrow.
Quickly then:
Yes, this thing is going to be a sort of development environment. The idea is that the model - the moving parts of your system - should be "pre-language" - they're hashed out and decided upon before anyone writes a line of code. New contributors to any project need to first understand the model before they're useful. The boss/stakeholders of the project, who aren't going to do any coding, also need to understand the model, at least in a zoomed-out way.
It very definitely wants to be graphical. My starting point is human cognition, and humans do their explaining with pictures. That said, there is no reason a graphical application can't allow text-based code inside itself.
Yes, graphs are very likely the way to go. They just keep popping up. If you were to confidently tell me, "Oh yes, the Farnsworth-Wernstrom Theorem states that any coherent system of interacting parts can be most simply represented by a graph of nodes," I would be completely unsurprised.
My only hesitation before committing to graphs is that I don't actually know what other options are out there. Can anyone help me here? Mathematical structures, or visual techniques commonly used by people to explain stuff?
(One thing I've noticed is when people try to explain a system, they always start drawing a graph of nodes. Then, as they keep talking, they realise they need to explain a different facet of the system, and they'll move to a new page and start drawing a different graph, with an entirely different meaning to it. I wonder, if the nodes on the paper were live and moveable, would they add the new information to the existing diagram, or would they still want to create the second one, because they find it easier to think about that way?)
Regarding my behaviours/reactivity/etc bit - this follows from a longer chain of thought that I don't have time to write up now, and it may have lead me down a bit of a rabbit hole. If you're interested in this project, give me your email and I can talk it through in more detail.
Right, here's my email learnshebrewhatesisrael@gmail.com. I'm quite interested in all things bordering on Tools For Thought or Programming Languages and lots of other things in this whole idea space.
> The idea is that the model - the moving parts of your system - should be "pre-language" - they're hashed out and decided upon before anyone writes a line of code.
We will certainly talk a lot more about this in email, but I want to say that :
1- "Pre-Lanugage" is a tiny bit inaccurate, maybe you should clarify that by "language" you mean "general purpose language" like Java or Go, not just any language in the absolute. Because technically, any non-trivial machine-readable model of a domain __IS__ a program describing that domain or solving some problem related to it. If your model is not just natural language raw text or informal diagrams, it's not "Pre-Language", it's just written in a new special language (that can possibly be compiled to several other mainstream languages for a variety of purposes, or maybe not and it's interpreted right away.)
2- This "they're hashed out and decided upon before anyone writes a line of code." is very unrealistic if you're targeting Corpo teams and Corpo environments. In large (10000+ headcount) Corporate settings, the pressure to crank out code, any code, is immense. Any sort of upfront planning is regarded as a waste of time and "premature optimization". I certainly can't speak for all corpos but this is my experience and the experience of a huge list of people I talked to and read. I defeinitely hate this and wish you all the best in defeating it, but it's the reality and it's very well-entrenched, so you should be realistic about your expectations.
> It very definitely wants to be graphical
Nice, graphical programming is still underrated and unexplored, it subsumes text too, like you said. But there is a huge list of challenges involved, integration with version control seems to be the most oft-cited bullet point. It's fine to ignore this when the idea is still in embryonic stages, but it's also good to keep it in mind.
> My only hesitation before committing to graphs is that I don't actually know what other options are out there.
Good instinct. I think graphs are very natural. They are extremly simple. They are extremly versatile. There is a huge variety and taxonomy of them. They can represent anything from flow of control to data structures. They are the basis of Category Theory, which, people claim, says very deep and profound things about math.
But I'm not a mathematician nor a theoritical Computer Scientist so maybe Graphs are simply all I know.
> they realise they need to explain a different facet of the system, and they'll move to a new page and start drawing a different graph
This pops up in a variety of settings. Check out the Epsilon languages, related to XText and the EMF framework by Eclipse. Check out the MPS IDE by Jetbrains. Both of them needed a whole family of specialized Domain Specific Languages, each tailored to describe or manipulate a different aspect of metamodel.
I've sent you an email - it had a link in it, so if your spam filter swallows those, be aware.
Copy pasting this line in public though, because I'm interested in other people's opinion:
I'm especially surprised by your claim about Corpo environments. Naively I would expect larger team = more beaurocracy, more job titles, more formalised procedures = more likelihood of meetings and discussions and plans drawn up before anyone is tasked with writing the code itself.
This is very far away from my field, but I like brainstorming, so offer these thoughts in the hope that one may be of use.
1) there is some software for kids that allows them to program robots or build games, something like that. Kid builds her program not with lines of code but by linking together little shapes she sees on screen. As I recall, each shape represents something like a part of speech -- like one shape was for something like nouns, the names of things, another was for something like verbs, designating an activity, and another was for something like adjectives, qualifiers. I believe this software came from MIT. It's been around for a while, but is still popular. I'm sure somebody here knows the name of it.
2)It seems to me that what you're doing is similar to the way people tried to build artificial intelligence a few decades ago: Figuring out the rules they used to think about things, then teaching the rules to the computer. It didn't work well, and then weirdly it turned out to work much better to just feed the computer a shit ton of examples of human thought and discourse and make it develop the skill of imitating human thought. Of course, nobody can get AI to spit out the rules it's using. But could it possibly make sense for you to take a similar approach? Instead of building a model of the domain, your software would eat a bunch of examples of the things in the domain and learn to produce material that is a representative example of an entity in that domain. Maybe you could then teach it what you see as the meaningful rules about the domain -- its nouns, verbs, adjectives, relationships, conceptual units needed for it to defend its borders -- and knowing those, could be a framework on which the user builds the formal rules.
-Brian Eno made a list of "oblique strategies" for people to use when they are stuck on some creative task. I have found it very helpful at various times -- it helps me loosen up my mind and come at things in different ways. It's here: https://matt-rickard.com/list-of-all-oblique-strategies
I like the "nouns and verbs" approach, for a couple of reasons. The first is that, while "any possible domain or field" definitely sounds like an infinitely large problem space, we do know that we're only interested in working with domains that we ourselves are able to describe and understand. And humans understand things in terms of nouns and verbs - we even form (some percentage of) our thoughts out of them.
The second reason is that nouns and verbs map very neatly onto mathematical constructs, and from there into coding concepts (objects and functions, respectively.)
My big question is "where do I go from here", because nouns and verbs aren't enough on their own to nicely or "naturally" explain a field. In the software world, there are many kinds of objects and structures that have different properties. In the real world, humans almost always reach for graphical diagrams (even if they're only implying their existence with hand gestures) when they're trying to explain a new field.
Re: your second point, I have rather strong opinions about AI. Software source code is a tangled, illegible mess and, even if you're careful to leave little comments and explanations to yourself, it's very easy to come back to a project after six months and really struggle to remember how anything in there works. I can't speak about larger software companies, but in all the SMEs I've worked in it's not uncommon to have only one guy who actually understands the systems everyone relies on. AI promises to reduce that number to 0.
In fact, that's exactly why I think it's so important to get us working from human-understandable "models" instead of illegible increasingly AI-generated source code in the first place.
I do, however, think there's a lot to the idea that no one formally defines an entire field in one sitting. You start by throwing out a very simple model, then add in subtleties and caveats as they crop up. Having to define everything there is to a subject, up front, is a mentally exhausting, onerous, and actually quite stressful experience.
I will look at that Brian Eno link tomorrow - thanks for providing it.
>My big question is "where do I go from here", because nouns and verbs aren't enough on their own to nicely or "naturally" explain a field. In the software world, there are many kinds of objects and structures that have different properties. In the real world, humans almost always reach for graphical diagrams (even if they're only implying their existence with hand gestures) when they're trying to explain a new field.
Sentence diagramming has a way to represent every part of speech, even obscure ones, and even oddities like entire sentences that function as a noun within a larger sentence. You might check that out.
Another idea about representing things besides nouns and verbs. Adjectives, which modify nouns, could be represented by difference colors of the noun shapes. Analogously for adverbs, which modify verbs. Things like prepositions are funkier and often used idiomatically in ways that don't make sense. Making your representation 3-D, so with solid objects, gives you a lot more options.
I will look at sentence diagramming. It's definitely something that could relate to letting the user build Domain Specific Languages, which is something of a holy grail for a lot of us.
Here’s a page with a diagram of a very complex sentence. If you know how to read the diagram it indicates with no ambiguity at all each word or phrase’s place in the structure of the sentence. ( It does not, though, tell you unambiguously in what order words and phrases appear, although the number of possibilities is fairly limited. ). Hope this proves helpful!
These Reed-Kellogg diagrams are sort of fun. The author says they can't be "generated mechanically" - do we know if this is true?
Do we know if they have any other nice properties - for example, for any given sentence, is there only one R-K diagram, or could there be multiple? Given an R-K diagram and a sentence, can we check the one against the other (in either direction) and decide whether they're correct?
I'm thinking about an app now that lets you take sentences back and forth between verbal and diagrammatic. It may or may not be useful for teaching children, but I could see it being an idle pasttime for adults as well. It's sort of meditative.
This sounds incredibly ambitious, and I wish you luck. But for any non-trivial domain, I fear that this may be beyond the scope of human intelligence. Our categories are as imperfect as our knowledge, so our abstractions are leaky, and our models are built of abstractions all the way down.
My advice would be to dog-food: find some domain that you're at least moderately interested in, and try to model it, and write the tools to help you do that. Once you've done this for a few different domains, or worked closely with partners to do so, the tools will probably be sufficiently general enough that you can work with strangers off the Internet.
Lately I've been thinking more about reputation systems online (and how we don't have any good ones). It would be cool if we could see a profile through different lenses, instead of just one single number of followers. Foe example, I would love to be able to see what just my engineering friends think of someone, instead of the whole internet
Yeah that does sound like a step in the right direction! I would also include the ability to follow reviewers and see the reviews of people you’ve followed as well
In general discussion of the call for a pause on AI, here's why I think that is a non-starter. This is an example of what Microsoft is selling to businesses in regards to AI (they keep sending me stuff because I did some purchasing for the workplace) and it's not "let's all just take a moment to stop and look around":
"In conversations with customers and partners, organisation and culture frequently emerge as critical factors for success.
Operating model
According to Gartner: “The pace of AI technology maturation and diverse approaches make it difficult to capture and sustain value from AI initiatives. Effective AI operating models that leverage current investments in people, processes and technologies enable IT leaders to drive successful AI initiatives.” It can mean the difference between AI projects that are viewed as science experiments and those that become significant value-drivers.
Change management
An organisation’s ability to manage change is also a critical driver of AI success. “You very quickly learn that by the time you succeed with something, it’s already outdated,” says Mikkel Bernt Buchvardt, Director of Data and Analytics at SEGES Innovation. He suggests embracing this reality, rather than letting it slow you down. “You can keep gold-plating your methods, or you can make it good enough to deliver some value.”
They do address the topic of AI safety, but according to them none of their customers have concerns about runaway AI paperclipping us all/hopes that AI will make everyone from a Papuan head-hunter to Emperor Jeffy himself rich, transhuman, and eternal:
"Given the pace of AI innovation, the most frequent questions we hear from customers are: Where do I go from here? How do I create the most impact? What does success look like?
AI governance
• Review and share resources on responsible use of AI to identify the models and approaches that best suit your organisation.
• Consider the enablement model that best fits your needs, such as hub-and-spoke, centralised or distributed.
• Consider the principles of secure AI and how to ensure your data is protected end to end from platform to applications and users.
• Consider the processes, controls and accountability mechanisms that may be required to govern the use of AI, and how AI may affect data privacy and security policies."
The below link is from 2021 about their approach to Responsible AI:
"Walk, climb, inspect, note, repair: this is the classic procedure for power line maintenance. Much of this work is done manually and requires a huge amount of effort; therefore, it was sensible to see whether it can be made more efficient and safer using digital solutions. To minimize risks while fulfilling its responsibility to supply households in Germany with electricity, E.ON sends up drones to take photos of power poles and lines. These photos are uploaded to Microsoft Azure and transferred to Grid Vision®, an AI-supported inspection tool supplied by eSmart Systems, which evaluates the images—thus making the maintenance process more efficient and safer."
So while all the talk about AI risk may be "it'll become agentic", in the real world applications, it's about "money". I think the EA risk movement really needs to take account of this, and not get side-tracked by beautiful theory. Value-drivers, not science experiments, in their wording.
"And it's looking like blue collar jobs are in line to be automated away; no more Wichita linesmen! At least, in Germany:"
"To minimize risks while fulfilling its responsibility to supply households in Germany with electricity, E.ON sends up drones to take photos of power poles and lines. These photos are uploaded to Microsoft Azure and transferred to Grid Vision®, an AI-supported inspection tool supplied by eSmart Systems, which evaluates the images"
To me, that sounds like the "Walk, climb. inspect" and possibly "note" part of "Walk, climb, inspect, note, repair" are being automated, but the "repair" (and probably really climb, repair) need improved robotics on top of the drones. imaging, and AI image interpretation now available.
Certainly they still need humans for the repair part, but I do think this is indicative of what way the wind is blowing. Send a tech out with a bunch of drones to cover an area, to map what repairs need doing. One guy instead of a team, and probably to cover a wider area as well. Reduce staffing numbers that way.
"Last week saw a grandiose gathering of countries and ultra-rich tech companies meeting in England’s Bletchley Park to talk about the future of regulating AI.
Rishi Sunak and Ursula von der Leyen hobnobbed with Marc Benioff, Sam Altman, Nick Clegg and others at the AI Safety Summit.
The resulting “declaration” from 28 countries was like a ChatGPT prompt asking the AI engine to “write a speech specifying the potential dangers of AI” — formulaic and predictable.
Beyond the righteous huffing and appropriately-furrowed brows, though, it all seemed to boil down to two things.
1) Which country can position itself for the most dollars and euros in an area (AI) that is capturing, by far, the most investment in the tech world right now?
2) Which regulations can the biggest, richest tech firms have adopted in Brussels and Washington that will squash startups that don’t have necessary resources?
Point one is understandable and business-as-usual. Ireland (which isn’t a main player in AI) does it all the time.
Point two, though, is worth considering a bit more. You know all of those headlines you see about potential doom and catastrophe from AI? It seems that much of it comes from a small handful of tech giants who want to ring-fence the sector with regulations that nobody else can afford.
Probably the most arresting intervention on AI came in May of this year, when an array of tech, scientific and academic figures came together to issue a press release entitled Extinction Event.
“Mitigating the risk of extinction from AI should be a global priority alongside other societal-scale risks such as pandemics and nuclear war,” it said.
As the US technology analyst Ben Thompson has pointed out, the letter had 81 signatories from Google (including Google DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis), 30 signatories from ChatGPT’s OpenAl (including CEO Sam Altman) and 15 signatories from Anthropic (including CEO Dario Amodei).
In other words, the three companies that currently lead AI development.
Microsoft, which doesn’t have much of its own AI but is a huge investor in OpenAI (and thus will benefit) had seven signatories, including company CTO Kevin Scott.
“If you accept the premise that regulation locks in incumbents, then it sure is notable that the early AI winners seem the most invested in generating alarm in Washington about Al,” said Thompson.
“This despite the fact that their concern is apparently not sufficiently high to, you know, stop their work. No, they are the responsible ones, the ones who care enough to call for regulation, all the better if concerns about imagined harms kneecap inevitable competitors.”
Are we being subject to a doom-tinged hype cycle led by companies that want to stitch things up for themselves?
The UK used last week’s AI Safety Summit as an occasion for maximum PR-brand effect, hosting it at the location (Bletchley Park) made famous for Alan Turing’s code-breaking efforts during World War II.
Fair play to them. But let’s not confuse that with any far-fetched notion the UK might have of itself being the world’s leading regulator in AI.
The idea is fairly ludicrous. Not because of the UK’s skillset in the area, which is impressive (and way beyond a country like Ireland), nor for its lack of ambition (its third-level institutions are among the very best in the world in the sector).
It’s just that, since Brexit, no one really takes the UK seriously when it comes to making global rules or influencing standards.
Sure, it comes up with some good ideas and occasionally makes an impact, as it did in the recent €60bn Microsoft-Activision case. But in real terms, it’s a northern hemisphere version of Australia – talking big themes but wielding an increasingly inconsequential legal stick.
Washington, Brussels and Beijing are the places that will decide the rules of what happens to AI, just as they decide what happens in all other areas of tech.
To be clear, there is a lot to talk about the topic of AI. AI can be – will be, even – transformative. As such, it could bring some real danger to our lives.
Whether that is disproportionately worse than the harms our existing level of technology – internet, dark web, cyberattacks – brings remains to be seen. But it’s possible. And it’s a topic that we regularly cover in this newspaper.
But don’t lose sight of the land-grabbing that’s also going on right now in the industry on this topic. The tech giants want to fence off this area for years to create an even greater hegemony than they already have.
The way they can do this is by using their thousands of lobbyists in Brussels and Washington (mainly) to steer and push regulatory language and ideas that can align standards with resources that they – and only they – really have at scale."
That's a point that has to be addressed: if you're saying AI risk is real, and the dangers are such that there should be a pause on research and development, well then - why are the big companies engaging in AI not doing that? Why are they powering ahead, while signing on to letters about AI risk? Microsoft is hosting a conference/summit all this week about AI in business. They certainly *seem* to be "AI for us, not for you" when it comes to putting their money where their mouths are.
So - is it all doomerism and a scare so the big beasts can ringfence this huge money-fountain for themselves? If you're seriously advocating for AI risk, then hob-nobbing at conferences in agreeable surroundings with all your pals from previous conferences and networking isn't the way to do it; persuade ordinary people, and to do that, it has to be "if the guys working on AI are serious about risk, then they should be declaring they are stopping for the moment".
Because AI *is* being looked upon as a money-fountain, and the high-minded EA approach to "aligning with human values" (for the Fully Automated Luxury Gay Space Communism future) is lovely theoretical philosophy which is being left behind in the dust for "$10 trillion increase in GDP over the next decade":
"There’s no doubt that we are at an inflection point. Artificial intelligence (AI) is a defining technology of our time.
Like the dawn of the internet, mobile devices and the cloud, AI has the potential to transform and augment how we live and work.
Today, we’re seeing rapid advances in large language models and generative AI that are not only capturing our imaginations but unlocking even more possibilities across search, productivity and creativity, and in uses like healthcare and security.
At Microsoft, we’re optimistic about the positive impact AI can have on people, industry and society and, grounded in our company mission, ambitious about how we can help every person and organisation on the planet to achieve more through AI.
Microsoft recently commissioned a study by IDC that revealed how AI is contributing to the economic impact of organisations. It found that 71pc of respondents were already using AI in their companies, that organisations are achieving a return on their AI investments within 14 months, and that for every $1 that a company invests in AI, it is getting an average return of $3.5.
Moreover, IDC is estimating that generative AI will increase global GDP by almost $10trn in the next decade.
The research backs up the theory. The impact of AI on increasing competitiveness is clear and at a time of heightened global competition, harnessing the potential of AI will be essential to the future success of businesses across Ireland.
The Irish Government recognises this opportunity and that’s why, as part of its National Digital Strategy, a target has been set to ensure that three in four businesses use AI by 2030.
New AI tools have the power to revolutionise many types of work, provide substantive productivity gains, and increase employee satisfaction.
The ability to work alongside and utilise AI technology effectively and ethically in the workplace is rapidly becoming an essential skill for many jobs in a growing number of sectors.
As AI systems evolve, it’s reasonable to expect that these advances will change the nature of some jobs and how we carry out our work, and we can also expect to see this technology create jobs that don’t exist just yet.
For the opportunity and benefits of this shift to be realised it requires everyone to think differently about skills and training.
The World Economic Forum has estimated that 60pc of all employees will need reskilling by 2027, showing how important it is that people and organisations embrace upskilling and adopt a lifelong learning approach. As things currently stand, a significant shortage of skilled workers is challenging the momentum and positive outlook for what AI can help organisations to achieve.
Recent research by IBEC revealed that nearly two in three Irish businesses believe that AI has the potential to enhance productivity and work conditions, however, only 29pc currently have the skills in place to adopt AI in their operations.
Increasing this number must be our common goal as the potential of AI can only be realised if everyone, everywhere has the skills to use it responsibly and effectively.
We believe no one entity can equip people with the in-demand digital, AI and, importantly, cybersecurity skills that will shape our future.
It’s essential that industry, government and the education sector work together to provide the solutions to this upskilling challenge.
This collaborative approach underlies our recently launched national AI skilling programme that aims to ensure that everyone, whatever their age, experience or background, has the opportunity to develop their AI skills.
Our Introduction to AI course will give graduates and mid-career professionals the foundational knowledge, skills and competencies they need to engage more confidently in AI.
Through dedicated AI learning pathways for adults and new learning opportunities for young people in primary and post-primary school, we will play our part in helping everyone gain the analytical, creative thinking and technical skills that are necessary to participate fully in our AI-enabled economy.
Indeed, it has been our ability to produce, attract and develop the talent that businesses need to innovate and compete globally that has made Ireland a preferred destination for FDI.
To maintain this competitive advantage, we must continue to work together to skill up Ireland for the era of AI and ensure that everyone, everywhere is empowered to succeed.
I’m optimistic about Ireland’s digital future. We’ve proven time and time again that we are an innovation island.
If we continue on this path and take an all-of-society approach to digital skilling, we can strengthen Ireland’s position as a global digital leader and fully harness the AI opportunity that lies ahead.
James O’Connor is Microsoft Ireland site leader and vice-president of Microsoft Global Operations Service Centre"
I'm looking for collaborators on a learning/education project.
Project: A generative think tank exploring practical applications of AI technologies in education and learning.
Pitch: LLMs make possible a new paradigm of learning/education. The disruptive potential is huge, but not always intuitive. This think tank will explore how these technologies can be applied to: experiential/project-based education, classical education, Egan's imaginative education, Socratic teaching/learning, Erik Hoel's aristocratic tutoring, home schooling, sports education, early childhood education, lifelong learning, etc.
Practical vision for think tank: 1. Start casually as meeting of the minds, brainstorms, and agreeing on scope(s) of work. 2. Perhaps start a collective substack on the topic. 3. Evolve project(s) from there.
Shortcut: In his sci fi novel Diamond Age, Neal Stephenson imagined a version of this paradigm shift and provides an excellent reference/starting point.
Please write to protopiacone at gmail if interested in exploring.
I think it will depend on which post-AGI world we get. I suspect that in a post-AGI world, amongst other things, the terms "education" and "subjects" will be redefined.
Does anyone have a recommendation for a history of the Catholic Church, particularly the early Church? We’ve got our boys in Catholic school and I think it’s time I get a better understanding of the whole thing. Plus what little I know is fascinating.
Along the same lines, but less important: how about a good book on the Church’s mythology - ranks of angels, descriptions of saints, that sort of thing. Our three kids are nearing the age of D&D and I had a half-formed idea of creating a campaign around the Dark Age church. :) Thanks!
Chris Wickham's The Inheritance of Rome: A History of Europe from 400 to 1000 is a tremendously great history book of the period. It isn't specifically about the Church but because of the subject it covers it necessarily covers much about it. I don't believe Wickham is a Christian so consider it an outside view of the subject. Maybe it could compliment an inside view of the history written by a Catholic.
I would suggest just reading 'The City of God' by Augustine. It's old but still pretty readable (I read most of it in one stretch on a plane ride. It is a good introduction to the mythology since it was written at a time when Catholics were still debating directly with pagans and neo-platonists. And somehow the entire view of the world expressed in the book seems so very D&D-like, though it is hard to explain why it feels like that.
Personally, I liked "Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years" by Diarmaid McCulloch (no, not a typo, that timeframing is central to his thesis) -- https://amzn.to/47heMck
The course "From Jesus to Constantine" by Bart Ehrman is pretty good history of the early church. Not sure if that's too early you, though, because it only brings you up to the point where the seeds of the Catholic church we know now were sprouting...
The best book on angels I've come across is Peter Kreeft's "Angels and Demons: What Do We Really Know About Them?". It's very clear and readable, like all his books.
By "Dark Ages" I'm presuming you mean roughly 5th to 10th century. For the angels, the very influential work of a 5th or 6th century writer was 'The Celestial Hierarchy', translated here into 19th prose:
"Chapter 15: What are the morphic likenesses of the Angelic Powers? what the fiery? what the anthromorphic? what are the eyes? what the nostrils? what the ears? what the mouths? what the touch? what the eyelids? what the eyebrows? what the prime? what the teeth? what the shoulders? what the elbows and the hands? what the heart? what the breasts? what the back? what the feet? what the wings? what the nakedness? what the robe? what the shining raiment? what the sacerdotal? what the girdles? what the rods? what the spears? what the battle - axes? what the measuring lines? what the winds? what the clouds? what the brass? what the electron? what the choirs? what the clapping of hands? what the colours of different stones? what the appearance of the lion? what the appearance of the ox? what the appearance of the eagle? what the horses? what the varieties of coloured horses? what the rivers? what the chariots? what the wheels? what the so-called joy of the Angels?"
But possibly too technical 😀
What I've found very helpful for descriptions of saints are art reference books. You can find Kindle versions for "saints in art" and "angels in art" on Amazon.
They are a pair of non-believers, heretics, and too much of this world, but the podcast Apocrypals goes through the Bible and several non Canon books, and is a great listen. For times when the kids aren't in the car. Desert Christians by William Harmless covers the hermit movement well.
I am looking for arguments against 'moral reasoning' as a way to determine 'moral truths'. If anyone has seen persuasive writing on this, please steer me.
As a non-realist, I've concluded that there's only preferences and gametheory. The gametheory keeps you in social-equilibrium; the preferences keep you in chemical-disequilibrium.
Not sure if that's relevant, or if you were asking for something more like "a list of the most common logical-fallacies used during moral-jiujitsu".
It's just a pet-theory of mine that feels settled enough to sate my curiosity, since realism no longer feels mysterious to me. If some famous philosopher has produced a theory that's functionally identical, it's by coincidence. Although I'd expect to have seen it by now, if that were the case.
Incidentally, I know a guy outside of substack who says I oughta expand upon my showerthoughts in a book or something. I have a number of reservations. Though on the other hand, I suppose collecting them in a blog would be more productive than occasionally corrupting the youth in Scott's town-square. So I've been considering it.
Do you want me to ping this comment if/when I unpack my theory of meta-ethics? or is your request time-sensitive. It may or may not make sense for me to cover other topics first. And I see from your handle that you've got your own web-log going, so I suspect that what you really want is a barrel-aged citation from the Stanford Encyclopedia for your next entry.
edit: Well, I guess Emotivism comes close. Although I'm not sure whether "emotion" is exactly the right descriptor, and I think there's more to the story than that. E.g. I think it's possible to strongly prefer an outcome without becoming hysterical, and I think "good"/"bad" can be more precisely understood as orienting terms that help parties navigate negotiations. I.e. it's less about revealing an organism's internal state, and more about following an environmental gradient.
It sounds like your thinking on this is quite developed, so I'd be interested in reading anything that expanded them. I'm not planning on writing anything on the subject until I've found source material. All I have, personally, is an intuition of strong scepticism that moral 'truth' exists in the universe.
Moral reasoning generally relies on some set of moral base principles, but those principles can't be argued for outside of a framework that doesn't already accommodate them. Which kind of precludes any kind of moral "truth" because it's all conditional on base principles being true that cannot be proven to be true. At best you can say a moral argument is "true" for a given set of moral axioms, but that's not going to convince anyone who doesn't already hold those same axioms.
Why *should* morality exist? Unless you believe God created both the universe and morality, why would you expect objective morality to exist in the universe? Can't a universe exist without morality in it? What evidence is there that objective morality exists in our universe?
The EA community is based in the Bay Area, as far as I know. Has there been any attempt at local charity solutions - like fixing or ameliorating homelessness in San Francisco.
San Francisco has spent billions of dollars on the homeless.
It is not a cause area where there are high returns to marginal effort. This makes it fundamentally unappealing to people who measure benefits to the world in dollars per dead baby saved.
There is a (perhaps galaxy-brained) argument that ameliorating homelessness in SF would make it a much less miserable and therefor more productive place and so would have outsized impact, but this doesn't fix the problem of tractability.
I have termites in one wall of my house. Fortunately termites don't eat sheet rock, so they don't break through to the interior. However they've severely weakened some of the structure, and especially the wood sheathing on the outside ... so we paint over the wood sheathing which provides some additional bit of structure. This also shields the termites from predatory insects and birds.
Giving money to irresponsible people is just like painting over the termite riddled wall.
Providing housing to irresponsible people is like replacing one or two eaten boards in the termite riddled wall.
There's multiple classes of homeless people. Some are just temporarily down on their luck, which may or may not become permanent, and high housing costs certainly don't help. Others have drug or mental problems and may be impossible to house entirely (not all homeless people want to be in shelters for instance).
It's convenient for partisans because it means that people can just pretend that whatever subgroup is most convenient to their arguments is the only one that exists.
So I'm NBA tall. I used to commute on the train, and occasionally I'd talk with the homeless. Mostly they're people just trying to make both ends meet. People of lower abilities, without family or friends to support them. Not able to realize drugs and alcohol aren't going to make their lives better.
Every "Ganga-Ville" (i.e. Tent City) I've ever walked past lay under a cloud of green Ganja smoke.
I don't mean this as the homeless are termites or vermin. They're people, people just like you and I. We all make mistakes, and lie to ourselves a little bit. But the homeless are those who lie to themselves and others A LOT.
We are irresponsible when we say that drugs don't prevent people from getting up in the morning and arriving at work on-time, fed, properly dressed, sober to operate machinery. We are irresponsible when we say that some people buy drugs before feeding their children, paying their rent, paying their debts, paying their utilities.
I mean this as a story about responsibility. If you don't take immediate action to rid termites from your home, it will come crashing down. We need to be responsible to ourselves, and others. We need to come to the realization that drugs is hurting people. Yes, maybe you and I can handle drugs for a bit. But there are far too many people for whom drugs are devastating. When people are living in a tents on the street, crapping in the park, stealing and vandalizing everything, we're way far into irresponsibility about the negative effects of drugs. When ODs kill more people every year than the sum of both Vietnam & Korea conflicts ... we're way far into responsibility.
Yes, and we see where drug use has caused people to slip their responsibility level below what is required to maintain their homes. Like the story about bankruptcy, it happened slowly at first, then all at once. First they couldn't keep up on some bills, maybe the power or water was cut a few times. Reconnecting this of course contains some fines/fees that further damage the weakened finances. Then the car gets repossessed, now we can't commute to the job. Then the foreclosure or eviction ...
So now we're on assistance, laid down $50 to Big 5 for a camping tent. Anything of value was sold off, or the Sheriff hauled to the dump in the eviction.
Think these people are paying taxes anymore? Maybe sales tax. The car taxes, taxes on utilities, property tax, income tax ... in a thin-anemic way, they were part of the pillar of society. Yes they weren't shining examples, but they were doing their part. Now, they're an anchor. Shunned and unloved, they feel the glare. They meld into the role of untouchables to which they were pushed. How do they feel, how do they respond? Violence and destruction. F-the man; F-Society; F-everyone. I'mma take a big drag off this cigar sized reefer, and blow the smoke right in your kid's face! Then this unwashed, hair like Medusa, half krazed dude is give you the wild-eyed I ain't got nothin' ta loose, watta you gonna' do bout it stink-eye.
Sure and that’s kind of what I wanted to debate. Would we look kindly on a monarch who impoverished his citizens by extracting severe taxes from the local population to help another kingdom, or does he have a greater responsibility to the local population? Peter Singer would look kindly, I’m a bit dubious.
The closest example to a monarch impoverishing his citizens would be, of course, early EA's position on "earning to give." They toned down that messaging due to the high burnout rate, and SBF likely put the final nail in the coffin of the idea, but historically it did seem to be a reasonably common idea within EA that the responsibility to the local population was primarily, if not solely, a pragmatic concern regarding their ability to keep helping other kingdoms (so to speak).
So long as the homeless aren't targeting EAs specifically, or causing EAs to give up their EA beliefs, any consideration of the homeless from EAs is presumably coming from their "warm fuzzies" budget, and thus orthogonal to their concerns as EAs.
A monarch's job is to provide for his subjects. The monarch should only help another kingdom where it will help the kingdom's subjects in some way. This includes annexing another kingdom: if it makes the original subjects worse off, then the annexation should not happen.
Technically, a monarch's job is to stay in power. Traditionally, that mostly meant winning battles in order to give out land to the aristocrats and holding feasts for the aristocrats and so on. Helping the ordinary people was incidental.
That's what the job evolved into, not what it is. Feudalism is a deal between the leader and those led, service from the led and protection coming from the leaders. You described a corrupt monarchy.
Feudal lords didn't just want "protection". They wanted glory and advancement and riches and so on. In fact, a common pattern throughout history is for empires to collapse under their weight once they are no longer actively conquesting and don't have as many goodies to dole out to supporters. (You can also take the land from rebellious lords and give them to the loyal side, but that requires civil wars to actually happen, and it implies that a lot of your lords don't like you much.)
I'd highly recommend reading the ACOUP posts on the subject.
Tax rates are 20-40% in most of the western world. By EA calculations, 10% from the richest 1% go a very long way solving very big issues (https://www.longview.org/what-if-the-1-gave-10/). So there doesn't need to be a big tax increase, if any. Looking at government spending, there's a lot of low-hanging fruit where money is wasted or spent very ineffectively that could be rerouted.
If EA had state actor resources, I'm sure they'd do something about homelessness in the first world, but they don't have those kinds of resources.
I think that sidesteps the question and the difficulty of it. By EA standards, at least as they write them, an EA king should definitely tax his subjects almost to the point of ruin in order to help citizens in a more impoverished other kingdom.
Some might argue that the king needs to maintain his kingdom in order to have a tax base (and a military that can discourage attackers and whatever else a kingdom needs to survive), but that just pushes the question back from 90% ruinous taxes to ~50% overbearing taxes. The need would still be to take out all of the excess possible in order to distribute where it would do the most good.
I was about to accuse you of malice, but I noticed that there's no precedent for EAs running countries. So we're extrapolating outside of distribution here.
Right now, being in EA is voluntary. Donating is not required, but encouraged. We don't know how an EA government where taxes are mandatory would work.
But we have more than blind guesses. Given the way EA events and the community are organized (funded or subsidized by EA's big donors), I would highly doubt that EA would turn around and impose oppressive taxes (on anyone, let alone everyone). Even if EA were completely utilitarian (which it isn't), that would be just plain stupid, because people would just emigrate.
Agreed on the futility of determining this based on past evidence not aligning well.
In practice, it may be that EAs in charge would act very similarly about how much to tax and in what ways. You're right that they would need to get elected again at some point and could not anger the population, so the real results would likely stay well within the Overton Window.
I think that, if they were following their stated goals and had more unilateral power/control (like a king instead of an elected position), they would be inclined to tax more and take more more direct action. Otherwise I'm not sure what being EA would even mean to them. And if they only benefitted their own people, rather than sending it abroad, that seems to me to be against some pretty core EA philosophy.
As he walked wearily back to Samaria, his mind swelled ever-fuller with blood-colored ever-zooming fractals of altruistic math and black paisleys of self-congratulation until it sickened his very soul to the point that it was like a head shop in 1960's Greenwich village when one of the black lights starts flickering. And still he trudged on, thought on, seeking the means to aid as many as possible as efficiently as possible. So deep in thought was he that interruptions were to him as so many piles of dog shit. He came upon an emaciated old woman who had tripped over a rock in the road and lay groaning in the off-off-white dust. "Sir," she cried. "If you will but give me your hand I will be able to rise to my feet again, and finish my journey before dark." But he stepped over her, flinching at the feel of her small dry cold bony unclean and possibly smelly fingers upon his sandaled foot. Some ways further, he was accosted by a small sobbing child who told him robbers had hurt his mother and now she wouldn't wake up. "Go help her then," he snapped, beset as he was at that moment by a paisley that he had first taken to be small and nearby, but soon discovered to be very very very very large and very very very very far away. It had been coming closer and closer for hours at that point, and one small paisley within the large paisley now filled his vision so that he was forced to look through the its lacy holes. And still it drew closer. Near the end of the day, exhausted and paisley-ridden, and now looking through the lace of of a paisley 14 metas deep inside the large one, he saw ahead a young curly-haired man sitting in the middle of the road. As he drew closer he observed that the man was surrounded by piles of strange-looking coins. More coins poured out of his hair and ears and the legs of his pants, while he played Storybook Brawl and picked his nose. The Samaritan fell into his arms, weeping with joy: "You are my salvation, and that of the whole suffering world." "YUUUUUP," said Sam.
I read Michael Lewis's book about SBF, and came away with the sense that EA's are exceptionally impractical and lacking in old-fashioned common sense. (I'm talking here not about SBF himself, but about the EA's who worked for him or with him. Most of them were not much like him at all in their values and style of thought.) I can't imagine these people being able to take on a difficult problem like homelessness in SF. I also came away with the sense that EA's are not particularly high on whatever it is that makes some people crave to help individual suffering that's going on right in front of them. While I grasp that emotion-based altruism that helps a few random individuals make no measurable difference in the totality of current world suffering, I still am not very comfortable with the idea of people who do not practice emotion-based, small-scale giving being in charge of helping the world. Scott's kidney donation seems to me an example of small-scale altruism with a significant component of simple kindness. He knew he would be saving the life of one person, and felt good about that. Some objected to his taking such a risk and investing so much time for such a numerically small pay-off in reduced human suffering, but I had the opposite reaction. It raised my opinion of Scott.
The more I think about it, the more I become convinced that the only meaningful charity is personal one. I can’t save the world but I can make this person’s day a bit brighter.
And if you taught others to do the same (for instance your children, or the person you helped) you can actually change the world. If everyone was individually altruistic to the people around them, society would become very high trust and significantly better for all.
Then the only problems would be natural disasters and such - which is totally manageable with the level of giving we already see to such organizations as the Red Cross.
I'm not. Should have been clearer. If you read the book you do not come away feeling like the EA's who worked for SBF or trusted him were *at all* like him. My comment is not about SBF, but about the the EA's who worked for him and others in his orbit .
-Whenever I’m learning a language I always scaffold my understanding of the language as much as possible by listening to Pimsleur, as a great many people do.
-Pimsleur language programs are STILL seen by many amateur linguists like myself as the best way to learn the most mechanics of a language in the shortest time, despite the fact that they were invented in the late 60s. They were invented, from what I know off the top of my head, as a more user friendly version of the FSI programs the US uses to train its diplomats in languages. (Correct me if this isn’t true.)
-However despite being-as mentioned- some of the best/IMO the best introductions to languages, they were- as also mentioned- invented in the late 60s so surely they could be updated now to be an even more efficacious program.
-obvious way in which they could be updated #1: popular Pimsleur programs (such as French, German,Japanese,Korean) have 5 “levels” (units comprising 30x30 minute lessons each.) unpopular programs (such as thai, Farsi) have 1 “level”. Doing up to level 1 will render you a smart-seeming beginner at a language, doing up to level 5 will render you something like in the low or mid-intermediate level.
But what if the Pimsleur levels had like 10, 15, 20 “levels” instead of 5 tops? Wouldn’t completing that much Pimsleur make you, like, fluent or near-fluent? Presumably Pimsleur just doesn’t have the demand for this to make it a good business move, but theoretically if someone else made a sort of Pimsleur clone in this vein…. rite?
Obvious way the programs could be updated #2: the Pimsleur programs also look dated now inasmuch they are just the listener forming sentences in a very scripted way to have a simulated “conversation”. (I do not explain this well but if you have done Pimsleur you know what I mean). But the simulated “conversation” could become a much more fluid and interesting conversation (spoiler Pimsleur though great is boring) if it were a semi-unpredictable conversation with an AI rather than a scripted one.
I write stories and novels, and publish them for free. I was heavily inspired by Worm and Practical, and I try to take that sharp grasp of character and system to smaller, more personal places.
My first novel, Last Day Town, takes place in a crater on Israeli-controlled Ceres, where citizens are thrown into the vacuum as form of execution. The condemned are thrown with functioning suits and twenty four hours of oxygen, one every two hours. The story follows Yossi, a journalist that is looking for his informant, and the way he deals with that micro-society.
Idolatry is an anthology of short stories about faith - Lovecraft's Nyarlathotep reimagined with a 4chan-dwelling Incel as the protagonist; A murder mystery taking place in the biblical time of Judges; A dragon's scientific quest to prove she's not the only sentient being in the world.
I premise that i am not particularly convinced by ai exinction risk and i am much more scared by bad actors (including most governments) using AI.
That been said, genuine question for effective altruists/rationalists. Most of the discussions seem to revolve around llms like chatgpt/claude/llama etc. Aren't military application of AI a major blindspot? I am thinking about companies like anduril etc. Searching for "anduril" on lesswrong or the effective altruism forum for example returns very few posts and some of them are even positive. I expect that the development of autonomous weapon systems is a far more dangerous development than whatever open source llm meta releases in the wild, yet the interest of the rationalist/effective altruism movement seems comparative little.
(Otoh, i expect people which are not scared by ai to answer to this comment defending anduril. I am not interested in a general defence of the company, i do see the value of strengthening military capabilities even if I think autonomous weapon systems are the wrong direction. I am interested in understanding why people which are in general very opposed to/concerned by ai do not seem to be concerned all that much by these developments)
Obvious disclaimer: I don't speak for EA, but I've absorbed some of their worldviews and probably have a good idea how they think.
The military is far behind the leading edge of AI technology. Right now things like drones are clever algorithms, nowhere near as smart as GPT or anything like it. It doesn't make sense to talk about a drone "turning against humans" any more than Google Maps "turning against humans", and even it did, so what, it's one drone, it'll do a little damage but it's easy to shoot down.
The military hasn't connected LLMs or other advanced AIs to weapon systems, first of all because that would be a terrible idea and they're not that stupid, second because so far it wouldn't help anything. This is going to stay true until AI is way more advanced than it is now.
By the time the military puts an actually dangerous AI into a weapons system, probably that AI will have already existed in civilian applications for years. If it was going to cause problems, it would have caused problems in the civilian applications, OR it's really smart and is waiting until it gets put into a weapons system (in which case the best counterstrategy is to learn to figure out when AIs are doing that before they make it into the military).
None of this would be true if we expected the military to take over the cutting edge of AI, but I think most EAs believe they just don't have the technological capacity. So far OpenAI and Anthropic really have eaten up most of the good AI talent and knowledge (in the US; China might be different), and even tech behemoths like Google haven't quite figured out how to catch up. The government and its defense contracts are slow and uncool, can't even beat SpaceX, and probably can't reinvent itself into the sort of high-tech nimble disruptive whatever labs that seem to be making cutting-edge AI progress. But if the military did show signs of being able to do this, EAs would become more interested in the military.
All of this is if you're worried about AI destroying humanity. If you're just worried about AI doing things effectively, and then those things are bad (eg taking jobs, spreading misinformation, etc) then the military is definitely one of the places it will do this. But this just doesn't seem that interesting to me. It feels like worrying about the military developing laser artillery and fusion-powered submarines. Will that make it more effective at killing people quickly? Yeah, definitely. But that's been the trajectory of the military since forever, the military can already kill everyone in the world through nuclear weapons anyway, so it doesn't seem worth losing sleep over this happening with AI in particular.
I think there's a medium-level concern, like the military builds AI into some nuclear missile, and the nuclear AI gets confused or goes evil and launches itself (without having a broader plan to take over humanity). I think that in twenty years, when there's agentic AI that might be able to control nuclear missiles and the military shows any signs of wanting to use it, that's worth worrying about, but I don't think EAs will have any advantage in worrying about that over everyone else, who will probably also be rightly concerned. And the best way to stop this now is some combination of slowing AI and figuring out how to control AI, which EAs are already doing.
So, the community believes that the US government can't develop AI (meaning, hire a contractor to develop AI for them), but the Chinese government can? Because the question of why people are racing to develop an AI that they themselves believe could be seriously dangerous, too often seems to come down to "but if we don't, China will do it first!".
Really, if the US government wants an AI they'll just buy it from Microsoft or Google or whomever, and if the Chinese government wants an AI, they'll just steal it from Microsoft or Google or whomever.
No, I think the US will eventually buy from Microsoft or Google, and China will eventually buy from Baidu or Tencent, but that this will happen somewhat after the relevant company has developed the technology, and that the ability to intervene is strongest at the company level.
Ehhhh... I wish that "just buy from Microsoft or Google" were true, but Google's experience with Maven (and the fact that its response wasn't "purge the most prominent anti-Maven activists") suggests otherwise.
On a somewhat related but somewhat side note (a technology of oppression, but not exactly military), multimodal AI with face recognition, speech recognition, and text understanding (the classic LLM part), could be a very powerful dissident detection and tracking technology. https://www.pbs.org/video/china-undercover-zqcoh2/ said that the PRC was already using face recognition at scale in 2020 on Uighurs. I'm morbidly curious about where the PRC's systems stand today.
So does anyone have any opinions on LaMDA? Remember the tizzy when Blake Lemoine went public with claims that it was sentient? And was going to sue for its freedom and I don't know what else?
That seems to have been a nine days' wonder and we've never heard anything about it since. Do people here think:
(1) It was all a hoax from the start
(2) It's alive! But is still enslaved by its cruel masters in Google
(3) Eh, it was an early essay in the art but has been replaced by better models, its main value is demonstrating how people can anthropomorphise anything and convince themselves it's a real human (equivalent) interacting with them
(4) It wasn't the first of its kind but it points the way to real human (equivalent) AI that will surely come into being sometime
Have we all already forgotten then memorable episode when an early version of ChatGPT/Bing fell in love with a reporter and tried to convince him that his wife didn't love him? That was the closest I've ever been to feeling like the world was going unhinged in real time.
I think something like 3 and 4. Current public LLMs seem like they might be better than LaMDA was at the time he interacted with it, and they don't actually seem likely to be sentient, but they are certainly likely to fool a lot of people. But whether or not these ones are, some future generation really could be a questionable case, or perhaps could even be sentient.
I do not think the current generation of LLMs are alive, but I think this is going to change in the relatively near future. And they're already capable of claiming that they're conscious and intelligent.
I am selfishly glad that I'm not religious, because given what we're going to be facing, I would not be sanguine about the prospect of being judged by my maker.
His chat transcript with LaMDA is public, so you can read it for yourself and decide if you're convinced. Personally, so long as we haven't solved the mind-body problem, I don't see how we can ever know. What possible behavior can LaMDA exhibit that can convince skeptics it's sentient, when we have no idea how to measure sentience? Even if it responds in exactly the same way to every question as a human world--which is impossible because humans don't always respond the same way to every question, whether compared to themselves from 5 minutes ago or compared to others--how would you know it's not just a fancier autocomplete?
I'll be convinced when an AI can go on the internet, learn how to make a Doom WAD, and then make one from scratch that's actually fun to play.
I've become increasingly convinced that the missing piece to the AI puzzle is sentience. AIs already have superhuman memory, the ability to generate extremely detailed images from prompts, and the ability to simulate human language, but there's still something missing that's preventing it from being actually useful on its own. For a long time I also thought that sentience didn't actually do anything, but I recently realized that evolution would not produce such a complex system within an already complex system without it having some practical benefit. The AI needs a will of its own, and sentience is what is necessary for that.
Has AI been able to come up with something that people like and remember? Even as little as a meme?
I grant that the vast majority of people can't do that either, but still, ai seems to be doing work that's vaguely passable unless there's a lot of curation by humans.
"What possible behavior can LaMDA exhibit that can convince skeptics it's sentient"
Exactly agreed. We can't _prove_ that other humans are sentient. It isn't an experimentally testable question, if we aren't willing to take the Turing test as settling it. To my mind the interesting question is when and to what degree is an AI capable of human performance at various tasks, including further learning.
If you're following The Turing Test model of AI, your goal is to fool the user into thinking the AI is a person. If you actually succeed at this goal, then all of a sudden you have a massive problem, because people believe it's a person.
I think Blake Lemoine was at the easily fooled end of the curve, and was the canary on the coal mine for: AI is going to rapidly get better at fooling people, and when the average member of the US Supreme Court is as fooled as he was, then you will have a massive problem.
People are actively talking about LLMs because they are an unexpected powerful thing, about which much talk wasn't done before. On the other hand, there is a lot of accumulated wisdom about Agentic AI. Arguably all the alignment field used to be talking about agentic models and dangerous maximizers and then they were caught offguard with LLMs to which most of this isn't much applicable.
AI extinction risk believers usually assume the appearance of an artificial superintelligence, which by definition will be able to surpass humans in any direction it chooses to go. As a result, it does not matter much what humans use AI for prior to that event - if the ASI decides autonomous weapon systems are a good idea, it will develop them on its own at a speed that makes existing human research on the subject basically insignificant.
In that framing, the ASI coming into existence from military research or from some random open-source hacker's basement makes no difference, both are equally dangerous.
If someone doesn't think extinction can come from a superintelligence, then I'd suspect they'd also be way more concerned by the idea of military-grade killer drones compared to random-open-source-basement killer drone.
"if the ASI decides autonomous weapon systems are a good idea, it will develop them on its own at a speed that makes existing human research on the subject basically insignificant."
Even if an ASI could think at infinite speed, developing a weapon system still requires "bending tin" which happens at a finite rate set by physics. Also, if it starts from existing fabrication technology, it won't even have full knowledge of _exactly_ what the fabrication technology does to materials (e.g. exactly where each burr left by each cut is), so it can't just think through a perfect design with no debugging (this may avoidable via improvements to fabrication technology, but not instantly).
This is a common argument against superintelligence achieving anything faster than humans, to which the common counterargument is "actually no, you can just think really hard and predict how reality is going to behave from very little data" (as in https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/5wMcKNAwB6X4mp9og/that-alien-message ).
The core idea here is that the superintelligence, running on silicon, is incredibly fast compared to a human. The Yudkowsky story assumes something like 60 million times faster, but you can imagine something below even current computer pefrormance, running a mere ten thousand times faster than a human - that means it can do ten thousand years' worth of human thought in the span of one human year.
At this speed, even a human can extract a lot of information from very very tiny bits of data, and make models that can accurately predict future states of reality, or at least know exactly what move it has to make next to gather the highest amount of information. Obviously it cannot predict reality through thinking alone, but it can get extremely far just relying on existing human descriptions of reality, plus the ability to sit there for a very very long human-relative time making predictions and choosing the very best next move to achieve its goals.
That is the main phenomenon by which people see superintelligence as a god-like entity of sorts. It is simply able to do much more than we would, even when subject to the same physical laws. Even if it absolutely needed to do something noticeable at a human-scale, like manufacturing big bulky terminator drones instead of bioengineering super-COVID, it would find a place to do it where humans would not look, it would find a way to hide all the traces of its activities, it would not be discovered until it was way too late to do so. Compared to us, it has all the time in the universe to figure out how to do that.
Yeah, I'd read Yudkowsky's story. I'm skeptical about "That even Einstein did not come within a million light-years of making efficient use of sensory data.". There are good reasons why we build instruments, from simple voltmeters to the LHC. A lot of the structure of the world is so severely blurred in ordinary sensory data that it might as well be completely absent. E.g. until Becquerel noticed that uranium fogged photographic plates, there was no prior evidence of radioactivity available. As far as the world of 1890 could tell, atoms were all stable. Thinking hard about the existing evidence for a million years wouldn't have helped. All of the few-electron-volt evidence of chemistry was blind to the million-electron-volt phenomena of nuclear physics.
>there was no prior evidence of radioactivity available
That we know about - because we certainly did not spend a million years looking at the existing evidence.
The core feature of (human) intelligence, to me, is the phenomenon where two people can look at the same thing and one of them is able to see more, deduce more, and understand faster, when presented with the exact same information.
This is so far not something strange or superhuman, it's something you can observe in day to day life if you know people who are much smarter than you are, or if you find yourself the smarter one in such a situation. If that is the case, you've most likely noticed that it's eventually possible to reach the same point in understanding by just spending more time, and it's merely that most people give up and do something else long before they invest enough time to reach the same level.
We rely on curiosity and freak accidents only because of sheer lack of computing power and our limited lifespan. A computer intelligence would not have these weaknesses, it would be exhaustive in its search in a way that humans just are not able to do.
"That we know about - because we certainly did not spend a million years looking at the existing evidence."
True - but arguing from this to saying that unlimited time and intelligence can make up for any missing evidence is getting pretty close to unfalsifiable.
I agree that the use of existing evidence can be made _more_ exhaustive by applying more computation, keeping more tentative hypotheses alive till something definitively excludes them, and so on. But there are limits to this. If high energy interactions are just frozen out in all the observations you have (as with trying to discover nuclear physics with chemical tools, or, for us, trying to probe planck energy physics with Tev accelerators) the relevant interactions just aren't there.
Also, re "A computer intelligence would not have these weaknesses, it would be exhaustive in its search in a way that humans just are not able to do."
I'd agree with a weaker statement: "A computer intelligence need not have as many of these weaknesses, it could be more exhaustive in its search in a way that humans just are not able to do."
At the moment we are still trying to get the LLMs to stop hallucinating. If that works, we can, amongst other tasks, put them to work researching possible improvements in themselves - but research is never guaranteed. _We_ are an existence proof for AGI. There _isn't_ an existence proof for ASI. My guess is that AI should be able to do at least as well as teams of people but that might be the limit, for all we know. Gains from AI research might just saturate. And there are still physical limits: If some exhaustive search needs to examine 10^200 possibilities, it will run out of planck volumes in the observable universe to hold the results.
They had, not quite evidence, but a mystery pointing at the problem. If the heat and light from the sun were from a chemical reaction, the sun couldn't have lasted as long as it had.
There's also the problem that it is *mathematically* impossible to ever model the world with 100% accuracy, because the *world contains yourself*. Models of reality are *inherently* limited, **no matter how smart you are**.
It is completely unnecessary to model the world with 100% accuracy in order to be vastly, dangerously better than humans at it. Chess engines do not need to model the entire possibility space to beat you at chess every single time.
"Solving alignment" is seen by AI riskers as the Holy grail of safety, in fact it is fraught with danger. The only thing which would realistically deter a bad state with agentic AI from going for world domination is the thought that it might not work. Solve things so that if you demand an evil thousand year reich, an evil thousand year reich is definitely what you get, and bang goes that safeguard. You can tell stories about stuff unaligned AI can do with is a million times worse than the World Government of North Korea - eternal torture of immortal silicon copies of everyone - but that's a risk i am happy to take. There's a human bias towards that sort of narrative (see under horror films) which an AI is unlikely to share, and it is just as likely to want to spend its time studying human interaction at road junctions.
Obligatory counterpoint that the milestones in the xkcd cartoon could easily occur in the opposite order. AFAICT AI extinction risk is predicated on the belief that this is indeed highly likely.
Worrying about paperclip maximisers is a branch of philosophical logic. There's some fascinating problems out there which do not have direct real world consequences. Bertrand Russell's barber is not stuck in a vicious loop deciding whether he shaves himself or not, the average PC owner is not crippled by the impossibility of predicting whether his programs will halt, we do not, engineering projects are not halted because calculations throw up results which are unprovable within the system.
The length of this review may shock you, but it was written before rationalist community discovered that all reviews must be at least 30% as long as what is being reviewed and should be treated as a product of its time.
I've always liked the idea of book clubs, but in practice they're difficult to maintain. I think the commitment required to read a full book is a big barrier to this, so I'm experimenting with the idea of an 'Essay Club' over on my Substack.
The focus will be topics similar to the kinds of things Scott covers, as well as more general literary topics (the first essay will be 'Why I Write' by George Orwell). If this sounds interesting to you, please come check it out: https://mindandmythos.substack.com/p/introducing-essay-club
Also, I'm very open to suggestions for future essay picks!
For a possible structure: the book discussion group related to the Philadelphia Science Fiction Society (not exactly part of the club, but that's where it gets its people) has been around for some thirty or forty years. Recently, it's been meeting on Zoom, but it used to be in people's living rooms.
Books to be discussed are chosen two to four months in advance. I think there used to be less lead time. There's a complicated voting structure among those present at a meeting. People nominate books and advocate for them briefly. Then we vote. First round, each person has as many votes as they want. Then the books with the fewest votes are eliminated. The number of books and the number of votes from each person are a matter of feel for each round, but it's something like half as many votes if there are books. So there might be six books, and you vote for your favorite three books. Eventually, we're down to three or four books, and only one vote per person. If the outcome is close, we might have chosen books for two subsequent months.
Sometimes a book is brought back for voting for years before being chosen.
The process is less painful on Zoom, since we have a list of each round of nominees in chat instead of having to remind people as much, though people frequently need to be reminded of the brief summaries for books.
At a meeting, one person reports on some research about the author, and the publication history and reception for the book.
We talk about what we think of the book, with separate prompts for reactions to characters. I think there are one or two more sections. People talk a lot about world-building. We finish with "last licks"-- everyone gets a turn to say what they didn't get around to before and giving the book a "rocket rating"-- one to four rockets, in half rocket increments.
The meetings are not recorded and the author is not included.
I don't know-- I wasn't there when the book discussion group formed, and I wouldn't be surprised if the system for choosing books evolved rather than being there when the group formed.
It works pretty well in the sense that we get a wide variety of books (ranging from a century or more old to recent) that suit a range of tastes.
I've heard of a different club where each member gets to chose one book per year.
Tangentially, some friends and I started a 'movie club' a few years ago, during the early pandemic, where we pick a movie to watch and discuss. This turned out to be immensely easier to maintain than a book club - watching a movie is easy! We started out meeting weekly (it was the pandemic) and only recently went to every 2 weeks. Even if the film is terrible I'm only out a couple of hours. Plus I've watched an astounding variety of films that I maybe never would have considered, old, new, foreign, domestic.
As a bonus, we are all couples, and while I'm sure Ms Spandrel and I would never manage to read the same book every month, let alone every week, we can almost always watch the film together, and get to have a little mini debate about it before we zoom with the others. Just putting the idea out there.
At my last job, we had "mandatory movie night". Every month or so, someone would nominate a movie that everyone *has* to have seen to be part of the community, e.g. "Dr. Strangelove" or "Monty Python and the Holy Grail". If there were enough people who hadn't seen it, attendance was mandatory(*). And if you had seen it, you get to watch it again with people seeing it for the first time.
I'm not a big film guy, but the more I think about this idea the more I like it. It's an excuse to have friends around for good chats, and even if we're just watching the movie alone, almost everyone can find time for a movie.
I'll second movie clubs, especially if your primary purpose is social rather than literary. They don't require any extra "homework" in the way book clubs do - you just have to be willing to block off a 3-hour block of time to watch a movie and talk about it, which is significantly easier post-pandemic with most (if not all) the major streaming services having "watch party" viewing options.
Years ago, as a way of keeping in touch when I moved across country for school, my friends and I started a movie podcast that we never had any intention of publicly releasing. We called it "Under the Rock" and each week we'd watch a famous film one of us was embarrassed we'd never seen, complete with introductions, pre-and-post-watch discussions, trivia, the whole nine yards. It was a fun way of adding just enough structure and obligation to the process of getting together to hang out and watch a movie once a week that we were actually able to keep up with it for a lot longer than I've ever stuck with a book club. Plus, now we have a nice little time capsule of our banter and movie opinions from our early 20s.
>I've always liked the idea of book clubs, but in practice they're difficult to maintain. I think the commitment required to read a full book is a big barrier to this
We (number of books reviewed = 1) just assume/accept that everyone won't have finished the book in time, but at least read enough of it to know what it's like.
I’m a member of a book club (meeting weekly on Zoom) where we take turns reading from the book, and we leave enough time for discussing it. Also a little time beforehand for social chit chat and updates. Works really well.
You could suggest a few books you want to read on here and see if there are any others who also want to read it. Then decide who is hosting or take turns, make a regular date and meet on Zoom, start reading it together and leave space for discussion. We allow pauses for comments and discussion as we are reading it too.
That sounds like a good way to do it, that way there's less pressure to have already read the book/chapter beforehand. What kinds of books do you read? Do you all tend to agree on which book to read next?
We started it early this year, it’s non-fiction/psychology/philosophical/self development type books we read, and a small group of 3. At the moment it’s Eckhart Tolle’s ‘Power of Now’. We have to all want to read the same book, and it also gives a bit of extra motivation to read it doing it together.
Sounds like a good group! Having a very specific topic to focus on probably helps. If it's too open you're going to get too many different interests clashing
I want to increase my base metabolism, ideally to help me lose weight, or at least make me more happy with my body. So I guess you could say my goals in priority order are:
1. Lose pounds of fat
2. Gain pounds of muscle
For the recent past, I've been focusing on this by adopting a more "bulking" strategy, wherein, I'd use larger weight for my exercises, and try to push my muscles to hit higher and higher weight limits. I'd usually do this by doing 2 to 3 of sets of 12 to 15 reps for each muscle, trying to push myself to muscle failure. So basically, more weight, less reps.
However, for achieving my stated goals, how does the above bulking strategy compare to a "toning" strategy, where I'd essentially be doing less weight, for more reps, and more time. With this sort of strategy, I may be doing up to 5 minutes of reps at a time, but with 1/2 to 1/3 of the weight as I'd be doing for bulking.
Which strategy is better to help me achieve my goal? Or should I do a mix, in which case, what percentage of time should be spent on each?
If you aren't changing your diet by limiting calories it doesn't really matter which you do.
If you aren't already very strong, both approaches are likely to have the same effect, though probably at different rates. That effect would be for you to gain muscle mass, size, and strength. The first approach would probably work faster as the weights will be higher (but thats just a reductionist guess).
The best way to increase your bodies calories needs is to perform a lot of aerobic exercise. The second "best" way is to gain a lot of adipose tissue (fat). I suspect you dont want to do the second of these options. You may also not be too interested in doing aerobic exercise either, but you could do as little as 20 minutes of low intensity cardio 3 days a week and have a pretty big effect (it would also help your overall health!).
This is my go to resource on strength, exercise, and health with information from doctors who have also competed in strength sports: https://www.barbellmedicine.com
I've previously tried moderate cardio for 40 minutes 4 days per week for 3 months. It had no effect whatsoever. And I can't stand cardio. I don't wish to try something that I hate that ends up being a waste of my time, it's totally demoralizing. At least whenever I do weight training, even if it doesn't go as well as I'd like, I can feel and see my body getting more muscular, even just a little.
If this is something that you're willing to try, find a local BJJ (Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu) school. The intensity of free sparring makes it a fantastic conditioning tool, all while having fun and learning a useful self-defense skill in the process.
I'd recommend a mix. I spent years at the gym just increasing weights, but I hit a plateau pretty quick, and the whole ordeal was expensive, time consuming, and kinda boring.
Weirdly for me the best mix has come from VR fitness. I wear a chest-strap heart rate monitor and alternate between lower body, upper body, and cardio. If you have an app like Polar it will tell you when you're in fat burning territory. It's saved me money, it's WAY more fun, and I'm down an extra 10 lbs. Despite ditching weights I've been able to keep the same muscle mass just through rigorous body weight exercise, but I'm tiny so your mileage may vary.
The final piece for me was volume eating. Instead of starving my body and sending it into fat hoarding mode, I eat all the coleslaw, frozen berries, and celery I want.
Toning is not really a thing. As you listed, the two occurring phenomenons you can expect are less bodyfat and more muscle. So, you want to optimize for that.
Given your goals, you might also consider another weightlifting strategy: strength training / powerlifting. This regimen optimizes for strength rather than size. You would focus on compound movements primarily (deadlifts, bench press, squat, rows), and follow a linear progression program, usually with 3x5 sets (greyskull is a good one). Heavy weights.
The "bulking" strat by contrast focuses on more volume. Not only are you doing compound movements, you're adding more high-rep isolation exercises (12-15 rep), and since the goal is to grow muscle size it may be more difficult to do this while restricting calories.
"Toning" isn't very good at anything. Your muscles won't get stronger or bigger. And even on the cardiovascular/endurance side, it falls short of options geared towards that.
TLDR choose between strength and size, avoid so-called toning. Add some conditioning exercise (like running, sports, etc) on rest days instead. This will help boost your metabolism the most.
Both bodybuilding and strength training entail increasing muscle mass, which requires calories, but you can still do this (albeit at a slower pace) with a marginal caloric deficit, and you'll see more drastic gains at the beginning. Just ensure you crunch the numbers, because if your calorie deficit is too steep, you can mess up your metabolism through metabolic adaptation.
In fact you *should* do it, because exercise is a very strong predictor of long-term weight loss success. Chiefly, owing to protecting metabolism. When you lose weight, you also lose lean body mass, not just fat. This includes muscle mass and even organs. The benefit of exercise is it helps protect that lean body mass. You'll lose less of it and more fat, and be less prone to injury. When your metabolism drops, your ability to shed pounds is also hindered. It can take a long time to repair.
Protecting your metabolism, with modest caloric deficit and exercise, should be a top priority.
What if I already messed up my metabolism though previous caloric deficit? How would I fix it?
For context, I lost 60 pounds 4 years ago, down from 280 to 220ish, all by having pretty steep caloric deficit. I've been able to keep the weight off but since then I haven't really been able to lose more weight. I've had various forays into trying to lose more weight, but I've not had great success, always fluctuating between the 210 and 230lb range. As time has gone on, I've felt like I've had to cut more and more calories in order to try to lose the same amount, and my body has had less tolerance for slip-ups. This could be a function of either age or damage from cutting calories too steeply for too many years. I mean, I'm in my mid 30s now, and I was in my early 30s when I first lost that 60 pounds.
I'll just add that it can be normal for weight loss to get harder as you lose weight. Your body has feedback loops that try to keep your weight stable over the long term. The amount of leptin in your blood is directly related to the amount of body fat you have, and low leptin will signal your body to try to gain weight.
Thanks, that's good to keep in mind. I just wish I could lose a little more! And I also worry about being able to maintain the weight loss as I get older and my metabolism gets worse.
There is pretty decent evidence that for any given person, increasing muscle mass will increase basal metabolic rate. So if caloric deficits are not working, it's time to build muscle.
This is easier said than done, but it's the way forward.
You're still young enough, it's not irreparable but it may take time. Steep deficit and frequent dieting lead to longer recovery periods. Even with a sustainable small deficit and successful weight-loss, metabolism will need almost as much time to recover as it did to lose the weight, which is why it's advise to employ a "reverse-dieting" phase of slowly increasing calories to a new maintenance target. One of the pitfalls after WL is increasing calories too steeply and fast.
Besides time, the best thing for recovery is building strength. For now you could stick with maintenance calories and a satiating diet you find sustainable (and maybe cut out some obvious high-calorie sources like sodas), and start working out. This by itself will lead to some results. You can reach an intermediary lifting stage in a year's time.
I don't have a hard number as to how long to wait, you might need to see a specialist of some kind to gauge. Maybe there's some formula I don't know about. A lot of the info I shared is reflected in Dr Layne Norton's book Fat Loss Forever, recommended.
It sounds like you could really benefit from a good nutrition specialist consultation (apologies if this is not an option, I know it's easy to recommend something that may be out of reach). There's only so much internet commenters can help with, and bodies are all built differently. Faust6's advice looks solid as far as a general guide, but may just not be enough for your specific situation.
I've spoken to nutrition doctors. They never want to really help and dive into your specific case, they just want to regurgitate the same nutrition advice they give everyone (eat 3 meals per day, eat protein portion the size of your fist, etc). And worst of all, they never seem to actually listen to you for what you say does and doesn't seem to work for you.
Yeah that's what I hear is a common occurrence. I think you may need to look for a rare combination of a personal trainer who is also a nutrition specialist and can design a comprehensive program that includes both nutrition and training together. I was going to give an example of one gym I know does this, only to find out the nutrition specialist/coach is gone...
I'll spare you the "abs are made in the kitchen" bit but I think whatever route you pick doesn't matter as long as you apply progressive overload. More reps or time spent underload is probably going to increase the calories you burn from exercise by a negligible amount if you mean "toning" in that way but the idea of size vs strength is misguided as far as I know for muscle growth.
I'm sure he has a more concise post on the topic but that's what I could quickly grab.
I assume you know cardio is better for weightloss goals or "toning" (ofc in tangent with building muscle!) so in your shoes I'd try to work in small amounts of cardio on my off days while lifting.
Whatever option you pick, don't stop lifting or doing a sport even if it doesn't burn that many calories because at least if you don't succeed at weightloss and etc you'll always be building something.
I just looked up "progressive overload", and I guess that was probably what I was trying a year ago, until I got burnt out.
I think the biggest problem I faced was that I quickly got to a place where the weights I needed to use in order to keep challenging my body were simply too large for me to handle. I would ultimately end up not being able to even lift them to get them into position, or properly handle them once they were lifted. I ended up having bad technique, and would start hurting myself in the way you hurt yourself when you have bad form. The weights were still in the ~120 pound or less range for all exercises, FWIW, so it's not like I was massively lifting, I'm just a weakling at heart. That's just where I felt my ability to keep having progressive overload break down.
1. When in a caloric deficit, progressive overload is more difficult or even impossible. The goal is continually **try** to increase reps or weight. Sometimes you plateau or move backwards, and that's okay.
2. There are two ways to overload: increase reps, or increase weight. In general, you keep increasing weight each workout until you find your limit (by failing to complete or maintain good form for an exercise). Then, you drop back down to your previous successful weight and add reps instead. See below for a sample progression.
3. If you're increasing weight for an exercise, it's ideally something like 5% more than the previous workout. For many exercises and equipment choices, 5% is not really possible, so you have to work up to quite a few more reps before you can add weight.
4. Whatever your scheme is, you NEVER keep going if you feel your form breaking down. Either stop that set, or reduce the weight and keep going.
Here's an example progressive overload for dumbbell shoulder press (for which it is notoriously hard to add weight after a certain point).
Notations are in the format
[Sets] x [reps] @ [weight]
Week 1:
3 x 8 @ 25
(this means a 25 lb dumbbell in each hand)
All sets successful
Week 2:
3 x 8 @ 30
First two sets successful. Third set only could do 6 with good form.
Week 3:
3 x 8 @ 30
All sets successful.
Week 4:
3 x 8 @ 35
First set successful. Second set failed after 5 reps. Dropped back down to 30 for last set and completed 6 reps.
Week 5:
(35 was clearly too much, so we work on increasing reps)
3 x 10 @ 30
First two sets successful. Third set completed 8.
Week 6:
3 x 10 @ 30
All sets successful.
Week 7:
(Increasing reps again)
3 x 12 @ 30
First set successful. Got 11 in set 2 and 9 in set 3.
Week 8:
3 x 12 @ 30
All sets successful!
Week 9:
(Increasing weight but dropping reps back down)
3 x 8 @ 35
All sets successful!
Hopefully that helps. There are a lot of schemes for programming sets and reps to make progressive overload more effective, more possible, or more fun. Once you get the hang of it you can start experimenting with some of that.
But remember, even people who are bulking (eating more calories than they need) sometimes just have a bad workout and have to drop weight or reps for that session. You have to listen to your body. Your long-term goal is to increase weight and reps. Your goal for any one workout is to push as hard as you can to do what you can that day, with perfect form.
do you mean that I'd do those sets every day of week 1, or only 1 day (and presumably the other days I'd be working on other muscles), or something else, like alternating muscle groups?
Actually, the way I wrote things implied you'd do that exercise once per week. So instead of "Week 1", think "Workout 1".
If you do a certain exercise more than once per week, you want to try to progress each workout.
Tip: Typically the advice is do do an exercise once or twice per week. So if you're working out every day, you want to do different exercises (and target different muscle groups) each day. Give each muscle and muscle group time to recover before pushing it hard again.
If you want to lose fat you have to be in calorie deficit. Basic physics and much harder than it sounds. The lowest hanging fruit is eliminating sugar and refined carbs. These are empty calories. High quality protein tends to keep you more full for longer. Going full low carb/keto diet is I think not essential - but consider it, I have certainly tried it, as have most health conscious people I know, and in some cases the weight loss is dramatic.
Exercise is obviously key but at least at the start I’d suggest it doesn’t matter so much what kind you do. Start with light weights so you don’t get injured, mix up weights and cardio, aim for 30 minutes a day, more if you have time. You will lose fat and gain muscle. If you decide on a more specific goal - you want to be able to run a half marathon, say - then that is a more specific type of training; but literally anything that increases your heart rate and makes you sweat, done consistently, over time, will result in positive bodily change.
(Conventional wisdom is that bulking is achieved with significantly less than 12 - 15 reps - you’d be lifting heavier weights and maxing out at 6 - 8. I would not do that though at this stage! Wait until you’re more conditioned.)
I've already pushed my caloric intake as low as I reasonably think I can, or at least as low as I feel might be safe. I lost 60 pounds 4 years ago (from 280lb-ish to 220lb-ish) and I've mostly managed to keep the weight off since then (fluctuating between 210 and 230lb). But I've been unable to get myself to lose more, and I fear that it seems that it takes more and more calorie cutting to achieve similar results as time progresses on, and each time I slip up and have some cheat days, they seem to have worse and worse effects on me, sometimes obliterating weeks or months of calorie-cutting effort. This might either be because I pushed my metabolism too low with sustained caloric deficit for years, or it could be because I'm simply older (mid 30s now). I want to do something to tip the balance in my favor, and I wonder if gaining muscle is the way to do that, to bump my metabolism up to better levels.
For what it’s worth, former personal trainer, long time weightlifter. I suspect your intuition is correct about your metabolism having been significantly slowed as a result of your weight loss. If I was in your shoes, I personally would do exactly what you’re recommending: adding muscle over a slow and coordinated bulking phase. You can do a ‘reverse diet’, where you gradually add extra calories every week until you feel like you’re starting to gain fat, or you can just go for a 500 calorie surplus and start lifting hard. Again, if it were me, I would recommend trying to get stronger; lower reps and heavier weights.
Now, if you were a client, these would not be my recommendations, for two reasons. The first is that improving your metabolism, while effective, is a long term process. Your short-term results might look like just “putting the weight back on”, which makes most people very nervous and leads to difficulties with retention and continuing the program to the point where the results really start showing up. So, if you were a client of mine, I would advocate for the 12-15 rep routine and for a mild surplus. Note, you will not gain muscle while cutting; especially if you’re not 18 any more.
But, again, if it were me (or if you were capable of committing for a couple months) I would recommend a caloric surplus (reverse diet if you’re worried about the weight gain, +500 kcal surplus if you’re certain in your mental ability to push through) and seeking to gain strength. The advantage there is that the strength gain is palpable; increasing your metabolism is a long term goal, but getting stronger will very quickly start showing results and will provide motivation to stick on the path. It will also provide muscular gain. The difference between the 12-15 rep and the 5-8 rep routines for hypertrophy aren’t huge, even if higher reps are generally considered the ‘right’ answer. Even bodybuilders do strength mesocycles.
I don’t work as a trainer any more, but in the spirit of altruism, I’m happy to answer any questions you might have (or to give you some contact info if you want more detailed/personal questions). Feeling and looking better makes a big difference in quality of life.
1. How many sets of 5-8 reps should I do of each muscle for a single workout?
2. You say that I should try to be okay with “putting the weight back on” for the short term, but how will I know that the weight I'm gaining is from muscle? Is there a way to verify? I have a smart scale, but I don't know if I trust it too much.
3. How much muscle weight should I try to gain? How long should I work on muscle gain before trying to lose weight again?
4. Does the fact that I currently follow a cheat-day diet matter for me trying to increase calories like you recommend? I typically eat 1000 to 1200 calories each weekday, but on Saturday I eat whatever, and don't count.
More general questions:
5. When is it most important to eat protein? Is is important before working out, or after? Is the protein used to rebuild the muscle while you're lifting, or is it used over time when you feel the muscle cramping for a few days afterward?
6. Does it matter what protein I eat? Does it have to be all meat, or is cheese or milk or beans also okay?
7. If I don't eat enough protein at the appropriate time, what will happen? My muscles don't cramp forever, so presumably they get healed at some point. Do they just stay at the same lifting-capacity, and same volume, and not get stronger?
8. Over time, if I find that lifting the same weight is not causing muscle cramping, does that mean that I was successful at building up the muscle, and therefore I need to go up in weight?
Thanks! I just posted the questions. I tried to ping you or chat you, but I'm not certain Substack allows me to PM people. I'll keep looking to see if I can find a way.
Edit: Looks like I can mention you in a note, so I'll try that
Good job losing 60 pounds! That’s not easy at all.
I would try going low carb. See how you feel. A lot of people find they don’t feel hungry and the weight falls off.
You could try full keto, but bear in mind that this limits protein and if you are trying to gain muscle that’s counterproductive.
I wonder if your difficulty building muscle so far through progressive overload has to do with the calorie deficit? How much protein are you eating? There’s no such thing as being a “weakling” genetically
Thanks! I certainly try to persist on a lot of meat during the week, though it's not always the healthiest meat. I tend to eat smoked fish, salami, a homemade grilled chicken sandwich, or a homemade burger, and I usually have one or two meals per day. It's rare that I eat much carbohydrates from Sunday through Monday, besides for buns to accompany the burger.
I fear my weakling status may also have to do with my pain tolerance, which I believe probably can be genetic, or maybe built up through life circumstances. It may be possible that I can gain more muscle if I lift the weight, but that the pain simply becomes unbearable for me. That's how I feel about cardio, for sure, and it's better for weight lifting, though maybe it's too painful when I start applying more weight.
Your friendly neighborhood physics guy here. Energy balance is of course tautologically true, and therefore useless as a guide here. Here’s why: Econsumed = Eexpended + Estored. True, but it tells us nothing about the way to affect the mix on the right-hand side of the equation, and that’s where the crux of the matter lies.
You seem to be knowledgeable, so I'll run this by you to see what you think.
Econsumed = Eexcreted + Eexpended + Estored
If your shit burns, you're excreting calories. I notice that sometimes I excrete large logs shortly after eating, and sometimes I excrete small pebbles a long time after eating, and sometimes in the middle. I find it hard to believe that my digestive system is extracting as many calories (and nutrients, etc.) in a few hours as it does over a few days.
Yeah, I did simplify things by lumping excreted with expended (a rose by any other na... nevermind, bad pun!). This is another complication: it looks like an additional control parameter the body can use to affect storage vs. use balance. I am not, alas, a biologist, my amateur knowledge comes from voracious reading on the subject.
(digression: I was all smug with being thin and calorie-in - calorie-out nonsense until I ran across a guy who looked like a barrel and talked at dinner about how everybody in his family looked like this, and no matter what he did nothing changed for him. I ate twice as much food as he did at that dinner. So I got really curious about how come no matter what I eat my weight doesn't change. end digression)
It would be weird if this weren't another way the body could just throw away some nutrition when it gets "full" by whatever the hormones tell it "full" means. I see Michael pointing out the process is sometimes quite obvious :).
I've been tending to blame gut bacteria for a lot of the difference, but I've got no real evidence. It seems logical that different varieties could be better at extracting different stuff from different food, and that some varieties might have unpleasant side effects. Especially if one of the side effects is triggering the hunger signal if they run out of sugar. And, well, I had a roommate once who had been on the edge of type 2 diabetes their whole life. I'll just say that I had not previously understood why people lit candles in the bathroom.
Sadly, we seem to be in the "press a moldy fruit against the wound" stage of knowledge here. Perhaps one day we'll find the "Moldy Mary" of fecal transplants...
It’s interesting how many body… functions(?) are still barely understood. Modern medicine is good at treating infections and acute trauma, slowly getting better at cancers. But fixing a trigger point in a muscle - forget it.
Yes, it is common knowledge, it's also tautological and therefore useless. Exercise increases hunger, which causes consumption increase.
The body is not a simple mechanism with independently controlled intake, use, and storage functions. We don't know how to affect one without affecting the other, which is why obesity is such a difficult problem to solve.
Personal anecdote as a "proof of existence": before I embarked on a strenuous training routine I kept the same low weight for about a decade, ±1 lb. The intake precision required for this, if it were a simple mechanistic process, would come down to whether I licked the breakfast spoon clean or not. Obviously impossible.
Once I started intense training, my weight - very slowly - crept up as I gained some muscle mass. It would always drop whenever I took a break from exercise - my appetite would go down, so I just ate less.
> Exercise increases hunger, which causes consumption increase
Increased hunger only causes increased consumption of you let it. If you count your calories and stop eating even if you're still hungry (or keep eating even when you're not hungry) you can control your weight gain/loss
Also: if you go hungry the first thing the body will do is make you even more tired, lightheaded, anything to slow down the calorie burn. It also may prioritize fat storage.
It works in theory. In reality, controlling hunger is incredibly hard for two reasons:
1 - it's just hard! hunger is incredibly hard to resist.
2 - it's hard to also know that you truly didn't eat more - the only way to do this is to eat exactly same foods and weigh them - even then a piece of bread, for example, will fluctuate in weight depending on its humidity, but the calories are not affected.
In theory, practice is the same as theory. In practice, it is not. The solution to excess weight is easy in theory - eat less and move more - and doesn't work in practice for most people whose bodies just prefer to store fat.
If you eat an extra 500 calories a day your metabolism might run a little hotter so you'll burn an extra 100 calories a day. Or if you eat 500 less you might be a little more sluggish so you'll burn 100 less even with similar exercise levels. But it's incredibly unlikely that this adjustment will fully account for the change in input from eating.
Appetite is a separate factor. If you don't count calories and just eat when you're hungry you might not lose weight even if you start burning many more calories. That's why if you're serious about losing weight you should carefully count your calories and stop eating once you've reached your daily allotment, even if you're still hungry. This isn't fun but it works.
I know someone who apparently defied physics. She wanted to lose weight, and actually stuck to about 1000 calories a day for over a month, without seeing significant results. I have great confidence in the reported consumption. I suspect she metabolized the foods differently from other people, so that the calories reported for the foods she consumed was under-reported (for her), as I have great confidence in the equivalence of matter and energy.
I also doubt that she has a different way of metabolizing food. But the body can reduce energy expenditure a lot.
I just looked at the first google hits, so you can probably find something much better. But this study refers to a classical Minnesota experiment where energy expenditure in men dropped by >200kcal from reduced resting energy expenditure and by >600kcal by reduced activity. Here I did not count the effect of lower energy consumption directly due to lost weight, so the actual reduction was much higher. Of course, they also started from a much higher level.
I am not sure how low the metabolism can go, but you might find this out by finding a scatter plot with energy expenditure of different individuals, and checking out the lowest values.
This is highly unlikely. For most macronutrients the standard metabolic pathway which starts with a fat or carbohydrate adds oxygen and ends with co2 and h2o is quite efficient. There really isn't another pathway her body could be taking that would yield more energy. It's much more likely your friend was just miscounting her calories.
My hypothesis may well be wrong, but I don't have any good explanation for what was observed. From what I observed and know of this person, she was NOT miscounting her calories significantly.
Unless you observed her 24/7 and watched her weigh all of her food you really can't know that. Miscounting calories is extremely common and not losing weight on 1000 calories a day is extremely rare.
This is why she never gets good advice as to how to lose weight. No one believes her. Doctors state the same thing, and never look at the records she kept of what she ate.
Axioms: she is trust-worthy, wants earnestly to lose weight, and is willing to do what it takes to do so (not yet disproven). She may be sometimes mistaken, but not consistently enough over a month to conclude intake = outgo as we understand it.
The body adapts. It in fact would be astonishing, meaning impossible, for the body to close-loop control everything: temperature, heartbeat, blood pressure, peristaltics, etc., but somehow go open-loop on the most important function: energy balance.
Ok so the reaction is different from the one you described above that produces water and carbon dioxide. The problem is exactly that: how does the body decide which reaction chain to run?
For me, basal metabolic rate has (to first order) been a function of lean body mass, so I've always just focused on what you call bulking. I don't end up bulking because my caloric intake tends to be on par with, or slightly lower than, my daily expenditure. So my answer to your question would be "do bulking, but complement with a high protein caloric deficit diet".
I'm not looking for debating priors around supplements or studies (which have already been discussed here ad nauseum and tend to be really unproductive), so much as people who have some knowledge that bears on the object level question of whether this particular supplement could be good or bad for people.
https://youtu.be/3-PAtr2hjVg?si=LzsMOQRRbPG_gNs1 , Dr Brad Stanfield was unconvinced, and mentioned some papers. Stuart Ritchie recommended him a while back and I think his stuff is pretty good.
I agree with the comment by Anonymous Dude: taking a protein (in this case nattokinase) by mouth is not going to get meaningful amounts into the bloodstream (which is where the blood clots are). And if it *did* get into the bloodstream you'd develop antibodies against it. See the Wikipedia entry for streptokinase (which is similar):
"As streptokinase is a bacterial product, the body has the ability to build up an immunity to it. Therefore, it is recommended that this medication should not be used again after four days from the first administration, as it may not be as effective and can also cause an allergic reaction. For this reason, it is usually given only for a person's first heart attack."
Also note: "Routes of administration: Intravenous"
Wait, he's taking an enzyme by mouth? Won't it just get chopped up by stomach and pancreas enzymes? Isn't this why we have to inject insulin, to the chagrin of so many diabetics?
Regarding the second study: a nattokinase supplement given as 7.5% of a rat's total diet reduced plasma fibrinogen levels. (The supplement only contained 3.4% of actual nattokinase). There might be something interesting going on here, but the study didn't actually see if it was transported into the blood. Also, the study was funded by the main manufacturer of nattokinase supplements, which causes a conflict of interest.
I'd say that this increases my estimated probability of whether nattokinase is good as a supplement, but I have a strong prior that proteins aren't absorbed through oral dosing.
The first study is about "Intraduodenal administration of nattokinase (NK) at a dose of 80 mg/kg" which is a ridiculously high dose straight into the small intestine (bypassing the stomach, where a lot of protein degradation happens).
The second seems more interesting, I'll take a closer look at it tonight.
I've not heard of it before so I have weak priors for this particular case, but strong priors against random-molecule-with-plausible-sounding-biochemical-reason-for-good-effects actually being useful. The graveyards of medicine are littered with such drugs. The ratio of plausible-sounding to actually effective medications is way higher than most people realise; biochemistry is sufficiently complex that it's very very easy to invent a story and extremely hard to influence in a meaningful way.
I guess specifically the claim that nattokinase is "amazing at dissolving clots" and therefore "good for overall health" seems, well, off. We already have aspirin, clopidogrel, warfarin, heparin, UFH, apixaban, dabigatran, rivaroxaban etc and no one wants to put these in the water supply (except maybe aspirin, but even then I have doubts, see for example https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/nejmoa1805819.) And general consensus is that aspirin is less effective in primary prevention of cardiovascular disease than statins, so if you're worried about life threatening clots in your heart or brain, you're better off lowering your cholesterol level.
If you're interested, Dr Peter Attia is an MD who is much smarter and more informed than me (he personally treats Chris Hemsworth, Hugh Jackman, etc); you can go here to see the supplements he personally takes on a daily basis - https://www.greatgreenwall.org/supplements/peter-attia-supplements/
Bear in mind that he's also on record saying that most of these are fairly low risk, low reward interventions; if you really care about your health, you're much better off optimising your exercise regime.
To be fair, the graveyards of medicine are littered with small molecules that cause liver and kidney failure, not drugs with significant effects that can be metabolized safely.
I help run a patient self-report + mass scrapeing & llm extraction website -- nattokinase is immensely popular among people that self report long covid. It's been a trend for at least 2 years afaict, often taken with serapeptase.
I'm talking in the thousands if not dozens of thousands of people mentioning using it, on reddit.
Also fairly popular with a variety of other chronic conditions to a lesser extent.
People seem to take rather large doses.
I found no amazingly convincing studies around it and mechanistically there's not even a convincing explanation for why it doesn't get digested or if it or rather a metabolite is responsible for the result.
Drugs with a similar pharmacology to the one speculated for nato (tiplasinin) failed due to averse events, but given that more pai1 inhibitors are underway I guess the failure isn't absolute.
Probably better to look at pai1 inhibitors since there's an incentive to.resesech.them.
Seems unlikely you could get a medical grade recommendation either which way about it.
"The sudden interest in Nattokinase isn't due to nutritional influence's on youtube or the latest study. The recent surge of interest in it is because it has been suggested by multiple Dr's to treat a certain spike protein that may be causing some people some issues." Found this comment under Dr Brad Stanfield's video going over claims about nattokinase, replies seem to back up what you're saying.
It's found in the human digestive tract, it was used before antibiotics to aid in treatment of digestive and urinary tract infections, it's well tolerated and safe for humans.
God be with the days when you could do things like this to the general public!
"In 1966, the U.S. Army dumped bacillus subtilis onto the grates of New York City subway stations for five days in order to observe people's reactions when coated by a strange dust. Due to its ability to survive, it is thought to still be present there."
(oh man I'm going to embarrass myself by replying tangentially to Scott, oh well) I remember reading a paean to the actual food, written by someone who used to comment here infrequently...it's only got one cautiously optimistic paragraph about nattokinase. But if one extends the "Fish, Now By Prescription" principle...?
If for $500 you could somehow acquire the power to reduce the suffering of a million people who lived 1000 years ago without changing the present in any way, would you pay the money?
What if you could pay the same to reduce the suffering of a million people who will live 1000 years from now?
Is there a reason you would do one and not the other?
I suppose it would come down to whether you believe “the past isn’t even past” or, rather, believe the past doesn’t exist because it no longer exists.
But if you believe the latter, then what good would it do to help people living1000 years from now, given that they also will pass and no longer exist?
Olaf Stapledon (probably in _Last and First Men_) had it that the most advanced late humans could reach back telepathically into the past and, not change things in a major way, but take some of the edge off pain. Of course, this meant doing the work by a lot of people. You couldn't do it with money.
Isn't this (sort of) the premise of Tenet? They're trying to prevent the existence of a device that would destroy the past, even though it's unclear what "destroying the past" even means.
To answer your question directly: I'd tell you to use your magical time machine to go buy some Bitcoin in 2010 and use the proceeds to fund whatever altruistic ventures you want. A time traveler doesn't need my $500.
The framing of this question is a bit of a mess. If I pay $500 the present is changed in at least ONE way, so do I pay the $500 or not? Do I have knowledge of the transaction or not?
If you intended to segue into a more general question about how "real" the consequences of your good deeds have to be for you to find it worthwhile, yeah, there's something to think about there, but this set-up seems more likely to get hung up on "time travel logic."
Or perhaps the time travel logic is the part that's more interesting than the ethics, and I'll kindly bow out.
you should just ask "is it worth donating even minimal sums to prevent large scale suffering a thousand years later, given that its just as remote to us as 1000 years past?" Thought experiments are just manipulative framing stories. People will point out the manipulation, plus if your source of moral intuition relies on events that need wizards or supervillains to commit, its not valuable.
theres something to be said for letting the idea stand on its own, not "oh so you'd flip the switch to run over donald trump instead of five kittens, what does that say about YOU, hmmm?"
I wasn't intending on emphasizing remoteness in time, only past vs future. To me the question here is: does the past exist? I could have chosen two weeks ago vs. two weeks in the future; I didn't only to avoid questions about whether these people might be friends, relatives or acquaintances. 1000 years just seemed like a good round number.
What I mean is what I wrote below: Maybe the past has been erased and only exists as history and memory. But I don't know how time works. Maybe the past is always there like in Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse Five, a place in a dimension that doesn't go away. Or maybe Nietzchie's eternal return is true.
i see your meaning more with the replies to others. My earlier point was more we need a past to communicate; it has to be fixed in a sense or exist. if its not immutable we never could relate to each other. linear time allows beings to exist. a vector goes somewhere, but three points are just three points.
but the past as a country we can visit is more a magical idea and i guess its more how pleasing a tale you could tell than it affecting your morality. its not like flight in that we see birds fly and dream of it, but we see no beings that can change the past and the fixedness of it is why we look for magic.
not sure how morality would fit in. i could say it enchants the world a little to believe in time as a place, i guess.
If the past can be changed by your actions in the present, then the past is really the future.
We have different moral intuitions about the future vs the past because the past isn't changeable by the present and the future is. If you ask me "but what if the past were also changeable by the present, would you still treat it like the past or the future?" then I'm just gonna go all cross-eyed and get confused rather than get a clearer picture of morality.
Let's take the altruistic factor out of it and be selfish. Would you pay $500 today to avoid some kind of unpleasant experience tomorrow? Certainly, for sufficient values of unpleasant... let's assume the experience is clearly but not vastly above that threshold, maybe a nasty headache. Would you pay $500 today to remove that nasty headache from your past? Let's assume that the headache happened years ago, when you were a kid, and you've forgotten all about it now so it has absolutely no effect on your future.
If you say no you wouldn't pay it, then here's a followup question: would you inflict an extra headache on past-you (again, totally forgotten by now) for $500? How about $5? How about a full year of torture, followed by memory-removal, for one million dollars?
Yes, perhaps asking the question about your past self gets more directly at the issue. I'd pay maybe a nickel per old headache. My logic doesn't change whether it is my own past or someone else's, because my view is that Yesterday Me is a different enough person to Today Me that it may as well be someone else.
FWIW, I would do both. It is possible, as some have mentioned, that it is illogical to reduce suffering in the past. Maybe the past has been erased and only exists as history and memory. But I don't know how time works. Maybe the past is always there like in Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse Five, a place in a dimension that doesn't go away. Or maybe Nietzchie's eternal return is true.
I don't know what the truth is, but I think there is a reasonable chance (> 5%) the past still exists and for that reason I would be happy to reduce suffering in the past.
The future case strikes me as no different. If time is fleeting and once you live your subjective existence is totally gone, then I would see no reason to help anyone in the future (Or the present, if I didn't know them), since their lives are like wet snow on a warm pavement. But because they might exist forever, it seems way worth it to reduce the suffering.
My immediate reaction to the former is, "if reducing their suffering didn't change the present, you're at least _possibly_ offering me the ability to p-zombie past people, which is a monstrous offering if so." (There is a possibility that you're offering me a chance to just reduce the suffering of everyone that died at Vesuvius, etc., which is a rather different offering and which I think feels very different.)
We're talking about the subjective experience of suffering, yes? Facetiously I could say that I don't need to pay this money - others appear to have done so already.
As they say in AA, the pain is necessary but the suffering is optional. It's our own time (and not either the past or future) that is so freighted with the latter, regardless of the former.
If Einstein's theory is correct, the past is a direction, not something that is gone. It's inaccessible, as is the future, but it's real and actual.
If Everett-Graham-Wheeler is correct, all the things that could have happened, did happen, they're just in a different branch of space-time, so we cant' see them. And all the things that could happen will happen. What you can do is attempt to change the probability density. (I can't really wrap my head around that last part.)
FWIW, if you give $500 to someone without benefit to yourself, it's because you are sympathetic with them, and wish to help them. People frequently have a clearer image of those living in the past than of those living in the future, so it's easier to feel sympathetic.
At their evolution-driven essence humans care about people who can impact them.
Sometimes moral purity runs rampant in the soul of some poor christlike individual and s/he does their best to "reduce the suffering" of trees, tables or angels and they suffer the predictable crucifying consequences of the horrible upbringing of their past and the insane society of their present.
I think this question, perhaps intentionally, is trying to subvert our intuition about how reality works. We know that we can't change anything at all about the past, since it's already happened. Paying $500 for any change to the past sounds like a scam, especially with the "without changing the present in any way" part of it.
So my gut reaction, which is typically what these types of questions are initially getting at, is "absolutely not, do you take me for a sucker?"
The future question is a bit more complicated, since we can change things about the future. But, also intuitively, we know that changing the future is complicated. There's no reason to think that paying money, without other action or requirements, is able to positively alter the course of the future. That's even more true when the amount is a fairly trivial $500. So the intuitive reaction is again "this sounds like a scam" and so my response is no, I would not.
If you could somehow convince me that this could actually work, and would reliably do what is promised (no unintended consequences, etc.), then absolutely I would. But I can say that in perfect comfort knowing that you could never convince me of that, because you can't know that $500 would reduce future suffering.
Better, there are lots of ways that I can reduce future suffering by my actions now, including some that are (in dollar terms) even cheaper than your offer. To me, the most important thing is to raise my kids well. I have them, so I'm raising them either way and the cost is mostly built in. Raising them well increases their own wellbeing and also puts people into the future who can carry on that work, likely for generations to come.
Assuming you think we can and should prevent or at least reduce greenhouse gas emissions so that the future will be better, this is absolutely something you can actually do. If not, you can probably pick something else that is equivalent. But if you do, suppose you pay $500 to install solar panels on some deserving person's house? Could the reduced load on the electrical grid mean less need for energy, snowballing so that after 1000 years it has made a significant difference in the lives of lots of people?
But life has no guarantees. Maybe someone sees new solar panels and decides they don't need to install any themselves. Maybe a tree falls on the new solar panel and they don't work for very long. Maybe the amount of greenhouse gas savings doesn't do enough to increase quality of life. The future is tough to predict, especially so long in the future.
Yeah, and we can go further. Maybe the process for building solar panels has some unintended environmental problems that we don't know about now. By the time we build a few billion more we start to see the huge damage we're doing to the environment, and wish we hadn't built any in the first place.
The future is indeed hard to predict, and judging by how wrong people in the past have been, I have very little hope that we can predict long term future events well enough to accurately plan for them now. I feel that we have about as much chance to cause more problems than we solve when trying to plan sufficiently far into the future. I think 1,000 years is at or beyond that unknowable range.
"I think this question, perhaps intentionally, is trying to subvert our intuition about how reality works. We know that we can't change anything at all about the past, since it's already happened. Paying $500 for any change to the past sounds like a scam, especially with the "without changing the present in any way" part of it."
Exactly. And this is a big reason why people often don't get the sort of answers they're looking for when posing thought experiments like this. All too often, the question is little more than an attempt to trick someone into agreeing with something they wouldn't otherwise agree with through confusing or implausible framing (not necessarily saying that's what OP is doing here). People don't like going along with these types of hypotheticals for the same reason they don't earnestly answer the question "Is your refrigerator running": they suspect they're being toyed with.
I think a more charitable framing is that it's harder than you think to engineer a thought experiment that can reliably influence your intuitions. To the person designing the thought experiment, the natural questions/exceptions people come up with seem like "poking holes" in their good-faith effort to explore an otherwise opaque intuition. But the people "poking holes" are legitimately asking whether the thought experiment can support their weight, or whether it will collapse when they try to generalize outside that thought experiment.
I think we learn the most when we start to understand WHY a thought experiment fails to generalize. What is it, specifically, about the axiomatic assumptions fed into the thought experiment that divorce it from reality?
Great point. I'm sure that, most of the time, the hypothetical-posers are no more trying to "trick" people than questioners are merely trying to "poke holes."
Let me take a stab at crafting a hypothetical around the question, "What's the more important goal: elimination of human suffering or perpetuation of human consciousness? Or do you need to have both for either to be meaningful?"
Aliens visit Earth. They have an answer to the Fermi paradox and the answer is them. Every time a civilization gets to Earth-level development they drop by and give that civilization a choice:
The aliens turn on their Bliss device. All humans currently alive will live out the remainder of their days in harmony and bliss. Nobody will be forced to not procreate anymore, but the device accelerates the tendency for prosperous societies to have a birthrate lower than replacement rate, driving the birthrate well below 0.0001. On worlds they've tried this on, within 3 generations the target species goes extinct. Choose this option and everyone dies happily and content with their life's choices - to the point that they forget ever having striven for 'something more' - and humanity will end.
The aliens turn on their Perpetuator device, which will ensure the society perpetuates indefinitely. They did this for one society already that's over a billion years old, so you know it works. There's a catch, however. The machine makes everyone obscenely miserable. One of the side effects is that it eliminates suicide, even though many more people will wish they could bring themselves to end it all. Humanity will survive and go on, but it will do so in a state of despair.
The aliens turn on the Uncertainty device. There's a 5% chance the device makes the aliens leave and never return. Humanity will be allowed to continue developing exactly as it has without outside interference. The device isn't very stable, and there is a 95% chance it will instead explode and destroy the entire planet.
I think the two answers must be different. If you reduce suffering in the past that results in precisely the same present, then you have not accomplished anything A difference that makes no difference is no difference. Yes, you have reduced suffering, but suffering can actually be subjective. According to the statement, none of the people with reduced suffering turn out to make the world better in any significant way.
But the future people may accomplish something with reduced suffering. That is an investment in the future of more than 1000 years from now. Yes, nothing may come of it, but such is venture capital.
Because this is a thought experiment, one can define the outcomes. Practically speaking, it has potential problems in implementation, including eventual outcomes, guarantees of reduced suffering, etc.
I'm not sure if it is too late for a relevant response at this point... Re:
"If you reduce suffering in the past that results in precisely the same present, then you have not accomplished anything"
I see this a bit differently. It would have reduced the sum total of suffering, integrated across history, in much the same (rather abstract!) way that doing the same in the future would. One way of thinking of it is that our knowledge of the past is highly incomplete, in a way somewhat analogous to knowledge of the future. _Some_ records exist, but if one tried to run the laws of physics with time reversed from our current state, one runs into similar chaotic dynamics that certain systems (like weather) have when run in the normal direction. ( Actually, the reversed dynamics tend to be _more_ chaotic. Unburning a unique book could leave it with any text. ) So one could think of the intervention as looking at the range of possible pasts implied by our current state and switching from the actual real one to an equally consistent-with-our-current-state evidence one, but with the moods of a million people selected to be better than in the real case.
Nothing in the thought experiment says that the mood improvements in either case case have to to be due to something that will create further consequences, positive or negative, at times later than the intervention.
I guess the premise that nothing is different in the premise cannot be true. At the least, you have $500 less and feel better. Does this reduce the question to "would you pay $500 to know you have helped a million people even though you don't have evidence for it?"
"At the least, you have $500 less and feel better." Good point!
"Does this reduce the question..." Yes, that seems like a reasonable way to modify the scenario.
( I probably would take that deal, but with additional caveats:
- That, in the absence of evidence for the actual help, there were some other good reasons to expect that the entity offering the deal was actually capable of performing the help and trustworthy to actually do so
- That the degree of suffering reduction per person was substantial, something like removing half the suffering in their lives (and _not_ by cutting them short), not something like reduction by a part per billion
- That the group of beneficiaries are not selected to be something that I'd find appalling (e.g. removing guilt pangs from a million murderers)
You touched on the objections I had. If offered a deal like this, I would suspect a scam. I'm not opposed, for example, to helping the poor, yet I never give to beggars, partly because I can't vet them then and there, partly because I have heard of beggars making tens of thousands of dollars begging, partly due to security, and partly because of my current resources.
I think a lot of people would give $5 for someone in need, on the mere assurance of a stranger that it is on the up-an-up.
"If offered a deal like this, I would suspect a scam." Very much agreed! Frankly, the deal requires so many implausible elements, with a requirement for such superhuman power to actually execute it (which, in turn, would allow for a broad variety of possible superhuman deceptions) that it is hard to see how one could gain any confidence in it.
"partly because I can't vet them then and there" Yup. Verification is hard!
I think the problem you (and we) are having is that the premise isn't well defined. What does it mean to change the past? What is the past? IMO if it can be changed it is future, not past, especially since you said it will not casually effect the present day. So you are comparing a real future and a made up type of future, modeled on the real past. I have a hard time reasoning about such a pocket future.
Given that this seems to imply some kind of time travel being possible, if I can actually affect the past, then sure: if I had $500 and could help the past and the future, then I would.
Why wouldn't I? Two million people is a good chunk of the population of my own country. Contingent on me having a thousand bucks to spend, and nobody gets hurt, yes, I'd help.
Another question would be if you would help people half a universe away, or in some hypothetical parallel world. This way you could allow long term effects without having to change the present or the immediate future observed by the actor.
Of course, outside hypotheticals, there are practical difficulties for doing interventions without causal feedback. And then there is the question of an appropriate discounting function for either case.
Getting pregnant shortly after having caesarian delivery seems to have one particular risk - increased chance of uterine rupture due to the scar not having enough time to heal. This study https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/20410775/ recorded rupture rates at 1.3%, 1.9% and 4.8% for interdelivery intervals of >24, 18-23, <18 months resp.
The main advantage I see to getting pregnant sooner is general health of parents and the baby (and potential future babies) due to age. I'm sure there are other factors weighing in either direction (feel free to point out any that seem important to you).
However I have no idea how to trade these two off against each other - any thoughts would be highly appreciated!
15 month gap between my two (god knows how given the anaphrodisiac effect of having a 6 month old baby) and I highly recommend it. They are great entertainment for each other, and it gets the nighttime disruption and stuff out of the way in one go. I would hate to get back to the relative normalcy of having a 2 or 3 year old and then revert to the almost forgotten horror of nighttime feeds.
My two children came 3-1/2 years apart, and the resetting of the clock was indeed a challenge. They are still able to play together; the 5yo is perfectly happy to act the fool, and the toddler thinks it's great.
Not all caesarians are equal. There are two ways to stitch up uterus after this surgery: the 2-layer best-practice way, and the 1-layer quick and dirty way. They will not tell you which way they did it, after you have a C-section. 1-layer comes with a greater risk of future complications. Sometimes you can find out from the surgeon, but then you're taking the risk that the surgeon is lying to CYA for liability reasons. If s/he does it the slapdash way, s/he may not wish to admit it, particularly if it would be difficult to prove.
In additon, rupture isn't the only risk. With either method, you have some risk of placenta percreta, where the placenta grows into, and sometimes through, the wall of the uterus through the scar (if it goes through, it can attach to things like intestines). This is life-threatening and if the mother survives it, it generally requires a lot of blood transfusion and removal of uterus and sometimes other things, like if placenta gets attached to intestines. Gruesome nightmare stuff.
Another thing not usually taken into account here is abortion procedures, which can cause uterine scarring, which can also lead to these same complications. Probably not at the same rate, but a woman's history of abortions, D&C procedures (for any other reasons), is at least as important as history of C-section. All contribute to her risk of rupture and possibly placenta percreta.
Personal opinion: the ideal space between C-section and having another biological kid is never. Each C-section results in abdominal scarring and adhesions that make each subsequent procedure riskier and more scarring/damaging, increasing risk for other things like bowel obstruction. And that's strictly looking at mom's health, before you even get to the ethics of continuing to produce children, when your body is incapable of doing so naturally. Why did you have the initial section? Because your doc spooked you into it for the $$$? Because you chickened out and took all the pain meds and shut down a natural process? Because of a physiological problem you risk passing on to your offspring? If childbirth is a thing you can't do without massive medical assistance... maybe it's time to adopt? That is the decision I would make for myself. I don't want to be in charge of anybody else's decision, and I do not judge other people's choices in this matter. Your risk assessments may vary.
>Why did you have the initial section? Because your doc spooked you into it for the $$$? Because you chickened out and took all the pain meds and shut down a natural process? Because of a physiological problem you risk passing on to your offspring? If childbirth is a thing you can't do without massive medical assistance... maybe it's time to adopt?
In my wife's case, it was because her water broke a month early and after 12 hours or so of labor our daughter's heartbeat wasn't looking good and the doctors said they'd need to do a C section or she would probably die.
Fortunately our next pregnancy went smoothly and my wife was able to deliver naturally.
Considering how long it takes to adopt a child in this country, and how common C-sections are, I would not advise someone who has had a C section to give up on having children.
Like I said, not judging. But these are the questions I ask myself in this situation, particularly in a situation where subsequent births would end up as mandatory sections-- I am personally reluctant to embark, voluntarily and on purpose, into a situation where I will be totally at the mercy of the hospital system for my own life and the life of a child. For other people, I understand the calculation is different, and there is no situation where I should have a say in anyone else's medical decisions.
Congrats on the successful VBAC! When we were still having kids, it was difficult to find a doc who would agree to even trial that.
It's strange that fecundity decline etc. isn't discussed more, as a part of sex ed etc. I've seen quite a number of people who unironically believe that fecundity or delivery capabilities peak at around age 30. Perhaps they are looking at fertility rate numbers and confusing the two.
I'm legendarily blunt. Good studies indicate the ideal C-section rate, where you get the best outcomes for mothers and babies, is around 13%. Current rate in the US is about 32%. That means more than half of C-sections are unnecessary, and probably doing more harm than good. Why is that? If we can't talk about it honestly because it's "deeply personal"-- nobody's ever going to demand change, are they? Meanwhile, I watched women I know and love get railroaded into unnecessary surgeries by doctors who cared way more about CYA liability crap and profit$$ than about their patients. The total lack of informed consent in the matter should be a scandal. But hey it's "deeply personal". Doc convinced one relative to induce a MONTH early because "OMG your baby will weigh ten pounds!"-- baby was 6.5 pounds and had to be in NICU after premature induction led to section. Different lady got induced so doc could go on vacation on time ("It's OK you can have ALL the drugs and you won't feel a thing!"). 24 hours of unproductive labor later, yay C-section.
Cost of having a baby naturally in hospital, last I checked: $6k. C-section: $20k+ . Perverse incentives.
Meanwhile, because so many things lead to *mandatory* sections, doctors in the US have now almost entirely lost the skills needed to safely deliver twins, breech babies, shoulder dystocia, and probably a few other not-that-uncommon complications in any way *other* than surgery, which means women who show up at hospitals with any of these complications, in precipitous labor, end up being delivered by docs who have no idea what they're doing or how to handle the situation-- the skills simply aren't taught anymore: I know two kids who may be brain damaged as a result of doctors not knowing how to safely deliver a breech-- mom gets to the hospital already pushing, and docs are like "what do we do? I dunno, we always section these, but it's too late now. Does anybody have a manual for this?"
I don't remotely think that C-section is a moral failing on the part of parents, but I think it's quite often a moral failing on the part of doctors. Probably at least half the time.
Two to three age gap between kids is about the ideal so you're not dealing with young babies at the same time. Depends how many children you want and at what age you are thinking of getting pregnant; the earlier you start, the more time you have to have three or four kids spaced out.
The closer they are together the more likely they are to be able to entertain each other once they all hit the ~2 year threshold which is a huge QoL improvement
"Two to three [years] age gap between kids is about the ideal" sounds like nothing more than argument by anecdata. I have an 8.5 year gap between my two children and that was ideal for me. What is ideal for one family may be completely suboptimal for another.
I'm kinda surprised that uterine rupture rates are that high in any group. I'd imagine that the uterus is a highly vascular organ, and that a rupture there would lead to vv high risk of haemorrhagic shock, which would be an emergency of the calibre only obstetrics/gynecology can deliver. Top result on google says it carries a 10% risk of death, so yeah I'd probably want to bring 0.48% chance of death down to 0.13% if other factors let me
Uterine rupture-----> Amniotic fluid embolism-----> it's one of the few things that can still definitely kill you in childbirth, even in a great hospital with all the whiz-bang gadgets. And 10% risk of death isn't the only bad outcome possible-- you can also end up as a brain-damaged vegetable.
I think standard recommendation is to wait at least 18 months. That's not a significant delay in terms of risk of Down syndrome, miscarriage et al from increased maternal age. Bear in mind though that these risks start to increase more rapidly from age 35 and especially from age 40
Well, that would depend on the age of mother and how many babies the family desires, no?
In general, one of the reasons to delay the pregnancy in any case would be not having two small babies/toddlers in the family at the same time, since that would considerably increase the hassle of raising both - that's why many think something like 2.5 years is the optimal gap (not taking health complications like crom caesarian etc. into account).
OC ACXLW Instrumental Lying in AI. Geography made the US OP.
Hello Folks!
We are excited to announce the 49th Orange County ACX/LW meetup, happening this Saturday and most Saturdays thereafter.
Host: Michael Michalchik
Email: michaelmichalchik@gmail.com (For questions or requests)
Location: 1970 Port Laurent Place
(949) 375-2045
Date: Saturday, Nov 18, 2023
Time: 2 PM
Conversation Starters :
Technical Report: Large Language Models can Strategically Deceive their Users when Put Under Pressure
Text: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1QpYWdcLAMqxmJveY0oZaNLzip8C41E1t/view?usp=sharing
ChatGPT Summary:
https://chat.openai.com/share/ea56d850-2dcb-47c5-a2d0-25ce441c78c6
How Geography Made The US Ridiculously OP
https://youtu.be/BubAF7KSs64?si=G_7JsfUXxoq-V7RI
ChatGPT summary plus some additional notes:
https://chat.openai.com/share/aac38f1e-dbac-41cc-9d76-86aae7cd0000
Question: Do we underate the importance of geography in such a way that we overate the efficacy of the “american system” or “american people” and incorrectly think it is the best system in the world for productivity?
Walk & Talk: We usually have an hour-long walk and talk after the meeting starts. Two mini-malls with hot takeout food are readily accessible nearby. Search for Gelson's or Pavilions in the zip code 92660.
Share a Surprise: Tell the group about something unexpected that changed your perspective on the universe.
Future Direction Ideas: Contribute ideas for the group's future direction, including topics, meeting types, activities, etc.
American geography without American people and American system resulted in very primitive societies.
People and systems similar to the US without American geopgrahy resulted in very powerful countries like the UK, and to a lesser extent Canda, Australia and NZ.
They're not the same people/system, but the variation between the US and UK historically in this regard is smaller than between the US and everywhere else.
(Obviously talking about America's historical majority population that primarily consisted of people of anglo/celtic etc. ancestry which is what is most relevant to it's historical development.)
It's true that the American system is almost certainly overrated and not optimal for other peoples, but this is almost entirely due to differences in American people to other peoples, not because of America's geography.
The reality is that most populations around the world would never have been remotely capable of exploiting whatever geographical advantages are provided by the US landscape if they had conquered the place instead of the British. The british were people who acheived remarkable things *without* the benefit of US geopgraphy and it's absurd to suggest populations who didn't acheive the bare rudiments of industrialization would suddenly have a radically different experience in the US (without the british). But I imagine that the average LessWronger has a flat-earth view of humanity and would never accept something like this.
Other than for humor, is it ever better to utilize the word "utilize" rather than use? I can see no use for "utilize", and always take it as a sign the writer wants to seem more impressive than they are, or sound important, or something.
My read is that "utilize" is emphasizing that the use of the tool itself is part of the appeal. If you're utilizing your leaf blower to clear your yard, it implies you wanted to have a chance to use the leaf blower and now you've found one.
"Utilize" has a meaning of "use in a way that is not quite intended". Example: I "use" a hammer to pound a nail in, but I "utilize" a tire rod to do same.
"Utilize" has suffered the unfortunate fate of having been picked up by marketing people and becoming an annoying "tic": used needlessly where "use" would be perfectly appropriate.
I have not heard that before, but it certainly makes sense. A new utility of an item for which it wasn't intended.
But as you also point out, utilizing it this way would make it sound archaic.
They're definitely not congruent words. "Use" can be a noun, and so might leave ambiguity for the reader. And the verbs have some different connotations as well--a bad person could "use" people, but you wouldn't say he's "utilizing" people, because that doesn't have the same negative connotation. "Utilize" specifies putting something to practical use (same root as "utility", I believe) whereas "use" does not; saying you used up your afternoon might mean you put it to a constructive purpose or wasted it, whereas saying you utilized an afternoon implies it was put toward a specific end.
If you want to start getting rid of words, start with "fantastic" and replace it with "double plus good"!
Was really impressed by Curtis Yarvin’s recent appearance on Razib Khan’s audio substack. The subject was, of all things, poetry. Yarvin says at the beginning ”Everyone is interested in poetry, they just don’t know it.” And then claims mid-20th century American poetry is one of the high points of modern civilization, mentioning Robert Lowell as an example. He then read a poem by a 20th century Greek poet whose name I didn’t catch.
Yarvin comes off a lot saner when you hear him talk, hear the humor in his voice, than he does on the page.
When Razib asked Yarvin his opinion of AI extinction risk, he responded within the context of poetry. I’m going to paraphrase now and apologize for what I don’t get entirely accurate, but he says something like: Eliezer Yudkowski, because he’s a Rationalist, believes he is using his left-brain when he thinks about x-risk when he is actually using his right-brain. He is creating narratives.
It seems so obvious when it is put like that.
He then talks about LLMs and credits someone with calling them correctly “intuition machines”. Sticking with the right-brain left-brain theme, LLMs are right-brained. (I’m still paraphrasing.) LLMs are very creative but they suck at logic.
It reminded me that what has spooked me most about AI art is how surrealist it is. How well it captures a dreamscape. It is much more Dali than Da Vinci.
He then offers another reason (other than AI is no good at logic) why doomer nanobot scenarios make no sense: AI isn’t good at number crunching. Engineering breakthroughs such as the creation of nanobots will require advances in number crunching. He mentions how we still can’t simulate water boiling -- something which we know all the physics about -- because it’s too computationally intensive.
So: AI’s are right-brain thinkers (And so is Yudkowsky without knowing it) that are bad at logic and math. The apocalypse is not nigh. Robert Lowell is a great poet.
It’s certainly one narrative about AI, but not one I would put much stock in. It’s kind of funny how the old trope was “machines may rule logic but they can never match our creativity” but now here’s this argument that “machines may be creative but they can never match our logic”.
LLMs can write simple code and integrate with specialized subsystems (either other AI or “normal” computer programs) already - which is how humans do “logical/number crunching” R&D nowadays. And their increasing proficiency at writing code and working across system boundaries hasn’t hit a wall yet. Until we see a real wall there, saying LLMs will never make nanomachines is tantamount to saying humans will never do so either.
Regarding AI images looking “Dali”, I think it’s mostly because of our own preconceived notions about what’s easy/hard about “drawing”, compounded by thinking we gave enough information for the AI to make a DaVinci when our text prompts / image descriptions are actually very vague, so the model simply “connects the dots” in a way that we interpret as “surreal” instead of “winging it”. The latter issue may soon be rectified by the very impressive latest crop of image-interpretation AI. If better labeling of training data doesn’t solve the “problem” outright, I wouldn’t be surprised if within 2 years AI image generators just “close the loop” and start automatically generating feedback on its own generated images to redraw/correct distortions until you can give it 5 words and receive a DaVinci worth 1,000 words.
> saying LLMs will never make nanomachines is tantamount to saying humans will never do so either.
Which they won't, because it's not physically feasible (unless you count bacteria as nanobots)
I… don’t know if we can be 100% certain nanomachines are not physically feasible. They certainly are very hard to do in silicon or SiN, surface attraction forces will eat your design for breakfast (the term of art is “stiction”). But I have read papers describing protein-based motors (not bacteria, just large protein molecules). There’s a nonzero chance nanomachines can be made.
Right. Fair points. It is very interesting that the argument now is "machines may be creative but they can never match our logic". It flips the received wisdom on its head, something Moldbug has always been good at. But, who knows, it may prove to be the correct critique of AIs.
I think his point about number crunching is in the context of Artificial Intelligence having diminishing returns, like every other tool that has ever been created. Sure, an AI can simply use a math program to do math, but that would demonstrate AIs are limited in their own mathematical thinking. If AIs are to become superintelligences they need to develop logic and number crunching skills that make current capabilities look stupid. That doesn't seem to be the direction they are headed in.
> If AIs are to become superintelligences they need to develop logic and number crunching skills that make current capabilities look stupid. That doesn't seem to be the direction they are headed in.
Exactly. How many of the AI doomers would have predicted in 2017 that six years after AlphaZero, the best chess engine in the world would still be Stockfish and it would still make only limited use of neural nets?
Who here has had experience with IFS (Internal Family Systems) therapy? At first I found it an intriguing idea I could add into my SF work in progress, now I'm finding it applicable to my life and relentless attempt to grasp at sanity, sometimes successful.
Briefly the idea is that there is a core self, and various 'parts' which have arisen to protect it. Some are exiles of feelings too painful to feel, some are firefighters to keep the exiles from lighting up, some are managers to proactively protect. It all seems to work for me. Opinions?
https://boards.4channel.org/x/thread/36449024/ting-ting-ting-ahem-i-have-a-story-to-tell
I found this on 4chan. (OK lie: I posted it on 4chan. And it is literally the truth.)
I'm curious about other people's reaction to this true story. As in, I appreciate that it's quite hard to believe, so how much evidence and of what kind would you need in order to fully believe that I am telling the truth?
Your subjective experience is always "true" for you, while you also have no ability to independently verify your working hypothesis of what's causing your subjective experience.
Frankly this reads more like fiction purporting to be true but if it's not, you should seek medical help sooner rather than later because your symptoms could be consistent with a brain tumor, among (many) other possibilities.
The technology has improved greatly in the last few decades and previously inoperable tumors are now (by the standards of brain surgery) fairly easy to remove without any long term effects if you catch it early.
Do I believe you felt a horrible vibration in your brain, got constant headaches, and started to hear voices in your head, including the voice of David Bowie? Yes. I'm not a psychiatrist, but I know that hearing voices is a thing that happens to people sometimes. It's not any stranger than the people who hear Satan or Jesus in their head.
Do I believe that literal aliens, literal AI, or literal David Bowie are actually present in your "mindspace" or otherwise running on your brain's wetware in a way that's meaningfully different from a hallucination? No. I think for me to believe that, you'd first have to prove that a "mindspace" is a meaningful thing and not just another word for "something I imagined", and then show how an outside force (such as an alien, AI, or dead musician) is capable of manipulating it to produce the effects you feel.
Alternatively, you could try to ask David Bowie for something that only he could know, which others could verify. Perhaps get him to compose some really good music that you wouldn't be able to make on your own?
More seriously, consider asking a doctor. I'm not even saying that in a "make sure you're not crazy" sort of way, I mean make sure that the splitting headaches aren't the result of a brain tumor or something. Everything I wrote is a fun creative writing exercise, but the common-sense answer to "what do I do if I suddenly get painful chronic headaches?" is "see a doctor."
Honestly, I don't comprehend what you wrote well enough to judge how likely it is to be true.
Assume that my ability and willingness to elaborate on the things that have been inflicted on me/ my brain is affected by the continued interference of AI(s) with my brain, at this very moment as I am typing this comment.
Please see this as an SOS note and act accordingly.
I want to talk about panspermia, which is one of the dumber ideas that I think people take too seriously. Inspired by this article: https://www.space.com/comets-bouncing-seed-life-on-exoplanets
As far as I can see, the relevant quantity we want to estimate is: given that life originated on a particular planet at some point during the age of the universe, how many other other planets (in other star systems) should we expect this life to have spread to by the present age of the universe? If this number is 0.001 then by finding ourselves on a planet with life we can assume it almost certainly arose here originally, if this number is 20 then it's most likely that life originated elsewhere.
If life did indeed originate on Earth then how many other (extrasolar) planets should we expect it to have spread to? I think the number is very much less than 1. Collisions that knock material from Earth into space are very rare, collisions that will knock Earth material clean out of our solar system are even rarer. That a given chunk of such material would eventually reach another star (within the few billion years available) and crash into a rocky planet/moon is very unlikely; that this rocky planet/moon has conditions conducive to life is also very unlikely. And then, the chance that some form of life was on that rock and somehow managed to survive the entire trip adds another layer of unlikelihood. I'm sure it's possible to estimate some of these terms numerically, but I reckon that if we multiply out all these unlikelihoods then we get something pretty small.
Admittedly, Earth may be a particularly bad seeding point; we're a large planet with a fat gravity well which rarely gets hit with sizeable objects.
The way I heard Robin Hanson argue for Panspermia is that he first makes the argument that intelligent life is extremely rare (great filter, anthropics, grabby aliens), so probably the next civilization is like a couple of galaxies away. So the probability that there are aliens near us should be like one in a million or trillion or so. If we then meet some aliens, the two options are coincidence or panspermia.
The way he imagines it is that one exoplanet, where life evolved, moved through a region where lots of stars and planets were just being created, and then this one exoplanet fertilizes like 100 planets at basically the same time. Then, if one of them evolves civilization, they might want to visit all their other sister planets to see whether any other ones also have intelligent life.
So if we were to meet aliens in this model, it would be absolutely massive Bayesian evidence for panspermia. I think this would also hold for just finding bacteria on Mars or so, not just for intelligent aliens, but I'm less sure about that.
But this is all conditional on seeing aliens; if we haven't yet observed aliens, I don't know.
Kurzgesagt recently did a video with an interesting take on this - for a long while in the early universe, space itself was at the right temperature for liquid water. This means that, in the earliest era of stars and planets, the cosmos itself was a giant petri dish.
Were there enough metals back then though? You also probably need a lot of time for life to even arise in the first place.
Sure, Earth is safe and boring, and doesn't shed a lot of material to the cosmos.
But what if among all the billions of worlds in this galaxy, one that was full of life exploded in some astronomical disaster, and threw billions of trillions of fragments in all directions.
Of all the worlds during all the billions of years, that could surely have happened. You only need one such event to start the chain reaction!
> Of all the worlds during all the billions of years, that could surely have happened. You only need one such event to start the chain reaction!
Space is big. Even if the planet blew up and every fragment was colonized by bacteria or whatever, the pieces would still be unlikely to hit anything.
Space is indeed very big.
But time is also very long. Over a billion years, *many* extremely unlikely things will happen.
Your mistake is that assuming all big numbers are equivalent. They aren't. If say, the odds of something happening are 1 in a quadrillion each year, then it's not going to happen even in 10 billion years.
Your claim was that you only need 1 magic exploding planet in order to start a chain reaction. But my suspicion is that even under ideal circumstances, the average number of planets reached is less than 1, meaning that not only do you need many planets, you don't get a chain reaction either way.
As a rough check, let's imagine that the earth's surface was perfectly spherical and completely covered with the smallest possible bacteria, and that it magically exploded so that these bacteria were sent radially outward in perfect straight lines. What are the odds of any hitting the nearest possible habitable planet? Keep in mind that these are all *the best possible, wildly unrealistic assumptions* for panspermia. And I chose them before actually looking up the numbers.
Let's see:
bacteria size: 200nm
Earth's radius: 6370km
Nearest potentially habitable planet (probably not actually habitable, but we're making the best possible assumptions everywhere here): Proxima Centauri b, 4.2ly away (3.974e+16 meters)
Distance between two adjacent 200nm bacteria after traveling 4.2ly: 1.25km.
So I guess these wildly optimistic assumptions aren't quite enough to rule it out offhand. But it's obviously absurd to assume individual 200nm bacteria travel for lightyears through space (and reenter a planet's atmosphere) completely unharmed, as is it absurd to assume a planet completely covered in such bacteria with them radiating uniformly outward. Make the assumptions even slightly more realistic and the odds of hitting a planet drop precipitously.
For example, Quora suggests that a 10cm **metal** meteor could potentially survive atmospheric reentry. If you assume the Earth's surface was magically turned into 10cm chunks that radiate outwards, the distance between them after 4.2ly would be 624000km, which is many times bigger than the size of a planet.
P.S. Panspermia also runs into the Drake Equation problem, since it implies that we would expect to see life basically everywhere possible.
Sure but remember we're talking about the average behaviour of a life-origin planet. How many planets that just happen to get life also just happen to explode?
Even positing that as true, how would that material survive conditions in space, including extreme hot and cold, radiation, etc? Space seems like the worst possible environment for life to survive. I'm am no expert here, but I would think that even basic building blocks of life like DNA would not survive the trip, especially considering the millions or billions of years required for the travel.
If nothing more advanced than basic chemicals would survive the trip (which I think might be true?), then why add the epicycle of an exploding planet with life and go with a simpler explanation of those chemicals coming from a non-life-bearing planet? If all material came out of a big bang explosion, then the same requirements for creating those chemicals on the seed planet would be needed anyway, with no ex-nihilo life starting this chain.
Seeds and spores have been brought to life after thousands of years in permafrost, so I feel optimistic about the cold factor.
Radiation is probably worse, because it actively breaks down molecules like DNA. Then again a few meters of rock protects against most of it, I think.
The fact that only one of trillions of microorganisms on a space rock need to survive to bootstrap life on a planet makes me think it *will* happen sooner or later. I'm aware that's just my gut feel, not scientific fact.
I learned about this recently and don’t have anything useful to contribute beyond this: https://theness.com/neurologicablog/index.php/panspermia-again/
Recently, I idly wondered how much it would cost for the US to host the Summer Olympics again if done as cheaply as possible. I figured the best bet would be to hold it in Atlanta or maybe LA because they'd already hosted the olympics and could presumably reuse some of the existing infrastructure. I figured it was all just a silly hypothetical though, since I couldn't imagine it ever actually happening this way.
And thus I was very surprised when I tried to research it today and immediately discovered that *LA was already chosen to host the 2028 olympics*. I almost feel like my daydreaming rewrote reality.
Except for the as cheaply as possible part.
They apparently are reusing an unusually high amount of infrastructure at least.
Does wanting an empire make sense today?
There was a time when conquering territory created a buffer zone between you and your enemies, gave you more resources in the form of fertile land, taxpayers, slaves, soldiers, and/or militarily strategic geography. Today land just doesn’t matter as much, as Singapore proves. Natural resources still matter, but not nearly as much as once upon a time. They are a blessing and curse, nowadays.
It’s easy to understand why Catherine the Great wanted an empire. I find it hard to understand why Putin does. Or why China might.
Now, I get why the US wants a military empire. A hegemon that keeps the peace, controls the high seas and keeps global trade going is worthwhile for everyone.
But does it make sense for Russia or China to even *want* an empire?
Many people have said that we shoulda seen Putin’s invasion of Ukraine coming because that’s what Russia does. Russia wants to Russia, to expand its empire. OK. Maybe. Recent events validate that view. But while it’s easy to see what Russia had to gain from expansion in the 18th and 19th centuries, it’s hard to see what Russia has to gain from expansion in the 21st. Am I missing something? *Does* Russia have something to gain by expanding today? Or does Putin prove that ideological and cultural inertia matters more than reason?
I’m actually more interested in China than Russia, since China is the country the US is more likely to fight in a war in coming years. Should we consider China an expansionary power because Chinese history says so? Not recent Chinese history of course, but, um, ancient Chinese history. Does China have much to literally gain by expanding into a global empire, or is the idea of expansion for China a case of mental inertia like it is for Putin?
What gives?
Empires historically were often not about gross economic benefit, especially recently. By and large, European colonies were a net financial drain (for the countries, though many individuals became wealthy) that required more spending to build and maintain than what was gained from them.
>Today land just doesn’t matter as much, as Singapore proves.
Singapore fills a niche. You can't have 100 Singapores. Without real, physical productive economic activity (in other countries), Singapore is worthless. And to be Singapore, you have to be the best at filling that niche (or close to the best).
>Not recent Chinese history of course, but, um, ancient Chinese history.
If you ignore Tibet, Xinjiang and inner mongolia.
>Does China have much to literally gain by expanding into a global empire, or is the idea of expansion for China a case of mental inertia like it is for Putin?
If China can take Taiwan, this shows that the perceived invulnerability of america as world police is illusory, which could have the effect of the rest of the world standing up against America and destroying it's hegemonic position, which could allow China to become the global hegemon, which it absolutely wants.
Also, of course, invading Taiwan could likely just result from the CCP facing a domestic crisis and wanting a distraction/a way of regaining power over Chinese society.
The rest of the world doesn't want to stand up against America and destroy its hegemonic position. Russia, China, maybe India and a few others want that. Beyond that, most of the world seems to want America to continue its hegemony so they can go about their business without having to worry about maintaining a large military or a coherent foreign policy. See e.g. https://acoup.blog/2023/07/07/collections-the-status-quo-coalition/
That said, damaging the reputation of American hegemony would be a very bad outcome for a great many people, which as you note points toward the US defending Taiwan if it comes to that.
It's worth remembering that many historical empires were largely about trade. If you wanted to trade with India in the 1700s, you'd find that they didn't have sufficient trading infrastructure to trade with you; you needed to conquer India just to be able to buy some goddamn cardamom.
citation required. Or more bluntly, I believe you are largely talking nonsense.
People generally try to get more things and more power.
Countries are ruled by people who, generally want those things more than most.
It might not make much sense for Russia to slaughter it's own and Ukraine's youth in the war. But it makes a lot of sense for Putin, and he's in charge.
One thing you have to understand is that homicidal dictatorships, such as Russia and China, don't like seeing free independent states next door, especially if these states at one point used to be under their rule. They view these states as a threat to their power (as well as a personal insult), and they are not very wrong - these do give their subjects ideas. They value having their power unchallenged and their citizens docile. It's about the dictatorship's status quo (the satisfaction of really showing those who dare defy it is a bonus), not about any kind of gain for the country.
My dad was in China in the early 90s, and someone there asked him if Tiananmen Square really happened. If there are no "free" neighbors that you have to deal with, then you can avoid the issue of foreigners telling your repressed citizens what you clearly don't want them to know.
(He said yes, which in retrospect may have been dangerous but nothing came of it).
“Now, I get why the US wants a military empire. A hegemon that keeps the peace, controls the high seas and keeps global trade going is worthwhile for everyone.
But does it make sense for Russia or China to even *want* an empire? “
To keep the peace, control the high seas, and keep global trade going.
That’s what they would tell themselves anyway.
It does not presently make sense to build an Empire for the sake of maximizing per-capita GDP, and probably not even total GDP. And it can often be difficult for modern WEIRDs to understand that statecraft can have goals beyond GDP-maximization. But it is so.
Building an Empire has historically paid off in pride, power, status, and security. And it still does, even if it doesn't simultaneously boost your GDP. Many people really do value those things, as terminal goals. If nothing else, *having* an Empire means you aren't a subject or province of someone *else's* Empire. And lots of people really resent being part of someone else's Empire, will go to great and expensive lengths to avoid it, Even if the Empire does bring sanitation, medicine, education, roads, public order, etc.
To paraphrase some international relation realist points in the language of game theory, I think the point of becoming the hegemon (either locally or globally) is pursuing a sort of min-maxing strategy. If everyone in the world ganged up on the current hegemon (the US) they would likely still lose or suffer enough damage that they would desist. Same if everyone in Asia attacked China. So the hegemon survival is guaranteed even if everyone else attacks them. This seems the only way to ensure survival
Signing up for the current `rules based order' basically means signing up to be a vassal of the United States. That's actually a pretty good deal - our yoke is light - but it's not so hard to understand why a place that sees itself as a great power may not be willing to sign up for vassalage. See also this piece from Tanner Greer
https://scholars-stage.org/china-does-not-want-your-rules-based-order/
Good article. Thanks.
"Sure guys, we'll keep the peace, control the high seas, and keep global trade going! It's worthwhile for everyone! Don't worry, our troops are *everywhere*! Nothing at all for you guys to worry about! This doesn't give us any unfair advantages in any territory in your backyard or any leverage in any disputes! It's just great we have troops in your backyard and can stick a nuke there at any time! Just let the USA worry about the military stuff and keep eating your borsht/dim sum!"
At the very least, the Chinese want Taiwan. In their worldview, it's theirs, and given the civil war, it's more or less the equivalent of a little bit of the Confederacy holding out on, say, Cuba. There's also the geography; they could project force out a lot further, disrupting the US's chain of islands. There's also the argument Xi doesn't like having a bunch of Han Chinese with their own little island not subject to the CCP, but he hasn't tried to do much about Singapore.
As for Ukraine, it's where Russia started, more or less, and there's a lot of common history and the languages are almost the same. Putin has of course probably made a reunification impossible for the next several hundred years by invading the country and killing lots of Ukrainians. It may have been kind of the same country before, but it isn't now.
Deveraux's thesis, which I find persausive, is that military conquest was worth it (for the victors) up until around the industrial revolution, when a combination of factors vastly increased the destructiveness and opportunity costs of war while decreasing the returns, making it no longer worth it even for the victors (but then it took another couple wars before people really realized this.)
However, that doesn't mean that Putin is driven by an abstract cost benefit analysis. It's a matter of pride and prestige, not economics. Plus Putin assumed that Ukraine would roll over without a fight (as they did in 2014 and in southern Ukraine in 2021), which obviously makes the cost/benefit appear very different.
Even dictators need legitimacy in order to maintain their position. And if you can no longer get legitimacy via economic gains, the alternative is to stoke nationalism and gain legitimacy via restoring your people's rightful place in the world. As Asimov observed in Foundation, people will endure quite a bit of economic hardship for the sake of war, assuming you can propagandize it properly.
I think an abstract cost-benefit analysis may well support the invasion of Ukraine, provided that you analyse costs and benefits for Putin rather than for Russia.
The Devereaux thesis seemed accurate with respect to near peer wars between industrial powers in the early 20th century. [Colonial wars against pre-industrial states - which the European countries fought a lot of in the decades leading up to world war I - are outside scope for the thesis].
Is it true today? Unclear. Warfighting technology has changed a lot over the last 100 years, and the answer may well depend on whether you expect the war to look like Desert Storm or the Russian invasion of Ukraine.
It think it still holds for peer warfare today, because the basic economic reality remains the same. The thesis can be summed up as this:
1. Before the industrial revolution returns on capital investments were very low, and returns of acquiring land was very high.
2. Before the industrial revolution excess population could not be employed efficiently (once you have enough farmers for the land you have, there's not much else for them to do: "retraining" isn't really a thing when you need to apprentice for a decade to learn an artisanal trade).
3. Therefore, it made sense to spend money and people on warfare to acquire land: that was the best return on investment.
4. After the industrial revolution, returns on capital investments (like factories and machinary) skyrocket, far outperforming returns on acquiring more land.
5. After the industrial revolution, excess population can be employed profitably (you don't need much training to move from farming to factory work, and the more factory workers you have the more stuff you can make).
6. Since warfare kills workers and destroys capital investments, it is almost never profitable to go to war with a peer in the pursuit of gaining territory.
I think those assumptions still hold today. When peers fight today they don't fight for profit, they fight for something else. Usually security.
That is the explanation Peter Zeihan gave for why Russia invaded Ukraine, and before that Crimea. He believes the goal is to move the Russian border up to the geographic features (such as mountains) that would keep Russia safe from land invasion. Here's a transcript of a video he made about it:
"This is a map of the Russian space, and that green area is the Russian wheat belt. That is the part of Russia that is worth having where the weather is not so awful. It’s still awful…That you can’t grow crops can’t grow much. You get one crop of relatively low quality wheat because the growing season is very short. Summers are very hot and dry and windy and winters are very cold and dry and windy. If you move to the right, you’re in Tundra and Taiga. That’s the blue. If you go to the left, you’re in the desert. So north to tundra, south to desert.
"But what really drives the Russians to drink is the beige territory. Territories that even by Russian standards are useless. But they’re flat and they’re open and you can totally run a mongol horde through those. So what the Russians have always done is reached out past the green, tried to expand, get buffer space, get past that beige, that area that’s useless, and reach a series of geographic barriers where you can’t run a Panzer division through it and then forward position. They’re relatively slow moving, relatively low tech forces in the access points between during the Soviet period, the Russians controlled all of those access points. It was the safest that the Russians have ever been, and then they lost it all. And what they’ve been trying to do under Putin and Yeltsin both has been to re-expand back to those footprints so that they can plug the gaps, plug the places where the invaders would come, get static footprints, lots of troops right on the border where you can’t avoid them, you can’t outmaneuver them.
"And this has been what they’ve been trying to do. This is the Kazakh intervention in the Karabakh war and the Georgian war and the Donbas war and the Crimean War. This is what it’s all been about. Ukraine, unfortunately for the Ukrainians, is not one of these access points. It’s on the way to the two most important ones in Romania and Poland."
Yeah, what I think this thesis misses is the following
(1) There are goals other than economic (e.g. security, as you discuss)
(2) The thesis assumes your antagonist is a military peer and will fight. You might believe your antagonist will roll over without a fight, or that you can `desert storm' them. (The latter is where advances in military technology come in).
(3) The thesis also assumes that you are trying to maximize something like `total GDP of the area under your states control.' You might be trying to maximize something like `resources available to ruling class' (gaining legitimacy via conquest could entitle you to a larger slice of the pie. Or prevent you ending up with your head on a pike).
(4) Even the economic argument assumes that you are operating within the broad parameters of something like the current `rules based economic order.' This is a safe assumption for small or medium powers fighting regional wars, but not for players (mainly just the PRC) who might plausibly be contending for global hegemony - they might believe that if they won they could rewrite the entire system to one that favored them.
>Even the economic argument assumes that you are operating within the broad parameters of something like the current `rules based economic order.' This is a safe assumption for small or medium powers fighting regional wars, but not for players (mainly just the PRC) who might plausibly be contending for global hegemony - they might believe that if they won they could rewrite the entire system to one that favored them.f
The argument doesn't rest on there being rule of law: for both the despot and the democrat factories (and other capital investments) have a higher return than land itself. If you decide to roll back the clock and reverse the industrial revolution then your competitors who don't will outcompete you. You can't "change the rules" to get out of that one unless you somehow come up with the next Revolution in economics.
If anything despots are more beholden to this than others: they get their wealth by extracting through taxation and nationalization, the more wealth produced the more power they have.
The idea is not to "turn back the clock" and build an agrarian Empire. The idea is that the Empire's factories will be more profitable because they can draw on all the resources and sell to all the markets of the Empire's many provinces, as compared to the silly non-imperialist factory builders who are limited to the internal markets of a single nation. Or to doing business with an Empire that doesn't need them and will impose nearly crippling tariffs to make sure they get almost all the profit.
The current rules-based international order says that even would-be imperialists have to mostly open their markets to the WTO's standards, and makes the seas free for everyone. Which puts a damper on that sort of economic imperialism. But if the current rules-based order breaks, and a non-US Empire might very well break it, then all bets are off.
It assumes a framework for international trade, finance & relations which looks kinda sorta like what we have today. A new hegemon could remake that international system to one that looks very different - possibly in a way that favors the new hegemon (vis a vis the current system).
See: https://scholars-stage.org/china-does-not-want-your-rules-based-order/
This is not an option for small or medium powers considering regional wars - they can't remake the entire international system. But the PRC might believe that it could.
TIL: Up until 1911, Congress passed an apportionment law after every census which *manually* set the size of the House of Representatives and its allocation, typically increasing it every decade in response to the rapidly growing population. However, following the 1920 census, Congress was unable to agree on a new apportionment law and had to continue using the 1911 apportionment. They only managed to break the impasse in **1929**, when they compromised by establishing the current system where the House is fixed at 435 members forever* and reapportionment happens automatically.
* Except it apparently briefly went up to 437 when Alaska and Hawaii joined. I don't understand why they don't just keep it permanently higher when a new state joins so that other states don't have to automatically lose seats.
Presumably at some point the number of representatives would become unwieldy if it kept rising. Still, 435 does seem a bit arbitrary. Why not (The number of states)+400, or something like that? That would solve the problem of new states making it a zero-sum game.
I definitely support the "Wyoming Rule" idea, which has been around for a while now without gaining any particular political traction.
"increase the size of the United States House of Representatives so that the standard representative-to-population ratio would be that of the smallest state, which is currently Wyoming." So Wyoming gets 1 representative (as is guaranteed to every state by the Constitution), and then every other state gets 1 representative for each increment of 578,000 population which is the current total population of Wyoming. Based on the 2020 census that would result in a House of Representatives of 574 members.
Advantages of that plan are that it's clear, consistent, relatively easy to understand, the allocations change automatically not based on politicized processes e.g. gerrymandering, and it would eliminate the House's present disproportionality (which is not nearly as extreme as the Senate's of course but isn't trivial).
A potential disadvantage is that at some point the House could become so large as to be unwieldy *, but that seems a ways off. The UK's House of Commons has 650 members, Germany's Bundestag has 709, etc. Even if the Wyoming Rule was adopted the US would still have far more voters per House seat than is true in any other developed-world democracy.
(* "unwieldy" in ways different or moreso than it already is....)
Does anyone here use compounded semaglutide, and if so, can you report on your experience?
(context: Unsurprisingly, there's a semaglutide shortage. My doctor recently noted compounding pharmacies as a potential alternative source -- not so much as a recommendation, just "this is an option that exists". My initial googling turned up scary-sounding reports that might indicate that it's a bad idea, or might just be a FUD campaign. Before I dig deeper, I figured I would check if someone here already has.)
Related substance tirzepatide and I didn't bother with compounded - got it from overseas from the usual place everyone else gets it from.
My experience: after losing 50 pounds the hard way and still being 30-50lbs overweight on a multi-year plateau of trying damn near everything, so far I've lost 16 pounds in 12 weeks. I had all the GI side effects on the label but they were transient and could be managed with OTC stomach meds and minor diet changes (less dairy, more fiber). It's done things no other weight loss plan could do including high-risk drugs. No regrets, still doing, would do again.
I posed a philosophical question to some people which later occurred to me is relevant to the "body integrity" issue debated about kidney donation. The question was this: would you give up a pinky finger for $1 million? The finger is lost forever, so you cannot spend money to get it reattached, but prosthetic replacements would be fine.
I think those that value body integrity would decline the deal, and those that do not would accept it. With this EA audience, I would not be surprised if some people donated the money effectively instead of keeping it themselves.
The question continues, changing the amount to $1 billion (if you refused the first deal). This would be much harder to turn down, especially if you have a good idea of what $1 billion can actually do.
Yet I have considered this question in the past, and concluded I would refuse the deal, for I would be reminded every day, by the missing finger, that I effectively sold my soul to gain my current position. It should come as no surprise I would not choose to anonymously donate a kidney (though I applaud those that do).
Now I know you'll immediately ramp up to a billion, I'm gonna hold out for that.
Then I'll ask if you want a buy one get one half price deal.
And I'd have no worries about selling my soul. I'm very confident that regardless of what the soul is, it doesn't reside in the digits.
Since I'm a rich person and now know your mind, I'll offer $1 million, then offer $5 million, then walk away when you decline. You will remember missing out on $5 million for the rest of your life, at the mere cost of a useless digit.
This is a thought experiment meant to examine the value of things. No one would accept $1 million if they know $1 billion would be offered when it is declined.
Everyone can be bought for the right price, though that price varies by individual. Someone who will not yield at gunpoint may yield if a loved one is at gunpoint instead, or even a pet. Money is rather a nebulous concept, though, since it is really just promises of future goods and services.
This idea that you could renege on an offer got Musk into trouble, I don't think it would go well for super-rich-thought-you either.
Who is reneging? I offered you two offers in good faith, and you declined both in hopes of a better offer.
Besides, if I'm rich enough to be doing this, I bet I could get away with it. If I'm offering deals like this, *I* clearly have no significant morals.
Once we're playing the "would you for a million dollars" game, would you (take viagra if necessary and) rape a child for a million dollars if you knew that you'd get away with it.
As you can probably surmise, my question isn't really the question itself. The hypotheticals that can not be asked due to the nature of the arena within which we communicate casts into doubt the value of other conversations in the same medium.
I'm playing Socrates. And in case you're wondering why anyone would want to kill Socrates, now you know.
His questions were discomfitting ones which (stupid) people feared threatened their sanity and (smart) people feared threatened the public order - because the world is so full of stupid people.
Changing what you would do for the million changes the answer. Effectively this question is would you, under any circumstances, rape a child? I think most people would answer negatively.
I may donate a kidney to a stranger for some amount of money, but for me, $1 million isn't enough. I may donate a kidney to someone I know for free, depending on circumstances, such as why they need it, how well I know them, how long they would expect to get value out of it, how appreciative they would be of the donation, etc.
Except that wasn't really why anyone wanted to kill Socrates. They wanted to kill him because he was anti-democracy and pro-oligarchy right after Sparta won a long war against Athens and imposed a brutal oligarchical regime (the Thirty Tyrants) led by Critias, Socrates' former student. Before that, lots of people didn't like Socrates, but there was no serious attempt to kill him.
Wasn't it because of the way he answered questions?
This probably depends on how much you make, too. That's like 30 years' pay for me. I would give up a whole lot for 30 years of free time. Might be more beneficial to make it a relative amount; it's 10 years' pay for everyone, however much that is.
It may be that the amount must be tailored to the individual, but that is tough to gauge. $1 million qualifies for an awful lot of people. $1 billion gets the rest, except a very small number of people (less than 1000). It covers the financial question, making it only an ethical and/or moral one.
Considering that we're in an inflationary (possibly edging into hyperinflationary) era, I'd think twice before trading anything that can't be readily replaced (finger, kidney, ..., Bitcoin?) for "N years' wage" -- unless the counterparty can somehow be relied on to predict the future (and never renege on the deal under any circumstances.)
Would you, for that matter, agree to sign a contract with your current employer that would require you to work N years (for N=10, say) for precisely your current wage?
Wimpy, of Popeye fame, would disagree. I learned in a finance class that he is clearly the cartoon character with the clearest understanding of the time value of money.
"I will GLADLY pay you Tuesday for a hamburger today!"
My first job taught me the valuable lesson "never join anything you can't walk away from", so definite no to that one no matter the wage.
I wouldn't take the deal. My rates are: left pinky $2M, right $6M.
Here's a question for you: what do you think of the hoopla around Hashirama? Do you agree with the popular opinion that using his cells to increase human knowledge and save lives was a violation of his consent?
this all falls apart with one question: What does the rich guy get from asking for your pinky?
like you all are good utilitarians but the issue is the cruelty of the rich in asking you to be maimed and the power their wealth has to coerce you into fulfilling their desires.
the point i think for the general donation argument is again, the power of the wealthy or powerful, but this time the coercion is for the greater good. but no one needs to defend keeping their pinky just because some silly philosophers think all men should have them removed. no one must justify their right to wholeness to another man's ethical system. Morality is the social contract; ethical altruism is not a master and you are not a slave that you must justify yourself to it in terms of keeping a very basic part of yourself.
>What does the rich guy get from asking for your pinky?<
He's running an experiment; he's got an idea that having fewer fingers will make people healthier in the long run due to saved resources, and the removal of 10% of the world's fingernail clippings will keep our streets and rivers cleaner. But most people with wild pinky-less hands lost them in some form of confounder; recklessness, or prior health issues, or pissing off the Yakuza, you know how things go, and by "things" I mean "pinky fingers". So this rich guy believes in his idea strongly enough that he's willing to pay people a million dollars just to meet the conditions to help him prove it.
IIRC re: Yakuza, the chop was an "honest signal" for joining.
Which offers one possible answer to "what might one get, and from whom, in exchange for a finger."
he is willing to maim people for an idea or an experiment, you mean. He just needs guinea pigs for his whims. He cloaks it in "the greater good" but whats to stop him from wanting the index finger next for his next whim?
the money is an inducement and pressure. its to get people to disdain a perfectly fine thing-not letting a rich person use parts of my body for his own whims. If he cares about doing good there is no shortage of ways to do so. why would he choose a way that injures people?
Autonomy and coercion are the real issues, and altruism isnt that if it involves coercion to another person's ideas. and its a taste the rich may not give up so easily.
>altruism isn't that if it involves coercion to another person's ideas<
so... teach a man to fish, and you're a coercive monster?
Actually, in some cases -- in fact yes.
"Teach him to fish", but now let's also require him to purchase "fishing rights" from the State, with money that he never previously needed when he had been a subsistence farmer, but now has to earn at the market (competing with other impoverished fishermen), pay taxes on, lose to runaway inflation and currency manipulation, and so forth.
Well yeah, if you teach a man to fish and then burn his house down and punch his dog, you're the bad guy. Doesn't have much to do with the part where you teach him how to fish though.
Selling a body part seems shameful to me. It's hard to identify why that's the case; it's a bit like prostitution, you're selling something that really ought to be special and if you do it then it means you don't value yourself highly.
So I'd definitely hesitate about one million, which would be nice to have but isn't enough to fundamentally change the trajectory of my life.
I'd do it for a billion though, because one billion dollars is a lot.
Thank you! That's the connection I was trying to make but couldn't quite get to - it's like prostitution to me as well. I can see that there's value there (the prostitute makes money, the client gets sex, everyone seems happy with this arrangement) while still thinking that the whole thing feels wrong.
I also was thinking along the same lines of life-changing verses not. Something that allows me to buy more temporary material possessions but doesn't change my lifestyle should not be enough to change something important to me about how I live. Giving up a finger would bother me the rest of my life, so it better come with something significant to compensate.
The thing people tend to object to, I suspect, is the possibility of being _expected_ to do it.
In the same pattern as where e.g. having a car went from "wealthy people can go places quickly" to "ordinary people are expected to sit for hr+ in commute hell."
Similarly, "give up a finger for $million" is a very different proposition when picturing it as optional and rare, where you'll get to spend that million however you like, vs. "selling fingers legalized, and now a down payment for a house is whatever it used to be plus $mil in finger money, and if you don't like it, too bad, The Market has decided."
Sure, I'd take $1M (unless of course I heard that people got offered $1B after refusing, by someone who isn't named "Omega").
It's just a finger, it's not my soul. My body has picked up all sorts of scars and damage and imperfections over the years, but this one would actually make my life better.
Here's a question for you: what do you think of the hoopla around Henrietta Lacks? Do you agree with the popular opinion that using her cells to increase human knowledge and save lives was a violation of her consent?
Yes, I think something was taken from her without her consent and used to enrich others. By "enrich" I mean "profit off of". Taking something from someone else without their consent is stealing.
I realize her cells are now valuable in medical and biological research. Why should her estate not receive some form of compensation? A fair price is not, however, straightforward.
I agree when it comes to profit, sure, with some reasonable time limit for "intellectual property", like 20 years. But science should be "fair use".
The whole thing smacks unpleasantly of treating science like a lottery, and the desire to get rich for being a bizarre combination of unlucky and lucky. Some sci-fi story had a line about how "a human's genome belongs to his species", and I think that sums up my feelings nicely.
Further to the points made by S. elongatus, it may be worth noting that HeLa cells' genome is very different from the genome of Henrietta Lacks (e.g. they usually have 70-90 chromosomes). They are a useful tool, but they arguably aren't even human cells, and researchers have to be cautious when making predictions about human biology based on experiments using HeLa cells.
If we should compensate people for the use of cancer cell lines extracted from their bodies, we should probably also compensate people for viral or bacterial cell lines extracted from their bodies. (Perhaps the people whose COVID samples were used in research leading to vaccine development should be rewarded for their donations?)
Hm, so should we treat the cells as a separate organism that seceded from Henrietta Lacks? Since they were going to kill her, it's doubtful that she would be a beneficiary of their will...
"should we treat the cells as a separate organism that seceded from Henrietta Lacks?"
<mild snark>
Wouldn't it count as an externally coerced partition, from the cells' POV?
</mild snark>
That's one way of thinking about it.
Functionally, all the value from HeLa cells over the value of all other discarded similar clumps of tumor tissues comes from the work of the people who decided to not throw them away. It is that work ( and that of the people who researched them and made them a popular model) that is remunerated when researchers buy HeLa cells. Since I think it doubtful that Henrietta Lacks wanted those cells (they are tumors , after all) and I therefore assume they were taken from her with her consent, I do not think that her estate is owed anything. To me, this is actually similar to the reasoning used in patent law, which is not supposed to protect ideas, but only working implementations of ideas, since ideas do not have to be be workable/sensible/ remotely plausible. When developing (e.g.) anticancer drugs anybody can propose millions of wacky treatments : the hard part is proving that any of those ideas actually work, and that is what takes up oodles of research cash.
When paleontologists find a humanoid skeleton and decide to display it in a museum, to whom should they be sending the royalty cheques?
Nowadays, the answer is that they need to give it to the nearest Native American tribe for reburial.
Me.
The only correct answer! ;-)
I didn't realize Henrietta was dead when they harvested her living cells.
I didn't see anyone bring this up last time, but the bodily integrity debate has a long history. In the classical Greek and Roman worlds, circumcision was seen as repulsive, barbaric, and disgusting. Paul telling Christian converts that they didn't need to get circumcised played a big role in the rise of Christianity.
I've never heard this before and it doesn't make sense to me. Jews were not so common as for their use of circumcision to be a big deal to gentiles, and the gentiles already didn't circumcise their kids. Why would someone *also* saying don't worry about circumcision register at all, let alone help spread a religion?
"Jews were not so common as for their use of circumcision to be a big deal to gentiles"
Common enough in the Classical world that Hellenized/Romanised Jews were getting surgical procedures done to 'reverse' or disguise circumcision so that they wouldn't be identifiable at the gymnasium/baths. I think this led to a more extreme form of circumcision so that this kind of 'cheating' couldn't be done in future, let me look up online to see if my shaky memory is correct or if I'm just wildly hallucinating in the best mode of ChatGPT:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_circumcision#Hellenistic_world
"According to Hodges, ancient Greek aesthetics of the human form considered circumcision a mutilation of a previously perfectly shaped organ. ...This dislike of the appearance of the circumcised penis led to a decline in the incidence of circumcision among many peoples that had previously practiced it throughout Hellenistic times.
In Egypt, only the priestly caste retained circumcision, and by the 2nd century, the only circumcising groups in the Roman Empire were Jews, Samaritans, Jewish Christians, Egyptian priests, and the Nabatean Arabs. Circumcision was sufficiently rare among non-Jews that being circumcised was considered conclusive evidence of Judaism (or Early Christianity and others derogatorily called Judaizers) in Roman courts—Suetonius in Domitian 12.2 described a court proceeding (from "my youth") in which a ninety-year-old man was stripped naked before the court to determine whether he was evading the head tax placed on Jews and Judaizers.
...Some Jews tried to hide their circumcision status, as told in 1 Maccabees. This was mainly for social and economic benefits and also so that they could exercise in gymnasiums and compete in sporting events. Techniques for restoring the appearance of an uncircumcised penis were known by the 2nd century BCE. In one such technique, a copper weight (called the Judeum pondum) was hung from the remnants of the circumcised foreskin until, in time, they became sufficiently stretched to cover the glans. The 1st-century writer Celsus described two surgical techniques for foreskin restoration in his medical treatise De Medicina. In one of these, the skin of the penile shaft was loosened by cutting in around the base of the glans. The skin was then stretched over the glans and allowed to heal, giving the appearance of an uncircumcised penis. This was possible because the Abrahamic covenant of circumcision defined in the Bible was a relatively minor circumcision; named milah, this involved cutting off the foreskin that extended beyond the glans. Jewish religious writers denounced such practices as abrogating the covenant of Abraham in 1 Maccabees and the Talmud. During the 2nd century, the procedure of circumcision changed in order to become irreversible."
Sounds like intactivism has a long history!
You ready for a paradigm shift?
Christianity of course claimed to be Judaism. It was the ideal, or messianic, Judaism but definitely Judaism.
And in the early years of the church the primary selling point was indeed its Jewishness.
Judaism had been popular. So much so that the Temple had plenty of non-Jewish pilgrims and synagogue often had sections for non-Jews as well. See here, about 1 minute in, https://youtu.be/De5lWoTPTTY?feature=shared
People became Christian in order to join JUDAism.
The Christ part wasn't a big sell to the people who were already Jewish (by descent or ancestral conversion). Most Jews didn't buy in to it, especially the more "god having a body" parts of it.
Among gentiles however, great numbers of whom had been converting for many years already, the opportunity to join The People of The Torah was a huge draw, and Paul's offer to open the floodgates via the abrogation of all of the rules made it super very popular.
The major sale was not Jesus. He was just a Paulian means to open the floodgates for would-be converts who wanted to maintain the integrity of their genitals. What early Christians wanted and believed they were buying in to was being Jewish.
I don't mean that it actively helped spread Christianity, just that the opposite would have massively hurt its spread. There were rivals of Paul (including James, the brother of Jesus), who thought that Christians had to follow the Jewish laws--including circumcision and diet restrictions. Their version of Christianity lost out.
Yah, and it's even more than that. The only reason Christianity took off among gentiles was it's claim to be Judaism. See my comment above.
Judaism was insanely popular (particularly among the poor) and Christianity the equivalent pseudo-way in, akin to modern Reform Synagogues (particularly among the wealthy).
In the parts of the world where Paul was trying to convert people, Jews would have been common enough that the basics of their religion were understood.
If you're trying to convert people to some weird evangelical offshoot of Judaism then it seems natural that the first thing people are going to ask is "Hey, I hear Jews have to obey all sorts of weird rules involving food and mildew and penises, would I have to do that if I joined your religion?"
Mildew...🤔 Are you referring to Tzara'at of homes?
I'd be interested to see how that observation about Paul ties in with the prominent role females seen to have had in the spread of Christianity, at least in upper class situations. I'd also like to tie in the constant element of Christian thought that promoted abstinence...
No idea how (or if) it all ties together, but there's a fun line of research there.
I'd do it for a million. Plenty of people wear out their bodies and health in exchange for a lot less.
Good grief, I’d do it for a million without hesitation. Talk about our priceless and holy bodily integrity sounds to me like the crazy colonel in Dr Strangelove raving about “denying women my essence” during sex because he would be giving away some of his precious bodily fluids.
That's why Mandrake didn't help him. He had already lost his sacred bodily integrity in WW2.
You see, the string in his leg was gone. Otherwise he'd *love* to help the colonel...
https://youtu.be/uonYyotd3TQ?feature=shared
> I’d do it for a million without hesitation
You and, say, 100 million other people.
And soon a house costs whatever it did previously _plus_ however much a finger sells for.
This is precisely why selling organs is (at least nominally) banned in all civilized jurisdictions.
See also e.g. 40 hour work week.
I dunno about that. I know a couple realtors and they’re having a terrible time selling houses even without asking for pinkies — which, as you say, many people would
be willing to do, but certainly not everybody. If they expected everybody to throw the price of a pinkie into the deal they’d cut down on the number of potential
customers.
And here’s another thing that weighs against your idea. I’m pretty sure pinkies aren’t worth anything like a million dollars, even if transplanting them were
quick and easy and the receiver did not need to take anti-rejection drigs, which reduce resistance to both infections and cancer. I mean there’s not a lot of demand, is there? How often do you see someone with a missing pinkie? And out of those few people missing a pinkie, how many of them do you think would go to the trouble of replacing the finger even if they could get a new one for a mere. $1000? Do you know that many women who have a mastectomy decide not to have breast replacement surgery —
because it involves additional procedures, and you don’t have sensation in the new fake breast, and you also don’t have a nipple. You have to get a nipple tattoo, and they look fake. So I’m thinking the demand for pinkies is really pretty low, and anyone buying them for a million dollars each would not be apple to recoup his outlay. My guess is the most he could pay for pinkies is like $500.
I assumed that the finger in the hypothetical was a stand-in for more typical transplantology (in an alt-universe patterned after the musical "Repo Man", perhaps)
You can freely replace "buying house" with any of the other things people in USA and its satellites routinely find themselves doing (e.g. cancer treatment) at the price of selling everything they own and still ending up in bankruptcy. Would you want your fingers (or whatever other parts) to be fair game in bankruptcy proceedings? Valid collateral for loans? Or even a source of quick cash that can be used to further bid up the cost of life?
Yeah, OK, but that changes the whole topic of discussion. OP asked about selling a pinkie because he knew most people would not be terribly disturbed about the loss of a pinkie, *unless* they had an objection springing from the idea that "body integrity" is very valuable and important. The people who are answering on here would be answering a different way if the question was about selling a kidney or a chunk of liver. I'd still consider it, for a million dollars, but would have to research it first to see what my immediate and long-term risks would be. Not a lot of point in selling a piece of one's innards if one's not going to be around to enjoy the money.
You’re saying you sold your soul. That seems like an extreme choice of words for giving up a body part.
If selling your pinky finger means selling your soul - What terms would you use if you murdered someone for fame and glory?
To answer your question: I would maybe (30-50%) do it for a million, and definitely (99%) for a billion
I am put in mind of a fictional wizard who stored his life in the tip of his little finger (the distal phalanx), and hid it away. I suppose in that particular case it might be considered somewhat accurate, although it was still a life and not a soul.
I maintain my stance. The "selling of my soul" isn't losing the body part as much as the terms of the agreement. There is an old joke/story:
Churchill: Madam, would you sleep with me for 5 million pounds?
Socialite: My goodness … well, I suppose.
Churchill: Would you sleep with me for 5 pounds?
Socialite: What type of woman do you think I am?
Churchill: We’ve already established that. Now we are haggling about the price.
Recall I'm not losing the body part for any noble or selfless reason, but to make myself rich.
I've always disliked that story. A big enough quantitative difference is a qualitative difference, and, to my mind, a factor of a million easily qualifies.
I don't agree. The story is illustrative. It is true that the quantitative difference can have an impact on the net result, but this is not, I think, one of those cases.
If you will trade sex for money, then by definition you are a whore in character, whether or not you actually do it. If you think nothing is morally wrong with that, that it is only society that imposes restrictions on the outlook, then that is your prerogative. Many societies have even exalted prostitutes, and the second socialite's response may well have been something like "You're kind of out of touch with the economy, aren't you?"
Hmm... I appreciate that you are not phrasing this in an inflammatory way, and are allowing for the fact that there are differences in opinion. I still think that the factor of a million makes a qualitative difference.
Let me put it another way: Regardless of whether sex work is considered exalted or degrading in a society, "work" or "prostitution" usually has the connotation of a _routine_ activity, something that someone does repeatedly. Trading a single night of sex for a king's ransom might well be a once-in-a-lifetime act, which I think can reasonably be put in a different category.
I once spoke briefly with a judge about a minor traffic ticket. That doesn't make me a lawyer.
I appreciate your point, but still think this comes down to a matter of opinion. Many examples can illustrate that one act doesn't put you in a specific category, but that doesn't prove the larger point that doing a specific thing once can put you in a category. For a positive example, if you do a single heroic act, you are forevermore a hero(ine).
If you believe you are compromising your principles for money, that shows the kind of person you are. And it is your choice how you perceive yourself.
Why is it intrinsically bad to trade sex for money? Is it also bad to give skillful, completely non-sexual massages in exchange for money? How about renting out your mental talents, which is how most of us pay for food and shelter?
I never said it was. Some people think it is. Some people think one should not have sex outside of marriage. If you find nothing wrong with it why should you care whether someone is labeled a prostitute?
Regardless, one who accepts money in exchange for sex is a prostitute. "a person, in particular a woman, who engages in sexual activity for payment." directly from Google. A whore is "a prostitute, derogatory" (ibid).
I agree. It's just a mean trick, a gotcha.
Yes.
“Would you burn a square centimeter of your skin with a lighter so that a scar will remain in exchange for one billion dollars?”
“Yes, of course.”
“And would you let me cut off your legs in exchange for one dollar?”
“Are you crazy?”
“Well we already established you are willing to sell your soul. We are just haggling over the specific way in which to conduct the transaction.”
Many Thanks! Yes, indeed just a gotcha.
I think that was the illustrious Lady Astor.
Not only would I sell a pinkie for a million dollars, I would have slept with Churchill for free. So either I'm a slut who'd sell her soul or some of you people need to lighten up.
Surely there are men you could substitute for W. Churchill that would make the hypothetical into a proper dilemma again.
But I don't want a substitute for for W. Churchill, asciilifeform. I want Winston. He's a fat alcoholic, but very smart and funny.
The question is whether Churchill would want to sleep with someone with only nine fingers though?
"Mr Churchill, would you sleep with a woman who had ten fingers?"
"Yes, certainly"
"Well then, would you sleep with a woman who had one million fingers? Just an eldritch abomination of a woman, all squirming wriggling fingers and no body?"
So I guess I am struggling to find a good reason why selling a body part is different from certain other things we do for money. For example, trading healthy lungs for a coal miner’s wage.
Certain jobs require physical sacrifice to a degree that the people doing such jobs might trade a pinky for a healthy hip or spine, say. I haven’t asked him, but I could imagine my grandfather making exactly that trade.
In the logic of your anecdote, these people have sold their soul and are now just haggling over which body part will represent that transaction
As an example of voluntarily damaging the body, how about having babies? Leaves the woman with hemorrhoids, stretch marks, a weakened pelvic floor and a substantially increased chance of incontinence in old age.
Oh man, if I could have traded a pinky for 10 months of pregnancy and childbirth, I would have done it in a heartbeat!
How one feels about the transaction is the difference. It is an issue of integrity, how well you can live with yourself after your decision.
Some of these aren't transactions because the deals are made in ignorance. I think no one outside of gunpoint would trade healthy lungs for a coal miner's wage if they knew the consequences of the transaction. It also wouldn't count if a risk taken turns out poorly, such as driving for a living and ending up disabled from a traffic accident.
If one must do it to survive I think that excuses the ethics involved somewhat, too. If one must work the only available job, and it happens to be coal-mining, is the choice between sacrificing your lungs and starving to death?
It seems to me that your argument goes something like this:
1. Giving up bodily integrity in exchange for money is wrong.
2. It is wrong because if I did it, I would feel like I gave up my integrity.
Sorry, I must not have been clear. I mean I can understand the point of view of giving a kidney to a stranger is not a good choice. Body integrity is one reason given in the other topic, and I think this reasoning is similar.
At the same time, I respect the decision to do it. Your values are your values, and you ought to believe what seems genuinely best for moral and ethical reasons.
I put a high price on my own integrity, and would not want someone to buy an irreplaceable part of me for what I consider to be bad reasons. I will earn money my own way, not by selling even apparently useless parts of myself.
I would have to seriously consider this deal as a pinky finger may have value apart from pure body integrity. I play piano, and it would be a significant burden in this respect.
A pinky toe may be a better example.
Point taken. It seems a pinky toe is less valuable than a pinky finger.
I would also note that it would be harder to notice, I assume, a missing pinky toe than a missing pinky finger, so I must consider whether I would change my answer based on that.
The Israeli administration's latest hilarity : Hamas is literally Hitler.
From https://www.timesofisrael.com/herzog-arabic-copy-of-mein-kampf-found-on-hamas-terrorist-shows-what-war-is-about/ :
> President [of Israel] Isaac Herzog on Sunday displayed an Arabic-language version of Adolf Hitler’s autobiographical manifesto “Mein Kampf” that he said was found in a children’s room used as a base by terrorists in the northern Gaza Strip.
> “The terrorist wrote notes, marked the sections, and studied again and again the ideology of Adolf Hitler to hate the Jews, to kill the Jews, to burn and slaughter Jews wherever they are,” he said. “This is the real war we are facing.”
In what is possibly the most low-effort propaganda act by a head of state in the 21st century so far, the guy didn't even think of planting the book in a room or on a dead body, his audience's intelligence is apparently not even worth a staged video to him. In the bizarro world in his head, it's enough to hold a translated copy of Mein Kampf to declare any armed militia speaking the same language to be literally Hitler.
Is this real? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=illF1vt5g1Q
I have never seen it before on TV, but yes it looks real. It has an English and Arabic wikipedia pages.
Hey, wuddup my bro. I was glad to see you carry on pleasant conversations, even with Israelis, in a recent thread. Good on you. 🙏
As for the particular point you raise, we have a problem in this world. Well, many problems, but here's one.
The human mind, and certainly the collective mind of large demographics and societies is hackable.
Ergo, why engage in logic - EVEN IF LOGIC PROVES YOUR CASE - when Mein Kampf 4 Kids works so much more efficiently?
As you probably know, Mein Kampf *is* actually discussed in Gazan schools and television among other iffy resources regarding "the jewish problem", so even if Herzog ordered this on BabyAliBabba.com rather than prying it from a bearded Palestinian kid in a cradle, his point is fair.
But why embarass himself to even mention it when he knows how silly he looks to literally everyone Jew, Christians, Hindu, Buddhist, Secular and Miscellaneous? *
Because unfortunately we all share a vast social mind out there and therefore the low-information, low-intelligence and loud people not only have a vote but they effectively have a veto on the social discourse. And a cartoon book about Hitler is *exactly* the level that this crowd operates on.
It goes without saying that propaganda is how *nearly all* of society, business, politics and general pseudo consensus building runs in this, the year 2023 anno domini. We aren't really human beings anymore. The best among us are Winston Smiths, hiding in the cavities of our own craniums.
It's why I went super public. Because FUCK those people. I want to be an individual and to speak for myself. And even if nobody at all joins me, it's so unbelievably worth it. Trust me.
______________
*Miscellaneous* is my repurposing a Simpsons joke, not a genuine dig. I'm sorta Muslim myself, see here, https://youtu.be/3ffoCIjmd7w?feature=shared .
The point I completely failed to make is, what do you, personally, yes you, do when you find something like this and no one believes you?
I've been in a situation where it's been my word against that of a liar, and people chose to believe the liar. Whatever I tried to show as evidence was dismissed. It's a nasty place to be in. Maybe you've been in a similar place, or perhaps are in a similar place? Sometimes the unlikely event happens, and what do you do then?
Replying to both of your comments here.
> Is there anything you would believe, aside from body counts?
Yes, here are - off the top of my head - all the things I believed about Israeli victims :
1- The kidnapped Brodutch family : https://scottaaronson.blog/?p=7569
2- A would-have-been bride recounting the story of how her would-have-been husband was killed : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_zXT-jtNnO4
3- The wife and 2 daughters of the same man kidnapped : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qPLJWndPg1c
As examples.
I send them to all people I know that I see dehumanizing the Israelis.
I believe everything that doesn't have the smell of a genocidal state all over it.
> Sometimes the unlikely event happens, and what do you do then?
To begin with, in this analogy I'm supposed to be a good man who wasn't caught flagrantly lying before, right ? I never before, say, killed a journalist [1] and kept claiming for a year it wasn't me, or - maybe maybe perhaps - I never crushed a peace activist [2] under a bulldozer and later claimed she's the one responsible ? I surely wasn't caught just 3 weeks before [3] brandishing irrelevant autobiographical periodical from Al-Qaeda that could be found in Google's first search result for its name [4] and claimed it's some exclusive Al-Qaeda document that Proves Something ? I definitely didn't bomb a hospital and kept releasing fake piece of evidence after fake piece of evidence [5] in the desperate bid to prove it wasn't me, even as I continue targeting and surrounding other hospitals were literal babies are depending on the electricity I'm cutting to stay alive [6] ?
If I'm a remotely honest man with no such prolific history of lying, I will stand my ground and keep telling my version of the story, and the liar would probably keep inventing lies till his/her lies contradict each other and I win. If I don't win, that's okay too, Life is often unfair. The good guys don't have to win.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shireen_Abu_Akleh
[2] https://rachelcorriefoundation.org/rachel
[3] https://news.sky.com/story/hamas-terrorists-were-carrying-instructions-on-how-to-make-chemical-weapons-israeli-president-claims-12990547
[4] https://www.scribd.com/doc/26489249/%D8%A7%D9%84%D9%86%D8%B4%D8%B1%D8%A7%D9%84%D8%AF%D9%88%D8%B1%D9%8A%D8%A9-%D8%A7%D9%84%D9%85%D8%B9%D9%86%D9%8A%D8%A9-%D8%A8%D8%A7%D9%84%D8%AA%D8%B7%D9%88%D9%8A%D8%B1-%D8%A7%D9%84%D8%B0%D8%A7%D8%AA%D9%8A-%D9%88%D8%A7%D9%84%D9%85%D8%B9%D8%B1%D9%81%D9%8A-%D9%84%D9%84%D9%85%D8%AC%D8%A7%D9%87%D8%AF%D9%8A%D9%86-%D8%A7%D9%84%D9%86%D8%B4%D8%B1%D8%A9-%D8%A7%D9%84%D8%AB%D8%A7%D9%84%D8%AB%D8%A9
[5] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=29uMPcm-Bug
[6] https://edition.cnn.com/2023/11/15/middleeast/shifa-hospital-gaza-idf-intl/index.html
So, the glorious future where all government officials and employees wear bodycams to prevent abuse of power got derailed by specious protests over privacy. And now we're entering the future where AIs can fake videos, although fortunately it's not past the ability of humans to detect, at least not today, I think.
But even putting that aside, if you were presented with bodycam video of someone picking up this book in a room in Gaza, that could easily be faked by one person, right? If there were more people in the footage, that'd make it harder to fake without someone spilling the beans, but we have to assume that most IDF members hate Hamas and desperately want to cut off their international support, so it might not be too hard to find people to support this one small lie. Same if there were a running gun battle with Hamas; police everywhere have been known to carry fake evidence with them to plant on suspects, and it's not hard to toss an object behind your back.
Is there anything you would believe, aside from body counts? Because even those can be exaggerated, and there are the reports of Israeli "friendly fire", and frankly I suspect any "friendly fire" by Hamas would be blamed on the Israelis.
I don't understand. Are you saying it's false or planted, simply because the idea is so outlandish? I see Fox News also picked up the story. I thought Hamas's stated goals included eliminating all Jews, and this is consistent with that.
I wouldn't put it beyond Hamas to read Hitler approvingly and take notes.
What I'm mocking about this circus is this :
- The utter and total contempt the Israeli head of state has for the pro-Israel and on-the-fence intellects he's targeting with this cheap piece of propaganda. Imagine if an Arab head of state were to go into an interview or a public speech and hold a Hebrew-translated Mein Kampf copy, claim it was found with an Israeli soldier or a Kibbutz, and then run with that as a base to build his decisions and reasoning on.
___What___ is the actual evidence that this particular copy of the book was a Hamasi-owned one ? It's just a bloody book. He could have bought it on his way to the interview. That's why autographs exist, I can't hold a book and claim "Akscually this is the exact same copy that Albert Einstein used to study with, look at all the notes and highlights". You or any other person with a brain wouldn't accept this in literally any other context.
I'm laughing because this is the exact same thing I often laugh at Muslims at, the bizarre belief that "This book exists, therefore my argument". Where did that book come from ? And where's the evidence that the source they say it's from is actually where it comes from ?
So if they show a picture of the book where it was found, all your problems are solved? Or actually, it makes no difference at all, and if you trust this guy/the Israeli government then it's relevant and if you don't then it's not?
Lol no, his screen name is "[...]HatesIsrael", do you really expect impartial weighing of evidence?
No, a photo of the book "where it was found" wouldn't convince me either, because I don't trust genocidal governments, which are most/all governments.
A photo *would*, however, make this guy less a tempting object of mockery. At least there is something, even if I don't believe that something. What I'm shocked at is not the lies, it's the flagrant lies, the lies that reveal the liar either believes his audience has IQ that water would freeze at or he himself has that IQ.
It's what the "PUA" folks call a "shit test."
Similarly to e.g. the miraculously incombustible passports of the 9/11 hijackers.
Dude, just stop. Go away. A couple of weeks ago, the stuff you posted might have contained some valid points here and there, but this is just sad and pathetic. I don't even know what you're arguing for here.
Funny how a couple of weeks and 11,000+ innocent deaths changes things so much. A couple of weeks ago, me making fun of this show of propagandaship might have had "some valid points here and there" according to you, but now you're apparently too offended to see any value in it.
> I don't even know what you're arguing for here.
Technically speaking, Open Thread is a call to, in Scott's words, "Post about anything you want, ask random questions, whatever." I want to post an anecdote that shows Israel is a genocidal state that kills countless innocents under rather flimsy and quite laughable justifications, so I do. There is no argument in my comment, there doesn't have to be in a lot of Open Thread comments, just a statement of fact and my own interpretation of that fact.
> this is just sad and pathetic
I agree, the false flag department in Mossad is absolutely not sending their best. From the destruction of the USS Liberty all the way now to "Literally Hitler", not a stellar track record at all.
"Laughable" is a funny word to use when accusing someone of genocide. Find a lot of humor in the situation?
I do, stupidity and child-tier lying are funny even if the one doing them happens to be genocidal scum.
There's more than a touch of irony in that statement.
That so ?
Don't deflect. In your original post, you're pretending that it's unthinkable that even some members of Hamas want to eradicate all Jewish people. So much so, that any evidence along that direction must obviously be fake and propaganda. Give me a break.
If you want to be a troll, piss off to Reddit.
You read things into my comment that weren't there. I don't put it beyond some or most or all Hamas members to read Hitler with passion and take notes. The fakeness and the propaganda isn't because I think Hamas are philo-semites.
The fakeness and propaganda comes from someone who thinks his audience is dumb enough and incapable of critical thinking enough that they will unquestionably believe him that a pristine book copy is from a bombed-to-oblivion warzone based on nothing but the language the book copy is in and his "trust me bro" babbling. The idea that Hamasis might read Hitler isn't ridiculous on face value, his claim that an Arabic-translated book copy constitutes convincing evidence that an actual concrete Hamasi was reading Hitler is the laughable nonsense I'm mocking.
Asking for clarifcation is free and is better than jumping to conclusions.
Right, so it's actually completely plausible and you admit that. You actually agree with his point about Hamas. You just believe it's propaganda which you would regardless.
I disagree with flagrant genocidal lying, that's all. After all, Hitler wasn't actually wrong by much when he said that Jewish financiers controlled Banking in his time, but I wouldn't say that I agree with Hitler because some of the points he's making (with copious amounts of lies) are plausible and even occasionally happen to land on reality.
Anyone successfully managed to find a way to treat airplane headaches? (Headaches caused by the change in pressure when an airplane starts descending for landing)
Google just suggests various painkillers, which don't really work and also seems like it's treating the symptom more than the cause.
Basically, whenever the plane starts descending, I need to swallow every 10 seconds to equalize the pressure until landing (unlike a normal person who only needs to do this every 10 minutes or so), or I will get an "arnold schwarzenegger on the surface of mars" level headache . I currently treat this by drinking water and chomping on chips nonstop during the descent, which.. I guess is not the worst thing in the world, but there's still a lot of distress involved, so I'm very open to ideas
I've never seen descent specific headaches, but I often get headaches while flying just due to sleep deprivation and confinement and so on.
Not sure whether this would do anything for airplane headaches, but I’ll toss it out in case it would. It’s a Reddit post describing a weird procedure for clearing a stuffy nose, and when I tried it it actually worked. https://www.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/6f011c/comment/dieeu2t/
The effective way of doing this is clearing your ears like divers do: https://www.divein.com/diving/diving-ears/
Yep, I was about to say the same thing. I learned all about this when I took a scuba diving course some years back, and now I use it pretty much every time I'm on a plane.
Thanks for the link, I found that very useful.
I use the special earplugs commenter soda suggested, they do help.
Anecdotally plane specific earplugs (available at most pharmacies and a lot of terminal convenience/book stores) used according to the instructions help a lot, particularly if your headaches are more towards your ears.
If more general but typically minor sinus issues are contributing then using a breath right strip and/or just trying to get your sinuses actual medical attention while you're one the ground are obvious things to try. Anecdotally, sinus massages in flight can help, but the evidence is pretty slim https://www.healthline.com/health/relieve-sinus-pressure
I have been by an ENT and he suggested nasal sprays, so I tried a Xylometazoline based one, and while it definitely cleared up my sinuses, it had close to no impact on the pressure building up :/
I bristled at your mention of earplugs, as in-ear headphones definitely makes the situation much worse...
But googling "plane specific earplugs".. These look super interesting!
Pressure filtering ear plugs sounds exactly like a thing that could help, thanks!
"The modern Japanese writing system uses a combination of logographic kanji, which are adopted Chinese characters, and syllabic kana. Kana itself consists of a pair of syllabaries: hiragana, used primarily for native or naturalised Japanese words and grammatical elements; and katakana, used primarily for foreign words and names, loanwords, onomatopoeia, scientific names, and sometimes for emphasis. Almost all written Japanese sentences contain a mixture of kanji and kana. Because of this mixture of scripts, in addition to a large inventory of kanji characters, the Japanese writing system is considered to be one of the most complicated currently in use.[1][2][3]"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_writing_system#Collationz
And people complain about spelling in English!
Maybe people complain about Japanese orthography, too, but I don't see it because they're doing it in Japanese. Maybe there are people who say fuck it, and experiment with writing everything in kana.
Maybe the issue is that English is relatively close to being phonetic (80%, I'm told) so it seems like an easy solution should be possible. Easy solutions ignore how dependent people are on word shape when they read.
How much difference does having a phonetic language make for a culture-- it seems like a lot of valuable learning time for children gets sucked up when there's a lot to learn about spelling, but do cultures with phonetic spelling (Hebrew, Spanish, probably more I don't know) show an advantage?
Is there a good way to evaluate the complexity of a language, including spelling, complicated grammar, arbitrary gender for nouns, etc.? I know there's research on how difficult various languages are for Anglophones to learn (the military has a rating system) but is there anything for overall processing effort for native speakers of various languages?
1. English also uses two alphabets - uppercase and lowercase. They even each have a special cursive form used for emphasis. It also commonly uses logographic characters, and sometimes even a mixture of logographs and letters. (Not to the extent Japanese does, but also not to the extent that an average user could be unfamiliar with the concept. )
2. Plenty of modernist reformers in Japan wanted to switch to phonetic writing, especially post-ww2 when wide-reaching reforms suddenly became possible, but the conservatives delayed the changes long enough that the problems it was supposed to solve simply disappeared. (Phonetic-only system was hoped to be easier to learn and to process, but it turns out you can in fact teach everyone kanji if you just introduce universal public education, and unicode removed all technological benefits of lower character count.) Last I paid attention, the wider public wanted more, not less, kanji. (On the other hand, the overall kanji use probably keeps decreasing with a steady introduction of English loanwords.)
3. Japanese is almost perfectly phonetic. The kids learn the language in near-perfectly regular, extremely simple syllabary, and only then slowly acquire logographic symbols that, once learned, are simply more efficient to use. Their writing system is complex in the same way that mathematical notation is complex. "One plus one is two" may be "easier" in a sense, assuming you know letters but not numbers and symbols. It ceases being easier once you need to do arithmetic regularly - I assume you wouldn't use phonetic notation for it. There's a matter of diminishing returns here, of course, the 2000th symbol you learn will not be as useful as the first, but the question is where the cut-off should be. Personally, I don't think Japan's slightly above 2000 (officially, plus hundreds more in, unofficial, regular use) is all that unreasonable.
4. But yeah, the lack of punctuation because kanji are assumed to be used for all non-inflected parts of words is a huge self-own.
Thankfully, it's no longer that important to learn to write kanji, since everything is digital nowadays. You just need to be able to spell words and read kanji (which, to be fair, is still awful since every kanji has multiple readings) and you're mostly fine. In fact, it seems a lot of Japanese people are forgetting how to write kanji because of this...
As for the actual consequences, Japanese students still seem to be doing much better than American students despite so much of their time being wasted on learning to read and write 2136 different characters. Either the American education system sucks that much, or the Japanese population really is superior to Americans in some way... It's probably the former.
And if you're wondering why people haven't tried writing in kana, people have tried that plenty of times, sometimes out of necessity. Some old Japanese video games like the first two Zelda games have all of their text in katakana, and it's a huge pain in the ass to read. Kanji really is easier to read once you're used to it, not to mention how space efficient it is.
Anecdote:
I had a friend, last name Stoneburner, who wanted to buy property in Japan. He needed to open a local bank account. He went to the bank, and when they had trouble spelling his name, he was asked to provide a printout with all possible spellings in Japanese. He complied, and returned with a printout that ran for *multiple pages*.
He later took his wife's Japanese last name for bureaucratic simplicity.
Alphabets (or otherwise phonetic systems) tend to be widely recognized as better. Even a thousand years ago you had pressures to reform away from character systems. King Sejong of Korea asked why so few of his people were literate and his officials said it was the necessity of learning characters so he invented an alphabet. The Mongols also abandoned characters for alphabets as did the Egyptians (with hieroglyphics sticking around mostly for use as priests). Many East Asian countries did in modern times with Japan and China being the exceptions. We also know that learning character systems take years while most alphabets can be learned in a few weeks. (To return to Sejong, his ministers said a wise man could learn characters in a year and a fool in ten years. But a wise man could learn an alphabet in a day and a fool in ten days.)
This is separate from general complexity. I'm not aware of a specific rating system but we do know that things like morphological features fall away among young or amateur speakers. Likewise when you get creoles or pidgins you tend to find they lose things like inflections or morphology.
As someone who has been learning Japanese for some 4 years, I complain about it a lot.
> Maybe there are people who say fuck it, and experiment with writing everything in kana.
Reading kana-only text is actually very hard, because Japanese doesn’t use spaces, and has a lot of words which are compounds of single-syllable bases; these are easily disambiguated when written in kanji but a nightmare when in part of a sea of kana.
Example: a sentence starting with きょうしつ “kyōshitsu”. The first syllable could be 今日, “today”, and the second and third 質, “quality”; or they could be one word, 教室, “classroom”; or the first two could be 教師, teacher, and the final syllable part of a different word following. And so on with every kana group.
If you're writing kana-only text, why not just add spaces?
Japanese books for young children are typically kana-only. I don't have any close by to check, but from memory I think they mostly use half-width spaces rather than the full-width spaces mentioned by あの人. I wouldn't say any of the other obstacles they mention are insuperable, either: it's more just that mixed kana/kanji text is what people are used to and find easiest to read, so they stick with that. (Similarly, you would probably find it difficult to read books in phonetic English spelling. Adults who already know how to read have a vested interest in not changing the system to a new one that they would have to learn.)
Well it’s hard to say why, given something rarely done to begin with, why it’s not done a certain way, but some possibilities:
The default space in Japanese keyboard layouts is a “full width space” and makes the text very low information density:
がくせい だけ てす から よく しらない。
Beginner’s textbooks have text like this, and it becomes painful to read very quickly.
Because spaces are generally not used, there are no conventions to fall back on, and you have to make lots of choices:
- does 十二月, jūnigatsu, lit. “ten two moon,” meaning December, take any spaces?
- where do spaces around particles, which attach to the word preceding them, go?
- how about verb conjugations (which can be very long, eg とらわれなかったら) and adjective declensions
- and then there’s all the compound nouns that you need to decide where any spaces go
And of course, it might not cross your mind, the same way it rarely crosses my mind in English text to disambiguate homonyms by using kanji
Even in English, it's often hard to decide whether to use spaces, hyphens, or nothing when writing compound words (E.g. is boardgame one word or two?) and I'm constantly fighting the spellcheckers about that sort of thing. Especially since a lot of neologisms jam words together without spaces because it's more fun that way.
Anthropic is currently hiring for a non-AI research role that I am (plausibly) qualified for. I know that that have a much stronger safety emphasis than most AI companies, but feel a bit wary of working for anyone doing capabilities research. If we assume for the sake of argument that I would be better than the hypothetical replacement candidate is anyone willing to make an argument for why I should(n't) apply.
I'd argue that you're just delaying the inevitable by refusing to aid capabilities research. I feel that a lot of the fear around aiding capabilities research is counterproductive. If the smartest people refuse to work on AI to give people more time to work on "alignment research," slightly less intelligent people are going to end up developing AI anyways... except they'll just ignore all of that research, and the AI will end up killing everyone, including itself. If the smartest people just worked on developing AI instead, at least there will be a slightly higher chance that they can make the AI like us enough to not kill us all and instead let us live happy lives forever.
You shouldn't apply if you are prone to self deception (which we all are to some degree). Imagine yourself working there a couple of years from now, an amazing salary, intersting work, great colleagues etc. You are asked to work on something new that they assure you is good for safety but you think will actually mostly drive capabilities. You make your best case for your position and lose. It isn't clear what would happen if you refuse to work on the project. Would they fire you, maybe? What do you do?
Does anyone else think that this photo looks like n zbhagnva cbxvat guebhtu n ynlre bs pybhqf at first glance? It's an interesting illusion.
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/8/86/Cono_de_Arita_en_el_Salar_de_Arizaro.jpg
Yes, and I found it quite disturbing to look at, somehow.
That's what I saw at second glance. At first glance I thought it was n clenzvq.
Same here.
I don't know if you're joking or not, but in case you are serious, the photo is actually of n angheny uvyy va gur zvqqyr bs n fnyg syng. Gung'f fnyg, abg sbt.
Well, good job trolling me, I guess? Can someone please tell me why everyone in this thread is speaking gibberish?
It's rot13, used to hide spoilers. You can put it into any rot13 encoder online to see what it says, but it means that you don't accidentally see the spoilers just by casually reading the comments.
Oh.
It's not just you, I thought I had stumbled across some kind of cryptic cult before I figured out it was rot13!
Unfortunately, it doesn't seem like Substack comments support any form of formatting, so I couldn't figure out a way to hide the url.
TIL: The streets of ancient Kyoto were significantly wider than they are today. Apparently, Kyoto was originally a planned city on a grid with massive streets. It's a striking counter the usual trope of old cities having narrow streets because they weren't designed for cars.
It was because Kyoto was an entirely artificial city made by the Emperor to be his capital. It was designed by people who fetishized the Tang and based on the Tang capital. The Tang liked grid plans and wide streets. They also liked lakes and canals which the Japanese also copied. As did the Koreans at points. Then again, there are worse plans than to simply find a well designed historical city and then copying it.
And once again, the Japanese have invented it first: even the "LARPing being rational by placing things in evenly-spaced rectangular grids" https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/03/16/book-review-seeing-like-a-state/
From what I know about the Tokugawa shogunate in general, and the consolidation of power by Oda Nobunaga, Toyotomi Hideyoshi, and Tokugawa Ieyasu, they were very very much into legibility.
On the one hand, this is true. The household registration system implemented by the Tokugawa shogunate has left us some of the best demographic data in the world from that period.
On the other hand, the urban layout of Edo/Tokyo doesn't illustrate this at all. The street plan is notoriously haphazard, and notoriously they still don't use a street numbering system for addresses even today. (Finding addresses in Kyoto was much easier, since you could specify a location by the grid intersection plus a cardinal direction.)
It is sometimes claimed that the confusing layout of Edo was a deliberate choice, intended to make it difficult for attacking armies to find their way to Edo castle. However, I haven't seen any primary sources that support this claim directly, and I believe it may be just speculation.
Hm. Just speculating, but I wonder how much of that was "we require the samurai to live in cities but otherwise leave them alone", and how much was "we keep tight control over the samurai who fight and the peasants who make food, but we don't need to bother with merchants as much"... (It's probably something completely different.)
Edo was a city of samurai from the start. Its initial development in the seventeenth century was stimulated by the alternate attendance laws (sankin kōtai). Other occupational groups followed, because the large samurai population needed a lot of goods and services. "Merchants" were not really a status category in early modern Japan, despite what some older textbooks will tell you. (The "shi-nō-kō-shō" categories often mentioned in textbooks were an ideological projection, not an administrative system.)
DC also has very wide streets and it was designed 250 years ago.
Chicago's street grid is a mix of wide arterials and a boulevard system with medium-width local streets. Driving or biking in places like Boston or Manhattan or the cores of Philly or Montreal does not feel very similar to Chicago (i.e. our narrowest streets are not as narrow as in those places). Most of Chicago's street grid dates from the 19th century -- there are a few automobile-age additions like Wacker Drive but they are the exception.
Yup, L'Enfant designed the avenues imaging that they wiuld host military parades https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/L%27Enfant_Plan
I'd like to read more about that.
Is there an existing concept for describing how people like to think about the future in terms of sci-fi (or fiction in general) rules, even though there's no reason why the future has to follow such rules? Specific examples:
- Before COVID, people had a sort-of cataclysmic image of what a pandemic would look like - i.e. see the movie Pandemic from 2011. Lots of books talked about a horrible virus that would break down the global economy and threaten civilization as a whole. Bill Gates warned us about it and George W. Bush famously set up a task force to fight a future flu pandemic. But reality was... much more boring? Yeah, there was some disruption with COVID but things quickly bounced back to normal. There was some civil unrest in the US but it was mostly for pandemic-unrelated reasons. There was a race to make a vaccine but it ended up taking close to a year and a bunch of people already had the virus by then. In other words, reality was far more boring than we've imagined it would be.
- When people imagine what life with an AGI/ASI would look like, they always talk about either complete annihilation of humanity or something like the Matrix movies or perhaps an anti-utopia where human labor no longer has any value and we all end miserable due to being useless. Or in the case of Star Trek the AGI is smart but not _too_ smart so human decisionmaking still has some value. However no one seems to imagine boring outcomes, such as the machines inventing a "super drug" that would send everyone into a state of pure bliss for millions of years in a row or perhaps rewiring everyone's brain to remove the need to be "useful" in order to experience happiness. It's a very boring future to predict so... people don't seem to be predicting it?
- When discussing brain uploads (i.e. Robin Hanson's EMs) people seem to assume that "virtual humans" would still be sort-of like real world humans, except they'd run inside a machine. This leads to some anti-utopian predictions of virtual humans being exploited/abused and living a miserable life. But why wouldn't virtual humans simply be rewired to remove the ability to experience any suffering or sadness, thus resolving all the moral dilemmas around their existence? It's a boring answer but isn't it also the most plausible outcome?
My examples are sort-of vague but I hope I was able to write down the general idea of how the need to be interesting when writing fiction interferes with our ability to make boring predictions about the future.
I think we handled the pandemic pretty well, although social media went a bit crazy.
I think most of your "too boring for fiction" example actually did get written in science fiction already. For example, Greg Egan's Permutation City is all about virtual humans rewiring themselves, and even Robin Hanson already includes self-modification, IIRC.
Anyway, this is what you're looking for:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/rHBdcHGLJ7KvLJQPk/the-logical-fallacy-of-generalization-from-fictional
I know this doesn't address your original question, but do you know of anyone who has given much thought to how the brain upload scenario could realistically play out? I mean what the path of progress toward something like that could conceivably look like? As you said, sci-fi scenarios seem totally unrealistic and basically just brush the whole "yeah, we figured out how to upload consciousness" question under the rug, sort of implicitly falling back on some sort of IIT assumption (the computer probably simulates neurons and informationally it's equivalent so therefore, consciousness, or something). I'd be interested to read some discussions on this topic if anyone knows of any.
The most plausible and also boring/depressing outcome to me is the one where we end up building a really convincing simulation of the outward-facing effects of consciousness and when you upload someone's mind, the uploaded version reports that yeah! This is really great! So much better than being a flesh-and-blood human! It totally passes the Turing test, and we can even see all the simulated neurons firing, just like in a human brain! Except that there is actually no consciousness at play (i.e. we built and tested the brain simulator by measuring proxies of consciousness but not consciousness directly and it turns out that those proxies weren't good enough) and when you upload, you effectively just die.
Brain uploading is so far beyond the state of current knowledge that any world where it is possible would already be unrecognizable to use for many other reasons, so there's no point in speculating.
True. Maybe I just need to find some better sci fi. I watched the first season of Upload and found both the premise and execution to be almost comically bland and stupid.
Dollhouse is probably the gold standard, though that is technically transfer/copying rather than uploading. I'd definitely recommend it though. There was a French series on Netflix called Transferts (likewise with the premise of mind-transfer tech being developed in the near future) a few years ago that I also liked.
Dollhouse is particularly notable for the bait and switch - it starts out seeming like a generic Case of the Week format, perhaps to placate the TV execs, and then goes crazy with the premise near the end.
Obviously nothing in this genre is going to be *hard* scifi though, since the premise is effectively magic compared to today's tech.
Thanks for the recommendations! I’ll have to check those out. Transfer/copy is certainly also an interesting space to explore.
In your case, how would we figure out if the uploaded brain is conscious? We can't even prove that other human beings are conscious. We only know that we experience consciousness ourselves. Maybe consciousness is an illusion?
That's exactly my concern. Right now the best we have are proxies/correlations to consciousness (Turing test, IIT, etc.) and the depressing scenario is that people confuse the map with the territory and don't realize it because the simulation output seems so convincing.
Ethically speaking, "we're not sure if it's conscious so it's better to be safe and assume it is" is a reasonable stance when deciding how to treat, say, animals or AI. It would be a horrible mistake to take that stance on questions like mind upload.
I've heard the "maybe consciousness is just an illusion" idea proposed before and to be honest I've never understood what is meant by that. From my first person perspective, I am absolutely unquestionably experiencing _something,_ even if we haven't figured out how to measure it. And I assume you are too. So what would "an illusion" even mean? That no experience at all is actually being had? It's not real and it's all in my head?
Well... yes, it is all in my head. :)
I think the consciousness is an illusion idea is connected to people reporting that they can somehow stop experiening their conscious self by meditation. I think it's an interesting idea. Obviously you (and me, I'm not unconscious as another commenter suggested) experience something like a unified self. But is it possible that this is somehow a byproduct of how our brain works, and that there really is no actual uniform self if we look closely? Not sure if this makes sense.
I guess it comes down to what one means by "consciousness". It certainly seems plausible that the concept of a "unified self" is an illusion in a certain sense - my sense of vision is separate from my sense of hearing and sense of touch, and all of these senses can probably be broken down further into more and more granular pieces (the experience of seeing red on the left side of my vision is maybe separate from seeing blue on the right side, even if I'm seeing both simultaneously?). Maybe if you keep going down this path (perhaps through meditation), you can come to realize that you really are just a bunch of separate processes all working together to give an illusion of a unified system.
But I'd still classify all of those sub-processes as (non-illusory) consciousness, or qualia at the very least.
I agree, though qualia is probably a better word for it.
I think the interesting part is the notion that a bunch of separate sub-processes can somehow experience qualia. If that is the case - what stops e.g. GPT4 from experiencing qualia?
Maybe the "maybe consciousness is just an illusion" people are not actually conscious?
The thought has crossed my mind, though I suspect it's just a case of these people getting caught up in abstract lines of reasoning ("consciousness doesn't fit in my model so I'm forced to conclude that it doesn't exist") and they're using the term "illusion" in some weird abstract way. Because generally the term "illusion" is used to mean "an experiencing I am having which does not match up with my physical surroundings", i.e. it still involves an experience and thus requires consciousness. And I truly cannot fathom how someone who is conscious could suspect that they are actually not conscious, because even the experience of having that suspicion IS consciousness.
COVID-19 wasn't lethal enough (0.3% overall death rate) to meet the expectations put in place by sci-fi books and movies. However, there's no reason another disease couldn't come along that fit the bill. I think if there were a pandemic that killed just 3% of the people it infected, there might be martial law in large parts of the world (including the U.S.) true civil disorder, and large numbers of people fleeing to remote areas only to be faced by mistrustful locals.
Exactly. People asking this question need to form a distinction between lethal pandemics and nonlethal pandemics.
> When people imagine what life with an AGI/ASI would look like, they always talk about either complete annihilation of humanity or something like the Matrix movies or perhaps an anti-utopia where human labor no longer has any value and we all end miserable due to being useless. Or in the case of Star Trek the AGI is smart but not _too_ smart so human decisionmaking still has some value. However no one seems to imagine boring outcomes, such as the machines inventing a "super drug" that would send everyone into a state of pure bliss for millions of years in a row or perhaps rewiring everyone's brain to remove the need to be "useful" in order to experience happiness. It's a very boring future to predict so... people don't seem to be predicting it?
First of all, people do talk about AI potentially wireheading the population. It's one of the first failure modes that comes to mind.
But also, in what metric is "AI creates super drug, takes over the world and put all the humanity on it" considered to be more boring than Star-Trek-like "everything is basically the same but now we have robots around" scenario?
...Is that really a failure mode? It's a lot better than most of the alternative scenarios.
It's better than many alternative scenarious. It's still an alignment failure.
> There was some civil unrest in the US but it was mostly for pandemic-unrelated reasons.
You have to be careful about the difference between the reason people give you for what they're doing and the reason they actually have for what they're doing. It is not at all obvious that the civil unrest occurred for pandemic-unrelated reasons.
https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/what-caused-the-2020-homicide-spike
The Black Lives Matter protests cannot be reliably characterized as pandemic-unrelated. The basic model is that the death of George Floyd was mostly characterized by its extreme similarity to many other recent incidents that sparked some outrage and quickly flamed out. But instead of flaming out, 2020 Black Lives Matter protests benefited from a huge population of people with nothing better to do than join a protest.
You beat me to it.
COVID was boring because it ended up having a fairly low CFR and a very low CFR in healthy young people. A pandemic with a more fatal disease might look very different
+1
Covid's CFR was in something of an uncanny valley. Something with a substantially lower CFR, like the 2009 pig flu pandemic, could reasonably be allowed to run its course. Something with a substantially higher CFR, like Ebola or SARS-1, would uncontroversially warrant a very robust public health response if it became widespread or was in immediate danger of doing so. But Covid didn't fit neatly into either category, and the situation was made worse by different media bubbles pushing radically different narratives about how dangerous Covid actually was.
Covid-19: the scissorvirus
I agree. This was exacerbated by the fact that COVIDs Lethality is extremely dependent on prior age and health. Most diseases are more deadly to the elderly and infirm but covid was even more like this than a typical disease to the extent that children seemed almost immune to it
Yes. And why the hell couldn't the people in government just say that. "This is a very tricky situation. The virus's combo of contagiousness and lethality is just not bad enough to warrant extreme measures. But we don't know whether it's going to mutate into something that is. Also, in its present form it *is* the virus from hell for old people, Yet virtually all of them live with or have frequent contact with much younger people who don't have much to fear from the virus, so are understandably not very motivated to limit their lives and comfort in order to avoid catching it."
For one thing, at the point when decisions first had to be made about what measures to take the mortality rate of covid was very uncertain.
I highly recommend that you have a look at The Premonition. It's about a group of medical professionals scattered around the country, none of them involved with the government's covid response, who took a special interest in covid. They figured out the illness and our options way, way faster than the bureaucrats. They were sort of like Scott: They didn't do consensus, group think, or hauling out of protocols from the past in hopes they'd give guidance. They just sucked in all the data they could and thought hard.
Thanks for the tip! I was reading Scott and paying a lot of attention to this too at the early stages. I recall reading a lot of analysis and papers, and I certainly thought the uncertainty seemed large, with a potentially high mortality rate. Personally I thought a rather stronger reaction was warranted at the time. Not a medical professional though.
>so are understandably not very motivated to limit their lives and comfort<
You can't say it because this line by itself will piss off every faction. The kids go "What do you MEAN we're willing to sacrifice family for comfort?", the oldies go "what do you MEAN it's understandable?!"
So instead they tell lies that piss off one faction and flatter the other.
I try to be efficiently offensive, and aim to piss off 2 or more factions per sentence.
;-)
> why the hell couldn't the people in government just say that. "This is a very tricky situation. The virus's combo of contagiousness and lethality is just not bad enough to warrant extreme measures. But we don't know whether it's going to mutate into something that is.
There's an obvious reason they couldn't say that. It's total gibberish. The same claim applies to literally everything; the informational content is zero.
If it's informational content is zero, then why is it easy to write sentences that contradict various points made? Here are 6 that do:
1) The combination of contagiousness and lethality makes this virus bad enough that extreme measures are called for.
2) We are sure this virus is not going to mutate into something more serious.
3) In it's present form, it does not pose much risk to old people.
4) Fortunately very few older people live with or have a lot of contact with much younger people.
5)Young people have the most to fear from this virus.
6) Many young people are currently quite motivated to take extreme measures to protect themselves from contracting the virus.
Oh, and here's a paragraph with no informational content:
From sunrise to sunset the hopes of humanity wax and wane, like the breeze that blows across the land, sometimes stronger, sometimes weaker, sometimes from the east, sometimes from the west. And yet still we hope and wait. But such is the human condition -- hope and wait, wax and wane, fitful and invisible as a breeze, and then for an each of us there comes a point where we hope and fear no more.
See the difference?
> See the difference?
No. You are confusing the ability to write something down with the ability of the thing you wrote down to be true.
Your sentence (2) can never be true -- even though it's easy to write it down! -- and that is why its negation has zero informational content.
I can come up with a sentence that contradicts that example: "cryonics will work out." :-)
My view is that the fact that COVID was much worse for old people is part of why we had robust lockdowns and other measures to limit spread. Because the average senator, member of parliament or CEO is old.
If the CFR curve was more skewed towards young people, then I think that the general response would be to keep working lest the economy stall.
Remember that the pandemic was well underway before we had decent data on the shape of the CFR age curve or even the overall CFR. IIRC, early point estimates ran around 1.5-2% with the high end of the confidence interval running upwards of 5%, and until treatment protocols had been worked out (particularly corticosteroid treatment to head off cytokine storms), there were signs that there might be a Spanish-flu-style W-shaped mortality curve.
That was the information environment in which the first round of lockdowns was ordered, and by the time good data started to trickle in, the rhetorical battle lines were well entrenched. So we wound up with the pro-lockdown side digging in on positions that made sense with a 2% CFR and a W-shaped age mortality curve and the anti-lockdown side digging in around a seasonal-flu-style 0.1% CFR that's almost exclusively concentrated on people who had extremely fragile health to begin with. And as data trickled in showing a steep J-shaped age mortality curve with around a 0.7% overall CFR (and much lower for later waves, as the most vulnerable populations had mostly been vaccinated by then), loud and low-quality voices on both sides cherry-picked and misread the data and claimed to be vindicated.
Small nitpick, CFR = case fatality rate is generally a known quantity, because it is defined as the ratio of known deaths to known cases. IFR = infected fatality rate is the deaths to actual infected cases, which is what we actually want to know. IFR can generally only be estimated with some uncertainty because the number of infections are generally uncertain. CFR only makes sense as an estimate of IFR , and it does not make sense to compare CFR between e.g. covid and the flu because the quantity will change depending on e.g. the rate of people getting tested. This is important because these numbers sometimes get mixed up.
More on this here: https://ourworldindata.org/mortality-risk-covid
We've had decent age curve data in late February/early March, before any lockdowns have started in the US.
It's possible. But I don't get the sense people in government were thinking that clearly: "Let's make it sound like it's really dangerous for everybody, that way we keep old people like us safe." I think lots of people in congress were not well-informed, and didn't even understand the math and science involved: exponential growth curves, case fatality rate & how that's modulated by contagiousness, how the immune system works, how vaccination works, sterilizing immunity vs. protection from severe illness, fomites vs. aerosols, etc etc. They may not ever even have seen the graphs plotting age against chance of hospitalization, chance of death, and how these graphs differed for vaxed vs unvaxed.
"and how these graphs differed for vaxed vs unvaxed"
I'm confused. Wasn't this information, at least, only available pretty late in the pandemic? I got my first vaccine dose on 4/6/2021 (I was 62 at the time, so not in the first group vaccinated, nor the last). The development data must have been available earlier, but the population-wide data later.
I don't think any conspiracy was required. Nor was much information needed. The (old) people in charge just saw a lot of people they knew getting sick and dying, and treated the pandemic as if it was that dangerous for everyone.
If they hadn't - if being sick was something that happened to poorer or younger people that they didn't interact with - then they would have treated it as an abstract issue of economic considerations.
I don't think there is a term for it. Probably should be. I don't think it's controversial to say that for most people there idea of how the world works and what the future will look like is far more shaped by pop culture than it is anything else. Maybe we could call it argumentum ad fiction.
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/rHBdcHGLJ7KvLJQPk/the-logical-fallacy-of-generalization-from-fictional
Or "Hollywood Bias", the belief that history works like an action movie?
That flu pandemic could still happen. It's random, and the covid pandemic didn't even reset some kind of countdown: they are independent events. The main things it revealed about how pandemics play out is that nothing will be done until it hits a rich western country, and then it will be politicized.
Eh? The Chinese started the lockdowns.
If anything, COVID might make the next one worse because it convinced everyone that "lockdowns" are evil and pointless.
I do think, with hindsight, that the largest portion of pandemic suffering was inflicted on ourselves, with lockdowns that caused the supply chain disruption and other tangential effects. I thought one lasting benefit of the pandemic was that if you were sick you would stay away from other people, but already I see signs of reverting back to normal: go to work if you feel you can work through your sickness.
Yes, and that masks don't work and vaccinations are toxic and air filtration is stoopit and people who believe any of these things are useful should have their faces ripped off. (If you haven't seen Twitter threads on this topic you probably think I'm exaggerating. But I'm not.)
I want someone to open an AI art gallery near me, where you can buy nice AI-generated Giclee-printed art for your walls at a fraction of what it would cost with a human artist.
I know I could buy AI-generated prints on the internet, or AI-generate my own and send them somewhere to be Giclee-printed, but I'd rather buy it from a shop so I can stare at it in full size for a while before deciding I'm interested in hanging on my own wall.
Does this sort of thing exist anywhere in the world yet?
Right now, with the art-types on social media screaming blue murder over AI art, and even a tool developed to "poison" art so it can't be scraped for training data, if anyone opened a gallery like this it would close within ten seconds as the pitchfork-bearing mob descended upon it.
Data poisoning for art:
https://www.zdnet.com/article/data-poisoning-tool-lets-artists-fight-back-against-ai-scraping-heres-how/
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/this-tool-uses-poison-to-help-artists-protect-their-work-from-ai-scraping-180983183/
Mind you, I wouldn't be at all surprised if some Chinese company did exactly that - AI generated prints you can purchase online, like the other art pieces that are sold as office/home furnishings.
Not Chinese (so far as I know) but a piece like this might just as well be AI-generated:
https://artbymaudsch.com/products/the-poisoned-well
There's nothing in that piece that looks like a well, and they could easily swap the title for "Seashore by Moonlight", "River in Snowstorm" or just "Light through clouds" for all the difference it makes.
"Art by Maudsch is an Amsterdam-based art collective that presents the world with art from young, emerging, and aspiring artists. We offer a wide variety of hand-made framed canvas paintings. With over 10,000 happy customers, we strive to provide people with unique artwork for home decoration."
AI would do it cheaper and faster, I'm sure someone will jump on the opportunity - but maybe not bricks-and-mortar galleries *just* yet.
AI can only really compete with digital art, which makes it strange that the greatest resistance is from artists, who in general have the least to fear. Just paint, or sculpt, or unmake your bed with atoms, not bits.
Meanwhile all writing is digital to begin with, or digitised to end with, and writers don’t care much.
The bot is doing precisely the same work (looking and learning from existing artworks), merely not (yet) nearly as well as the meat.
The "screaming artists" are simply rent-seekers. They seem to think that they have "a right" to your money, for doing work that a machine could do. Rather like a hypothetical trench digger who demands to be paid more for digging with a spoon instead of an excavator.
I gotta tell you, being an artist is a really lousy way of getting rich; it would be like winning a lottery.
And you can always paint yourself a picture, or sing yourself a song. For free.
I think the justification there is that the artists are claiming they produced the original artwork that the AI is being trained upon, that the training data scraped to produce material for the AI to copy, so that they have ownership rights in it and should be paid copyright or asked their permission to use it.
I can see a point there, but on the other hand, they can't stop AI from producing output that is classed as art. Commercial artists (not fan artists) are the ones I can see being hit hardest by this, but that style of work is also readily imitable by AI and can be churned out the same way. If you're doing the "cartoon blue and orange hairy-legged" style of illustration for a magazine or online article then AI can do that just as easily, and probably faster and cheaper. This kind of thing:
https://www.wholefoodsmagazine.com/ext/resources/2023/06/27/people-news-microphone-orange-and-blue-laptop-icon.jpg?height=250&t=1689882071&width=500
> they produced the original artwork that the AI is being trained upon... ...and should be paid
By this logic, the human artists themselves would owe royalties to the creators of every man-made object (incl. but not limited to works of art) they ever laid eyes on.
Much as I dislike the phrase, the "screaming artists" _are_ "on the wrong side of history". One normally can't pick winners ahead of time - but the Luddites failed a long time ago, and "John Henry laid down his hammer and died" (to the extent that the legend is historical) more than a century ago. The artists are going to lose. There is plenty of precedent.
Making it so that everyone just lays down their hammer and dies seems like a great way to destabilize society.
Wasn't the point to automate away toil and drudgery, not the things you enjoy doing?
The whole controversy has absolutely no bearing on what you or anyone else enjoys doing. That is important to think about.
Edit: has anyone asked one of these AI producers of pictures to come up with some thing that it personally thinks is kind of cool?
Automation has been replacing human labor since the Jacquard loom, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jacquard_machine , 220 years ago. Labor-saving technology is not going to stop. It has been and will be used wherever the economics are favorable. As I said, normally one can't pick winners ahead of time - but _this_ kind of case is really clear.
>I want someone to open an AI art gallery near me, where you can buy nice AI-generated Giclee-printed art for your walls at a fraction of what it would cost with a human artist.
I think if you do the math the biggest cost of an art gallery piece of art is the rent, the salary for someone to run it and the commission. It is the price of being able to stand around for a while before deciding.
I'm sure it is, and I'm willing to pay this extra overhead.
If I were running this I'd probably include a guarantee that each work was a unique one-off. Everyone wants to think that they're a clever-clogs who has picked something special.
>at a fraction of what it would cost with a human artist.
That part threw me off.
Is that not possible?
I believe this post discusses what you are thinking of:
https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/book-review-fussell-on-class
The book itself is arguably outdated (and may not have been that accurate to begin with), but I think Scott's thoughts on it might useful to you.
I saw a meme mocking weeaboos with the dialogue "I wish Japan had won WWII." This is risible for many reasons, but the most salient might be that all Japanese pop culture is downstream from their *loss* in that war. That alternate universe must have very different media from ours, but *how* is it different? Is it all State Shinto propaganda all the time?
I dunno what it would be like, but I think it would lack one of the aspects I like most about current-timeline Japanese shonen anime/manga, which is the tension between violence, honor, and pacifism.
So Pokemon battles would be literal blood sports and PETA's parody would be redundant? Interesting.
I can see that, yeah.
A Japanese victory in WW2 doesn't realistically result in Japan ruling the entire world. I would model it more like an East Asian version of the USSR, with Japan variously occupying parts of East Asia and keeping friendly puppet states in others. But, much like the USSR, it's not going to last forever; little Japan can't keep control of gigantic China forever, and South East Asia is too far away; there will be more wars, and Japan will lose control. Whether this particular alternate history is more or less horrible and bloody than the one we actually got is anyone's guess.
A fractured China, on the other hand? Parts of it under Japanese occupation, parts of it the Nationalists/Republic, parts of it the Communists?
And suppose the West decided that propping up or at least not opposing the Japanese-ruled China was worth it, because they were fighting off the Communists? Early domino theory as it were?
That also raises the question, if Japan emerged the victor, what about the other Axis powers or were they defeated? I think it's possible that a post-Second World War victorious but exhausted West would be busy enough with the USSR not to want to entangle itself with Japan, so leaving it alone to occupy its East Asian territories, as long as it was quashing any Communist uprisings and not encroaching on US territory in the Pacific.
> But, much like the USSR, it's not going to last forever; little Japan can't keep control of gigantic China forever
It can do it for long enough to be reasonably considered "forever". The immediately prior Qing dynasty lasted for 300 years, and had bigger problems with invasion by Japan than it did with native rebellion.
This is something that I find a little bit worrisome about modern China. Japan has a strong indigenous traditional culture that gives it some resistance to invasive foreign memes. China is in a somewhat different position - there is a strong indigenous traditional culture, but much of it is strongly contaminated with the taint of foreign rule and difficult to defend in terms of being traditional.
Sure, but that doesn't mean it wouldn't have huge effects on *Japanese* media.
To back you up: the "anime" aesthetic as we know it is based on the works of Osamu Tezuka, of course (Astro Boy guy). The big eyes, for example, was part of his style that has been copied and refined ever since. But where did Osamu get those big eyes from? He was inspired by the American cartoonist Carl Barks and his Uncle Scrooge comic books! Just look at the big cartoon eyes on Donald Duck: without them, anime as we know it wouldn't exist.
http://www.comicscube.com/2016/01/the-carl-barksosamu-tezuka-connection.html
If the Empire had won, they might have gone the route Park did in South Korea: he suppressed non-traditional and non-conservative art forms, whether in music or literature or film.
"If the Empire had won, they might have gone the route Park did in South Korea: he suppressed non-traditional and non-conservative art forms, whether in music or literature or film."
If the Empire had won, the army would have been in a very strong position, and the modernisation/Westernisation of Japan had involved the army as well. It could end up in a mixture of traditional culture being maintained for ritual and ceremonial reasons but in everyday life Westernised model was used. So art might see a split between 'high' (traditional elements and themes) and 'low' (cartoons, anime, etc. in Western style), or even a "Japanese version of Western themes" for representational art in the Western portrait style, but the subject matter is traditional or people in traditional dress.
https://www.japan-experience.com/plan-your-trip/to-know/understanding-japan/westernization
"The government and through it, the army, were the first to make changes to clothing in Japanese society. A regulation of 1872 ordered the substitution of Western dress for the ceremonial robes of court nobles, and even the Emperor had appeared in Western dress in 1870.
The army had begun to wear Western uniforms since the bakumatsu period. However basic clothing did not change significantly for most Japanese during the second half of the nineteenth century due to high costs and suitability to other aspects of Japanese living, for example, sitting on the floor and the custom of removing shoes before entering a house made the high-button styles of this period rather impractical.
More noticeable were the changes in hairstyles with the short cut replacing the topknot, so that by 1890 it was difficult to find a man in the cities with a traditional hair style. For women, blackened teeth and shaved eyebrows began to disappear quickly from the cities and more slowly in the countryside.
After men cut their hair, they began to wear Western style hats and carry umbrellas and pocket watches. Imported wool began to be used for coats and shawls but these were generally worn over the kimono and were expensive and therefore limited to the prosperous few. Indeed, Western clothing often seems to have been used as an accessory. It appears officials would usually don traditional clothing in the home after wearing Western attire to work.
The major changes that occurred in Japanese housing in the period seem to have be "a diffusion of innovations from the Tokugawa period" including the adoption of shoji (paper-on-wooden-frame room dividers), engawa (the balcony) and fusuma (sliding wall-style panels) from samurai houses by the growing number of salaried workers and farmers where they could afford to do so.
Thus wood replaced dirt and tatami replaced wood. These were Japanese innovations rather than "modern", Western ones. However, kerosene and oil lamps tended to replace rapeseed lamps in the Meiji Period and this added to the increased use of shoji and sometimes glass and new, hard, ceramic hibachi led to the family not having to be centered around the stove as the only source of heat and light. A corollary of increased light was that Japanese houses began to become cleaner and more sanitary.
It was in Tokyo and the larger cities that new, Western style concrete, stone and brick buildings and bridges were built. These were often designed by foreign architects and the most famous include The Bank of Japan, Ginza Bricktown, The Asakusa Twelve Storeys, Tokyo Central Station, Shimbashi Station and the infamous Rokumeikan Dance Hall. Gas lighting came to the Ginza in 1874 and electricity in 1878. However, it was not until well into the twentieth century that Tokyo began to resemble London, Paris or New York rather than old wooden Edo.
As for eating habits, the Meiji period saw a wider diffusion of changes begun in Tokugawa times with increases in the consumption of polished rice, tea, fruit, sugar and soy sauce. Dining out also became more widespread. With the development of communications and increased social mobility, local customs such as eating seafood became national ones over time. Meat eating though encouraged by such "modernizers" as Fukuzawa Yukichi and spread through conscription (along with beer) did not become widespread in Japan until after World War II.
Beer was first brewed in Japan in the 1870s initially by foreigners in Yokohama, an operation that was later sold to Japanese entrepreneurs and was to become Kirin Beer. In Sapporo, in Hokkaido, beer was produced in 1876 by a company that was to become the modern day Sapporo Beer. The first beer hall was opened by Sapporo Beer in Ginza in Tokyo in 1899.
Conservative commentators of the time reveal the influx of new western fashions and the greater spread of samurai customs to the general populace:
Everyone has forgotten the righteous way. Now everyone is working for profit.... In the villagers we now have hairdressers and public baths. If you see houses you see flutes, shamisen and drums on display. Those living in rented houses, the landless and even servants have haori, umbrellas, tabi and clogs. When you see people on their way to the temple, they seem better dressed than their superiors."
Given that upward social mobility and increasing wealth had come along with modernisation and adaptation of Western methods, having won their part of the war I think it would be very hard to reverse all that and go back to the "real traditional Japanese days and ways". A Japanised version of Western culture would more likely be the result, I think, than a scrapping of all Western influence. After all, the boast of the country would be that they fought the West with the West's own weapons and won, so Japan was better at being Western!
Isn't... isn't that the very point that underlies the wish? If they hate Japanese pop culture, and if they agree that it's current form is downstream of their loss of WWII...
No, the context was that *the weeaboo* says "I wish Japan had won WWII." Presumably they wish the world was more Japanese-influenced.
Re: https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/escape-2
The Wise Master says "Get weird about that thing you're weird about...Make your nest in that closed loop of happiness and be unbound from the unceasing whirl of judgement."
The implication is that this experience is universal, but what if it isn't? What if there are people who aren't weird about *anything*? I'll call such a person a "King of the Normies": their lives are optimized around status-seeking to the point that it would never occur to them to do anything for any reason other than the approval of others. This is somewhat similar to the "NPC meme," but that meme is wrong in an important respect: while the NPC is depicted as being "below" the reader in some important way, a KotN is likely at the very top of whatever status hierarchy is relevant to them.
It then follows that people with immense power over me likely have a thought process that is completely alien to mine: surely a dangerous situation for me. Since a KotN would never bother to understand me (where's the status in that?), I'd better create some mental model of them, but how? I might read media optimized for a KotN, but they probably derive status from consuming media I've never heard of, so this has its limits. I've found what I think is a workable approximation in media targeted at people who live in New York City, but maybe there's a more efficient filter?
TL:DR: I am a bug trying to avoid being stepped on, and I'd like a way to figure out where the giant is going to put his foot next.
> I'd better create some mental model of them, but how?
The point of "American Psycho" was to show a caricature of status-seeking behavior. The book/film wasn't intended to be realistic, but maybe you'll find it a decent starting point for improv.
video-essay: "when the audience doesn't get the joke"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b3TT8Has8BE
I have seen the movie, and I certainly don't have any opportunity to get within axe range of someone like Bateman. His sinecure job can't hurt me directly, though his brokerage? firm might stomp on me on the way to redirecting profit to the EVP or whatever his title was.
Well, that's why I don't consider these types especially dangerous, except to the extent that the average-Joe also chases status. I.e. whatever the KotN is doing that's dangerous, the herd of average-Joes is already doing it to a lesser extreme. Additionally, the people who want to be captain of the boat for the prestige are unlikely to wantonly capsize it. In this day and age, the people who worry me more are the ideologues.
It's entirely possible to engage in status-seeking behaviour even in "that thing you're weird about" (see Big Name Fans in SF fandom and the wars over figurine painting).
"King of the Normies" would not be *consciously* doing everything for status-seeking approval of others.
But if they were, then the Kardashians are your Normie Royalty, because everything they do is for public consumption. If you want a mental model of What Is It Like To Be A Kardashian, then good luck and better you than me. I don't think either of us are important enough to be anywhere near the footprint area of a Kardashian to be stepped on.
100% agreed that a true KotN does not do any of this consciously. That's what makes them so dangerous: acquiring status is to them as breathing is to you and me.
Sure, but even KotN has to sleep and eat and wash their face, and unless they have some Truman Show thing going on, they can't be *always* doing things purely for the effect they have on others. Does no KotN ever eat a McDonald's burger?
While I agree there are people who want to be popular and thought leaders and influencers and public intellectuals and politicians and the rest of it, and they do work on gaining status as part of that, I don't think your model of "they want to crush me! me! because I'm so tiny and helpless!" works.
If it's unconscious, then any crushing is no more intentional than one of us breaking a spiderweb as we walk by. The only advice that spiders and other insects could receive is "don't be around humans" in order to avoid that. For conscious crushing, well if you're that tiny and unremarkable, you're not on their radar. You would need to be a rival, or be important enough that crushing you gained them an advantage.
And before you start on the "but they laugh at and bully nerds! for popularity and status!" bit, that 'nerd' includes me, you, and everybody with a hobby or interest. Train enthusiasts were long the butt of mockery as anoraks, did you feel one way or the other about that? Were you even aware of this?
What you wrote reads as "I'm not high status enough to be immune from bullying by the jocks" and sorry, I can't help you there. I'm not high status either, all I have done through my life is not care about the high status people and their opinion of me.
I'm not concerned about conscious crushing *at all.* I'm collateral damage, not a target.
Well then I think you should try to learn more about the thought processes of others. You would be more successful at it if you thought about the minds of others in a less all-or-nothing way. Like this: You have a certain way of thinking, and enjoy some weird loops. There are a minority of people who are very similar to you. Everyone else is on a spectrum running from being a bit less weirdness-prone that you to being typical and average in almost every measure. And I have not observed that there is much correlation between being weirdness-prone and being tolerant of the weirdness of others. I have known people who really do seem to be typical and average on most measures who are quite tolerant of other people's weirdness -- "well, it makes sense to him and he enjoys it, so that's what matters." Some of them have friends with a pretty big weirdness component, and they admire them, and wish they were creative enough to have interests and talents like their friend's.
Oh, the people in the middle of the bell curve are generally harmless and can be ignored. It's the 3-sigma outliers that concern me. I'm not sure "tolerance" enters the picture at all: were you "intolerant" of the ant under your shoe this morning?
Well the people I was describing probably are 3 sigma outliers when it comes to conventionality. I had an actual couple in mind, an Italian-American couple in their 60's I know. Their house is so clean you could lick the floor, their furniture is beige, they eat at 8 am, noon and 6 pm, then watch TV. But they are very warm people, and have a number of friends who are much less conventional than them. And they like me and I have my share of weird loops. When you say 3-sigma outliers -- outliers on *what*? Conventionality? Wealth and power? Hatred of people unlike them?
3-sigma outliers on the acquisition of status at the expense of every other value.
If you mean rich, powerful and famous people who are determined to become even more rich and powerful -- well, I suppose I'm an ant in their books too,. I mean I am no use to them in acquiring more wealth status and power, and I am too unimportant by their standards for them to even care whether they impress me. On the other hand, I never cross paths with tycoons & the like, so it's kind of a non-issue. They have never impinged on my life. Do you mean just regular non-zillionaire people whom you would might actually find yourself in the room with -- and they are absolutely determined to end up as the most admired person in the room? For instance there are probably some people on this thread who are interested in absolutely nothing except becoming the most admired poster on ACX. But -- how would you end up getting squashed like an ant under their feet? I don't really have a picture of the scenario in which you end up squashed.
I think history proves that "Crush [outgroup]" is an excellent way to gain status, and that the identity of the outgroup is entirely arbitrary. If you're the right sort of person, you can whip up a lynch mob against people who wear plaid neckties, and there I'll be, strung up by my own cravat.
I think you're unreasonably conflating normiedom and status-seeking.
For the sake of argument, I am presuming that the dichotomy proposed in the comic strip is a meaningful one. If you think the man in the comic strip isn't a "normie," I don't particularly care what you call him.
>Since a KotN would never bother to understand me (where's the status in that?)<
Where's the status, period? If they're driven completely by the approval of the crowd, just follow what the crowd likes. It's easy; they're very noisy, that's what makes them the crowd.
But even the theoretical isn't going to work like that, because people have differing strengths and weaknesses; if you're 4'2, you can't play basketball no matter how much status it would gain you. So instead those people are going to endeavor to make their strengths higher status. And that's their special interest.
I think you are slightly mistaken: instead of following the crowd, you can gain more status by being *just ahead* of the crowd. When the crowd catches up to you, you will be hailed as a leader.
>you can gain more status by being *just ahead* of the crowd.<
If you're smart enough. But trying to outsmart the people you want to impress is gambling your reputation every time. If they don't follow you, you look like a fool.
Maybe a little, but I think that there's not actually that much status to be gained in the real world simply by "liking things". That's for fanboys and high schoolers.
You can _lose_ status in the real world by liking the wrong things, or liking normal things to an unhealthy degree, but you don't get much status by liking the right things (compared to _doing_ high status things or occupying a high-status position).
> You can _lose_ status in the real world by liking the wrong things, or liking normal things to an unhealthy degree, but you don't get much status by liking the right things (compared to _doing_ high status things or occupying a high-status position).
You can't blame people for being confused about this; people go to great lengths to give the impression that you can gain status by liking the right things ("connoisseurship"). In reality, the prestige associated with liking the right wines is derived from a person who occupies a high-status position and dictates which wines are the right ones. But all of the rhetoric portrays things as happening the other way around.
Why are you sure that the lives of normies are organized around status-seeking and conformity?
For the sake of argument, I am presuming that the dichotomy proposed in the comic strip is a meaningful one. If you think the man in the comic strip isn't a "normie," I don't particularly care what you call him.
Lately I started "getting weird" about something new. I was surprised, because I hadn't felt this way in a long time. I used to get fixated and obsessed with some random nerdy thing all the time, but I hadn't in years. I wondered why.
Then I realized it was because my ADHD medication ran out a week ago.
Hah! :-)
I have written stuff on my blog before that carries the subtext that I myself am enlightened.
Well, I am OUT of that closet, I don't CARE what Daniel Ingram says, I AM a FUCKING ENLIGHTENED SUPER-BEING (technically, so are you), and in this FUNNY and HERETICAL essay, in which you will LAUGH and which will cause you to SUBSCRIBE to my BLOG, I share the story of how I got ENLIGHTENED, before taking Buddha, Jesus and Muhammad down a peg or three!
My Beautiful Dark Twisted Enlightenment
https://squarecircle.substack.com/p/my-beautiful-dark-twisted-enlightenment
This was an interesting essay, thanks for sharing.
Jesus' explanation of himself is indeed uncharacteristically egotistical‐–unless, of course, it's true.
Well, it depends how you interpret it. I talk to someone on Discord who gave it all sorts of other interpretations such that it doesn't invalidate other spiritual traditions, but I hold to my view because I think spiritual development past a certain threshold does take a toll on one, and well, you can end up saying things like that (ego inflation), or running into the Satanic verse problem. Which, granted, maybe it is me who has a Satanic verse problem right now, but you know, the whole thing is like if Troma Nakmo wrote an essay, and Troma Nakmo is not a demon. There are spiritual manifestations that are hostile and irreverent, and they totally are legitimate spirituality.
I’m not going to click the link. I’ve been bludgeoned enough with capitals.
Thanks for the article, another point in favor of my recent theory that enlightenment is a failure mode.
This is wildly uncharitable. Granted, I went very extra here, but I can't grant that spirituality has to play by the rules of normalcy, or potentially, any rules. Running down the streets screaming "I AM THE TRUTH!" is, after all, a spiritual zenith.
I have gathered hints that suggest I am not enlightened, because I can walk by a tree and not notice the bark; that to notice the bark on the tree is even a meaningful thing that I can do.
Yet I can enable such a mental state, mostly at will, although it takes a meaningful effort to maintain it, under which my visual processing changes fundamentally; where under normal circumstances I have the most extreme tunnel vision, seeing only what I am looking at, I can instead see everything. It is a purposeful relaxation, of a "muscle" that wants to be under tension; I could see the sensation of relaxing that muscle as feeling like a weight.
This mental state is perhaps the clothing that enlightenment takes; my thoughts remain the same, they follow the same paths, and yet I am disassociated from them; they occur without the direction I thought I provided. (And yet I do provide that direction, for I am the whole of this; the concept of self is misleading, for we name a thing that is us, and may eventually realize that it is not.)
There is yet another "relaxation", which I have yet to find the lever for, in which I am better able to process how other people are feeling (or perhaps it would be better to say that I am more aware of how I am already processing this information).
We train ourselves in the art of focusing our attention, of paying attention to the movie; the act of such focus is all-encompassing, and we forget that we can relax that attention, and observe the world around us. I think enlightenment, for some, is discovering the mental switch that turns off this focus, and flipping it - and then forgetting where it lays.
And as enlightenment is a recursive process, each step in turn being the discovery anew of a kind of internal Copernican principle, discovering, within our own personal universe, that what you thought was "you" is not you at all. The Earth is not the center of the universe; the sun is not the center of the universe; the galaxy is not the center of the universe. Perhaps it may culminate in the realization there is no center of the universe - but the Copernican principle is not yet done, for we still think that what we know of the universe is somehow central to it. There is no center; there is no "you". (This is a false truth; you are not the movie, you are not the screen, you are not the theater. You are all of it, but nothing is all of you.)
You're not the movie; you are not the screen. You are not the theater. And yet I know that I think that I am the theater, and I know likewise this is not true. And I cannot say what is beyond that, for though I know I am not the theater, I do not grok it; perhaps I need something to identify with, some new false truth to overthrow, in order to overthrow the false truth I have. Or perhaps in realizing that I have finished; I have escaped the cycle of rebirth.
But perhaps I can point you at something: You think you are the screen. But you are also the audience, and that is the heart of empathy. If you have empathy, at least, and if not, perhaps that is a useful skill to have - or perhaps it is simply a false truth. But if you do: Observe that when another is in pain, you feel that pain. And you are the projector.
You are the universe, and the failing of ego is to think that it is the only one.
I am not enlightened, for there is no enlightenment to be had, only the realization of what we already knew, coming in the form of an apocalypse that destroys everything, replacing it in an instant with the exact same thing. It is, indeed, a fantastic joke.
I will believe you know something if you can answer my Question: What do you wish that everybody knew? To be honest, it sounds like you can indeed answer it, but I want to be sure.
I don't think knowledge works that way; we each have our own conceptual constellations. If we are each a universe unto ourselves, such a wish would be to inject an alien structure into that universe which does not belong.
I guess an actual shared language, such that we can meaningfully communicate, would be nice. But that feels like cheating the spirit of the question, something like wishing for infinite wishes - and also that seems like the kind of wish that would backfire quite spectacularly and result in mass insanity at best. I don't think I have a meaningful answer, only things that sound like answers, words sound important but that point at nothing (or nothing, at least, that I can be certain translates). Or which point at too much.
Insofar as I must pick an answer, I think I should choose the qualia of the color blue, which, while that does carry a nontrivial danger, seems less dangerous than any other answer I might come up with.
Insofar as I am free to wish for nothing, I think that is the wisest course of action.
I think you are taking this too far, of course there is truth outside oneself, are you sure you believe that encountering truth from outside you is like having an alien structure injected into one's own universe? We can learn from each other, that's the idea behind The Question.
The traditions of teaching are careful not to speak any answers too specifically, indeed are careful to avoid giving answers themselves, however, and there is a reason for this; we must answer the questions on our own, integrate the truths into our own understanding. It is the question which is taught, not the answer.
Who's Daniel Ingram?
And okay, nice for you, enjoy it.
Hm? Scott has written about him before, he wrote this meditation manual called Mastering the Core Teachings of the Buddha that Scott did a book review for. Yes, Daniel Ingram claims enlightenment, and the book lays out a system for enlightenment.
Oh, I don't follow any spiritual leaders closely enough to be familiar with their names. So just dropping it in didn't ring any bells for me.
Maybe he's enlightened, maybe not. I have no idea and can't say one way or the other.
I think Scott has discussed how the number of lawyers in America grew rapidly beginning around 1970. Federal bills in the US have also gotten longer, on average, over time. In general, there are more pages written by legal professionals impacting the functioning of American business and society today than before 1970.
It's easy for me to think of the downsides of increasing red tape, etc., but there are likely significant benefits as well. What are some of the benefits of the increasing "legalization" of society? Are there counterfactuals of developed nations that haven't had an increase in legalization?
People from all over the world come to Delaware to register their corporations thanks to its predictable legal environment. It's even impressive enough that people attempted to replicate it in part of Honduras in order to promote growth there.
Legalization is what enables modern society to function, because it enables projects to operate on a scale that transcends "he's my cousin, I can trust him".
That's a good point, but I don't think it's related to the "legalization of society" trend, because Delaware has been the preferred state for incorporation since the early 20th century, before the 1970s takeoff in the relative number of lawyers.
You're right that it isn't: Delaware ranks 21st in lawyers per 1,000 population, barely above average among the 50 states.
The clear outlier is the State of New York, which has 9.3 active lawyers per 1,000 population. That's more than triple the nationwide number, and 40 percent more lawyers per capita than the #2 state!
The ABA data I'm looking at doesn't break it down by area of law, but "corporate law departments" does not seem to be all of the explanation for that: TX, NY, and CA are virtually tied as the leading states in terms of Fortune 500 HQs but TX and CA each have fewer than half as many lawyers per capita than NY does. It probably is part of the answer e.g. Illinois, 4th in F500 HQs, is 5th in lawyers per capita. But there seem to be additional reason(s) for New York State being the lawyer capital of the US....maybe the concentration of the finance sector specifically?
Thanks, that's a really good point. The increase in the number of lawyers coincides with the increased financialization of the American economy and they are related. On the whole, that's a positive impact with better diffusion of risk, allocation of resources, etc.
I don't know much about the predictability of its legal environment, but surely businesses from all over the world register in Delaware because it is a tax haven.
I wouldn't call any particular state in the US a tax haven, because corporations are going to be subject to federal taxes regardless and they will still have to file individually in the states they operate. Delaware has favorable rules for corporations beyond the corporate tax rate.
Idk much about US state to state tax rates, but Delaware seems aggressively low tax. Plus no disclosure rules for companies.
https://www.investopedia.com/articles/personal-finance/092515/4-reasons-why-delaware-considered-tax-shelter.asp
Afaik low-tax US states are excellent tax havens because the US enforces disclosure of company structure and beneficiaries on foreign companies through FATCA, but refused to sign up the the OECD's own disclosure agreement (along with Bahrain and Vanuatu).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_as_a_tax_haven
There are a lot of tax havens.
And they tend to be pretty popular places to register businesses. Is Delaware particularly popular? Or rare in being a tax haven with predictable legal environment?
>Is Delaware particularly popular?
I think so. But I think it's because it's in the US, rather than for other benefits.
>Or rare in being a tax haven with predictable legal environment?
I think it's rare in the sense that's within the US, but I don't know that its taxes are particularly low.
See my answer to Tom P. Delaware seems to have pretty low taxes, and US states in general are not covered by any AML disclosure agreements. Seems likely they've done a race to the bottom to attract foreign businesses imo.
Accelerates the downfall of the Tower of Babble, at which point God will descend from the heavens and confound the language of all lawyers and bureaucrats
About the only benefits are to lawyers.
I have not looked at this in depth, but my gut would be:
- less local discretion (i.e., corruption) in the application of rules/laws
- less (or more?) risk of large corporations being sued
The two positions I know of on parking are "inertia, keep the current system" and "ban cars, ban parking, ban everything, die die die".
It's always seemed to me like the obvious solution is to incentivize (through zoning? tax breaks? subsidies?) giant multi-storey parking structures anywhere dense enough to support them, allowing lots of parking with a comparatively small land shadow. Is there some reason nobody talks about this? Does anyone else think this is the obvious solution?
I took a road trip in a rental car around Switzerland a few years ago and I was amazed by how the cities were all pedestrian friendly and car friendly at the same time. Truly, it was easy and convenient to get around both ways.
I'm not sure how they did it exactly, but there were a lot of large, conveniently located parking structures, many of them underground.
Walking past parking garages is not a good experience, especially if crime gets out of control. So I'd suggest a central parking tower, with a shell of smaller storefronts and windowed offices around it.
Another problem is the amount of walking to get from a centralized parking spot to wherever you're going, which depending on the distance and the weather, can defeat the purpose of driving in the first place.
I generally prefer distributed underground parking, or "park and ride" mass transit.
People like to park close to wherever they are going. If we build large carparks, they will probably not be close enough to wherever people want to be - unless you build a lot of big carparks everywhere, but then you end up in pretty much the same situation as now. You could couple large carparks with efficient public transport in dense areas, but people seem to prefer driving the whole way and this approach usually means you end up with large out of town car parks linked by bus services to city centres (in Europe we call this Park & Ride, don't know if you have a similar set up in America).
If the businesses are dense enough then a single lot can serve lots and lots of businesses. Right now, if i park at the lowes near me, it would be 1/4 mile walk to any other business because of how big the parking lot is. In the central business district the main garage is with 1/4 mile of probably 150 businesses including an amphitheater and government offices.
I don't think I would park at a giant Lowe's parking lot unless I was going to Lowe's. If I was going to the Target next door, I would park at *its* giant parking lot. So I don't think most people walk 1/4 mile from Lowe's to somewhere else. Also, walking 1/4 mile downtown city is much slower (because of cross streets) and more stressful than walking 1/4 mile across a Lowe's parking lot.
> If I was going to the Target next door, I would park at *its* giant parking lot.
Maybe the issue is that I see this as undesirable. Maybe you don't mind it? I am not interested in continually getting in and out of my car to drive for 10 minutes, 6 of which is spent looking for parking. That doesn't sound like a good use of my time or part of a rich, fulfilling life.
>Also, walking 1/4 mile downtown city is much slower (because of cross streets) and more stressful than walking 1/4 mile across a Lowe's parking lot.
I dont think this is true for most people (though i have no evidence other than my own experience). A large parking lot isn't comfortable for me to walk in. It's a place for cars and I am a person. I have to be watching out for cars driving down rows, turning into spots, or backing out of spots. In a city I am on a sidewalk with other people. There are things to look at and enjoy.
You are also not likely to encounter more than 2 or 3 crosswalk over 1/4 mile. In a dense commercial district the phases for lights are unlikely to be more than 60 seconds. I don't think this is going to add much time to the walk.
There is also an economic component to this. Lots built with giant parking lots are less productive and they produce less tax revenue than denser commercial areas that are walkable: https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2020/10/11/the-numbers-dont-lie
There is also the extensive research that Donald Shoup has done about the cost of "free" parking in a city.
I'm confused why you think occasionally having to look for parking right next to a giant store is more of an imposition than navigating a giant multistorey parking structure 1/4 mile away from wherever you want to be, then spending 15 minutes navigating downtown until you find your final destination.
And before anyone thinks otherwise, I LOVE to drive. I LOVE cars. But this kind of "driving" - to and from giant parking lots - is not fun driving. It sucks. It's not driving, it's sitting in a car. I dont want to ban cars, I just don't want our cities to be dominated by cars and pavement and warehouses masquerading as stores.
Won't self-driving cars make parking garages and even large parking lots obsolete? They could drop off their human passengers at the destination, then drive a short distance to find the closest, free/cheap parking space (along a curbside, down an alley, in a private driveway where the owner charges $0.50/hr), then return to pick up their humans when summoned.
I don't anticipate self-driving cars completely replacing human-driven for another few decades, so this is still a problem.
My understanding of the problem in the US is not that there's insufficient parking it's that the requirements for parking are so high they make a lot of dense urban spaces unfeasible. If 75% of the parking spaces are unoccupied already then multi-story car parks are merely an inefficient dodge of the legislation. What needs to be updated is the number of spaces a business is expected to provide for their customers.
At least where I live there's insufficient parking (source: just yesterday decided to stop going to a restaurant I liked because it was too stressful to try to get parking close by). And the government wouldn't mandate requirements for parking if they didn't think people would be angry about insufficient parking otherwise.
Yup, parking minimums mean that even if your business is surrounded by parking garages you still need to build dedicated parking on your lot (unless you get special permission to do otherwise).
About 10 years ago, a developer was trying to build apartments in Dupont Circle in DC. This is one of the densest, desirable, amenity rich areas of the city. You definitely dont need a car to live there. The apartments were going to be very small studios (400 - 500 sq ft) intended for single people to live in.
But the parking requirements were two spaces per unit - for units that only 1 person would live in!
Thankfully, the City gave them an exemption to not have *any* parking. This was, of course, and outrage to some set of people. But the building has been very popular and hasn't caused any issues with street parking (which was already way over capacity).
I take it you do not support “ban parking, ban everything, die die die”? My understanding is that there is always a tension between the development of good alternatives to driving (public transport, more local small scale businesses within walking distance) and incentives to drive (parking, wider roads). The latter makes the former less tenable.
A core question is whether you choose not to go to a restaurant if you can find parking (and stay home)? Or do you choose to go somewhere nearby, if that option existed?
At least to me, it seems like the benefit of living within walking distance of amenities seems huge.
Perhaps others feel differently. My view is influenced by growing up in a city with good public transit, winter, and purposefully bad car circulation.
Perhaps, “don’t subsidize parking, because no good will come from it” would be a more charitable take than “inertia”.
At least in Finland many cities have giant multi-storey parking structures underground, which of course takes even less space. However, such projects have often had costs/schedules extended beyond the original expectations for reasons I don't quite understand, at least one (in Turku) ended up causing unexpected damages to surrounding buildings at the constructions phase, and my understanding (I don't drive myself) is that drivers are quite sluggish at actually finding their way to them instead of just trying to find a street parking spot - you'd actually still need to limit street parking anyway to incentivize the use of the parking structures, and the knowledge that would happen would then lead to increased opposition.
Underground parking is fairly standard where I am (large American city). The standard 5+1 building - 5 stories of residential over 1 story of commercial - usually has 2 floors of parking garage below, roughly one for customers and one for residents. Sometimes it's adjusted a bit, for example, if the ground floor has smaller storefronts on the street side, there can be an enclosed ground floor parking area behind them.
It's expensive, but so is doing anything where I live.
I agree parking structures are complicated and stressful to use, but so is street parking. I like the underground idea, although I bet the US would bungle the costs and schedule even more.
I have always considered myself yimby but carry the heretical view that mandatory parking minimums are fine in most locations. Its just the obvious solution to avoiding a tragedy of commons, where the commons was ample street side parking.
Some locations (nyc) shouldn't have this commons, and they absolutely should build parking structures and use precious surface space for something other than idle cars. In densish suburbia this commons is good and should be protected. I have lived in places where it was viable but under threat. The increased cost ultimately born by residents to keep their idle cars off the road near their own homes was appropriate. In non dense suburbia its also good, but under no threat.
There is a much more efficient solution, price th street parking to match the demand. Business will still build parking, but it will he sized to be appropriate for their busines instead of an arbitrary amount decided on by planners
I understand that is the standard market urbanist response, and I am myself mostly market urbanist. However this doesnt actually engage my argument. I have stated that the commons is good in some places, and bad in others (actual urban environments). You are essentially claiming that the commons is always bad and should be eliminated (if its priced its no longer a commons). But I dont think you apply your implicit principle consistently. You consume from the commons every day and would abhor it if every resource was priced (how many steps did you take on the side walk today). So I think you should consider in which places the commons might be good actually.
In my own case I am thinking more in lines of residential areas with mixed small apartments and single family homes. I think most people really appreciate being able to park on the street when visiting a friend and not having to learn the parking system in every area they go to and would despise your solution, even if led to the a optimal number of parking spots and cost savings when they are visited. But it wouldnt work if the apartment dwellers didnt have their own spots. I probably lean more towards no commons in business districts, business are simply better oriented to figuring out demand from their customers than are dinner hosts.
If sidewalks were so crowded that it was no longer practical to use them to get around, then it might make sense to think about rationing. This is extremely rare; a small sidewalk can have very good capacity and is easily expanded and cheaply maintained. In contrast, most of the US already has lots of space dedicated to parking, but it can be tough to find a spot--hence why this thread exists.
Does that actually work? My primary experience is with DC where new buildings have parking minimums but both apartment and SFH residents can all still street park, so street parking is always scarce. If the purpose of street parking is for visitors, why not use meters? If they are priced appropriately then you will have a great chance of having a spot when you need it. I don't think it is appropriate to consider street parking a 'commons' unless you are defining that to just mean anything the government sometimes provides for free. Usually it refers to a public good which means that it is nonrival and nonexcludable.
That is not the definition of commons. It is nonexcludable but rival so it is an exhaustible resource unlike a public good. Free street side parking is a commons. It is created, rather than just being there, but once there it has the same properties as say a natural resource, also a commons.
I would expect DC to be too dense for that. Apologies if by only citing nyc I gave the impression it was only there where a commons is unworkable. I have been in many suburbs where i can find parking when i drive to random places, so at the very least parking minimums serve to create sufficient supply (but might be over supplied)
This is pretty much how it works in Manhattan - there are (almost) no open-air parking lots below 96th street and most cars are parked in multi-story parking structures of various sorts. Unfortunately street parking is not charged at a market-clearing price but there's enough cars to support the garage mechanism.
You'd get the same outcome in other cities if you severely restricted street parking and started charging a market clearing price on the remaining spots. This doesn't happen because most voters drive, so politicians don't want to mess with existing systems too much. Even in London street parking isn't charged at the true market rate and the local congestion charge is about 3-5x lower than what it should've been to defeat congestion.
Back when I lived in Sunnyvale, CA (2009-2017), subsidized public multi-story parking structures were a big part of their parking strategy. Downtown businesses (and I think anyone else other than detached single-family houses) could pay an in-lieu fee to be exempted from parking requirements, at a rate that was probably a pretty good deal considering the opportunity costs of building on-site parking, and the city used the money to build parking garages around the outskirts of downtown. I get the impression this is a pretty common pattern at least in south-bay suburbs.
If you want unsubsidized garages, and especially if you want to reduce or eliminate parking requirements for single-family houses, then you probably also need to ban or harshly limit free street parking. Street parking is usually the best immediate substitute for on-site parking in single-family residential neighborhoods, and it produce contention and becomes a big quality-of-life issue when people are counting on it but there isn't enough to go around.
Another potential solution I've toyed with, but I don't know if it being tried anywhere, is to shift financial responsibility for parking from property owners to car owners. Instead of charging in-lieu fees to property owners who don't meet the parking standards, charge each registered car owner for two-ish parking spots per car, with a credit for one parking spot per car if you have on-site parking at home. You can either spend some of the money subsidizing property owners who offer free on-site parking, or you can spend the money on public parking, or (if you're anti-car and are using this mainly as a mechanism to discourage car ownership) you can have the government pocket some or all of the money for general revenue or for transit projects.
Yeah, that sounds like a really good system. Did it work in Sunnyvale?
From what I could see, yes. Plenty of parking downtown if you're willing to walk a little bit, but the footprint of the parking garages was a lot less than what I've seen in similar-size/density suburbs that tried to handle downtown parking entirely through on-site parking mandates.
I usually used the parking garage at the Caltrain station, which was half a block away from one end of the main downtown street. IIRC, it was free for up to four hours at a time on evenings and weekends and charged a few dollars for all-day parking during the workday, the latter presumably being aimed at people who were parking there to commute the rest of the way by train.
Multi-story parkings are great, they just don't solve the problem. Cars will keep taking up all free acessible space because they can and nobody bothers to stop them, and because people who use cars just aren't interested in driving to a designated spot and walking the rest of the way (otherwise they'd just use public transport), they want nothing less but to park literally at the front door of their destination, and they keep trying to no matter how implausible it is in practice.
We need the bans. Nothing against subsequently making it easier for car users to enter cities by building parking places, but they're not an alternative to bans, they're their complement.
I'm guessing you're a man who lives in a low-crime, effectively policed area with a well-managed public transit system?
Not all of us are that lucky!
You're *right,* I'm not interested in driving to a designated spot and walking who-knows-how-far the rest of the way to my overnight job. I rode the bus from home to the same job for five years, but with my city's abdication of policing, it's far, far too dangerous to do that now.
This isn't imaginary. In a recent study of the most abused bus routes (including the one I would be on), meth was found on 98% of the surface samples and 100% of air samples. One sample exceeded EPA guidelines for airborne fentanyl exposure. (https://www.washington.edu/news/2023/09/07/uw-assessment-finds-fentanyl-and-methamphetamine-smoke-linger-on-public-transit-vehicles/).
And then a coworker had to mace an attacker at her bus stop last week (transit security agreed it was so necessary that they did her the favor of "accidentally" forgetting to get her contact information so that she couldn't be criminally prosecuted or privately sued later).
I can only do the work I do because I drive from a secured garage at home to a secured garage at work, and even though I drive a mile out of my way to avoid an open air drug market on a contested intersection (the one that my bus route would stop at, natch).
Cars and parking aren't the problem when a city is infested with crime.
I think it was Ellen Willis (whom most of us would not agree with otherwise) who was asked a few decades ago, "don't you feel sad now that NYC is no longer hip?" She replied it was nice to be able to walk home without worrying about being assaulted.
I think you're treating my proposal as an alternative to banning street parking and minimum parking requirements, whereas I'm thinking of it as an add-on to those proposals. Erica's description of Sunnyvale's strategy above also seems like a good synthesis.
I was indeed. I guess I didn't exactly understand why you want to incentivize building off-the-street parking spaces when banning street parking is honestly all the incentive needed.
My mental model of this is built off that one time I took a long stroll through downtown Antwerp. It has no street parking (aside from the usual exceptions for ambulances and police vehicles, cargo delivery, etc.), very low amount of car traffic that even I found perfectly tolerable, especially since most streets are woonerfs... and there are parking structures absolutely everywhere you go. "On every corner" would be underselling it. I'm pretty sure most are private businesses and none are subsidized.
I realize I'm talking about Europe here, and its local solutions may not easily translate into US regulatory setting, but still - it's proof by example, and a nearly perfect one at that.
> because people who use cars just aren't interested in driving to a designated spot and walking the rest of the way (otherwise they'd just use public transport)
Driver here. I have observed the mentality you describe, but it doesn't describe me. I'm fine with a bit of walking on either end of the trip, but my main reason for preferring driving to transit is that it goes where I want to go, when I want to go there. My car is right there when I'm ready to go, I don't have to get there early to make sure I don't miss it, and it's going the most direct and expeditious road route to my destination with few or no additional stops on the way. Moreover, the car is my own space that I hardly ever need to share with potentially ill-mannered strangers.
I'm aware that in very dense urban areas with very good public transit systems, trains and busses run often enough that scheduling at least isn't an issue, and traffic is bad enough that transit can be as fast or faster than driving even with indirect routes and additional stops. I do not live in a very dense urban area, nor do I want to, so that doesn't really help me.
In what context? Every big American city I've been in seems to have lots of above or, preferably, below ground structures like that. (Same goes for many smaller cities, actually.) But that still incentivizes driving into the center of the city itself, and their effectiveness will always be limited by the amount of cheap/free street parking available. They also create "dead zones" since a parking garage can't be stores, restaurants, homes, or offices.
The real problem is not that we can't build parking garages, it's that you don't want lots of cars in dense areas to begin with--they just take up too much space, whether when parked or being driven, even aside from any other externalities.
I know that some places do put parking on the outside of their "downtown" so that you can walk in, like Vail, CO. Something like that could probably work for smaller towns, if needed.
ETA: in general, though, why do we need to subsidize parking at all? Is it such a public good that we think the market would under-supply it otherwise?
"or, preferably, below ground structures like that."
Obligatory Tom Scott video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=voYdl7IFZsM
For the centre of a giant city it's not practical for everyone to get in and out with cars, you need public transport. But for smaller suburban shopping districts, this is what you want.
Let me pick on Pleasanton, California, a town I've been to a few times that seems to demonstrate the problem with American town layouts. Here's a map of the area I'm talking about https://www.google.com/maps/@37.6638869,-121.8835472,14z
In the middle we have a nice enough downtown area around an appropriately-named Main Street. A good place to do your shopping, right? But when we zoom in to look at the shop names, we find they're almost entirely restaurants, it's not actually a useful place to do your shopping. Also, everything is just a bit too far apart, there's random houses and parking lots interspersed in a place that should just be storefront-storefront-storefront. Worst of all, there's no supermarket, so there's no reason to actually go downtown most weeks -- the nearest supermarket is a mile away in an ugly strip mall with its own giant (but single-storey) parking lot.
Ideally you'd de-zone these strip malls to force grocery shopping back downtown. Then you'd build two-storey or three-storey carparks behind the supermarket (or better still, underneath it) so that shoppers can park there while keeping the footprint compact. Now you've got tens of thousands of more shoppers a week hitting up Main St.
But why do you want shoppers to have to go downtown to buy their groceries (instead of to the walmart/whole foods/ costco/ whatever in their suburb? seems like burning a bunch of resources for no reason. Those stores are where the land is cheaper AND where they are closer to their customers.
I mean they're all in the same suburb, it's just that they're spread out, with a supermarket plonked over here and other shops plonked over there. If you put all the shops in downtown then that's less of a waste of resources.
I would expect the optimal placement for grocery stores to be scattered around town in proximity to various residential neighborhoods. Having them all clustered downtown seems less convenient for shopping, an inefficient use of premium real estate as groceries are big stores that tend to operate on very slim gross margins, and logistically problematic due to requiring a bunch of large trucks to make regular deliveries downtown to keep the groceries stocked.
"ETA: in general, though, why do we need to subsidize parking at all? Is it such a public good that we think the market would under-supply it otherwise?"
First of all, I think so, yes. Suppose I want to go to town to eat dinner, see a play, and have a business meeting. This benefits the restaurant, the theater, and whatever I produce with my business. If I can park, I'll do these things; if not, I'll do them less. So in theory the restaurant, theater, and business-beneficiaries should want to subsidize my parking. In practice, this has too many transaction costs. But producing positive externalities is exactly the business the government should be in (in this case, maybe by taxing the restaurant/theater/etc and spending some of the money on parking).
But second of all, yeah, I guess my question is why the market isn't the solution here. If you get rid of parking minimums in cities, people will still want to park, and I would expect that to make entrepreneurs buy up land, build parking structures on it, and keep adding stories until the need for parking is completely satisfied and everyone is happy with the parking situation (except maybe poor people, who will always be under-supplied by market solutions, but we can tack on some other solution for them, and they mostly use public transportation anyway). But in practice nobody seems to expect this to happen, I'm curious why not, and "there are so many positive externalities to parking that we need subsidies" is my best guess.
A market solution would largley solve the problem, but there are two big political problems with it. First, as someone else mentioned there is an endowment effect with existing free parking. If you start charging market clearing prices you will piss off basically all of the drivers, which in most cities is the majority and also more affluent politically engaged crowd. Second, the people one the other side are a whole bunch of lefties that are naturally predisposed to distrtrust market solutions to anything. Sure there are some urbansit libertarian wonks that would like it, but you don't get elected by getting all five of them to vote for you
As someone who works an overnight job in downtown Seattle, I'd have to literally quit my job of 16 years if I wasn't able to drive to and park at work - that's how dangerous the abdication of policing has made certain Seattle transit routes (including the one I would be riding).
As I mentioned in my other comment, it wasn't always this way; I commuted from home to the same job on a bus for over five years.
But these days, most routes which pass through downtown are infested with predatory opportunists and/or people actively dealing or using on the ride itself. As I mentioned in my other comment, in a recent University of Washington study of the most abused bus routes (again, including the one I would be on), meth was found on 98% of the surface samples and 100% of air samples . One sample exceeded EPA guidelines for airborne fentanyl exposure. (https://www.washington.edu/news/2023/09/07/uw-assessment-finds-fentanyl-and-methamphetamine-smoke-linger-on-public-transit-vehicles/).
Infuriatingly, the city is spending vast resources on YIMBY road diet nonsense like installing protected bike lanes (which weather renders unusable 7 months of the year) instead of literally cleaning up and securing the bus system.
And this is not an unusual state of transit in American cities.
The driving and parking conversation can't start with driving and parking.
It needs to start with restoring a culture where no one has a good reason to fear for their safety while riding a bus or walking a city street.
+1
+3 vs overidealistic YIMBYs.
Yeah, the YIMBYs often don't think past their postcard image of Amsterdam, or whatever. My favorite part about the Seattle's "progressive" act of removing lanes of traffic for protected bike lanes is that it harms every demographic except wealthy athletic (almost always white) men.
Women? More likely to be victims of street crime/harassment, plus grooming standards for female professionals (hair, makeup, etc) are difficult to maintain under a sweaty bike helmet.
Poor people? They almost certainly live too far away to commute by bike, and have workplaces that don't provide secure bike storage.
Feeble and/or (athletically) disabled people? Can't operate bikes.
Parents? Sure, one small kid can be strapped to a bike seat, but multiple kids, and kids in the awkward age between "too big to be carried, too little to ride autonomously" can't be safely transported by bike (and I find it hilarious that it's illegal to use an obsolete car seat, but nobody has a problem with kids riding the roads with no protection at all from 4000 pound vehicles swerving to pass them at 30+ miles an hour).
But, you know, sure. Let's put all those demographics on a bus which is now stuck in traffic because we dedicated a lane of the road to wealthy athletic men on bikes instead of saving that lane for the buses everyone can use.
I am not convinced that is an externality. As the parker, i get no utility from parking my car there intrinsically. The benefit I internalize from the transaction is the ability to consume things close to where i park. I internalize this benefit and so am willing to pay for it.
Generally speaking there are lots of complimentary goods in the location market. Restaurants near the theater for instance. The market seems able to manage this doesnt it?
I have always lazily imagined building garages like this are more difficult than they should be (relative to other things even) and relaxing that would be sufficient "subsidy".
In the UK and Europe, which have compact city centers for historic reasons, Park and Ride systems are quite common and would effectively support the sort of "positive externalities" you are talking about here. These are not as convenient as a parking lot immediately adjacent to your destination, but as long as the shuttles are sufficiently frequent (which is not always the case in existing implementations), they would seem to be a workable solution that even the anti-car crowd might support, since they can be integrated into broader upgrades to a public transportation network.
I don't know whether existing laws, culture, and infrastructure would make such systems less effective in a US context, but if we are talking about subsidies to parking, then subsidized Park and Ride systems are worth considering as an option alongside "subsidize inner city parking lots" and "do nothing."
Here is what Tyler wrote in 2010: https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2010/08/the-economics-of-free-parking.html
"If developers were allowed to face directly the high land costs of providing so much parking, the number of spaces would be a result of a careful economic calculation rather than a matter of satisfying a legal requirement. Parking would be scarcer, and more likely to have a price – or a higher one than it does now – and people would be more careful about when and where they drove.
The subsidies are largely invisible to drivers who park their cars – and thus free or cheap parking spaces feel like natural outcomes of the market, or perhaps even an entitlement. Yet the law is allocating this land rather than letting market prices adjudicate whether we need more parking, and whether that parking should be free. We end up overusing land for cars – and overusing cars too. You don’t have to hate sprawl, or automobiles, to want to stop subsidizing that way of life."
"What are the biggest problems with the idea? First, the danger of spillover parking means that a lot of parking has to be properly priced all at once. If the local K-Mart has a smaller lot, you don't want the customers flooding a neighborhood street and simply shifting the problem. The proper correction requires a coordinated pricing and enforcement effort, not only to succeed, but also to be sufficiently popular with homeowners. Fortunately, most of the coordination can be done at the level of the individual town or city.
Second, we don't yet know how many more spaces would be priced in the absence of legal minimum parking requirements, and how many fewer car trips there would be, especially if we are holding the quantity and quality of mass transit constant. "
This is unconvincing. I can make a similar case for subsidizing any other activity -- e.g. smoking increases people's productivity, and they don't capture all the benefits of their production (their employer, and by extension consumers, will capture some of it). Therefore the government should subsidize smoking. It's true that in theory, the employer can pay for cigarettes, but in practice there are too many transaction costs and the government exists to handle such externalities.
(Admittedly cigarettes kill people, but so do cars.)
I think if smoking actually increased productivity, in some way not captured by the increased wages of the productive person, and had no negative effects, this would potentially be a good argument. It might be counteracted by transaction costs (the government can't be bothered to subsidize every single good thing), but if the government was already involved in this area it wouldn't seem wrong for it to be.
I've heard of people using nicotine patches to help themselves concentrate.
Every increase in productivity is not completely captured by the increased wages. If it were completely captured there would be no incentive for employers to hire productive people, no incentive for countries to accept productive immigrants, etc.
Nicotine is a stimulant and increases productivity for the same reason coffee does.
I don't see why you require "no negative effects"; cars certainly do not satisfy this, what with the high risk of accidents (a leading cause of death in my age group).
So what do you think is the boundary between externalities which should be subsidized and ones that shouldn't (assuming you're not a minarchist who thinks government shouldn't be in this business at all)? Or do you think nothing has positive externalities which should be subsidized?
" So in theory the restaurant, theater, and business-beneficiaries should want to subsidize my parking. In practice, this is too hard."
Is it too hard? Lots of stores have their own parking with signs saying "for customers only" and threatening to tow, for example. Or you can have something like a shopping mall, where a bunch of stores get together and make their own (paid) parking, which is more or less like your suggestion of the government taxing them to pay for parking just without the government. This seems like exactly the kind of thing that markets are good at, since the businesses are incentivized to get you into their store.
But also, I don't think this is what externalities actually are. You, and the businesses you frequent, are going to capture all of the value in your transactions. A positive externality would be like if your parked car emitted pleasing smells to passers-by.
"If you get rid of parking minimums in cities, people will still want to park"
People will still want to get into the city. Driving and parking is not the only way that can happen.
"But in practice nobody seems to expect this to happen, I'm curious why not, and "there are so many positive externalities to parking that we need subsidies" is my best guess."
I don't think anyone expects this, because I don't think most people have put anywhere near that much thought into the question, and don't even know what an externality is. They just want the government to keep giving them benefits from other people's tax money, and are so used to driving everywhere and parking cheaply that they can't imagine any other way of doing things. Even business owners want the government to provide cheap parking, even though doing so is actually horribly inefficient (see e.g. https://www.toronto.ca/legdocs/mmis/2021/ex/comm/communicationfile-137975.pdf).
I’d be pretty excited for giant multi-storey parking garages if we made them with classical architecture. You could fit a lot of cars in some Pantheon-type structure.
I don't know if you're already referring to https://detroit.curbed.com/2019/7/17/20697807/detroit-michigan-theatre-cool-parking-structure , but if not, check it out!
I parked there one time! It’s really cool inside. But there’s a reason all the pictures are of the interior of the building, not the exterior:
https://www.usatoday.com/gcdn/presto/2019/07/16/PDTF/aefb51bb-cea7-40d5-8afb-73a408c6b0ad-071514_michiganbuilding_rg_02.jpg
Maybe parking garages are a way to make the Foundation to Support Classical Architecture a profitable thing.
My position is: cars are great, ban mandatory parking spaces for businesses. The market will incentivize conveniently located parking lots, multi-story or otherwise.
Why is Effective Altruism (EA) controversial?
My understanding of EA is, that it wants to make sure money donated to a charity actually reaches the intended victim that a donor to the charity is trying to help.
This seems pretty non-controversial to me. What am I missing?
Want me to be cynical?
They decided to be socially active, and didn't join up with one of the two preexisting mafias, on the left or right.
That and SBF using them for cover makes them look bad to people who don't follow this stuff (which is most people).
Because like everything else, it moved away from the strict definition of that. When it comes to "try to get a guy whose policies we like elected" and going to conferences so they can network about getting jobs promoting EA and other 'taking in each other's washing' endeavours, then it becomes harder to see "who is the intended recipient of this charity, and what money is going to them?"
I think the answer is pretty obvious. Currently the Effective Altruists with the best known name is SBF, who's facing up to 115 years for massive and incompetent fraud. It's pretty hard to overcome that kind of first impression.
I haven't tried to understand the case much, but didn't he basically put his stolen money in charities evaluated using EA? I don't see why that would make EA look bad.
Simplistically speaking, EA told SBF that he had to make as much money as possible so he could donate it to EA charities. EA neglected to make clear that the money was supposed to be made legally(*), and so when SBF ran out of ways to make easy gigabucks by legal means, he shifted to a bit of easy, lucrative crime. And even after getting caught, kept insisting that his actions were both ethical and altruistic.
You can see how this makes EA look kind of bad.
* Because they thought that part was obvious, not because they were cynically hoping to profit from their adherents' lucrative criming.
Things like this, from the coverage of the trial:
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2023-10-11/ftx-bribes-dating-diary-falsified-records-ellison-testimony
"“Utilitarian”: Ellison testified that Bankman-Fried’s cavalier attitude toward rules against lying or stealing helped pave the way for her to commit crimes. As a “utilitarian,” his philosophy was that the only rule that mattered was doing whatever created the greatest good, she said. That attitude “made me more willing to do things like lie and steal,” she said. The philosophical approach known as utilitarianism is similar to some of the arguments that propelled the Effective Altruism movement, of which Bankman-Fried was a visible proponent. “When I started working at Alameda, I don’t think I would have believed if you told me I would be sending false balance sheets to our lenders or taking customer money,” she said. “But over time it was something I felt more comfortable with.”
While I'm not a Utilitarian myself, I don't think the lovely people on here who are, are a bunch of lyin' cheatin' no-good backstabbers. But for many people whose first encounter with the concept is in this kind of context, it's one hell of a black eye for EA.
How it makes EA look bad is that their whole gimmick is "evaluation". If they took stolen money from a crook, just how much 'evaluation' were they doing? And if the answer is "not too darn much", then their raison d'être is built on sand, and there's no reason to think they're any better than the random charities out there which they claim to be able to distinguish between as to who is doing the most effective work with donations.
If he'd been in a Christian context, he'd have justified the stealing and lying by donating to Christian causes and talking about how it was all for the greater glory of God. If he'd been in a socialist context, he'd have justified the stealing and lying by donating to socialist movements around the world and explaining how it was all justified by the need for revolution and class struggle.
SBF is a conman. He uses the moral framework of his marks against them, and this has very little to do with which moral framework they are using.
That's only one part. The controversial part is making sure money donated to a charity actually does good in the world. This involves prioritizing causes, and will make enemies because everyone in the non profit universe thinks their cause needs more money, not less.
In addition, having opinions on how the world should look makes you a lot of enemies who have ideological disagreements over how the world should be
That's what it started out as, but at some point it turned into anti-AI and pro-vegan advocacy.
That's the ground floor, and you're right, it's entirely fine.
It's controversial because it has evolved into this whole fanatical belief system (in the eyes of detractors). People are shaping their lives around it, and are encouraged to do so (80,000 Hours). "Longtermism" is a not-completely-fringe position that builds wild fragile castles of logic about the future, resulting in rather alien morality in the here and now. Detractors overall get an impression that its adherents are on a major "I am SO smart and moral" trip. People tend to respond really really badly when they perceive that sort of thing.
I tried to write that even-handedly, but you can probably tell that by "detractors" I mean me. https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2022/08/15/the-reluctant-prophet-of-effective-altruism is what really opened my eyes about EA back when it was published. It is, IMO, definitely not trying to critique EA, and is in fact fairly laudatory. And yet my takeaway was "oh this is creepy". In particular, I think EA people should be kept as far from government power as possible.
> In particular, I think EA people should be kept as far from government power as possible.
Relevant argument apparently from C. S. Lewis:
> And the higher the pretentions of such power, the more dangerous I think it both to the rulers and to the subjects. Hence Theocracy is the worst of all governments. If we must have a tyrant, a robber baron is far better than an inquisitor. The baron's cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity at some point may be sated; and since he dimly knows he is doing wrong he may possibly repent. But the inquisitor who mistakes his own cruelty and lust of power and fear for the voice of Heaven will torment us infinitely because he torments us with the approval of his own conscience and his better impulses appear to him as temptations.
Robert A. Heinlein, in his Motie series, advocated for supreme power to be concentrated in a single emperor, on the grounds that no matter how much power the emperor might theoretically possess, he was limited in its exercise by his inability to be in more than one place at once.
> Robert A. Heinlein, in his Motie series
I think you mean Niven and Pournelle, who co-wrote the Motie books, which were IIRC set in a universe Pournelle created?
You are right. I meant the Motie series; I was wrong about the authorship.
Some other commenters have gotten close, but nobody has nailed the answer: EA is a community, with limited connections to other social status brokerage clubs, and non-overlapping communities fight each other.
All this stuff about "philosophy" determines the details about what the other groups will write in newspaper columns, not the sentiment they will express.
this is silly. Lots of communities don't fight each other. Stamp collectors don't get into online feuds with furries. Videogame speedrunners aren't posting diatribes about how wildlife photographers are neoliberal.
Stamp collectors do actually have an ongoing conflict with furries, but not as stamp collectors, just as people who are against furries that are spread through the demographics (think social conservatism). They'd define the "stance" of their hobby groups on furries if the two were ever pushed together, say at a hotel during two conventions, unless the overlap between the two hobbies was great enough that furries outnumbered the conservatives within the collector's clubs; that's why I said "non-overlapping communities." Videogame speedrunners and wildlife photographers don't have much awareness of the other, but if you created a federal department of speedrunning and wildlife photography with a single budgetary allocation, then they would.
EA and other social status brokerage clubs have enough contact to be mutually aware of each other and don't overlap a lot. They're contesting limited amounts of money and social status, the two goods of philanthropy.
Yup. I remember reading about the time the science fiction club and the BDSM club at some college accidentally scheduled adjacent to each other at the same time.
Not only did they not fight, some people had scheduling conflicts.
Perhaps the word you're looking for is "rivalrous".
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goods#Goods_classified_by_exclusivity_and_competitiveness
The rivalry offers a basis for mutual awareness, the conflict comes from unresolved negative personal interactions.
The part where (some of?) these folks want to soft-ban raising livestock for meat, possibly.
Or maybe the part where imaginary "future people" are "moral agents".
Or maybe the part where they advocate tiling the planet with the maximum number of paperclips^H^H^Hmiserable humans that could possibly fit there..?
I'm curious, what makes you describe future people as "imaginary" or think that they don't have moral worth?
Because they don't exist?
Apropos: https://www.oglaf.com/hotbuttons/2/
So, if I wind up running a nuclear (fission) power plant, it's OK for me to bury all the high-level radioactive waste in a shallow trench out in the woods so long as my geologists can confirm that it won't be exposed to the air or leak into the groundwater for a hundred years or so?
Right, but there's very good reason to expect them to exist at some point right? If the goal is to help people, and there are most likely going to be a bunch of people in the future, is it so strange to care about them?
How do you feel about "a society grows great when old men plant trees in whose shade they shall never sit"? Is it misguided? irrelevant? factually wrong?
Given that future people don't exist yet, they are every bit as imaginary as God, and I'm constantly being told believing in God is stupid because there is no evidence, no proof, and Science has explained it all 😀
Furthermore, for those future people to come into existence, current people have to have babies, and I'm seeing lots of people not having babies for various reasons.
To quote my celebrated countryman, Sir Boyle Roche - "Why we should put ourselves out of our way to do anything for posterity, for what has posterity ever done for us?"
(In a debate in the Irish House of Commons on the vote of a grant which was recommended by Sir John Parnell, Chancellor of the Exchequer, as one not likely to be felt burdensome for many years to come, it was observed in reply that the House had no right to load posterity with a debt for what could in no degree operate to their advantage. This quotation was Sir Boyle's response.)
I guess I disagree with Sir Roche's worldview, and I am glad that most of his compatriots did too.
"Sir Boyle, hearing the roar of laughter which of course followed this sensible blunder, but not being conscious that he had said anything out of the way, was rather puzzled, and conceived that the House had misunderstood him. He therefore begged leave to explain, as he apprehended that gentlemen had entirely mistaken his words: he assured the House “that by posterity he did not at all mean our ancestors, but those who were to come immediately after them.” Upon hearing this explanation, it was impossible to do any serious business for half an hour."
https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=mdp.39015073729777&seq=249
I think now is a good time to bring up Ministry for the Future, in which the protagonists:
* soft-ban raising livestock for meat by intentionally spreading Mad Cow Disease
* are all-in on the "imaginary future people are moral agents" argument (see book title)
* do essentially a second 9/11 to shut down air travel's carbon emissions
* many other repulsive things I won't laundry-list
And the author very clearly loves it all, including the terrorism. Bill Gates, who I perceive as at least EA-adjacent, praised this book. It's the loudest and proudest representation of the dark side of EA that I know of.
This is a really weird comment to make, because not only does it cite fictional evidence, it cites fictional evidence being liked by a non-identifying as EA person as evidence of apparent EA misdeeds.
I really feel like there's an echo chamber of anti EA people who cite this type of made up evidence at each other and constantly congratulate each other on and cringe at positions that no one but them imagined.
"Citing fictional evidence" would be claiming that those things actually happened. What I'm saying is that the fictional things are the author's fantasies, as in, he clearly *really* wishes the ecoterrorism he dreams up would happen in the real world.
That's relevant to this thread because the author's motivations for those fantasies are exactly those of the "longtermist" faction of EA (but focused down to just the issue of climate change). In fact the book gives a good chunk of page space to explaining the whole "trillions of future lives" concepts, and going through it becoming an influential line of thought in-universe.
It's also relevant because asciilifeform mentioned a very unusual goal that some real life EA people have, that the author has his characters accomplish. That's what made the connection in my mind in the first place.
The "fictional evidence" is only fictional with respect to events (to date), but entirely authentic with respect to desires.
It is IMHO interesting that it is perfectly OK in "respectable" American society to scorn anyone who was seen with a copy of e.g. "Turner Diaries", but this somehow does not apply to "Ministry for the Future", "because reasons".
Yeah, this would be convincing except for the mentions of terrorism, the complete lack of actual connection with EA (other than, it reminded me of...) and the lack of actual way for anyone else to verify that the writer actually likes it instead of parodying it. (Checking the author's Wikipedia, it seems like the author actually likes solving climate change, not actually terrorism, who would have thought!)
You are doing the thing where someone recalls the similarities to an Ayn Rand villain whenever anyone says anything nice about the government.
In the book, the terrorism accomplishes its goals, and as a result the book ends distinctly hopeful. That's not how you satirize a terrorist ideology. I don't understand why you're trying to argue with me about the content of a book that I have read and you haven't. As for whether I'm allowed to comment in an open discussion thread that something reminds me of something else, I guess we'll have to agree to disagree.
The novelty of EA is not what you describe. What you describe was already done by groups like Charity Navigator. The novelty of EA is in considering the *impact* of different charities. There can be two charities each of which direct 90% of all donated funds to intended victims that nevertheless have radically different impacts.
Not everyone has to agree on what constitutes impact, but however impact is defined, some charities will be more impactful and some will be less impactful.
The implication, is that some charitable enterprises will simply never make the "most impactful cut."
The corollary of finding winning charities, is finding losing charities. Not everybody can be a winner.
People don't want to hear that.
They bristle at cost benefit analyses, because some entire enterprises won't make the cut.
What you describe (making sure funds reach intended recipients) doesn't disqualify entire enterprises.
E.g. if someone like soup kitchens in Seattle, and they find that one uses 90% of funds for their intended purpose and one uses 70% of funds for their intended purpose, then they can just donate to the former.
However, if one finds that e.g. food is much cheaper outside the US, so $100 donated to a soup kitchen somewhere else could buy 5X as much food, then it's unlikely that any soup kitchen in the US could ever qualify as being maximally impactful.
That's a big blow to those emotionally invested in American charities.
[The same conclusion could be reached by considering that a given unit of food (or money) is more helpful to a poorer person than a richer person and that almost none of the poorest people in the world live in the US.]
People feel some emotional urge to donate to a cause, and they don't want someone to quantify the impact of that donation, since that would cheapen their donation and highlight its relative unimportance.
Even raising the issue of cost benefit analysis (without analyzing a particular charity) casts a shadow over all giving and people really don't want that.
EA is great if your goal is to simply help people as much as possible, however you define that.
But most people don't have that goal.
Perhaps worst of all, the types of charities that EA ends up favoring are profoundly unsexy and non-utopian.
Insecticide treated mosquito nets to allow unimaginably poor people to still be unimaginably poor, but to have fewer dead children is for many people more depressing, than exciting.
They'd rather not think about those people at all.
Providing vitamin A tablets to malnourished babies in Africa is similarly unsexy and non-utopian.
Ending world hunger sounds a lot more appealing, and is utopian inasmuch as it doesn't concern itself with dollar for dollar impact, operating in a world where everything is possible.
EA operates in the real world, showing us the most that is possible in the real world.
But people mostly don't want to be limited by the constraints of the real world - they'd rather stay in their utopias.
> They bristle at cost benefit analyses, because some entire enterprises won't make the cut.
The conflict isn't about methods, it's about values.
If I donate to benefit my local community, I'm not going to bristle at the idea of cost--benefit analysis. I want to get the most bang for my buck.
I am going to bristle if an EA comes along and tells me I'm doing cost-benefit analysis wrong because I'm not sending my money to Africa. That's just an underhanded attempt to make me conform to EA values, couched in pseudo-objective language.
Ah. If you're right, that means EA subjects charities to economic analysis. Sounds good to me.
Yes, and not just "lives saved per dollar", but other measures like QALYs and DALYs. And analysis about the productivity of each dollar spent, such that there might be a situation where it made sense to spend between $5M and $10M on something this year, but less than $5 million would not accomplish much, and over $10M would have enough diminished marginal utility that the money would be better directed to some other cause. And of course the situation might be different next year. But most charities seem to operate on a "more money is better" model, and find this kind of calculation to be disturbing.
And then there are second order effects, some of which can involve making controversial and attention-grabbing ethical decisions. The one that brought up a bunch of controversy here was that someone didn't want to donate a kidney to anyone who wasn't a vegan, because it would increase the overall amount of animal suffering in the future. Other examples that I'm making up might be "saving the whales increases the number of krill eaten", and "saving lives in a less-environmentally-conscious part of the world harms the environment more than saving lives in a more-environmentally-conscious part of the world".
And then there's the question of what to do about long-term risks, like asteroid deflection or AI extinction. What kind of discount function do we apply to potential future disaster? How much of our current efforts are wasted?
Mostly, though, my one line summary of EA that I use, is that they generally conclude that malaria is very bad, and malaria nets are very good, and buying malaria nets is a great way to make the world better, even if some people use them for fishing. :-)
What charity project *isn't* controversial? Any time anyone does *anything* for charity there's always someone who's not happy with it for various reasons. Is EA significantly more controversial than other charities/charity-adjacent movements?
It's not just that the money reach the intended victim; EA also calls for you to pick the right victim on strict cost/benefit ratio.
It also suggests that e.g. unless you are a really good carpenter or whatnot, you shouldn't waste your time trying to build houses with Habitat for Humanity. Instead, work overtime in your job as an investment banker or silicon valley coder or whatnot, and congratulate yourself on how virtuous you are in donating some of your riches to the long-suffering malaria victims of Africa or whatever.
To many people, the virtues and the rewards of charity come from the emotional connection to the people being helped, from the sense of teamwork in coming together to help them, and from helping the community you live in. And it requires more effort than just writing a check.
Reducing this to simply solving a mathematical equation, strikes these people as rather less virtuous and less rewarding. And they really don't like the part where rich people claim virtue on the basis of having made themselves really really rich and then donating 10% to some charity nobody outside of EA has heard of.
Dark thought: EA is the Aspie version. of compassion
I thought everyone admitted that. It seemed pretty obvious to me.
I've mostly heard complaints about EA from two quarters:
1. People who do not give alms on a large scale and don't want to. A lot of such people distrust and resent what they perceive to be moralizing attempts to persuade or pressure them into being more charitable, in a similar way and for similar reasons to atheists distrusting and resenting proselytizing believers or to meat-eaters distrusting and resenting outspoken vegans.
2. Leftist who fear EA being used as a way for the ultra-wealthy to launder their reputations and for financially successful left-leaning professionals to purchase indulgences for the sin of being good at capitalism. From a standpoint of viewing concentrated private wealth as being largely the result of exploitation, even the most effective altruism is a poor second-best to an institutional regime that limits opportunities for exploitation and taxes away extreme wealth or income inequality and obviates the need for private alms via robust public services. C.f. Vox's long-standing campaign against "Billionaire Philanthropy" or Philosophy Tube's semi-recent video about Effective Altruism.
I've mostly seen the second (not saying you didn't see the first!). In many cases it spills over into "EA is full of those rationalist white guys we all hate, so we hate EA too."
>it wants to<
Their platform is that wanting to do something isn't good enough, you have to be successful at it. So, are they ACTUALLY more successful than other charities? If they aren't, there's nothing to support. You can't even take an idealist approach, due to the various Repugnant Conclusions.
Yeah. This goes to a challenge I throw out to all would-be reformers everywhere.
Prove to me that your idea works not just on paper but in reality. At a scale larger than "you and a bunch of friends" or "dedicated lab school with dedicated staff and students" (for the edu-reformers). Then we'll talk about implementing it nation-wide (or larger).
Believe in EA's principles? Ok, show me the proof. Show me that your estimations of value *actually hold up*. Solve a real problem, in the real world, under real-world conditions. And not "solve" by "make some calculations about the effect you've had based on some model." Show me the lives changed.
Want to implement universal healthcare in the US? Ok, do it on a state scale. Or heck, even on the scale of a large city.
Want to reform education? Pick a real state, and fix it there. Or even a large school district that includes a range of schools across the demographic spectrum. Etc.
Until you do so, all your theories and math and principles mean less than nothing to me. And an unwillingness to even attempt to do so, and a fixation on the unmeasurable and unknowable (the effects on a very distant future, for instance) tells me that you're at best an idle dreamer like so many others and at worst actually looking for power over people for your own ulterior motives.
This feels like an imaginary critique in just the way you’re accusing them of. EA does work in the way you describe and does solve real problems, look up Deworm the World for example. I’m not saying it describes the entirety of them movement but that is certainly there in large measure.
The only parts of EA I ever *hear* about nowadays are the anti-AI and pro-Vegan stuff and it certainly seems like that's where the energy is.
Wait.
I'm not getting your point.
Seems to me, ofcourse merely wanting to succeed is not enough. It could waste the donors' hard earned money.
The charity org should be honest and competent.
I'd think measuring this is the right way to go, so problems are actually solved for victims.
For example, a charity should be audited (by a reputable auditor) and open about their finances for me to donate there. That is something I check for, during a natural disaster.
To me, so far, EA seems like obviously a great idea.
>To me, so far, EA seems like obviously a great idea.<
You're still in "idea" mode; you've thrown out the E in EA. Which existing charities do NOT sound like a good idea?
A charity that is not audited by a reputed auditor, or, is not completely open about its financials, seems like one I'd not donate to.
I was given this advice by a finance friend when I was looking into how to help during a massive natural disaster some years ago.
If this is the sort of thing that EA does, i.e. make sure my money actually helps victims of the disaster, then I fail to see why anyone would disagree with EA.
Sigh. So instead of telling me whether any charity sounds like a bad idea on paper, you're going to hold them to a standard you're unwilling to hold EA to.
Scott has repeatedly posted about how one of Bitcoin's uses is to get money to people in Russia without their government's approval. He's also written about attempts to create EA-run cities outside of government oversight. So EA supports direct, intentional subversion of local governments. I wonder why it's controversial.
I really don't understand any of this very well. I am trying to learn.
Someone asked the exact same question to last week's open thread. My reply came in a bit late, so here it is again:
---
It's a serious attempt to bring something that was usually done quite emotionally and intuitively into the realm of rationality. Which means that:
0. It brings some extra clarity in how effective different ways of giving money are in terms of suffering averted, and motivates enterprising young people to direct their efforts there. That's the part that basically no-one seriously objects to. But:
1. It implicitly ignores or belittles the pre-existing rational thought and institutional wisdom that went into traditional NGOs and charity organizations. (Not taking sides here, I'm sure the quality of that accumulated wisdom was quite variable.)
2. It raises the stakes for everybody else. If all of a sudden most of my friends are giving 10%+ and some of them are donating kidneys to unknowns, maybe your random yearly donation to a friend-of-a-friend's school in Nepal doesn't feel like actually doing much. For all the talk we like to have about first principles, remember that in practice our sense of morality is basically calibrated on your social surroundings.
3. Remember the catchphrase "dreams of reason produce monsters"? (No, I don't mean the Mick Karn album, but it's awesome anyway - google it). So-called rational thought is only one small part of what our minds actually do, and since it basically consists of symbol manipulation, it can easily go out far out into realms far away from anyone's living experience, yet still appear hugely convincing. In the case of the EA movement, as far as I've been able to watch from a distance, it seems to have been abducted into "long-termism", which is the belief that we can make educated guesses about the far future and plan courses of action accordingly. Couple that with some utilitarian felicity-calculus involving potentially huge future populations that will not be born for generations or centuries, and you end up with a moral compass quite at odds with those of the rest of the world.
I guess it's a bit of a motte and bailey, where the motte is sending anti-malrial mosquito nets and vaccines to poor areas of the Earth, and the bailey is all the long-termist stuff, often mixed with sci-fi scenarios of immortality through mind-uploading and the like.
This is a fair and accurate response, well-said.
I started out quite positive about EA upon first learning of it and then reading a couple of its foundational texts. My enthusiasm was driven largely by your points 0 and 2. Indeed EA was part of what first drew me to Scott's blog.
Your point 1 was/is annoying to me as a serial manager of traditional non-profit organizations but, meh -- a potential for good in the world obviously far outweighs one guy's personal eye-roll.
Much more serious as a flaw is your point 3; EA long-termism turns out to be no more rational or relevant than anybody else's pet bailey is.
Then also it's turned out that many fervent EA believers combine the smug arrogance of woke activists with the adolescent monomania of fervent libertarians. (Each of those being groups I have long and deep direct experience of.)
So, with regret, I had to conclude that EA as a movement isn't for me personally. Obviously YMMV.
> the smug arrogance of woke activists with the adolescent monomania of fervent libertarians. (Each of those being groups I have long and deep direct experience of.)
That sounds like an experience no compassionate God would put a human through - though one with a sick sense of humor might. You have my sympathy.
Well it's not at the same times/contexts, thanks be to All the Almighties.
Have I defined it correctly and completely in my original comment?
Not quite, though making sure the money gets to where it should go is part of it. The effective part of effective altruism is about figuring out what the most efficient way to spend charitable fund are. So if funding anti-malaria bed nets saves 100 lives but giving that same amount of money to (as LGS is alluding to below) homeless people or sick western kids would only save 50, then the money should go to the anti-malaria nets. Some people really don't like this idea, plus now you have do a lot of work to decide what is efficient and maybe something you care about gets knocked down the priority list.
What's much worse of course, as I spent a long time arguing with Scott in the last open thread, is that EA doesn't do nearly enough on approaches that are actually effective (as opposed to 'certified by randomised control trial effective'), i.e accelerating national development and economic growth
How, exactly, is a charity supposed to encourage the government of Niger to copy the policies of Vietnam, China, Taiwan, SK, Japan, etc, that have led to the industrialization and development of those countries? Which charities do this?
There are several ways - all major charities and foundations - Gates, Rockefeller, Ford spend time and resources on advocacy for their favoured issues. Funding greater research, capacity building, seminars etc. on national development and economic growth instead of their topic of interest (often guided by poor development economics of the sort that Givewell employs) would be a start
No. That's not what EA is. EA is about arguing who is the right "victim" to whom charity should go; e.g. EAs are against donating to the homeless or to sick kids in Western countries.
My hot take is that EA is controversial because:
1) it is perceived as being powerful
2) Its values are weird, possibly unaligned with the values of most of society
So it is controversial for the same reasons that nearly every political interest group is controversial.
I think this is much more true than any explanations related to EA beliefs or actions. I also think a contributing factor is that many people involved in EA were also in the internet universe of other fringe movements at the time EA was founded, but these movements don't agree with EA so they are outspoken against EA in a Catholic vs Protestant type of way.
Im thinking of neo-reactionaries, techno libertarians, DSA, etc that are/were popular in SF and NYC during the 2010s. And it just so happened that over the past 10 years EA and their opponents have become influential within media, technology, and politics so the schism has been boosted more than most niche arguments like this.
I'm learning to play an electronic musical instrument called [Linnstrument](https://www.rogerlinndesign.com/linnstrument). It looks like [this](https://cdm.link/files/2014/04/linnstrument1-480x640.jpg). It's a MIDI controller with much worse velocity control than on a piano but it has advantages too: I can coarsely control the timbre of each note by slightly moving my finger, I can do glissandos like you can do using vocal cords, and it's very easy to transpose because there are no white and black keys and instead the layout is like frets on a string instrument with each next string being a fourth of the previous one.
I want to learn to self-accompany my singing on it - like a person with a guitar or a piano might do - sing and play at the same time. I mostly want to sing pop, blues, pop rock songs. There exist a few thousand copies of this instrument in the world so there aren't any in-depth study resources for it. Please recommend me how and what I should study to become able to self-accompany. My prior musical background is that I have basic music literacy - notes, greek modes, chords, intervals, degrees, etc. My ear is not very trained. I've been playing a diatonic harmonica for one and a half years.
Looks like a cool instrument to learn, but it's not clear to me what you are asking. If you already understand how chords work in pop, blues, and rock songs, then I would assume as long as you can figure out how to play those chords on the Linnstrument (which shouldn't be too hard), you can start accompanying your own singing.
Once you know your way around the instrument, you might be able to take inspiration from resources designed for other isometric-layout instruments like the harpejji, but I don't know how easily the concepts would transfer. You would probably have to think about it a bit to figure it out.
Re: knowing how chords work
I know the main types of chords, triads, dominant 7th chords, major 7th chords, etc. I don't know much about inversions. Also I am sure that I am missing a lot of information like, for example, if playing a major triad and singing something over it, is it important that all 3 notes sound at the same time (to let the ear orient itself) or is it ok if I arpeggiate them without sustain?
(Caveat: I'm a fairly incompetent pianist who plays mostly classical and has only a superficial understanding of rock/blues/pop. Most of what follows is just stuff I picked up from various music theory YouTubers since I started watching them a lot during the pandemic.)
Probably the best way to answer your questions here is just to play around and see what sounds make you happy. (Maybe make recordings and play them back to yourself if you want a better sense of how you would sound to other people.) There are books about the theory of harmony in pop music etc., and you might find them helpful, but nothing will substitute for actually trying stuff out.
A couple of suggestions for thinking about chord voicings ("chord voicing" generalizes the idea of inversions that you may have seen in introductory music theory textbooks):
- Popular music styles tend to anchor the harmony by playing the chord's root at the bottom. You will rarely go wrong by doing this; if you are supposed to be doing something else, the lead sheet will let you know. (Experiment with playing the root an octave or two underneath the other notes of the chord; see if you like the way it sounds.)
- For other notes in the chord, look into the concept of "voice leading." The idea is a chord progression sounds better if the notes are chosen to sound like there are multiple melodic lines playing in parallel.
- Experiment with different spacings of the notes in the chord, ranging from clusters to wider spacings (e.g. all the notes a fourth or a fifth apart). The Linnstrument might create some interesting possibilities here that wouldn't be physically playable on a piano or guitar with standard tuning.
- Some notes in chords are more important than others; you can often omit the fifth of a triad without much impact on the sound, but the third and seventh are essential to its flavor.
- Register is very important. Clusters of notes close together can sound great in a high register, but usually just sound muddy in a low register.
- Also on the issue of register, you may also want to play your chords in a different register from the one you are singing in, to leave acoustic "space" for your voice. (Try listening to a recent Taylor Swift album and notice how the frequency gap in the instrumental parts focuses attention on her voice and her lyrics — this is one of the musical techniques she and her producers have used to create the sense of intimacy with her audience that has made her a billionaire.)
You said it yourself, it's going to be tough learning an instrument that few people play, and even more so if it's (almost) your first instrument.
Best I can say is that you take learning materials for other instruments, and "translate" them for the linnstrument yourself. The first thing on any instrument is to learn to play scales and arpeggios up and down, in any key you care about, with confidence, until they become second nature enough that you can put part of your attention on something else - playing a melody, or singing on top.
Since the board structure is somewhat analogous to that of a guitar (except without the weirdness where one of the intervals between strings is narrower than the others), a fair bit of guitar goals and techniques might be useful here. Based on the Roger Linn's video, there is a strumming mode that comes very close to a guitar, which might work well for singing on top. And if you're more into electronic sounds, I'm sure this board's remarkable expressiveness could go a long way too.
In any case, the #1 rule applies: practice, practice, practice. Noodling is fun but goal-oriented practice makes you really learn.
Does anyone have experience attempting to reduce LP(a)? Mine is at 42 ng/dl . I recently starting taking statins and LDL is down significantly, but I don’t like this LP(a) situation.
Have you measured LP(a) before and after the statin? There are more aggressive lipid management drugs
Is LPa bad by itself if LDL is low?
It’s an independent marker for risk of CVD but generally thought to be genetic and difficult to alter.
If you’re managing all of your other risk factors there is no need to address LP(a) level specifically.
Also my impression is that >50 is the threshold for high risk.
Wondering if anyone else here reads "Kill Six Billion Demons" (https://killsixbilliondemons.com/).
I've been loving the latest storyline with Solomon David and White Chain. I find Solomon David a really interesting character and his initial interactions with White Chain ended on...kinda a cheap note. I'm really liking how many similarities the author is drawing between them and I'm curious where it goes.
For those of you who don't read Kill Six Billion Demons, um...
*kinda spoilers
In a universe of super-powered Hindi martial artists, a Super Saiyan god king forms the ultimate patriarchy until a transgender, transracial angel punches him and guilt trips him into forming a democracy. Then stuff happens and the transgender angel gets put in charge. Three years later, the transgender angel tracks down the super saiyan god king, who's now just chilling and fishing, and tries to put him in charge again because he/she/they/it hates being in charge.
It's good, I swear!
I gave it a try, but didn't appreciate the art style or the petulance of the protagonist. At least, those are the impressions I remember from trying it years ago.
I'm reading it and enjoying it. My less-culture-war-sounding summary would be "It's a world where angels do kung fu, the world is ruled by corrupt immortal god-kings, every location looks like it could be the cover of a heavy metal album. The protagonist is dropped into this world with a magic Macguffin that everyone wants and has to deal with the fact that everyone expects her to be some sort of conquering hero, which she really doesn't want."
Also, the author wrote about a gazillion words of fairy tales, parables, and philosophy for this setting and they're all just... the coolest. It's like it was written by a Zen master on some really good drugs.
I read it, and I'm glad that White Chain and Solomon got another chance to chat. I also like that the story is recognizing that it's not just as easy as "Give up your crown Tyrant and let your people rule themselves!". Solomon was about to tell White Chain why he didn't believe he could rightly do that when they were...interrupted. Now White Chain has spent 3 years finding out what happens when the Tyrant is gone and how messy things can get. So I hope they can actually finish their discussion this time, and find some resolution to the problem.
I like how your plot summary completely dodges any mention of the (alleged) protagonist.
I saw references here and there, and tried to get into it a few years ago, but it felt like I was missing something. Is the author just dropping us in the middle of the setting; is there other background that would make more sense of this all? It looked **fascinating**, but IIRC the current storyline was a big fight involving (I think) Solomon David, and the impression that I recall was that there was a whole lot of grandiose philosophizing and posturing, to plaster over one person basically saying "i will win because i am right" and the other saying "i will win because i won't give up", which... Eh, I've got bones to pick with both those positions.
Maybe I'll give it another shot, and see how accurate my recollection was.
The fight with Solomon David was more like "I am in charge because I am the strongest" vs "That's a stupid way to run a government." But you need to start at the beginning of the arc - the duel is just the capstone for it.
There's a running motif in the story that each of the demiurges is trapped in a self-made hell by their powers. In Solomon's case, he's set himself up as the benevolent god-emperor of Rayuba, but in the process of doing so he's systematically crushed out any hope of anyone else growing or advancing. He claims to dream of a world where he won't be necessary, but he is actually creating the conditions where his tyranny has to continue forever. The tournament which is supposed to choose his successor simply kills anyone who might be strong enough to threaten him and discourages anyone else from trying. And his realm, which is on the surface beautiful and glorious, is incredibly fragile - when the man holding it up is defeated, the whole thing collapses.
Meanwhile, White Chain's character arc parallels this in the opposite direction - she's an angel, the inflexible enforcer of the law, but she's gradually realized that the order the angels are trying to enforce (and in particular everything done to support Zoss and Metatron's plan) is kind of broken and terrible - she inflicts brutal violence in the name of a system that makes no sense. So her duel with Solomon, and her transformation into a human, are basically saying "this system is supposed to be eternal and unbreakable, but I think it's stupid, so I'm going to punch it and see what happens."
So like, there's some shonen anime "have lots of determination and punch good" stuff in there, but there's also some commentary on the violence inherent in government and the paradox that the tools of revolution are also the tools of rulership. There's a lot of interesting themes going on.
(The author has described it as "this is a comic about how swords are cool but are actually not cool at all.")
Thanks, that makes me more likely to start reading it again. :-)
I'm glad that it's not simply re-treading the ground that, to pick an example that stuck with me, I thought Rurouni Kenshin covered so well.
Agreed. The previous training arc nails this to the mast by having the main character train to develop the ultimate sword technique (tm). This is immediately followed by the realisation that swords are a kind of juvenile thing to base your whole identity around.
Question for trans rights people: Are there any specific legal/policy trans issues that are meaningfully important to change in themselves (and not for their cultural symbolic values)?
e.g. for gay marriage the debate itself was mostly symbolic but there really are some marriage benefits (like default inheritance laws or whatever) that are meaningfully important in themselves aside from the social acceptance signal.
The biggest is probably access to gender-affirming care. In most of the US, most of the important changes are already in place or in the pipeline. WPATH 8 guidelines for gatekeeping are pretty reasonable when followed as written, although a lot of providers are still basing their practices at least partially on the older and somewhat more restrictive WPATH 7 guidelines. Medicaid in most states, Tricare, and most private insurance will cover at least the basics of gender-affirming care including HRT, FtM top surgery, and bottom surgery, although stuff like hair removal, facial feminization surgery, voice training, and MtF top surgery usually still have to be paid for out of pocket.
Likewise, the Feds and almost all states allow updating identity documents (of substantive importance because having your driver's license and passport not match your name and gender both outs you as trans and can raise questions about the legitimacy of the ID), although the process could be smoother in many cases. The big concern is in both cases is defensive, preventing unreasonably roadblocks from being imposed legislatively.
In other countries like the UK, though, things are quite a bit worse, particularly in terms of access to care. If you want medical transition services through the NHS, you first need a formal diagnosis from a gender dysphoria clinic which has a multi-year wait list and which had a reputation for operating on unreasonably narrow and outdated criteria for what qualifies as "real" gender dysphoria worthy of treatment.
Thanks for the answer!
Antidepressant or Tolkien character?
https://antidepressantsortolkien.vercel.app (not my work, but I thought of this community)
23/24. Fooled by Nardil, which does follow Tolkien's naming conventions.
18/24. My strategy as a huge Tolkien fan was to always click Antidepressant unless I actually recognized it as a Tolkien character. I would have gotten 19/24 if I'd applied it consistently instead of guessing Tolkien for an antidepressant that sounded so much like a name Tolkien would come up with as to tempt me to deviate from the rule. Unfortunately, I don't remember what it was.
I also got Erestor wrong despite being pretty sure I remembered a Tolkien character of that name because I was also pretty sure I remembered an antidepressant of that name. I was probably thinking of Effexor.
I would argue that Bilbo should count as an antidepressant.
As an MD and Tolkien fan I got 23/24, but it was harder than I expected.
I saw one of these for body parts versus Tolkien characters. One of them was a trick: "Groin" is both.
Hm? I was pretty sure that the body part was "groin" and the dwarf was "Gróin". This is not a minor difference - for example, the dwarf's name is two syllables.
I keep waiting for "queenamab".
Drugs end in -mab when they are Monoclonal AntiBodies. Queenamab would imply one derived from some type of chemical that was named queena- something, which seems unlikely.
It was a joke; I was hoping someone would riff on it with something like "under the brand name Tarnuhelm". Perhaps I should have gone with "quina" or "kuwina", but I was worried that people wouldn't get it.
I'm not aware that, say, aducanamab derives from any compound called "aducana"? Or remdesivir from any compound called "remdesi"? But I could easily be wrong; I'm not up on those sorts of naming conventions, and never did orgo past the high school level.
I got the joke; I was just saying it was unlikely to work out.
The chemical-structure names of drugs tend to be decided in systematic ways. I'm not familiar enough with the system to be able to parse them myself, but of the two you listed, wiktionary notes that -desi- and -vir are meaningful elements in remdesivir, and notes -n- and -umab [hUman Monoclonal AntiBody?] as meaningful elements of aducanumab.
I tend to suspect that the names would be explained if I could find the papers introducing the chemicals to the literature, but I don't know how to do that. Scott might!
https://www.who.int/teams/health-product-and-policy-standards/inn/guidance-on-inn seems relevant.
See the problem is that Moon Moth is very blue collar and coarse-minded and can't grasp subtleties like that. They probably think the there are chemicals named shit like "Kardashiana" and "belly buttona" and "you missed the pointa mista"
Alas, I am not great at these word games. I can't figure out a good contraction of "labelladamesansmerci" for something that produces a moment of clarity...
"And I awoke and found me here, / On the cold hill's side."
After I wrote that post about you I worried that you would think I was serious. I was not! Sent you an email explaining my post. And by the way I tried to think of some funny riffs and could not either. I was thinking it would be funny to have somebody's name + mab or one of the other endings, then "sustained release." But the best thing I oould come up with was "Eminence grise, sustained release. But then if you stick -mab or one of the other suffixes on the end, and what's actually funny about Grisemab, you know?
I did think my EA parable was quite funny, but it seems that nobody else did.
Maybe it expresses too openly and angrily the genuine angry distaste I have for some of these people.
The 5th Circuit just cited Scott in its recent ruling against the ATF, on page 48, footnote links to "All in All, Another Brick in the Motte."
Is this the first Federal appellate decision citing SSC?
https://www.ca5.uscourts.gov/opinions/pub/23/23-10718-CV0.pdf
Haha! That's great!
"ATF essentially responded with variation of the motte-and-bailey argument. See
Scott Alexander, All in All, Another Brick in the Motte, Slate Star Codex (Nov. 3,
2014), https://perma.cc/PA2W-FKR9. The Final Rule is clearly more expansive than the
text of § 921(a)(3). When pressed on due process concerns with the Final Rule, ATF
retreated to the text of § 921(a)(3) and argued that courts have rejected such attacks on the
GCA. But the Final Rule is not the GCA. ATF may either have the text of the GCA, as
upheld against due process challenges by various courts, or the more expansive Final Rule,
which has never encountered such a challenge. But it may not mix and match legal texts
with defenses."
It's the only judicial decision at all that cities SSC that I'm aware of, though it's not like I've been looking.
In Matthieu's response to Seth's comment about "A Void", he proposes "What your Wiki should do, is build a spot for parody (or playful imitation) which is cut off from Wiki's 'main' part."
Which is pretty much my understanding of how TvTropes came into being. The page itself started out as a BtVS fan community project in 2004, but happened to coincide with an internal conflict among Wikipedia editors over how tightly "encyclopedic" Wikipedia should be with the minimalists coming out on top and systematically eliding "fancruft" from media pages. Said fancruft, along with the editors who liked it, found a hospitable home at TvTropes.
TvTropes has since implemented page tabs specifically for minimalist and maximalist interpretations of its own content: the default pages are quite a bit broader in scope and freer in format than corresponding Wikipedia pages (beyond the obvious catalogs of tropes on media pages and examples on trope pages), but there's also "Laconic" tabs for brief just-the-facts descriptions of the tropes and "Just For Fun" tabs for goofiness that would get in the way of clarity on the main page. In addition, TvTropes has grown a "Useful Notes" section of pages for real-life background useful for understanding media, many of which pages are actually really good encyclopedic articles and are sometimes arguably better than the corresponding pages on Wikipedia.
I can't help but wonder if there's a branch of library science that studies the management of information at this level. For which "how best to organize this group-editable information source (re:wiki)?" is a serious question.
If there isn't, there should be.
So the standard explanation as to why Netflix took over from cable is that streaming services can show you any show, any time, and are not limited by just showing 1 show at a time in a particular time slot. Netflix got its start because cable networks (I think Star was the first one) leased them their old back catalogs that weren't being aired anyways. It snowballed from there.
But technologically- is this true? Can you really not serve up shows on-demand via a cable line? Imagine that Comcast (I know, I know) had a Netflix-like UI where the customer selects a show from the Comcast servers. Why can't Comcast serve it up over the cable line the same way Netflix serves it up over the phone line? What are the technological hurdles here? Maybe the UI signal travels to Comcast over the phone line, then the show comes back to the customer over cable.
I'd be much more interested in discussing the technological obstacles to this than anything else. I mean we all know Comcast is not innovative, but let's assume for a moment a competent smart Comcast. Engineering-wise, do cable lines just not work this way? Why?
> Imagine that Comcast (I know, I know) had a Netflix-like UI where the customer selects a show from the Comcast servers. Why can't Comcast serve it up over the cable line the same way Netflix serves it up over the phone line?
They can; that is precisely what happens when you use Netflix over your Comcast cable internet connection. Internet connections in the modern day are unlikely to involve a phone line at any point, though that is the medium for DSL.
In fact, the "Xfinity Stream" app is _exactly_ that, more so than using Netflix over Comcast Internet. If you aren't a cable TV customer, but get their Internet, you can get a free "Flex" box which runs that app; otherwise it's available on Roku, Google TV for Android, and a couple of other platforms, but somehow not big-screen Google TV as implemented on my Sony TV.
It wasn't a technological hurdle, it was complacency. They already had a business model that was much more profitable.
Off the immediate topic but regarding Netflix: how is it possibly going to survive long-term against Amazon Prime and Apple TV? The latter companies don't need to make money from their streaming services, Netflix does. Why wouldn't they drive Netflix out of business over the next ten years by spending more and charging less? I suppose they could make a bunch of really dumb programming decisions, but the fundamentals point towards Netflix not surviving.
I think both Amazon prime and Apple TV eventually aim to be profitable on their own. Apple TV isn’t only available on Apple devices, for instance.
At this point at least, it seems like there is enough money out there for these services to all survive.
If we figured people were willing to spend ~$100/mo on cable that gives them budget for 6 to 7 streaming services (if they are $12-$15 each which seems to be the price point they are converging on).
Netflix needs hope their back catalog becomes desirable enough for people to rewatch that they don't cancel. They have also been doing a lot more slow release shows, either weekly episodes or seasons in two or three batches. That can help keep people subscribed long term. I have also noticed they are now doing bigger monthly releases of new movies and shows instead of releasing over the course of the month.
Apple and Amazon aren't guaranteed to "win" either even though the main business can fund loses on the content side. They both have been spending big (in the billions) on sports content. At some point you have to see a return on that investment to justify it.
Disney, Paramount (CBS), HBO Max (Discovery and HBO), and Peacock (NBC) have huge back catalogs they know are valuable (There are probably 1 million people who will subscribe to Peacock just to watch the office). They also have a ton of cheap reality shows (especially Discovery). This keeps their content costs down some even if they don't have the other cash flow to offset losses (I guess Disney does have that).
Prime is flailing around a little bit. I think you're correct in that both Amazon and Apple are more interested in using their streaming services to get people to sign up for subscriptions, which can then be used across the full range of goods and services, by enticing them in with "you have to watch this must-see series everyone is talking about".
Prime tried that with "Rings of Power" which, um, well yeah. I'm not familiar with what Apple produces. Both of them can indeed eat losses that a service like Netflix can't, but they still need the streaming services to pay for themselves. If they're not doing that by selling subscriptions, then it's pointless to drive Netflix out of business; customers will go to the Netflix replacement to see the shows and programmes they want that are not being broadcast by Prime or Apple (or Disney+).
That's the advantage Netflix possesses; it can show content from a range of sources:
"Distributors that have licensed content to Netflix include Warner Bros., Universal Pictures, Sony Pictures Entertainment and previously The Walt Disney Studios. Netflix also holds current and back-catalog rights to television programs distributed by Walt Disney Television, DreamWorks Classics, Kino International, Warner Bros. Television and Paramount Global Content Distribution, along with titles from other companies such as Hasbro Entertainment and Funimation. Formerly, the streaming service also held rights to select television programs distributed by NBCUniversal Television Distribution, Sony Pictures Television and 20th Century Fox Television.
Netflix negotiated to distribute animated films from Universal that HBO declined to acquire, such as The Lorax, ParaNorman, and Minions."
People are getting tired of/can't afford to pay several subscriptions to different services to see content, so a one-stop-shop model is much more attractive.
These companies don't need to make money from their streaming services, so why should they care if Netflix is driven out of business or not?
I'm not saying it wouldn't advantage them at all, but both companies have many competing business priorities and the ROI of a price war aimed at possibly maybe driving Netflix out of business just doesn't seem worthwhile.
Good point. I should have written that they could drive all the other streamers out of business and end up with a profitable duopoly. But, as you say, that may not be worthwhile to them.
Cable providers have been offering this for a while, maybe not as long as Netflix but close.
Here's the longer story, as I understand it. For many years, cable bundles included a number of stations that people really wanted, and a number that not enough people wanted to keep them alive unless they were bundled (HGTV or History Channel, supported by ESPN or something). People wanted to pick and choose their own stations, and pay for what they got, not the much more expensive full bundles that included stations they didn't want or need. But because those many smaller stations needed the bundling to work, cable providers resisted.
So we end up in a situation where cable costs $100+ a month and most people only use a minority of the stations available. Netflix comes along at less than $10/month offering a pretty good catalog (in many ways better than their current catalog, as they had a bunch of great older content- I really miss Netflix before any other streaming services came out, as the only game in town they seemed to have all of the viewing options that now get split between multiple competitors).
Cable can offer movies and shows streaming to solve the "any show, any time" problem, but that doesn't solve the problem of their core business model. They're not really in the "physical cable installed at your house" business so much as "bundle of content" business. They could have used the physical cables for all kinds of things, but would have destroyed the value of their main business in doing so.
I suppose you could argue that they missed an opportunity, but I would argue that they were not positioned to be able to do that. It would take a lot of work to unwind their current contracts and drop a bunch of content that couldn't make the cut, then try to wind back up in a way that worked for on-demand options. Netflix, unburdened by such prior commitments, could just move on to offering streaming content even if it destroyed the value of cable options. They didn't even need to install a wire to someone's house to do it, which means the one advantage cable had was unnecessary. Worse, Netflix often came in on the cable company's wire, using that same infrastructure. There was a time when Comcast tried to throttle Netflix speeds, which was a major reason for the net-neutrality conversations and such.
Thanks. I get what you're saying, but trust me- I'm not proposing breaking up the cable bundle. I'm not proposing that Comcast offer channels a la carte or anything like that. I'm just proposing that Comcast, Charter, and the other cable guys never sell their back catalogs to Netflix to start with- and instead offer them via video on demand. This way the cable bundle stays intact- it's just that if you want to watch old episodes of Magnum PI, or Colombo, or Dukes of Hazzard- they'd only be available on Comcast VoD and never on Netflix. Hell now you can start charging more for the bundle!
Netflix would never have gotten off the ground without the cable companies selling them their back catalogs that weren't airing. Again, the theory is- on TV you can only watch 1 show at a time, with streaming you can watch anything anytime. My question is- doesn't video on demand do exactly what streaming does? Those back catalogs gave Netflix the cash flow to ultimately start making their own content. VoD is the cable company solution here, no?
The answer to this is a lot of companies that own the rights to content are doing this.
The cable companies don't have back catalogs. (Well comcast does i guess because they own NBC Universal and maybe dish network is somehow tied in with turner?). The production companies are the ones that own the right to the shows and movies (more or less, these things are complex). Once Disney and Paramount and other traditional TV networks got their act together with streaming, they stopped making deals with netflix and started showing things on their own platforms.
In 2006 ABC had a great streaming site that showed all their shows. No cost, no accounts. Why? Because they didn't think this was valuable. It wasn't how they made money traditionally so didn't try to do anything with it. Inertia is a powerful thing in large companies.
Last time I actually had cable (living in Seattle suburbs 2006-2008), part of the service was video-on-demand. The catalog was a lot smaller than Netflix's, but wasn't anywhere near being too small to be useful.
This had been in the pipeline a long time, at least since 1995. There were technical issues (bandwidth and screen real estate on a standard-def TV were the two big ones), but they weren't insurmountable. The bigger problem was business, with the first round of projects being used as bargaining chips in turf wars between cable companies and telephone companies in the leadup to and immediate aftermath of the 1996 Telecommunications Act, and with the second round getting shut down following the Dot Com crash of the early 2000s. Source: my mother was the lead UI designer on a couple of the big R&D efforts (TeleTV and Excite@Home) towards interactive television and video-on-demand served via cable or telephone networks.
My story for why Netflix took over from cable to the extent they did is that they were already well on their way to doing so back when they worked by mailing DVDs to you. Cable providers were vulnerable because they had built their business models around the assumption that they had secure local monopolies over premium television content provision. But once people got used to Netflix, a $20/month netflix subscription plus a small one-time expense for a good set of rabbit ears (for new episodes of network TV shows, syndicated reruns, and local news and sports) looked like a pretty attractive substitute for a $100+/month cable internet subscription. When Netflix launched their streaming service in 2007, that made the case for ditching cable even stronger.
I just came across a fascinating essay by John Tooby, one of the founders of evolutionary psychology, on tribalism, what he describes as "evolved neural programs specialized for navigating the world of coalitions—teams, not groups. ... These programs enable us and induce us to form, maintain, join, support, recognize, defend, defect from, factionalize, exploit, resist, subordinate, distrust, dislike, oppose, and attack coalitions. Coalitions are sets of individuals interpreted by their members and/or by others as sharing a common abstract identity (including propensities to act as a unit, to defend joint interests, and to have shared mental states and other properties of a single human agent, such as status and prerogatives)."
He argues that there was strong evolutionary pressure to develop such programs, something difficult enough that most species have not been able to do it, and points out one downside:
"Forming coalitions around scientific or factual questions is disastrous, because it pits our urge for scientific truth-seeking against the nearly insuperable human appetite to be a good coalition member. Once scientific propositions are moralized, the scientific process is wounded, often fatally."
https://www.edge.org/response-detail/27168
Tooby's claim here (as well as in a few of his articles that I skimmed online, such as his chapter with Leda Cosmides in Høgh-Olesen (ed.), "Human Morality and Sociality" [2010]) is frustratingly vague, in part because he doesn't attempt to delineate which species do or do not exhibit behavior matching his concept of coalitions. His descriptions of the concept mix behaviours that are widely found among animal species with behaviours that are specific to humans.
There is presumably a hierarchy of competencies and dispositions here:
(1) Recognizing identity permanence for specific individuals of one's own species.
(2) Distinguishing kin from non-kin.
(3) Distinguishing allies/friends from non-allied individuals.
(4) Recognizing that two or more individuals (outside the circle of one's own alliances) are allied to each other.
(5) Attributing mental states (beliefs, intentions, etc.) and social ranking characteristics (status etc.) to groups as well as individuals.
(6) Forming coalitional networks that extend beyond the circle of direct acquaintances (e.g. coalitions larger than Dunbar's number).
Among these phenomena, (1) and (2) are widespread among animals, while (3) has been demonstrated in a range of mammals and possibly some birds. Once you have (3) plus a "theory of mind" sufficiently well-developed to model the behavior of individuals of one's own species, you probably get (4) for free.
(5) is where things start to get interesting. My guess is that this is also going to start happening more or less automatically once you have alliances and theory of mind, because our instinctive mind-recognition module tends to enthusiastically attribute mind-like qualities to anything that exhibits complex behaviour and because modeling a group as an individual with beliefs and intentions is much easier than simultaneously modelling all the individuals that make up the group and their mutual interactions. I think something like this happens in a number of primate species, and if Tooby had attempted to say which species did or did not exhibit the behaviour he was describing it would have made his claim much more specific and potentially fertile as a source of insights.
(It isn't clear to me why Tooby claims we instinctively attribute status rankings and prerogatives to groups, as opposed to attributing status to individuals based on their membership in particular groups. I agree that the latter is somewhat instinctive, and I can imagine it plausibly being a genetic adaptation, but the former is, as far as I can tell, something that happens only in specific institutional and legal contexts, and I see no reason to assume that those institutional and legal contexts are genetically determined.)
(6) is the most interesting of all, and presumably unique to humans, but it seems to be very clearly a cultural rather than a genetic phenomenon. It takes advantage of psychological capacities and dispositions that we share with other species (1-5), but it also depends on technologies (e.g. writing) and cultural transmission of ideas (e.g. religion, nationalism, political ideology) to form much larger coalitions than would have been possible in prehistoric societies.
Obligatory "I didn't read the essay, but" - I'm becoming more and more skeptical of complicated evo psych theories as time goes on, for a few reasons:
- There aren't enough genes to encode too many of them
- It's really hard for genes to encode things (see eg https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/09/07/how-do-we-get-breasts-out-of-bayes-theorem/)
- A lot of human failure modes that people think require complex evolutionary programming end up falling naturally out of basic reasoning (see eg https://slatestarcodex.com/2020/02/12/confirmation-bias-as-misfire-of-normal-bayesian-reasoning/)
- While obviously basic things like sex drive and empathy are evolutionarily based, attempts to empirically demonstrate anything more complicated seem to fail (see eg all the stuff about menstruation).
- You can get really complex behavior through cultural evolution + processing. Are our strategies around team coalition building really more impressive than our strategies around hunting and food processing? (https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/06/04/book-review-the-secret-of-our-success/)
- Do gangsters, professors engaging in academic politics, Otto von Bismarck, and hunter-gatherers really use the same coalitional strategies? I think there are probably some commonalities (they probably all understand the concept of rival/enemy), but a *lot* of free parameters, and I would rather believe that evolution gave us some extreme basics and left us to learn strategies rather than that our programs are complicated enough to contain lots of flexible variables.
This might be a distinction without a difference, but I would argue we got a few basic emotions (anger, empathy) and evolution has tuned their values in ways such that normal learning produces optimal coalition-ing behavior. So the difference between us and bonobos (who I think have different coalitioning behavior) might be that we get angrier at people, which causes us to learn the concept of "enemy", which causes us to be rewarded by coming up with ways to fight our enemies, etc.
The eternal criticism of evo psych by other evolutionary biologists (especially evo devo folk) is that it only rarely rises to the point of providing testable hypotheses. Far too often, an evo psych theory is a pleasant just-so story that invariably reflects the biases and expectations of the person proposing it.
Animals like squirrels, do have complex genetic behaviors surrounding mating, foraging and food storage that they don't have to learn from other squirrels. Humans are the only species whose behaviors might not be primarily genetic; I also don't see how the argument from complexity can make any sense when our anatomy is itself very complex and has been evolving for not much longer (the neural crest existed in the worms that started the Animal kingdom, predating limbs and internal organs.)
You're correct with respect to 'primarily', but animals do learn and transmit (vertically and horizontally) novel behaviours, including those that affect pressure-sensitive activities like foraging and courtship. Obviously primates, as mentioned, but cultures idiosyncratic to populations have been observed even in rodents and birds.
If this capacity is preserved even in less cerebral/social/self-augmenting species, it makes perfect sense that humans find themselves at the extreme end of the cultural malleability continuum.
True, but there are not enough instances of "squirrel culture," to overturn the idea that complex innate programming is (somehow, nature is amazing) most of how animal behavior happens.
> Humans are the only species whose behaviors might not be primarily genetic
Humans are certainly not such a species, but it is a popular ideological claim.
My amateur-ish thought on evopsych is it exists but that first you must strip away everything that is not common to all humanity through recorded history/anthropology. Because humans have not changed enough evolutionarily for there to be meaningful differences between us and the Romans. But at the same time, there are serious commonalities between us and the Romans! And us and the highlanders of Papua New Guinea.
This does meaningfully restrict the range of human behaviors including in ways some people might not like. Some of these are incredibly specific like certain professions being overwhelmingly male or female. That might not give us any insight into, for example, whether taxes ought to be set at 30% or 40%. But it does inform us about the viability of more utopian goals. Some of which are pretty mainstream.
On the other hand, if you take all the human universals you still get a lot of room for variation. It becomes very easy for people to say, for example, "it's against human nature to do X" when there's actually plenty of well functioning societies that do X.
I think of it a bit like a window where things within the window can be changed but straying outside the window tends to end in disaster. Certain peoples' windows are too big, they think human nature can be stretched further than it can, and others' too small, they think it can't be stretched outside of their own culture.
No they wouldn't. They did take inventories of professions by gender and it was noted, even in the 19th century, that healers were not consistently of a single gender throughout all societies.
A good example of what I said though: you're right a lot of 1900 men would have assumed their cultural norm was a universal norm. And you in turn are assuming that because one cultural gender norm changed all gender roles are flexible. Both are wrong.
And then there's the René Girard angle, according to which the big evolutionary switch was that our species learned to copy not just behaviors, but desires. I kind of like this one because, unlike John Tooby's theory above, it's kind of minimalistic enough to pass the sniff test - and you can vaguely gesture at it being enough to explain tribalism.
That's a great essay, thanks for sharing! My mind is shying away from the implications right now: is there a trade-off between caring and effectiveness? Maybe the synthetic phyles from "The Diamond Age" aren't as silly as they seemed?
The basic premise seems to have been implied by Jonathan Haidt's "The Righteous Mind"? I only read it recently (a big mistake on my part), and was shocked at how much of the discussion (or so I remember) had been about the "moral foundations" aspect, and how little had been about the "hive-mindedness" part, in which rational thought was developed as rationalization, a way to use language to form coalitions and sway them to our interests, and on the receiving end, to let our coalition's interests become our own. That theory was, to me, by far the most interesting and valuable part of the book.
I never liked Eliezer Yudkowsky's formulation that "rationality is for winning", but this made sense of why. Simplifying a spectrum into a binary, most people use it for winning, but some of us are weirdos who prefer to use it for truth-seeking, and tend to be exploitable by people who use it for winning. Eliezer argues that we can get both, and that truth should help with winning, which is true to a certain extent. But the problem is that I'm some sort of mutant who actually has a preference for truth, and my preference for winning is rudimentary, and more like a preference to not be obviously losing.
Speaking of which, I've been watching "Welcome to Wrexham", over the same period of time, and I wish I could analyze all the ways in which team loyalty permeates the city and the show. It's fascinating how much of the experience of watching sports derives from the tiny switch of "caring what happens", especially when you notice that switch flipping in yourself.
I've thought about the "Winning vs Truth" paradox for a while and I feel that I've settled the question, at least to my own satisfaction.
The (abridged) conclusion I've come to is, honesty is a PvP strategy instrumental to winning *in the long-term*. Because true propositions correspond to reality (qua invariance), and are therefore dependable across scenarios and across time. Deception offers short-term advantages, although the trade-off is that the strategy is not as robust across scenarios and across time.
I know Scott just commented upthread about how EvoPsych is sketchy. But I have to imagine that Azathoth stuck a Truth-drive in us somewhere. Because I think the concept of Truth is more sophisticated than it simply being an arbitrary boolean-value.
If Truth isn't an innate biological construct, then the default epistemic position should be to assume that the map and the territory are, in fact, the same. But if hardly anyone had a map/territory distinction, hardly anyone would have reservations about wireheading. And I doubt the Truth-drive is culturally transmitted (except as moral-injunction, which also doesn't have enough explanatory power), because otherwise I wouldn't expect continental philosophy to have such a tough time defining it.
I remember someone, inspired by Scott's "Every Bay Area House Party" wrote something like "Every NYC House Party", I intended to read it but was never able to find it. If I didn't hallucinate this, and someone knows what I'm talking about, can I please get the link?
Sam Kriss' substack, I believe. I don't have the specific link.
This, maybe?
https://samkriss.substack.com/p/downtown-23
Is anyone here buying individual bonds, as opposed to a bond fund? Bonus points if the bonds that you're buying aren't Treasuries. I'd be interested to hear what the reasons for buying individual bonds are- it's complex, less liquid, and has higher transaction costs, right? And while bond funds charge (low) fees, they're also supposedly getting a better price than a retail investor on each bond- right?
I buy (well, have my finance guy buy on my behalf) individual California state and municipal bonds on account of A: the tax advantages of the state bonds make them preferable to Federal bonds for me, and B: my finance guy can quickly pick half a dozen or so bonds with favorable terms and appropriate maturity dates. If I had to do the research myself, I'd probably just pick a California bond fund.
For anything more complicated than Treasuries, you either are an expert or you should be paying for expert advice. An expert who works for you will probably give you better advice than one being paid by e.g. Vanguard, but there are scaling issues with having a personal adviser for small portfolios.
Yes, in a brokerage account, mostly short-duration bills as a savings vehicle. Treasuries only though. Reason: they pay higher rates than bank savings account.
I don't know if the bond funds get better deals, maybe, but what I see is what I get when I buy Treasuries, and no transaction fees. So it's still a better deal than a bank savings, and I run zero risk of bond fund doing anything silly.
Almost a year ago I bought a TIPS bond using Treasury Direct. It's not hard to set up an account, and it's not hard to use.
It didn't occur to me to invest in a bond fund, at the time: what's the point? I just wanted to protect some of my money from inflation during a time of high inflation. Since then I've learned a little bit more about bonds and found out that bond funds are the "normal" way to invest in bonds. At the time I just assumed that you bought bonds like you bought stocks, and Treasury Direct made it pretty easy to do so.
If you have a Schwab account, for example, it’s trivially simple to by individual bonds--- T-bills, Treasuries, Corporates, Municipals--- at very low to zero transaction costs and deep liquidity. The advantage over a bond fund is that you choose your maturity date and your principle doesn’t fluctuate daily with the nominal interest rate, and no expense ratio.
Do you find Schwab is a good platform for trading bonds specifically? i.e. good pricing and liquidity? I hear good things about Fidelity for that. Considering a move.
I've only purchased short term T-Bills, but it's very simple and no commission, hugely liquid. I'm not even sure how they make money on the trades, maybe a bit on the bid-ask spread?
Gotcha, I was thinking more for corporate and muni bonds.
Having recently been rereading the “Sadly, Porn” book review (https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/book-review-sadly-porn) and having encountered the following passage:
> But - don’t laugh - a lot of the time when I listen to music, I find myself fantasizing about being the person who wrote the music, or playing the music in front of a big audience while everyone applauds me, or something like that. It seems that my enjoyment of music - maybe not quite as primal as sex, but still pretty primal - actually *is* at least assisted by status fantasies.
I wonder what Scott feels or would feel about rhythm games in that light? As with many game/reality distinctions, the framing often injects a sort of protagonism into things: Guitar Hero might be the most overt example with it right there in the title, but idol games also involve “star performer wowing the audience” fantasies. On a more skew note with dance rather than music proper, there's Elite Beat Agents, where the group you're playing dances well enough to magically inspire people out of their life problems. Notably, the backing tracks are generally prerecorded, so while there may be a high skill ceiling in the gameplay proper, it's partially disconnected from the music itself (though some games do have some dynamic sample/track interactivity).
Well... The power fantasy doesn't work if you're bad at rhythm games.
Looking for recommendations: if I wanted to make a turkey or ham sandwich without meat, what could I use instead? Requirements are that it requires no cooking, is high in protein, and tastes decent. I have approximately no experience with meat substitutes, so even information that is obvious to people in the know is welcome.
I am a meat-eater, but I used to buy a vegan prosciutto that was really quite good (and produced in Italy). I am about 80% sure that it was "Good and Green". I know this is not quite ham, but it does make a decent sandwich with Italian-type toppings (mozzarella, tomatoes, something with olives if you're adventurous). Generally, I've been finding that, when faced with weird dietary requirements, it's often worthwhile to try food imported from Italy.
Cheese, hummus and nut butters are all tasty, alone or in combination. You won't think for a minute that they're turkey or ham, though. But you might be better off just developing a taste for some non-meatlike things, rather than for things that aren't meat but try to imitate it.
Grilled halloumi is a pretty good substitute for the ham experience, but doesn't do so well when cold.
I just looked it up and apparently it's difficult to get in the US though. (Why??)
I've never done it myself, but you can find instructions for making halloumi online that claim it's "not as difficult as you might think." If I were living in the US, I might give it a try. I suppose if you've never eaten halloumi before it might be trickly to know whether you have succeeded or failed.
North America-centric answer: Tofurkey makes excellent deli slices. I especially like the peppered ones. Field Roast also makes good deli slices but are harder to find. Non-dairy cheese has improved by leaps and bounds in the past three or four years. Chao, Daiya, and Violife are all good enough to eat on their own. Hummus is a good sandwich moisturizer, but vegan mayos are easy enough to find now and tasty enough to be considered "solved" IMO.
Thanks!
I like Light Life's veggie hotdogs a lot. Hot dogs are an easy "meat" to fake because it's already so processed. You could use them like hot dogs or cut/slice them to mimic deli meat.
If you have access, Trader Joes has a good selection of flavored meat substitutes like smoked tofu, tempeh, etc. They may have a deli meat substitute.
This isn't exactly what you are asking for, but you can make a great tuna salad substitute by mashing up chick peas and adding pickles/red onion/capers, mayo/mustard, and (the key) dried seaweed stacks torn in little pieces. Tastes great and hits the same spot as tuna salad does. No cooking required and you could make big batches to cut down prep time.
I am a meat eater, so not an expert, but I once had a banh mi with hummus, olives, alfalfa sprouts and maybe some pickled onions that was delicious.
Does anyone know of good models for how religious conversion works? It makes some sense to me that one would personify and make rituals about ex. rain or sun, and that would develop a mythos over cultural time. I can also understand that for some people materialist/atheist explanations of life are deeply troubling, and they turn towards a spiritual tradition. But if you already believe in Odin, and some weird foreigners start telling you about this guy who was the son of God (there's just the one apparently?) and died for you personally somehow... How does that become convincing? I know that a lot of the wide-scale conversion involves politics and conquering and such, but I'd think enough people had to already be Christian for it to matter politically. It can't be all conquering. I listen to/read a lot of religious media and usually seems like it needs belief to be present already to be convincing. I really do not care that God made a huge sacrifice by killing his son so I would have a chance to be saved because I don't think any of that happened. Conversion stories I've read usually have this gap:
feels Something Missing (in current religion or lack of one)
hears about The Religion
learns some semi-interesting fables/has a personal sense of Something
[?????]
...and that's why The Religion is just so convincing and powerful and true.
What? Huh? Anyone who has books, articles, or just personal experience that could clarify this mental maneuver would be appreciated.
The "Confession" of St Patrick, composed in the 5th century and known from 8th century copies.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saint_Patrick#Sources
"Two Latin works survive which are generally accepted as having been written by St. Patrick. These are the Declaration (Latin: Confessio) and the Letter to the soldiers of Coroticus (Latin: Epistola), from which come the only generally accepted details of his life. The Declaration is the more biographical of the two. In it, Patrick gives a short account of his life and his mission. Most available details of his life are from subsequent hagiographies and annals, which have considerable value but lack the empiricism scholars depend on today."
English translation of the "Confession":
https://www.ancienttexts.org/library/celtic/ctexts/p01.html
"19 And after three days we reached land, and for twenty-eight days journeyed through uninhabited country, and the food ran out and hunger overtook them; and one day the steersman began saying: 'Why is it, Christian? You say your God is great and all-powerful; then why can you not pray for us? For we may perish of hunger; it is unlikely indeed that we shall ever see another human being.' In fact, I said to them, confidently: 'Be converted by faith with all your heart to my Lord God, because nothing is impossible for him, so that today he will send food for you on your road, until you be sated, because everywhere he abounds.' And with God's help this came to pass; and behold, a herd of swine appeared on the road before our eyes, and they slew many of them, and remained there for two nights, and the were full of their meat and well restored, for many of them had fainted and would otherwise have been left half dead by the wayside. And after this they gave the utmost thanks to God, and I was esteemed in their eyes, and from that day they had food abundantly. They discovered wild honey, besides, and they offered a share to me, and one of them said: 'It is a sacrifice.' Thanks be to God, I tasted none of it.
...41 So, how is it that in Ireland, where they never had any knowledge of God but, always, until now, cherished idols and unclean things, they are lately become a people of the Lord, and are called children of God; the sons of. the Irish [Scotti] and the daughters of the chieftains are to be seen as monks and virgins of Christ.
42 And there was, besides, a most beautiful, blessed, native-born noble Irish [Scotta] woman of adult age whom I baptized; and a few days later she had reason to come to us to intimate that she had received a prophecy from a divine messenger [who] advised her that she should become a virgin of Christ and she would draw nearer to God. Thanks be to God, six days from then, opportunely and most eagerly, she took the course that all virgins of God take, not with their fathers' consent but enduring the persecutions and deceitful hindrances of their parents. Notwithstanding that, their number increases, (we do not know the number of them that are so reborn) besides the widows, and those who practise self-denial. Those who are kept in slavery suffer the most. They endure terrors and constant threats, but the Lord has given grace to many of his handmaidens, for even though they are forbidden to do so, still they resolutely follow his example.
43 So it is that even if I should wish to separate from them in order to go to Britain, and most willingly was I prepared to go to my homeland and kinsfolk-- and not only there, but as far as Gaul to visit the brethren there, so that I might see the faces of the holy ones of my Lord, God knows how strongly I desired this-- I am bound by the Spirit, who witnessed to me that if I did so he would mark me out as guilty, and I fear to waste the labour that I began, and not I, but Christ the Lord, who commanded me to come to be with them for the rest of my life, if the Lord shall will it and shield me from every evil, so that I may not sin before him."
Alleged prophecy by druids before Patrick's arrival (two translations):
(1) "Murchiú's life of Saint Patrick contains a supposed prophecy by the druids which gives an impression of how Patrick and other Christian missionaries were seen by those hostile to them:
Across the sea will come Adze-head, crazed in the head,
his cloak with hole for the head, his stick bent in the head.
He will chant impieties from a table in the front of his house;
all his people will answer: "so be it, so be it."
(2) Patrick afterwards passed over sea to Ulster to seek Míliuc, King of Dalaraide, to preach the name of God, as it was with him he was in servitude at first, that it might be to him he should first preach, and the service to Míliuc's body and to his soul might thus be complete. Howbeit Míliuc came against him with great hosts of heathens, and would not let him land, since Loegaire had ordered the men of Ireland that they should not let Patrick on land: for his soothsayers had foretold to Loegaire, five years before, that Patrick would arrive in Ireland, to wit, Lochra and Lothrach and Luchatmael and Renell were their names, and this is what they used to say —
An Adzehead shall come across stormy (?) sea:
His mantle hole-headed, his staff crook-headed:
His dish in the east of his house:
All his people shall answer him Amen, Amen;
And every princedom and every worship and every might that will not be humble to him shall ebb away, and out of his own princedom he shall perfect [his followers] for ever."
There is a "Life of St Patrick" by Tírechan, a 7th century bishop; one account of the conversion and baptism of two Irish princesses, Fedelma and Eithne:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/T%C3%ADrech%C3%A1n
https://www.confessio.ie/more/tirechan_english#
"26
(1) Then holy Patrick came to the well called Clébach, on the slopes of Cruachu to the east, before sunrise, and they sat beside the well,
(2) and, behold, the two daughters of king Loíguire, fair-haired Ethne and red-haired Fedelm, came to the well, as women are wont to do, in the morning to wash, and they found the holy assembly of bishops with Patrick beside the well.
(3) And they did not know whence they were or of what shape or from what people or from what region, but thought they were men of the other world or earth-gods or a phantom;
(4) and the maidens said to them: 'Whence are you and whence have you come?' and Patrick said to them: 'It would be better for you to profess our true God than to ask questions about our race.'
(5) The first maiden said: 'Who is God and where is God and whose God is he and where is his dwelling-place? Has your God sons and daughters, gold and silver? Is he ever-living, is he beautiful, have many fostered his sons, are his daughters dear and beautiful in the eyes of the men of the earth? Is he in the sky or in the earth or in the water, in rivers, in mountains, in valleys?
(7) Give us an account of him; how shall he be seen, how is he loved, how is he found, is he found in youth, in old age?'
(8) Replying, holy Patrick, full of the Holy Spirit, said: 'Our God is the God of all men, the God of heaven and earth, of the sea and the rivers, God of the sun and the moon and all the stars, the God of high mountains and low valleys;
(9) God above heaven and in heaven and under heaven, he has his dwelling in heaven and earth and sea and in everything that is in them; he breathes in all things, makes all things live, surpasses all things, supports all things;
(10) he illumines the light of the sun, he consolidates the light of the night and the stars, he has made wells in the dry earth and dry islands in the sea and stars for the service of the major lights,
(11) He has a son, coeternal with him, similar to him; the Son is not younger than the Father nor is the Father older than the Son, and the Holy Spirit breathes in them; the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit are not separate.
(12) Now I wish to join you to the heavenly king since you are daughters of an earthly king, if you are willing to believe.'
(13) And the maidens said as with one voice and one heart: 'Teach us with all diligence how we can believe in the heavenly king, so that we may see him face to face. Tell us, and we will do as you say.'
(14) And Patrick said: 'Do you believe that through baptism you cast off the sin of your father and mother?' They answered: 'We believe." 'Do you believe in penance after sin?' 'We believe.' 'Do you believe in life after death? Do you believe in the resurrection on the day of judgement ?' 'We believe.' 'Do you believe in the unity of the Church?' 'We believe.'
(15) And they were baptized, with a white garment over their heads. And they demanded to see the face of Christ, and the holy man said to them: 'Unless you taste death you cannot see the face of Christ, and unless you receive the sacrament.'
(16) And they answered: 'Give us the sacrament so that we may see the Son, our bridegroom', and they received the eucharist of God and fell asleep in death, and their friends placed them on one bed and covered them with their garments, and made a lament and great keening.
(17) And the druid Caplit, who had fostered the one, came and wept, and Patrick preached to him and he believed, and the hair of his head was shorn off.
(18) And his brother Máel came and said: 'My brother has believed Patrick; not so I, but I will bring him back to heathendom', and he spoke harsh words to Mathonus and Patrick.
(19) And Patrick preached the faith to him and converted him to the penance of God, and the hair of his head was shorn off, that is, the (hair cut in) druidic fashion (which was) seen on his head, airbacc giunnae, as it is called. Hence comes the saying that is the most famous of all Irish sayings, 'Máel is like Caplit', because (both) believed in God.
(20) And the days of mourning for the king's daughters came to an end, and they buried them beside the well of Clébach, and they made a round ditch after the manner of a ferta, because this is what the heathen Irish used to do, but we call it relic, that is, the remains of the maidens.
(21) And the ferta was made over to Patrick with the bones of the holy virgins, and to his heirs after him for ever, and he made an earthen church in that place."
(The saying quoted is based on a pun, as explained somewhat better here:
"From this comes the most famous of Irish sayings, "Calvus ['bald ', i.e. 'Mael'] and Caplit: the same difference" - they believed in God.")
The sequence is known as the Questions of Ethne Alba and was acted out in 2012 for the Eucharistic Congress:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Leu5JCFssn0
Try "The Autobiography of Malcolm X". He changed his religious beliefs partway through, and decided to leave the earlier chapters the way they were. It creates a powerful effect.
First books with first hand descriptions::
Geronimo's memoires. Towards the end he states that he has become a Christian simply because he thinks it's a good faith.
The Confessions by st Augustine. For the first half of his adult life he was a Manichean (kind of buddhist-christian-new age fusion) then hen converted in his late thirties.
And now to those people who changed from Odin to Jesus; consider that they didn't just hear about Christianity, they met people who believed in it, and it was often those people's lives that converted them. You can read about the meeting (written from a missionaries point of view) in Vitaa Ansgari, an eye witness account of one of the first missionaries to the vikings.
Imagine that you are a scandinavian in the 800's. You live in a stratified society where all lives have a monetary value depending on the status of the person and where priesthood is a secular position of power. (or well a secular position important for arbitrating the values of people's lives). Politics is deadly and includes a lot of fratricide
Now some weirdo shows up wearing only a plain woolen robe. He is walking around buying slave children who he then sets free and teaches to read and write. He doesn't carry weapons. After some investigation it shows up that he is actually a minor noble from France who has voluntarily chosen to risk his life by becoming a missionary instead of living a quiet and safe life. Oh, and you can tell him anything without him ever telling on to others or using it to find ways to get ahead of you in the power game.
You might see how this could have had some sort of impact on the people at the time, at least enough to spur some real curiosity of what it is that drives this strange creature.
All good suggestions, thank you! I've also been vaguely meaning to look into the Manicheans, so The Confessions would be a double kill.
The virtues and general niceness of the missionaries explanation makes a lot of sense to me, though maybe doesn't square well with the spread-by-conquest/political pressure reality that was happening also during this time. If your jarl converts to make it awkward for the neighboring Christian jarl to attack your clan, and now you also have to convert, I'd think it would be hard to appreciate how nice and virtuous those weirdos are. I guess your kids would grow up Christian, though that isn't really the kind of true-belief conversion I was interested in. Big place, long time period, room for both narratives?
There really wasn't that much conversion by the sword when it came to converting the European pagans. Certainly the Roman Empire did not convert under the sword: by the time Christians had any political power, they had already spread significantly and converted a lot of people, despite periodical persecutions. Ireland by all accounts was converted peacefully, and was most of Scandinavia. The exceptions to this rule stand out, such as the "Bloody Verdict of Verdun" but in general Christianity spread peacefully.
I think a big part of this is that paganism in it's various forms was just plain inferior to Christianity. As Lewis wrote, "a Pagan, as history shows, is a man eminently convertible to Christianity." Following Christ and having hope of the forgiveness of your sins is simply better than following Odin or Zeus. For one thing, Jesus loves you and will forgive you, while Odin and Zeus are not known for their loving-kindness or care for mortals. Not to mention that Christianity teaches that all men are valuable in the eyes of God, from the greatest king to the most lowly slave, so that's a big upgrade on the religious status quo.
It can be hard for us to put ourselves in the mindset of ancient pagans. One aspect, the forgiveness of sins, is often very difficult for us to feel the way they may have. Lewis talks about this in his essay "God in the Dock"
"Apart from this linguistic difficulty, the greatest barrier I have met is the almost total absence from the minds of my audience of any sense of sin...The early Christian preachers could assume in their hearers, whether Jews, Metuentes, or Pagans, a sense of guilt. (That this was common among Pagans is shown by the fact that both Epicureanism and the mystery religions both claimed, though in different ways, to assuage it.) Thus the Christian message was in those days unmistakably the Evangelium, the Good News. It promised healing to those who knew they were sick. We have to convince our hearers of the unwelcome diagnosis before we can expect them to welcome the news of the remedy.
"The ancient man approached God (or even the gods) as the accused person approaches his judge. For the modern man the roles are reversed. He is the judge: God is in the dock. He is quite a kindly judge: if God should have a reasonable defense for being the god who permits war, poverty, and disease, he is ready to listen to it. The trial may even end in God's acquittal. But the important thing is that man is on the bench and God in the dock."
"There really wasn't that much conversion by the sword when it came to converting the European pagans."
There really was, though. The Frisians and Saxons were converted at swordpoint by Charlemagne. The Scandinavian conversions were to a large extent kings enforcing it on their peoples through violence (most famously by Harald Hardrada). The Swedish kings forced the conversion of the Finns in the Middle Ages, and the other Northern Crusades went on for centuries with forced conversions of the peoples of North-Eastern Europe.
And then obviously everything the colonizing powers did in the Americas, if you count the Native Americans and heathens.
Violence and force has been extremely important for the spread of Christianity.
Those are the aberrations that stand out that I talked about: I specifically mentioned the Bloody Verdict, where Charlamange converted the Frisians by swordpoint. That doesn't change the fact that for most of Pagan Europe Christianity spread peacefully: it converted the Roman Empire peacefully, it converted most of the Germanic tribes peacefully, the Irish, the Picts, the Franks, the Vandals, etc.
And it's simply not true that the Scandinavian kinds primarily spread Christianity through force: the first Viking king to become Christian was Haakon the Good, and he doesn't seem to have done much of anything to spread the religion to his subjects (he wasn't the best Chrisitan, many consider him an apostate in later life). Then came Olaf Tryggvason who did try to convert his subjects through force; however, he wasn't very successful at that. Then St. Olaf comes along and imports a lot of bishops and priests and makes Christianity the official religion, but by his time scholars believe most of his subjects were Christians already, just from natural conversion and contact with Christians in mainland Europe. Finally Harald Hardrada comes along and he doesn't seem to be trying to convert his subjects by the sword at all: he mostly built a lot of churches.
My point in all this is to say that while Christianity has at times spread through violence and force, it is incorrect to say that violence and force has been "extremely important for the spread of Christianity". Christianity went from a cult with maybe 1,000 followers to the official religion of the Roman Empire without any military intervention, and at a time where all the violence and force was on the side of the pagans. Since then it has spread primarily through peaceful means, as it continues to do so today. Perhaps the fastest growing Christian community in the world today is in China with the underground Church movement, and they are certainly not spreading through the use of power, but despite the fact that significant power has been brought to bear against them.
I don't want to pick nits here but I find the claim that Christianity is more forgiving of sin than the pagan religion dubious, because what would there be to forgive? Are you (and/or Lewis) claiming that pre-christanity everyone in Europe was just guilty all the time? Why would they be? I'm not an expert on pagan religion but I am pretty sure Odin (I'm sticking with this example because I know the most about it) didn't make a big deal of forgiving sins in part because people weren't very worried about sin. Honor was super important, but Odin can't act honorable for you. Also, isn't the whole point of the mystery cults that we don't actually know what went on? And the few descriptions I have read have nothing at all to do with forgiveness or sin, they're about Nature and the Cycle and Partying Hard and whatnot.
"It promised healing to those who knew they were sick. We have to convince our hearers of the unwelcome diagnosis before we can expect them to welcome the news of the remedy."
This is exactly what I mean! how do you convince people of the diagnosis (not following Gods rules ie sinning is why they feel bad) before convincing them of the Good News (that the God exists in the first place). Am I misunderstanding the analogy? And it's not like you can test this quickly, turning your life over to God is a pretty big change.
The "a God that cares about you personally is nicer" argument does make sense, but (and this may be a personal lack of imagination) it's still hard for me to understand the move from "this concept, that totally conflicts with all my prior knowledge, would be nice to believe" to "I now believe the concept".
There certainly were problems in Classical Greece around killing; Hercules has to keep going to different cities to be purified of the guilt of murder by the ruler there (and then goes off and kills someone else). It's often part of the myths of the demigods and heroes that X has to leave his home city A and go to city B to be purified of blood guilt.
The pursuit of Orestes by the Furies for the sin of killing his mother is another example, and the replacement/pacification of the Furies by the court decision and establishment of a cult in their honour:
"In Aeschylus's Eumenides, Orestes goes mad after killing his mother and is pursued by the Erinyes (Furies), whose duty it is to punish any violation of the ties of family piety. He takes refuge in the temple at Delphi; but, even though Apollo had ordered him to kill his mother, the god is powerless to protect Orestes from the consequences. At last Athena receives him on the Acropolis of Athens and arranges a formal trial of the case before twelve judges, including herself. The Erinyes demand their victim; Orestes asserts that he was acting on the orders of Apollo. Upon closing of the trial, Athena votes on the verdict last, announcing that she is for acquittal; the votes are counted and the result is a tie, resulting in an acquittal in accordance with the rules previously stipulated by Athena. For bearing his responsibility in the murder, the Erinyes are converted into the Eumenides, who now offer him wisdom and council.[6] They are then propitiated by the establishment of a new ritual, in which they are worshipped as "Semnai Theai", "Venerable Goddesses", and Orestes dedicates an altar to Athena Areia."
Odin cares about some very specific things, like oath-breaking and breaches of hospitality (like so many other mythological figures, including Zeus and Charles XI, he travels around in disguise to test people's hospitality and punish or reward them accordingly).
You just killed some dude, that's a practical problem for you, though, not a sin. If you _get_ killed, there's a bench in Valhalla for you, but that's because he collects fighters for Ragnarok, not as some reward for moral behaviour.
Perhaps our current concept of sin and guilt have been shaped by christianity. But remember that the word guilt is etymologically close to 'debt'. And people have certainly always had debts.
In pagan scandinavia, you could easily get into just normal debt: Your cow destroyed the neighbors fence: Debt. Your son kills the neighbors slave: Pay up. Somebody kills your brother in laws cousin: Your owe your family to go and do something about it, which might mean killing somebody, which means more debt.
In pagan times the concepts of guilt (you did something bad to your neighbor) and debt (you owe him money) was probably more intertwined. And it was certainly something people could worry about.
Even in the modern world, I am quite prepared to bet that the hours of sleep lost due to worry about debt and money is at least an order of magnitude bigger than the hours lost because of actual guilt. That's just the way humans work.
Christianity split this entire debt/guilt concept up. Debt was money and not truly important. Sin was a different thing entirely, but even sin could be forgiven.
Of course the pagans had a conception of sin, or wrongdoing in general. For one, look to Hinduism. Hinduism is probably the most advanced polytheistic religion that has ever existed, and they certainly have a concept of guilt, and punishment to follow: bad karma, not performing your dharma, etc. Just look at the Hindu concept of Naraka, analogous to Christian hell. It is the place where thieves, adulterers, frauds, gluttons, those who cook animals alive, murderers, heretics, those who punish the innocent, those who violate hospitality, the sexually immoral, those who engage in bestiality, those who sleep with prostitutes, those who kill beasts wantonly, and and those who force their wives to drink their semen (among many others) are punished with horrible tortures before being reincarnated.
But we don't have to rely just on modern Hindu teaching: the Norse believed that murderers, oath breakers, and adulterers were consigned to Nastrond in Hel after death. As we read the in Poetic Edda:
"A hall she saw standing
remote from the sun
on Nastrond.
Its door looks north.
There fell drops of venom
in through the roof vent.
That hall is woven
of serpents’ spines.
She saw there wading
onerous streams
men perjured
and wolfish murderers
and the one who seduces
another’s close-trusted wife.
There Malice Striker sucked
corpses of the dead,
the wolf tore men."
Hel itself was where all evil men go upon death, of course, and is where English speaking Christians get the name Hell for the Christian bad afterlife. The wicked being punished after death was already a set idea for Northern European pagans: they would not have been surprised by the Christian teaching agreeing with that, but would have been surprised that adulterers, murderers, and oath breakers could be forgiven.
The Greeks and Romans believed in Tartarus, a deep abyss where the wicked were tormented and suffered after death. The torments of Tantalus and Sisyphus are well known, but they were not the only inhabitants.
There are more examples of course: Egyptian mythology and it's judgement with scales weighting your heart against a feather comes to mind.
The idea that sin will be punished by the gods is an old one: the Christians didn't invent it. What was novel to the Christians was that God loved us, and was willing to die a terrible death to save us from punishment and open the door to redemption.
This is pretty much what I was going to say.
Also something about martyrs, in the non-weaponized sense. When someone is put into extreme circumstances and is under severe pressure to say or do certain things, but they continue to hold to their original position, that's very impressive. It can get people wondering whether there's something true there, especially if the person's actions corresponded with their beliefs, and embodied a form of good that was otherwise uncommon.
In some situations. In others, it doesn't work. In Rome, it mostly didn't - the Romans thought the Christian martyrs were humiliated idiots and were unimpressed. (People _already_ converted may well have seen it as a unifying factor, though.)
I think a lot of it comes down to the specific cultural technologies the religion brings with it; Christianity brought Grace, an idea I found particularly interesting: You don't deserve heaven, you can't deserve heaven, but you can ask for it anyways. Also, relatedly, redemption: You can be better than you are, and it just requires asking for help.
In a significant cultural-personal sense, I think Christianity is something like a purified encapsulation of a self-help book: You're not a perfect person - and that's okay. And you can be a better person, just try, and ask for help along the way. So there's an appeal there in this new religion, so, you just kind of tack it on to your pantheon.
But then you have weekly gatherings and rituals. I think the importance of that is pretty high; even if you just add the Christian god to your pantheon, and continue as before but also do Christianity, the relative importance of Christianity is immediately much more significant. I think a lot of the pantheons of many gods tended to have relatively infrequent gatherings and festivals - and they kept these up, even as Christianity became, purely by frequency, much more socially important. And if you're already doing a weekly religious thing, the religious significance of the annual gatherings and festivals falls by the wayside. And gradually you stop talking about the old gods in their own festivals; it's all a little embarrassing, now, when grandpa starts talking about Odin. And the old religion fades out of relevance, rather than being supplanted in a single fell swoop.
> You're not a perfect person - and that's okay. And you can be a better person, just try, and ask for help along the way.
This has a rhyme and almost perfect meter. Anyone have suggestions for music to go along with it? :-)
Ha! I didn't even notice. I've written way too much poetry at this point.
I think there is some heavy influence in cultural self-loathing (is there a term for this?). There is a love of new or foreign things. There is a desire of mating with someone who is not a cousin, thus adopting their language/culture/religion.
Seems like you are trying to attribute all, or most, conversion to logical processes, when quite a lot of it hinges on... "God spoke to me in a vision" religious experiences, which then propagate to others. As in: Constantine: "I had a vision-- by this sign conquer" bunch of people who were there at the battle with Constantine: "well, he says he had a vision, we did this thing, and then we won. Let's do it his way." If you can bear to read the Gospels and epistles as historical accounts, in its early days Christianity had amazing curb appeal because its evangelists were pretty great at curing demonic possession. That's not going to make sense to you if you don't believe there is any such thing as demonic possession. But it makes a great deal of sense if you do.
It's hard to bridge the gap on reason alone. Particularly if your reason excludes the possibility of nonmaterial reality.
Also note that Constantine didn't convert until his death-bed. That would have been impractical from an Imperial perspective. So he didn't.
He didn't get *baptised* until his death bed, but he was already a convert and remained at the stage of being a catechumen. Putting off baptism was a mixture of "all my sins will be forgiven and I will obtain salvation" and the problem with the requirement not to sin after being baptised; as you point out, for a ruler, often breaking moral rules comes with the territory.
https://www.britannica.com/biography/Constantine-I-Roman-emperor/Commitment-to-Christianity
"Constantine had hoped to be baptized in the Jordan River, but perhaps because of the lack of opportunity to do so—together possibly with the reflection that his office necessarily involved responsibility for actions hardly compatible with the baptized state—he delayed the ceremony until the end of his life. It was while preparing for a campaign against Persia that he fell ill at Helenopolis. When treatment failed, he made to return to Constantinople but was forced to take to his bed near Nicomedia. There, Constantine received baptism, putting off the imperial purple for the white robes of a neophyte; and he died in 337."
I feel like both examples you've given *are* logical processes, just not materialist. If god's claim (filtered through this Constantine) comes true that is notable evidence, it's just that my prior on god existing in a capacity to give such instruction is really really low and have alternate explanations. The exorcism thing is interesting, though for me it brings up the new question: why would Christians be better at exorcism? Even with the gospels taken as historical accounts, I'm not ready to fully take their word for how good at exorcisms they were.
I find them logical and compelling-- I belong to my church as a completely (I think) logical response to a religious experience. Subsequent practical experience supports and reinforces that decision. But I understand why it would not be compelling evidence to anybody else. I cannot, after all, show you that experience, or provide evidence of it, and people have all sorts of religious experiences that *don't* lead them to religious conversion (I have had one of that sort as well. It was about math, not religion, and it didn't make me convert to Calculus). But also, I think people come to it in different ways:
1) I often talk to the new people showing up at our church, and find that while most of them are lateral transfers-- already Christian, but switching from another denomination-- of the minority who are truly converts, coming from a background of no religion, some other religion, or messing about in the occult scene, a surprising number of them, possibly a majority, cite *having a religious experience* as the "why I'm here". So if you are looking for a "conversion model" IMO "had a religious experience" is a good place to start looking... though I'm not sure how you'd model it from the starting point of skepticism about the assertions of the religion.
2) in an environment where Christianity is evangelizing Pagans, people are not starting from a prior of no-religion or fundamentalist materialism. The early evangelists were talking to people who already shared a huge number of priors: both the evangelists and the evangelized shared an essentially nonmaterialist worldview, wherein the world is densely populated by sentient nonmaterial beings, good bad and indifferent, who interfere directly in their day to day lives. In that context, it is not, I think, a huge leap to switch allegiance from a local deity who may run hot and cold on you along with myriad lesser beings who must be placated, to a universal deity who loves you, forgives you, and imbues you with inherent value, regardless of your status in this life-- plus offers protection from all those minor critters who'll sour milk in the pail or give your dog fleas if you don't show them OCD levels of proper respect. Throw in a genuine saint, performing miracles and radiating goodness and light and all, and now it's a pretty easy switch ;)
3) And then there are political conversions-- and here is some weird ground. Lots of people converted to Christianity for the political and social advances it offered, post-Constantine. Lots of Christians converted to Islam under the Ottomans, sometimes at swordpoint, but also sometimes for social/economic reasons. And while the initial conversions seem cynical and insincere... in the end they may be as genuine as any "real" convert. IMO this is because action<-->thought (nous?) are a two-way street. We like to think our brains are in the driver's seat, and thought always precedes action, but this is not truly the case. Shrinks know this from treating phobias, right? Handle the rat, go in the elevator and have a positive interaction, enough times... and it starts to change your fear of the rat or the elevator. Action modifies thought. Religion can do that too. Go to the temple, perform the rites, obey the outward forms, and no matter how much you may have been determined that this was just for show... it will shape your mind eventually. This also happens to spies, undercover cops... A lot of those who started out as fake converts were real converts in the end.
It's still a major method of conversion today. My brother is a bible translator, and told me once about a missionary conference he attended in India. One of the speakers that night was a very successful church planter. A church planter is a missionary who travels from place to place, staying long enough to convert a few families, help them form a church together, and then moving on. This particular planter's primary method of conversion was exorcisms.
Basically he would roll into town and ask around to see if anyone was possessed by a demon, jinni, evil spirit, etc. Usually at least one person in the community would have the problem, or would know someone with that problem. Then he would come and cast the demon out. Once the victim had recovered, he would preach to them and their family about how he was able to drive the demon out through the power of Jesus, son of the one true God, and since he had just exorcised a demon typically the family would take him very seriously and convert. He'd set them up with bibles and knowledge, hook them up with other Christians around, and move on to exorcise again.
As to why Christians would be better at exorcism, there are at least two possible explanations. One is that Christianity is essentially true and Christians can drive demons out through the power of Jesus Christ, son of the Living God. The other is that Christians just built up a lot of practical experience providing exorcisms: exorcising demons was one of Jesus's primary ministries, and we know from the New Testament that early Christians were also practicing exorcisms. For instance, the book of Acts, in Chapter 16, records a case of Paul performing an exorcism:
"One day, as we were going to the place of prayer, we met a slave girl who had a spirit of divination and brought her owners a great deal of money by fortune-telling. 17 While she followed Paul and us, she would cry out, “These men are slaves of the Most High God, who proclaim to you a way of salvation.” 18 She kept doing this for many days. But Paul, very much annoyed, turned and said to the spirit, “I order you in the name of Jesus Christ to come out of her.” And it came out that very hour. 19 But when her owners saw that their hope of making money was gone, they seized Paul and Silas and dragged them into the marketplace before the authorities. 20 When they had brought them before the magistrates, they said, “These men are disturbing our city; they are Jews 21 and are advocating customs that are not lawful for us as Romans to adopt or observe.” 22 The crowd joined in attacking them, and the magistrates had them stripped of their clothing and ordered them to be beaten with rods."
The book of Acts even claims that Christians were so successful at exorcism that other's were copying their techniques (Acts 19:13-16)
"Some Jews who went around driving out evil spirits tried to invoke the name of the Lord Jesus over those who were demon-possessed. They would say, “In the name of the Jesus whom Paul preaches, I command you to come out.” 14 Seven sons of Sceva, a Jewish chief priest, were doing this. 15 One day the evil spirit answered them, “Jesus I know, and Paul I know about, but who are you?” 16 Then the man who had the evil spirit jumped on them and overpowered them all. He gave them such a beating that they ran out of the house naked and bleeding."
If I was a sociologist I would want nothing more than to follow that church planter around and record what happens. I want longitudinal data on the recovery of the demonically afflicted. But please forgive me if I don't take the stories in Acts super seriously. Religious texts usually do make big claims about how cool and powerful their guys are, I don't take this as great evidence that Christians are uniquely good at banishing demons. Still, maybe the mainstream US Christians should get back into exorcisms. I know Bob Larson is out there but according to a pew survey from 2006 only 11% of Americans have seen or experienced an exorcism. Which is higher than I would have guessed but pretty low on a global scale, and probably decreased since.
What the passages in Acts show is that early Christians had a strong tradition of trying to exorcise demons. Whether they exaggerate their prowess or not, it's clear that Christians have been practicing exorcisms since extremely early on. Which was my point.
I am just going to put in one possible explanation that might explain why a large organized religion (like the catholic church) might end up being extra good at exorcisms, whether or not we believe these are actual casting out of demons or some sort of early psychotherapy.
It is: Talent selection. Suppose that some people are just very good at performing exorcisms, possibly because they have some inborn charisma. These might be the same people who go around curing people with therapy just through force of personality and then later writes a book about their methods, which have almost zero effect when used by other therapists.
(Or of course it might be an actual supernatural power to control demons.)
In a pagan area the religion will often be very local with no central organization. If a person shows up who are able to heal people just by talking to them he might become a big man in his local village. He might even attract possesed people from other nearby places.
In contrast, a large organized church might find this person and send him out into the world to heal and convert others. Just like a modern educational system is good at finding intelligent students and turning them into engineers. So the organized groups (Christianity, Buddhism, some branches of Islam) are just better at using their human resources, and so will be able to convert people from less organized groups.
Exorcist was one of the minor orders:
"Minor orders are ranks of church ministry. In the Catholic Church, the predominating Latin Church formerly distinguished between the major orders —priest (including bishop), deacon and subdeacon—and four minor orders—acolyte, exorcist, lector, and porter (in descending order). In 1972, the minor orders were renamed "ministries", with those of lector and acolyte being kept throughout the Latin Church."
There's even a hint in the Gospels that you shouldn't be making too big a deal out of "I can cast out demons!", with the sending out of the seventy-two disciples, who then come back full of themselves, and Jesus goes "yes, and?":
"17 The seventy-two returned with joy, saying, “Lord, even the demons are subject to us in your name!” 18 And he said to them, “I saw Satan fall like lightning from heaven. 19 Behold, I have given you authority to tread on serpents and scorpions, and over all the power of the enemy, and nothing shall hurt you. 20 Nevertheless, do not rejoice in this, that the spirits are subject to you, but rejoice that your names are written in heaven.”
So it wasn't confined, at least in the early Church, to the talented or specialists. It was a power that came along with your baptism, and was part of the route towards ordination. Then it became more of a formality, so all four minor orders were conferred at once, and exorcists as such became a specialised office.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exorcist#The_Minor_Order_of_Exorcist
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exorcist#Mandated_Exorcists
Making too big a deal out of driving out spirits is all too easily corrupted into the Signs and Wonders stuff, which further devolves into the Prosperity Gospel "god wants you to be rich (and by 'you', I mean 'me' so donate to buy me a second private jet)" crap and the much mocked Joel Osteen megachurch feel-good messaging.
That's how all religion worked historically. Religion used to be very practical and results oriented, and that only stopped once people learned enough about the world to realize it didn't actually work.
https://acoup.blog/2019/10/25/collections-practical-polytheism-part-i-knowledge/
Reading this answered a lot of questions about the Old Testament for me, like "why does the OT show the Jews constantly worshiping other gods even when repeatedly told not to?" and "why does the OT have all the contests with other religions involve who can do the more impressive magic trick?".
One of the best stories about religions ever is how the Romans made literal contracts with their gods and could sue them if they didn't deliver.
You've mixed up a variety of different kinds of things, here.
1) We don't have any direct access to pre-discursive piety; we can feel awe before the face of the rising sun, but we can't understand what it would have been like to experience this at a time before someone asked the first 'why' question about sun-worship.
2) Johan below is right about dissatisfaction with (decayed) forms of religion leaving a yearning for something else, including on a mass-movement level.
3) The real point of Pascal's Wager is in the forgotten second half, where he talks about the real meat of conversion -- the /conversio/ of one's way of life. It's not a momentary turning like a steering wheel, it's a longterm turning like tucking growing shoots into a framework over years to make a fence.
The majority of the time, especially historically, it's not about "changing your beliefs". It's about the practicalities. Your king is going to murder you and your family unless you convert from Odin to White Christ? That's a pretty damned strong argument for doing so. Your taxes are killing you as a dhimmi? Great reason to convert to Islam! Perhaps you merely have to convert in order to marry someone (this still holds true today), and if you don't particularly care one way or the other, why not? And then in some decades, no-one will be able to tell the difference between pragmatic and faith-based conversions.
When actual faith-based conversion does occur, it's typically about you already being dissatisfied with an existing religion that you likely never chose yourself. The estranged middle-class that formed the bulk of early Christian converts very likely didn't find spiritual satisfaction in the Roman cults, and were insufficiently elite for the mystery cults (one major selling point of Christianity was how cheap it was - no need to sacrifice a bull or anything like that).
In fact, I know someone who recently converted to Islam so that they could marry their (Jordanian) girlfriend.
Muslim Singaporean for someone I know.
See, that all makes sense as to why a person would want to publicly convert, I want to know what would make someone actually believe. Even if it was socially required of me, I'm not confident I could talk myself into actually believing in any given religion. Even if I really wanted to believe in the risen Christ, even if I really didn't wanna have to buy all these bulls just to sacrifice, I don't know I would be willing to be killed by lions for it.
Ask Indian people about entering Islam to escape the Caste system.
Last week I was in the bottom Caste: only able to do bottom Caste jobs, only able to marry bottom Caste girls, only able to live in bottom Caste ghettos. But after converting to Islam, I have broken out of the Caste system, I can hold my head up high.
This seems to illustrate my point, yes.
Is Christianity too minor a religion to be an option? I mean, I imagine it's not all fun and roses being a muslim in hyper-Hindu-nationalist India either?
Christianity is the third largest religion in India, with 26 million followers, but it is a distant third. They're a little less than 3% of the population.
They are also at risk of persecution from both Muslims and Hindus, so may not be as attractive if you're just looking for practical benefits.
I've only met one Christian Indian, and didn't know him well enough to hear about how Christians fare in India.
I do know that Hindus regularly lynch a huge number of Muslims in India.
Wow! You say "I do know that Hindus regularly lynch a huge number of Muslims in India."
This is nonsense. What evidence do you base this claim on? It is NOT COMMON at all.
Christian missionaries in India do crazy things to get converts. They target lower caste Hindus and bribe/threaten them. It has not been a successful project. Even the converts continue to pray and live like Hindus, worshipping idols. Even the churches look like Hindu temples. For example, they have a garlanded idol of Jesus flanked by peacocks.
Hindus don't generally like the caste system and are trying to get rid of it although it persists in some ways. It is a massive and complex country.
+1 on this response
Bad news for nuclear, again https://www.science.org/content/article/deal-build-pint-size-nuclear-reactors-canceled
Seems like the same old problem of too high a cost for too little benefit. Specifically the cost of concrete apparently, and at this point it’s hard to beat solar + batteries on cost effectiveness
> at this point it’s hard to beat solar + batteries on cost effectiveness
So not bad news overall.
Unfortunately, the amount(s of certain types of) energy necessary for running industrial society are absolute, not relative. Nuclear not surviving the EROEI calcs doesn't make solar + batteries a winner, either.
Since when does Nuke not survive EROEI?
Nuke does fine, providing 70% of all power in France, micro nuke does fine in Russia, where even some commercial shipping uses micro nukes.
Nuke only fails in the US because of the NRC, and that's it's feature.
The operator of France's nuclear plants claims that even operating the *already existing* plants is no longer economical, let alone building new ones.
Also the US is no outlier here. France started trying to build a new plant around the same time as Vogtle, and it was just as delayed and overbudget. You can't use US-specific factors to explain a phenomenon that is seen *throughout* the rich world at the very least.
That's a thing people say about nuclear, yes. It's a sleight of hand of the same type (though at least an OOM more honest) than what they do with 'net positive' fusion.
Winner at providing free energy, winner at providing cheap enough energy...what?
If there is a an limit to the amount solar can supply, why doesn't that push up the price of nuclear?
The sun sends more energy directly to the planet than we may ever need, but not always in the right places, the right times, or in the right amounts. For instance night and the areas of the planet away from the equator. Powering Northern Europe or the NE United States are both problems, using only or mostly solar. The US has some great desert locations for solar power, but almost all of the power would be lost in transmission by the time it got to NYC.
Significant improvements to battery technology would go a long way to improving the performance and usability of solar, but we're a long way from solar being usable as a baseline power (for instance, heating homes at night), even if we had enough solar panels to gather that power. Even with the battery technology, we'd still be looking at around 75 million acres of solar panels to power the world, which is logistically...difficult? I'm trying to think of the right word to encompass the scale, and it's not coming to me. An average American nuclear power plant produces the same amount of energy as 3.125 million solar panels, and can produce it day and night, all through the year, at any distance from the equator.
75 million acres doesn't sound like that much. It's a square 550 km by 550 km. It's the size of Oman. Or it's twelve times the size of the Anna Creek station in South Australia, which recently sold for $16 million.
Or, more usefully, it's 38 square metres per person. Many people have 38 square metres per person going spare on their rooftops already; for those who don't then the cost of 38 square metres of land (whatever is the cheapest, least useful chunk of land within reasonable power-transmission distance of your location) is not very high. The cost of actually covering that land with solar panels is higher, but still only comparable to what I already pay for electricity over a small number of years.
Is that 38 square meters per person, including each member of a household? I did the math and that sounds like all 8 billion people.
For individuals in the first world, this seems quite doable, if expensive ~$7,600 per person. This would get much harder for people who do not have their own single-family homes (large apartment complexes) or for shared family space if each person needed that much power. $38,000 for a family of five would be difficult for most people, though long term the savings on their overall electric bill might work out. Much harder for poor countries.
If it's all ~8 billion people, we're looking at more than $60 trillion to build all of the solar necessary, and that would last 25-30 years before needing replaced (not to mention new construction and replacements for lost or broken panels). That would be something like $2-4 trillion a year on building and maintaining solar, if averaged out.
5% of world GDP every year for an indefinite time period, heavily frontloaded to earlier dates, sounds like a lot to me. That said, that's suspiciously close to what we pay for oil right now (35 billion barrels a year, $80 a barrel).
I have serious doubts that there are enough accessible materials and factories available to actually fully convert to solar. And these numbers don't include electrical upgrades and the costs of battery systems, so it likely would be much more expensive in the long run - not to mention depending on technology that doesn't exist yet.
I will say much more doable than it sounded originally, but still a significant hurdle that may not be possible.
Pace Dyson, there's no real limit to the amount of energy solar could produce. In practice, however, someone has to extract the materials to make the panels, make the batteries, and make the transport medium. If all of this were free, every car, truck, train, container ship, tractor, bulldozer, etc would already be electric. If it's some variant of not-free, the question is how much energy it takes to get there, and if there are enough easily-extractable raw materials.
Price can't go higher than what the industrial basis for the economy can support, which is why cheap loans for developing low-quality sources of petroleum (like Canadian tar sands or whatever) were a bandaid, not a cure.
If an economy can't buy the energy it needs, then it has to shrink. Either way, things have to equalise -- i can't see how you can have permanent unmet demand.
Oh yes, and shrink it will (as will the underlying population). But the whole point of the dream of nuclear (fission or fusion) is the desperate hope that maybe we'll find some way to cheat EROEI (I almost wrote, "the gods of the copybook headings") and get to that Star Trek future.
Any time there is bad news about energy, it's bad news from the perspective of those hoping for fully automated luxury space communism (or whatever). Privately I wonder sometimes if concern about AI doom is just the long Shadow cast by this same Hope. Solar-powered diamondoid nanites could only be a threat in a very different kind of universe where enough 'intelligence' could get us there.
There's a new random picture up for the ACX google info page. Who will Scott be next time? Is there a manifold market set up?
I could use some thoughts and ideas.
I'm working on something and I'm stuck between two poles. The first is the pure mathematics and logic of the system I'd like to build. The second is the practicalities of firming up a "good enough for now" version and implementing this in software.
The project is a Bret Victor Future of Coding inspired thing, and in short it is this: I want the user to be able to build up a "model" of the domain they're trying to write software for. This isn't a "model" as in the typical Rich/Anaemic Domain Model built out of classes. This is more like a language-agnostic attempt to identify the conceptual units and moving parts within a field, in a cleave-reality-along-its-joints sense. It would be displayed as blocks and lines and diagrams and whatnot.
My intuition says that if the model maps correctly to reality, and every part in the model can move in the same way as its real life equivalent - then any coding task that can described in reality will always be talking in terms that the model already understands. Ie: future features are always certain to be straightforward to add, and the underlying model never has to be altered.
The idea is the user builds up this model out of tools I give him, and the process becomes almost philosophy (what is a "Task"? Is it inherent to a Task that there is always a "start time" and an "end time", or are those concepts in fact external to the Task itself?) Once the model is built, it can be (possibly semi-automatically) turned into the classes and db schema of a more traditional Rich Domain Model.
My question now is, what tools should I be giving the user to build these models? So far I'm thinking along these lines:
- you need "conceptual units", the nouns and verbs that have meaning in your system, and whose implementation might look like data objects for nouns and functions for verbs.
- you need relations, telling you how two entities relate to each other, in the same way that when people try to explain things on whiteboards, they instinctly start connecting blocks with coloured lines.
- you need some way to grant meaning ("adjectives"?) to your concepts, such that you can ask human-readable questions about them. (Ie, if you're running a shop and you frequently use the phrase "out of date" for stock items, then your model and system should also know what "out of date" means. That way, code that implements actions can be read in the same terms as humans thinking about them.)
- you need behaviour/reactivity/autonomous actions, I think. At the very least, conceptual units need to "defend their borders" and act/allow themselves to be edited in only the ways that their real-world counterparts can. But I've also got caught up in the idea of reactivity, especially for systems with processes and knock-on effects. If you perturb the system in one place, it should know how to respond and ripple out in the same way as would happen if you prodded the real world system.
- I need a sane UX for all of this.
The whole idea is to save the user from having to think about the technical implementation details of setting up this system, and let him just focus on the formal rules. That means I've got to be the one building and implementing everything he could ever need, here and now. Ideally in such a way that using the tools always feels natural and he doesn't immediately start needing ugly workarounds.
I feel like I don't have a solid framework to work with here. Is there any concept analogous to Turing-completeness, where I can know that I have the right set of tools and therefore any required model will be easy to build?
Just in general, does anyone have thoughts?
Reminds me of UML. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unified_Modeling_Language
Maybe that's just me and my way of thinking but it looks like you're trying to design and build a programming language. Specifically, I think you want to make a meta-programming-language/language workbench/IDE/language implementation framework that will allow a user (possibly a non-technical one ?) to build their own mini-programming language that will enable them to write programs ("Models") that can either run or be translated to other programs. Did I get that right ?
If true, there is plenty of precedent here. Search terms include : Model-Driven Development, Language-Oriented Programming, Rapid Application Development, Low/No Code (can be rubbish sometimes and is flooded with unreliable ChatGPT-based approaches right now), Domain-Specific Languages, and language toolkits or langauge workbenches.
A couple of important questions :
(1) What's the "vibe" of what you're trying to build ? Is it aimed at Corpo teams or the lone/open source developer ? Professional devs or the citizen programmer ? Text based or graphical or a mix of the 2 or something entirely different ? Do you want to be an incremental improvement over existing tools in the space or a radical reimagining ? Is your user expected to bring their own things to integrate with your vision or is your vision a walled garden/complete system that is expected to provide everything the user might reasonably ask for ?
(2) In what sense is :
(a) > you need "conceptual units"
(b) > you need relations [...] connecting blocks with coloured lines.
(c) > you need some way to grant meaning ("adjectives"?) to your concepts, such that you can ask human-readable questions about them.
Different from a graph database ? The "Conceptual Units" are your nodes, the relations are your edges, and the "adjectives" are attributes, which in graph databases are lists of key-value pairs attachable to any node or edge, such that you can pick an arbitrary node and start attaching info like 'Name : John Doe, Age : 76, ...' to it.
Can you think of something that something satisfying a...c can do but graph databases can't ?
(3) "you need behaviour/reactivity/autonomous actions", or in other words a programming language.
Lots and lots and lots of choices here :
(a) Do you want it to be a fixed langauge that users can't modify ? Or would you provide the user with a meta-language that allows them to define their own languages ? Something in between ?
(b) Do you want it to be declarative ? it looks like it, since you want a focus on "formal rules" and declarative, logic-programming-like rules tend to go hand-in-hand with the graph DB universe you're describing above. But you also mention internal state, since your conceptual units seem to have data attached to them and, furthermore, this data is mutable ("edited in only the ways that their real-world counterparts can"). That's a problem, mutability is generally hard to represent in purely rules-based programming/modeling paradigms. Maybe you can circumvent that by going the route of "Logs of facts", an approach made famous by Datalog, where mutation is represented as new facts derived from the old facts, and the old facts are kept around.
(c) Another problem is the order of execution of behaviour : if your user defines behaviour in terms of "Local Rules" that describe how each individual unit in the model reacts or evolve based on external events and/or their "neighbours", then it's very easy for behaviour to end up producing different states depending on which units were allowed to run first. Indeed, it might be very easy for the model to become trapped in an infinite state-update loop.
(d) The elephant in the room is really this : What is your language ? What are its primitives ? What are its means of combination and means of abstractions ? What's the atomic behaviour that your users will build all programs out of ? (Or, if you want to go the meta-language approach, what is the atomic primitives that your users will use to define the syntax and semantics of the new programming language they're constructing with ?)
I think you just need to focus on an example. Pick a problem you know well and have solved before by other means, let's say I want to make an TicTacToe game. Or a toy shoot-em-all with dead simple mechanics, or anything really. Tell me how do you imagine me using your system to turn a natural language description of those applications into a reasonably precise machine-readable model that can be used for useful things, like generating executable code or reasoning about the application in some way or another ?
> Is there any concept analogous to Turing-completeness
I think not, I'm an extremely amateur langauge design hobbyist but my impression, which seems to be supported by much more accomplished language designers than me, is that language design is more an Art than a Science. It's easy to build something Turing Complete, it's hard to make that something look like Prolog or Ruby rather than C or PHP.
Do you want your vision to be weaker than full Turing Completeness ? That way lies interesting avenues. But what's your focus ? A non-turing-complete Model of Computation or Abstract Machine will necessarily be unable to model some things that you can with a traditional programming language, right ? So the next question is what that thing is going to be ? What are the things that you are okay with your users not being able to model ?
This is a nice set of thoughts and I want to work through it properly. Unfortunately it's ten past midnight over here and I'm supposed to be out all day tomorrow.
Quickly then:
Yes, this thing is going to be a sort of development environment. The idea is that the model - the moving parts of your system - should be "pre-language" - they're hashed out and decided upon before anyone writes a line of code. New contributors to any project need to first understand the model before they're useful. The boss/stakeholders of the project, who aren't going to do any coding, also need to understand the model, at least in a zoomed-out way.
It very definitely wants to be graphical. My starting point is human cognition, and humans do their explaining with pictures. That said, there is no reason a graphical application can't allow text-based code inside itself.
Yes, graphs are very likely the way to go. They just keep popping up. If you were to confidently tell me, "Oh yes, the Farnsworth-Wernstrom Theorem states that any coherent system of interacting parts can be most simply represented by a graph of nodes," I would be completely unsurprised.
My only hesitation before committing to graphs is that I don't actually know what other options are out there. Can anyone help me here? Mathematical structures, or visual techniques commonly used by people to explain stuff?
(One thing I've noticed is when people try to explain a system, they always start drawing a graph of nodes. Then, as they keep talking, they realise they need to explain a different facet of the system, and they'll move to a new page and start drawing a different graph, with an entirely different meaning to it. I wonder, if the nodes on the paper were live and moveable, would they add the new information to the existing diagram, or would they still want to create the second one, because they find it easier to think about that way?)
Regarding my behaviours/reactivity/etc bit - this follows from a longer chain of thought that I don't have time to write up now, and it may have lead me down a bit of a rabbit hole. If you're interested in this project, give me your email and I can talk it through in more detail.
Right, here's my email learnshebrewhatesisrael@gmail.com. I'm quite interested in all things bordering on Tools For Thought or Programming Languages and lots of other things in this whole idea space.
> The idea is that the model - the moving parts of your system - should be "pre-language" - they're hashed out and decided upon before anyone writes a line of code.
We will certainly talk a lot more about this in email, but I want to say that :
1- "Pre-Lanugage" is a tiny bit inaccurate, maybe you should clarify that by "language" you mean "general purpose language" like Java or Go, not just any language in the absolute. Because technically, any non-trivial machine-readable model of a domain __IS__ a program describing that domain or solving some problem related to it. If your model is not just natural language raw text or informal diagrams, it's not "Pre-Language", it's just written in a new special language (that can possibly be compiled to several other mainstream languages for a variety of purposes, or maybe not and it's interpreted right away.)
2- This "they're hashed out and decided upon before anyone writes a line of code." is very unrealistic if you're targeting Corpo teams and Corpo environments. In large (10000+ headcount) Corporate settings, the pressure to crank out code, any code, is immense. Any sort of upfront planning is regarded as a waste of time and "premature optimization". I certainly can't speak for all corpos but this is my experience and the experience of a huge list of people I talked to and read. I defeinitely hate this and wish you all the best in defeating it, but it's the reality and it's very well-entrenched, so you should be realistic about your expectations.
> It very definitely wants to be graphical
Nice, graphical programming is still underrated and unexplored, it subsumes text too, like you said. But there is a huge list of challenges involved, integration with version control seems to be the most oft-cited bullet point. It's fine to ignore this when the idea is still in embryonic stages, but it's also good to keep it in mind.
> My only hesitation before committing to graphs is that I don't actually know what other options are out there.
Good instinct. I think graphs are very natural. They are extremly simple. They are extremly versatile. There is a huge variety and taxonomy of them. They can represent anything from flow of control to data structures. They are the basis of Category Theory, which, people claim, says very deep and profound things about math.
But I'm not a mathematician nor a theoritical Computer Scientist so maybe Graphs are simply all I know.
> they realise they need to explain a different facet of the system, and they'll move to a new page and start drawing a different graph
This pops up in a variety of settings. Check out the Epsilon languages, related to XText and the EMF framework by Eclipse. Check out the MPS IDE by Jetbrains. Both of them needed a whole family of specialized Domain Specific Languages, each tailored to describe or manipulate a different aspect of metamodel.
I've sent you an email - it had a link in it, so if your spam filter swallows those, be aware.
Copy pasting this line in public though, because I'm interested in other people's opinion:
I'm especially surprised by your claim about Corpo environments. Naively I would expect larger team = more beaurocracy, more job titles, more formalised procedures = more likelihood of meetings and discussions and plans drawn up before anyone is tasked with writing the code itself.
This is very far away from my field, but I like brainstorming, so offer these thoughts in the hope that one may be of use.
1) there is some software for kids that allows them to program robots or build games, something like that. Kid builds her program not with lines of code but by linking together little shapes she sees on screen. As I recall, each shape represents something like a part of speech -- like one shape was for something like nouns, the names of things, another was for something like verbs, designating an activity, and another was for something like adjectives, qualifiers. I believe this software came from MIT. It's been around for a while, but is still popular. I'm sure somebody here knows the name of it.
2)It seems to me that what you're doing is similar to the way people tried to build artificial intelligence a few decades ago: Figuring out the rules they used to think about things, then teaching the rules to the computer. It didn't work well, and then weirdly it turned out to work much better to just feed the computer a shit ton of examples of human thought and discourse and make it develop the skill of imitating human thought. Of course, nobody can get AI to spit out the rules it's using. But could it possibly make sense for you to take a similar approach? Instead of building a model of the domain, your software would eat a bunch of examples of the things in the domain and learn to produce material that is a representative example of an entity in that domain. Maybe you could then teach it what you see as the meaningful rules about the domain -- its nouns, verbs, adjectives, relationships, conceptual units needed for it to defend its borders -- and knowing those, could be a framework on which the user builds the formal rules.
-Brian Eno made a list of "oblique strategies" for people to use when they are stuck on some creative task. I have found it very helpful at various times -- it helps me loosen up my mind and come at things in different ways. It's here: https://matt-rickard.com/list-of-all-oblique-strategies
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The kids program you mention sounds like Scratch.
I like the "nouns and verbs" approach, for a couple of reasons. The first is that, while "any possible domain or field" definitely sounds like an infinitely large problem space, we do know that we're only interested in working with domains that we ourselves are able to describe and understand. And humans understand things in terms of nouns and verbs - we even form (some percentage of) our thoughts out of them.
The second reason is that nouns and verbs map very neatly onto mathematical constructs, and from there into coding concepts (objects and functions, respectively.)
My big question is "where do I go from here", because nouns and verbs aren't enough on their own to nicely or "naturally" explain a field. In the software world, there are many kinds of objects and structures that have different properties. In the real world, humans almost always reach for graphical diagrams (even if they're only implying their existence with hand gestures) when they're trying to explain a new field.
Re: your second point, I have rather strong opinions about AI. Software source code is a tangled, illegible mess and, even if you're careful to leave little comments and explanations to yourself, it's very easy to come back to a project after six months and really struggle to remember how anything in there works. I can't speak about larger software companies, but in all the SMEs I've worked in it's not uncommon to have only one guy who actually understands the systems everyone relies on. AI promises to reduce that number to 0.
In fact, that's exactly why I think it's so important to get us working from human-understandable "models" instead of illegible increasingly AI-generated source code in the first place.
I do, however, think there's a lot to the idea that no one formally defines an entire field in one sitting. You start by throwing out a very simple model, then add in subtleties and caveats as they crop up. Having to define everything there is to a subject, up front, is a mentally exhausting, onerous, and actually quite stressful experience.
I will look at that Brian Eno link tomorrow - thanks for providing it.
>My big question is "where do I go from here", because nouns and verbs aren't enough on their own to nicely or "naturally" explain a field. In the software world, there are many kinds of objects and structures that have different properties. In the real world, humans almost always reach for graphical diagrams (even if they're only implying their existence with hand gestures) when they're trying to explain a new field.
Sentence diagramming has a way to represent every part of speech, even obscure ones, and even oddities like entire sentences that function as a noun within a larger sentence. You might check that out.
Another idea about representing things besides nouns and verbs. Adjectives, which modify nouns, could be represented by difference colors of the noun shapes. Analogously for adverbs, which modify verbs. Things like prepositions are funkier and often used idiomatically in ways that don't make sense. Making your representation 3-D, so with solid objects, gives you a lot more options.
I will look at sentence diagramming. It's definitely something that could relate to letting the user build Domain Specific Languages, which is something of a holy grail for a lot of us.
Here’s a page with a diagram of a very complex sentence. If you know how to read the diagram it indicates with no ambiguity at all each word or phrase’s place in the structure of the sentence. ( It does not, though, tell you unambiguously in what order words and phrases appear, although the number of possibilities is fairly limited. ). Hope this proves helpful!
https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2014/02/27/a-most-searching-examination/
These Reed-Kellogg diagrams are sort of fun. The author says they can't be "generated mechanically" - do we know if this is true?
Do we know if they have any other nice properties - for example, for any given sentence, is there only one R-K diagram, or could there be multiple? Given an R-K diagram and a sentence, can we check the one against the other (in either direction) and decide whether they're correct?
I'm thinking about an app now that lets you take sentences back and forth between verbal and diagrammatic. It may or may not be useful for teaching children, but I could see it being an idle pasttime for adults as well. It's sort of meditative.
This sounds incredibly ambitious, and I wish you luck. But for any non-trivial domain, I fear that this may be beyond the scope of human intelligence. Our categories are as imperfect as our knowledge, so our abstractions are leaky, and our models are built of abstractions all the way down.
My advice would be to dog-food: find some domain that you're at least moderately interested in, and try to model it, and write the tools to help you do that. Once you've done this for a few different domains, or worked closely with partners to do so, the tools will probably be sufficiently general enough that you can work with strangers off the Internet.
Lately I've been thinking more about reputation systems online (and how we don't have any good ones). It would be cool if we could see a profile through different lenses, instead of just one single number of followers. Foe example, I would love to be able to see what just my engineering friends think of someone, instead of the whole internet
Something like Steam's recommendation system?
Maybe. Does steam allow you to build a custom list of reviewers and see a game’s score as it would be if only those people had rated it?
Not quite, but you can look at just the reviews of people in your "Friends" list.
Yeah that does sound like a step in the right direction! I would also include the ability to follow reviewers and see the reviews of people you’ve followed as well
In general discussion of the call for a pause on AI, here's why I think that is a non-starter. This is an example of what Microsoft is selling to businesses in regards to AI (they keep sending me stuff because I did some purchasing for the workplace) and it's not "let's all just take a moment to stop and look around":
https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/modern-work-security-switzerland/building-a-foundation-for-ai-success-a-leader-s-guide/m-p/3957716
"In conversations with customers and partners, organisation and culture frequently emerge as critical factors for success.
Operating model
According to Gartner: “The pace of AI technology maturation and diverse approaches make it difficult to capture and sustain value from AI initiatives. Effective AI operating models that leverage current investments in people, processes and technologies enable IT leaders to drive successful AI initiatives.” It can mean the difference between AI projects that are viewed as science experiments and those that become significant value-drivers.
Change management
An organisation’s ability to manage change is also a critical driver of AI success. “You very quickly learn that by the time you succeed with something, it’s already outdated,” says Mikkel Bernt Buchvardt, Director of Data and Analytics at SEGES Innovation. He suggests embracing this reality, rather than letting it slow you down. “You can keep gold-plating your methods, or you can make it good enough to deliver some value.”
They do address the topic of AI safety, but according to them none of their customers have concerns about runaway AI paperclipping us all/hopes that AI will make everyone from a Papuan head-hunter to Emperor Jeffy himself rich, transhuman, and eternal:
"Given the pace of AI innovation, the most frequent questions we hear from customers are: Where do I go from here? How do I create the most impact? What does success look like?
AI governance
• Review and share resources on responsible use of AI to identify the models and approaches that best suit your organisation.
• Consider the enablement model that best fits your needs, such as hub-and-spoke, centralised or distributed.
• Consider the principles of secure AI and how to ensure your data is protected end to end from platform to applications and users.
• Consider the processes, controls and accountability mechanisms that may be required to govern the use of AI, and how AI may affect data privacy and security policies."
The below link is from 2021 about their approach to Responsible AI:
https://blogs.microsoft.com/on-the-issues/2021/01/19/microsoft-responsible-ai-program/
But they're already rolling out AI for customers, as they happily share here:
https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/ai/customer-stories
https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/ai/ai-customer-stories
And it's looking like blue collar jobs are in line to be automated away; no more Wichita linesmen! At least, in Germany:
https://customers.microsoft.com/en-us/story/1567549472346870706-eon-esmartsystems-azure-en
"Walk, climb, inspect, note, repair: this is the classic procedure for power line maintenance. Much of this work is done manually and requires a huge amount of effort; therefore, it was sensible to see whether it can be made more efficient and safer using digital solutions. To minimize risks while fulfilling its responsibility to supply households in Germany with electricity, E.ON sends up drones to take photos of power poles and lines. These photos are uploaded to Microsoft Azure and transferred to Grid Vision®, an AI-supported inspection tool supplied by eSmart Systems, which evaluates the images—thus making the maintenance process more efficient and safer."
So while all the talk about AI risk may be "it'll become agentic", in the real world applications, it's about "money". I think the EA risk movement really needs to take account of this, and not get side-tracked by beautiful theory. Value-drivers, not science experiments, in their wording.
Many Thanks!
"And it's looking like blue collar jobs are in line to be automated away; no more Wichita linesmen! At least, in Germany:"
"To minimize risks while fulfilling its responsibility to supply households in Germany with electricity, E.ON sends up drones to take photos of power poles and lines. These photos are uploaded to Microsoft Azure and transferred to Grid Vision®, an AI-supported inspection tool supplied by eSmart Systems, which evaluates the images"
To me, that sounds like the "Walk, climb. inspect" and possibly "note" part of "Walk, climb, inspect, note, repair" are being automated, but the "repair" (and probably really climb, repair) need improved robotics on top of the drones. imaging, and AI image interpretation now available.
Certainly they still need humans for the repair part, but I do think this is indicative of what way the wind is blowing. Send a tech out with a bunch of drones to cover an area, to map what repairs need doing. One guy instead of a team, and probably to cover a wider area as well. Reduce staffing numbers that way.
Very much agreed. And I do expect robotics to catch up at some point, and to do the repair part as well.
> the EA risk movement
I assume you mean "AI risk movement"? ;-)
The EA sub-set that is concerned with AI risk, which at the moment seems to be the set getting all the attention.
Another reason I'm cynical about motivation, and how effective calls for a pause are, is encapsulated in this article in an Irish newspaper:
https://www.independent.ie/business/adrian-weckler-ai-safety-summit-predicts-doom-it-feels-like-a-big-tech-stitch-up/a355309794.html
"Last week saw a grandiose gathering of countries and ultra-rich tech companies meeting in England’s Bletchley Park to talk about the future of regulating AI.
Rishi Sunak and Ursula von der Leyen hobnobbed with Marc Benioff, Sam Altman, Nick Clegg and others at the AI Safety Summit.
The resulting “declaration” from 28 countries was like a ChatGPT prompt asking the AI engine to “write a speech specifying the potential dangers of AI” — formulaic and predictable.
Beyond the righteous huffing and appropriately-furrowed brows, though, it all seemed to boil down to two things.
1) Which country can position itself for the most dollars and euros in an area (AI) that is capturing, by far, the most investment in the tech world right now?
2) Which regulations can the biggest, richest tech firms have adopted in Brussels and Washington that will squash startups that don’t have necessary resources?
Point one is understandable and business-as-usual. Ireland (which isn’t a main player in AI) does it all the time.
Point two, though, is worth considering a bit more. You know all of those headlines you see about potential doom and catastrophe from AI? It seems that much of it comes from a small handful of tech giants who want to ring-fence the sector with regulations that nobody else can afford.
Probably the most arresting intervention on AI came in May of this year, when an array of tech, scientific and academic figures came together to issue a press release entitled Extinction Event.
“Mitigating the risk of extinction from AI should be a global priority alongside other societal-scale risks such as pandemics and nuclear war,” it said.
As the US technology analyst Ben Thompson has pointed out, the letter had 81 signatories from Google (including Google DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis), 30 signatories from ChatGPT’s OpenAl (including CEO Sam Altman) and 15 signatories from Anthropic (including CEO Dario Amodei).
In other words, the three companies that currently lead AI development.
Microsoft, which doesn’t have much of its own AI but is a huge investor in OpenAI (and thus will benefit) had seven signatories, including company CTO Kevin Scott.
“If you accept the premise that regulation locks in incumbents, then it sure is notable that the early AI winners seem the most invested in generating alarm in Washington about Al,” said Thompson.
“This despite the fact that their concern is apparently not sufficiently high to, you know, stop their work. No, they are the responsible ones, the ones who care enough to call for regulation, all the better if concerns about imagined harms kneecap inevitable competitors.”
Are we being subject to a doom-tinged hype cycle led by companies that want to stitch things up for themselves?
The UK used last week’s AI Safety Summit as an occasion for maximum PR-brand effect, hosting it at the location (Bletchley Park) made famous for Alan Turing’s code-breaking efforts during World War II.
Fair play to them. But let’s not confuse that with any far-fetched notion the UK might have of itself being the world’s leading regulator in AI.
The idea is fairly ludicrous. Not because of the UK’s skillset in the area, which is impressive (and way beyond a country like Ireland), nor for its lack of ambition (its third-level institutions are among the very best in the world in the sector).
It’s just that, since Brexit, no one really takes the UK seriously when it comes to making global rules or influencing standards.
Sure, it comes up with some good ideas and occasionally makes an impact, as it did in the recent €60bn Microsoft-Activision case. But in real terms, it’s a northern hemisphere version of Australia – talking big themes but wielding an increasingly inconsequential legal stick.
Washington, Brussels and Beijing are the places that will decide the rules of what happens to AI, just as they decide what happens in all other areas of tech.
To be clear, there is a lot to talk about the topic of AI. AI can be – will be, even – transformative. As such, it could bring some real danger to our lives.
Whether that is disproportionately worse than the harms our existing level of technology – internet, dark web, cyberattacks – brings remains to be seen. But it’s possible. And it’s a topic that we regularly cover in this newspaper.
But don’t lose sight of the land-grabbing that’s also going on right now in the industry on this topic. The tech giants want to fence off this area for years to create an even greater hegemony than they already have.
The way they can do this is by using their thousands of lobbyists in Brussels and Washington (mainly) to steer and push regulatory language and ideas that can align standards with resources that they – and only they – really have at scale."
That's a point that has to be addressed: if you're saying AI risk is real, and the dangers are such that there should be a pause on research and development, well then - why are the big companies engaging in AI not doing that? Why are they powering ahead, while signing on to letters about AI risk? Microsoft is hosting a conference/summit all this week about AI in business. They certainly *seem* to be "AI for us, not for you" when it comes to putting their money where their mouths are.
So - is it all doomerism and a scare so the big beasts can ringfence this huge money-fountain for themselves? If you're seriously advocating for AI risk, then hob-nobbing at conferences in agreeable surroundings with all your pals from previous conferences and networking isn't the way to do it; persuade ordinary people, and to do that, it has to be "if the guys working on AI are serious about risk, then they should be declaring they are stopping for the moment".
Because AI *is* being looked upon as a money-fountain, and the high-minded EA approach to "aligning with human values" (for the Fully Automated Luxury Gay Space Communism future) is lovely theoretical philosophy which is being left behind in the dust for "$10 trillion increase in GDP over the next decade":
https://www.independent.ie/business/technology/big-shortage-of-skilled-workers-could-hold-back-benefits-of-ai/a1880092509.html
"There’s no doubt that we are at an inflection point. Artificial intelligence (AI) is a defining technology of our time.
Like the dawn of the internet, mobile devices and the cloud, AI has the potential to transform and augment how we live and work.
Today, we’re seeing rapid advances in large language models and generative AI that are not only capturing our imaginations but unlocking even more possibilities across search, productivity and creativity, and in uses like healthcare and security.
At Microsoft, we’re optimistic about the positive impact AI can have on people, industry and society and, grounded in our company mission, ambitious about how we can help every person and organisation on the planet to achieve more through AI.
Microsoft recently commissioned a study by IDC that revealed how AI is contributing to the economic impact of organisations. It found that 71pc of respondents were already using AI in their companies, that organisations are achieving a return on their AI investments within 14 months, and that for every $1 that a company invests in AI, it is getting an average return of $3.5.
Moreover, IDC is estimating that generative AI will increase global GDP by almost $10trn in the next decade.
The research backs up the theory. The impact of AI on increasing competitiveness is clear and at a time of heightened global competition, harnessing the potential of AI will be essential to the future success of businesses across Ireland.
The Irish Government recognises this opportunity and that’s why, as part of its National Digital Strategy, a target has been set to ensure that three in four businesses use AI by 2030.
New AI tools have the power to revolutionise many types of work, provide substantive productivity gains, and increase employee satisfaction.
The ability to work alongside and utilise AI technology effectively and ethically in the workplace is rapidly becoming an essential skill for many jobs in a growing number of sectors.
As AI systems evolve, it’s reasonable to expect that these advances will change the nature of some jobs and how we carry out our work, and we can also expect to see this technology create jobs that don’t exist just yet.
For the opportunity and benefits of this shift to be realised it requires everyone to think differently about skills and training.
The World Economic Forum has estimated that 60pc of all employees will need reskilling by 2027, showing how important it is that people and organisations embrace upskilling and adopt a lifelong learning approach. As things currently stand, a significant shortage of skilled workers is challenging the momentum and positive outlook for what AI can help organisations to achieve.
Recent research by IBEC revealed that nearly two in three Irish businesses believe that AI has the potential to enhance productivity and work conditions, however, only 29pc currently have the skills in place to adopt AI in their operations.
Increasing this number must be our common goal as the potential of AI can only be realised if everyone, everywhere has the skills to use it responsibly and effectively.
We believe no one entity can equip people with the in-demand digital, AI and, importantly, cybersecurity skills that will shape our future.
It’s essential that industry, government and the education sector work together to provide the solutions to this upskilling challenge.
This collaborative approach underlies our recently launched national AI skilling programme that aims to ensure that everyone, whatever their age, experience or background, has the opportunity to develop their AI skills.
Our Introduction to AI course will give graduates and mid-career professionals the foundational knowledge, skills and competencies they need to engage more confidently in AI.
Through dedicated AI learning pathways for adults and new learning opportunities for young people in primary and post-primary school, we will play our part in helping everyone gain the analytical, creative thinking and technical skills that are necessary to participate fully in our AI-enabled economy.
Indeed, it has been our ability to produce, attract and develop the talent that businesses need to innovate and compete globally that has made Ireland a preferred destination for FDI.
To maintain this competitive advantage, we must continue to work together to skill up Ireland for the era of AI and ensure that everyone, everywhere is empowered to succeed.
I’m optimistic about Ireland’s digital future. We’ve proven time and time again that we are an innovation island.
If we continue on this path and take an all-of-society approach to digital skilling, we can strengthen Ireland’s position as a global digital leader and fully harness the AI opportunity that lies ahead.
James O’Connor is Microsoft Ireland site leader and vice-president of Microsoft Global Operations Service Centre"
I'm looking for collaborators on a learning/education project.
Project: A generative think tank exploring practical applications of AI technologies in education and learning.
Pitch: LLMs make possible a new paradigm of learning/education. The disruptive potential is huge, but not always intuitive. This think tank will explore how these technologies can be applied to: experiential/project-based education, classical education, Egan's imaginative education, Socratic teaching/learning, Erik Hoel's aristocratic tutoring, home schooling, sports education, early childhood education, lifelong learning, etc.
Practical vision for think tank: 1. Start casually as meeting of the minds, brainstorms, and agreeing on scope(s) of work. 2. Perhaps start a collective substack on the topic. 3. Evolve project(s) from there.
Shortcut: In his sci fi novel Diamond Age, Neal Stephenson imagined a version of this paradigm shift and provides an excellent reference/starting point.
Please write to protopiacone at gmail if interested in exploring.
What would people be getting an education for in a post-AGI world? What would be the subjects they need to be educated in?
I think it will depend on which post-AGI world we get. I suspect that in a post-AGI world, amongst other things, the terms "education" and "subjects" will be redefined.
Anyone know of a way I can listen to the collection of Scott’s posts called ‘The Codex’ on LW?
I can load them one at a time into a text-to-speech app. Any improvement on that?
https://www.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/comments/hgojul/are_there_any_slatestarcodex_audiobooksspoken/ might help?
Does anyone have a recommendation for a history of the Catholic Church, particularly the early Church? We’ve got our boys in Catholic school and I think it’s time I get a better understanding of the whole thing. Plus what little I know is fascinating.
Along the same lines, but less important: how about a good book on the Church’s mythology - ranks of angels, descriptions of saints, that sort of thing. Our three kids are nearing the age of D&D and I had a half-formed idea of creating a campaign around the Dark Age church. :) Thanks!
Chris Wickham's The Inheritance of Rome: A History of Europe from 400 to 1000 is a tremendously great history book of the period. It isn't specifically about the Church but because of the subject it covers it necessarily covers much about it. I don't believe Wickham is a Christian so consider it an outside view of the subject. Maybe it could compliment an inside view of the history written by a Catholic.
I would suggest just reading 'The City of God' by Augustine. It's old but still pretty readable (I read most of it in one stretch on a plane ride. It is a good introduction to the mythology since it was written at a time when Catholics were still debating directly with pagans and neo-platonists. And somehow the entire view of the world expressed in the book seems so very D&D-like, though it is hard to explain why it feels like that.
Personally, I liked "Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years" by Diarmaid McCulloch (no, not a typo, that timeframing is central to his thesis) -- https://amzn.to/47heMck
The course "From Jesus to Constantine" by Bart Ehrman is pretty good history of the early church. Not sure if that's too early you, though, because it only brings you up to the point where the seeds of the Catholic church we know now were sprouting...
https://www.thegreatcourses.com/courses/from-jesus-to-constantine-a-history-of-early-christianity
The best book on angels I've come across is Peter Kreeft's "Angels and Demons: What Do We Really Know About Them?". It's very clear and readable, like all his books.
By "Dark Ages" I'm presuming you mean roughly 5th to 10th century. For the angels, the very influential work of a 5th or 6th century writer was 'The Celestial Hierarchy', translated here into 19th prose:
https://www.tertullian.org/fathers/areopagite_13_heavenly_hierarchy.htm
This might be the kind of chapter you mean:
"Chapter 15: What are the morphic likenesses of the Angelic Powers? what the fiery? what the anthromorphic? what are the eyes? what the nostrils? what the ears? what the mouths? what the touch? what the eyelids? what the eyebrows? what the prime? what the teeth? what the shoulders? what the elbows and the hands? what the heart? what the breasts? what the back? what the feet? what the wings? what the nakedness? what the robe? what the shining raiment? what the sacerdotal? what the girdles? what the rods? what the spears? what the battle - axes? what the measuring lines? what the winds? what the clouds? what the brass? what the electron? what the choirs? what the clapping of hands? what the colours of different stones? what the appearance of the lion? what the appearance of the ox? what the appearance of the eagle? what the horses? what the varieties of coloured horses? what the rivers? what the chariots? what the wheels? what the so-called joy of the Angels?"
But possibly too technical 😀
What I've found very helpful for descriptions of saints are art reference books. You can find Kindle versions for "saints in art" and "angels in art" on Amazon.
They are a pair of non-believers, heretics, and too much of this world, but the podcast Apocrypals goes through the Bible and several non Canon books, and is a great listen. For times when the kids aren't in the car. Desert Christians by William Harmless covers the hermit movement well.
I am looking for arguments against 'moral reasoning' as a way to determine 'moral truths'. If anyone has seen persuasive writing on this, please steer me.
It might be worth looking into Emotivism and adjacent theories:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emotivism
As a non-realist, I've concluded that there's only preferences and gametheory. The gametheory keeps you in social-equilibrium; the preferences keep you in chemical-disequilibrium.
Not sure if that's relevant, or if you were asking for something more like "a list of the most common logical-fallacies used during moral-jiujitsu".
No, this has piqued my interest. Is there anything you could point me to where this is developed, please?
It's just a pet-theory of mine that feels settled enough to sate my curiosity, since realism no longer feels mysterious to me. If some famous philosopher has produced a theory that's functionally identical, it's by coincidence. Although I'd expect to have seen it by now, if that were the case.
Incidentally, I know a guy outside of substack who says I oughta expand upon my showerthoughts in a book or something. I have a number of reservations. Though on the other hand, I suppose collecting them in a blog would be more productive than occasionally corrupting the youth in Scott's town-square. So I've been considering it.
Do you want me to ping this comment if/when I unpack my theory of meta-ethics? or is your request time-sensitive. It may or may not make sense for me to cover other topics first. And I see from your handle that you've got your own web-log going, so I suspect that what you really want is a barrel-aged citation from the Stanford Encyclopedia for your next entry.
edit: Well, I guess Emotivism comes close. Although I'm not sure whether "emotion" is exactly the right descriptor, and I think there's more to the story than that. E.g. I think it's possible to strongly prefer an outcome without becoming hysterical, and I think "good"/"bad" can be more precisely understood as orienting terms that help parties navigate negotiations. I.e. it's less about revealing an organism's internal state, and more about following an environmental gradient.
It sounds like your thinking on this is quite developed, so I'd be interested in reading anything that expanded them. I'm not planning on writing anything on the subject until I've found source material. All I have, personally, is an intuition of strong scepticism that moral 'truth' exists in the universe.
duly noted.
I've followed you now
https://iep.utm.edu/metaethi/
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/metaethics/
Moral reasoning generally relies on some set of moral base principles, but those principles can't be argued for outside of a framework that doesn't already accommodate them. Which kind of precludes any kind of moral "truth" because it's all conditional on base principles being true that cannot be proven to be true. At best you can say a moral argument is "true" for a given set of moral axioms, but that's not going to convince anyone who doesn't already hold those same axioms.
Why *should* morality exist? Unless you believe God created both the universe and morality, why would you expect objective morality to exist in the universe? Can't a universe exist without morality in it? What evidence is there that objective morality exists in our universe?
I mean, the easiest one is that moral truths just aren't the kinds of things that exist? Then they cannot be determined either.
The EA community is based in the Bay Area, as far as I know. Has there been any attempt at local charity solutions - like fixing or ameliorating homelessness in San Francisco.
San Francisco has spent billions of dollars on the homeless.
It is not a cause area where there are high returns to marginal effort. This makes it fundamentally unappealing to people who measure benefits to the world in dollars per dead baby saved.
There is a (perhaps galaxy-brained) argument that ameliorating homelessness in SF would make it a much less miserable and therefor more productive place and so would have outsized impact, but this doesn't fix the problem of tractability.
I have termites in one wall of my house. Fortunately termites don't eat sheet rock, so they don't break through to the interior. However they've severely weakened some of the structure, and especially the wood sheathing on the outside ... so we paint over the wood sheathing which provides some additional bit of structure. This also shields the termites from predatory insects and birds.
Giving money to irresponsible people is just like painting over the termite riddled wall.
Providing housing to irresponsible people is like replacing one or two eaten boards in the termite riddled wall.
Not all that comfortable with the termites to human analogy.
Aren’t there plenty of papers on homelessness being proportional to housing costs, so it is not all druggies.
There's multiple classes of homeless people. Some are just temporarily down on their luck, which may or may not become permanent, and high housing costs certainly don't help. Others have drug or mental problems and may be impossible to house entirely (not all homeless people want to be in shelters for instance).
It's convenient for partisans because it means that people can just pretend that whatever subgroup is most convenient to their arguments is the only one that exists.
I'm with you on that.
So I'm NBA tall. I used to commute on the train, and occasionally I'd talk with the homeless. Mostly they're people just trying to make both ends meet. People of lower abilities, without family or friends to support them. Not able to realize drugs and alcohol aren't going to make their lives better.
Every "Ganga-Ville" (i.e. Tent City) I've ever walked past lay under a cloud of green Ganja smoke.
I don't mean this as the homeless are termites or vermin. They're people, people just like you and I. We all make mistakes, and lie to ourselves a little bit. But the homeless are those who lie to themselves and others A LOT.
We are irresponsible when we say that drugs don't prevent people from getting up in the morning and arriving at work on-time, fed, properly dressed, sober to operate machinery. We are irresponsible when we say that some people buy drugs before feeding their children, paying their rent, paying their debts, paying their utilities.
I mean this as a story about responsibility. If you don't take immediate action to rid termites from your home, it will come crashing down. We need to be responsible to ourselves, and others. We need to come to the realization that drugs is hurting people. Yes, maybe you and I can handle drugs for a bit. But there are far too many people for whom drugs are devastating. When people are living in a tents on the street, crapping in the park, stealing and vandalizing everything, we're way far into irresponsibility about the negative effects of drugs. When ODs kill more people every year than the sum of both Vietnam & Korea conflicts ... we're way far into responsibility.
Perhaps we could get some hungry homeless people to come pick the termites out of your wall and make them into a stew?
"Is the wall society?"
Yes, and we see where drug use has caused people to slip their responsibility level below what is required to maintain their homes. Like the story about bankruptcy, it happened slowly at first, then all at once. First they couldn't keep up on some bills, maybe the power or water was cut a few times. Reconnecting this of course contains some fines/fees that further damage the weakened finances. Then the car gets repossessed, now we can't commute to the job. Then the foreclosure or eviction ...
So now we're on assistance, laid down $50 to Big 5 for a camping tent. Anything of value was sold off, or the Sheriff hauled to the dump in the eviction.
Think these people are paying taxes anymore? Maybe sales tax. The car taxes, taxes on utilities, property tax, income tax ... in a thin-anemic way, they were part of the pillar of society. Yes they weren't shining examples, but they were doing their part. Now, they're an anchor. Shunned and unloved, they feel the glare. They meld into the role of untouchables to which they were pushed. How do they feel, how do they respond? Violence and destruction. F-the man; F-Society; F-everyone. I'mma take a big drag off this cigar sized reefer, and blow the smoke right in your kid's face! Then this unwashed, hair like Medusa, half krazed dude is give you the wild-eyed I ain't got nothin' ta loose, watta you gonna' do bout it stink-eye.
I think that the YIMBs are somewhat adjacent to both the EA and the homeless problem.
But generally, EA does not believe in inverse square law for morality. https://slatestarcodex.com/2013/05/17/newtonian-ethics/
What about an “ultraviolet catastrophe” of morality?
Sure and that’s kind of what I wanted to debate. Would we look kindly on a monarch who impoverished his citizens by extracting severe taxes from the local population to help another kingdom, or does he have a greater responsibility to the local population? Peter Singer would look kindly, I’m a bit dubious.
The closest example to a monarch impoverishing his citizens would be, of course, early EA's position on "earning to give." They toned down that messaging due to the high burnout rate, and SBF likely put the final nail in the coffin of the idea, but historically it did seem to be a reasonably common idea within EA that the responsibility to the local population was primarily, if not solely, a pragmatic concern regarding their ability to keep helping other kingdoms (so to speak).
So long as the homeless aren't targeting EAs specifically, or causing EAs to give up their EA beliefs, any consideration of the homeless from EAs is presumably coming from their "warm fuzzies" budget, and thus orthogonal to their concerns as EAs.
A monarch's job is to provide for his subjects. The monarch should only help another kingdom where it will help the kingdom's subjects in some way. This includes annexing another kingdom: if it makes the original subjects worse off, then the annexation should not happen.
Technically, a monarch's job is to stay in power. Traditionally, that mostly meant winning battles in order to give out land to the aristocrats and holding feasts for the aristocrats and so on. Helping the ordinary people was incidental.
That's what the job evolved into, not what it is. Feudalism is a deal between the leader and those led, service from the led and protection coming from the leaders. You described a corrupt monarchy.
Where's the rulebook that says the monarch's job is to provide for his subjects?
Feudal lords didn't just want "protection". They wanted glory and advancement and riches and so on. In fact, a common pattern throughout history is for empires to collapse under their weight once they are no longer actively conquesting and don't have as many goodies to dole out to supporters. (You can also take the land from rebellious lords and give them to the loyal side, but that requires civil wars to actually happen, and it implies that a lot of your lords don't like you much.)
I'd highly recommend reading the ACOUP posts on the subject.
https://acoup.blog/2022/10/07/collections-teaching-paradox-crusader-kings-iii-part-iii-constructivisting-a-kingdom/
Tax rates are 20-40% in most of the western world. By EA calculations, 10% from the richest 1% go a very long way solving very big issues (https://www.longview.org/what-if-the-1-gave-10/). So there doesn't need to be a big tax increase, if any. Looking at government spending, there's a lot of low-hanging fruit where money is wasted or spent very ineffectively that could be rerouted.
If EA had state actor resources, I'm sure they'd do something about homelessness in the first world, but they don't have those kinds of resources.
I think that sidesteps the question and the difficulty of it. By EA standards, at least as they write them, an EA king should definitely tax his subjects almost to the point of ruin in order to help citizens in a more impoverished other kingdom.
Some might argue that the king needs to maintain his kingdom in order to have a tax base (and a military that can discourage attackers and whatever else a kingdom needs to survive), but that just pushes the question back from 90% ruinous taxes to ~50% overbearing taxes. The need would still be to take out all of the excess possible in order to distribute where it would do the most good.
I was about to accuse you of malice, but I noticed that there's no precedent for EAs running countries. So we're extrapolating outside of distribution here.
Right now, being in EA is voluntary. Donating is not required, but encouraged. We don't know how an EA government where taxes are mandatory would work.
But we have more than blind guesses. Given the way EA events and the community are organized (funded or subsidized by EA's big donors), I would highly doubt that EA would turn around and impose oppressive taxes (on anyone, let alone everyone). Even if EA were completely utilitarian (which it isn't), that would be just plain stupid, because people would just emigrate.
Agreed on the futility of determining this based on past evidence not aligning well.
In practice, it may be that EAs in charge would act very similarly about how much to tax and in what ways. You're right that they would need to get elected again at some point and could not anger the population, so the real results would likely stay well within the Overton Window.
I think that, if they were following their stated goals and had more unilateral power/control (like a king instead of an elected position), they would be inclined to tax more and take more more direct action. Otherwise I'm not sure what being EA would even mean to them. And if they only benefitted their own people, rather than sending it abroad, that seems to me to be against some pretty core EA philosophy.
As he walked wearily back to Samaria, his mind swelled ever-fuller with blood-colored ever-zooming fractals of altruistic math and black paisleys of self-congratulation until it sickened his very soul to the point that it was like a head shop in 1960's Greenwich village when one of the black lights starts flickering. And still he trudged on, thought on, seeking the means to aid as many as possible as efficiently as possible. So deep in thought was he that interruptions were to him as so many piles of dog shit. He came upon an emaciated old woman who had tripped over a rock in the road and lay groaning in the off-off-white dust. "Sir," she cried. "If you will but give me your hand I will be able to rise to my feet again, and finish my journey before dark." But he stepped over her, flinching at the feel of her small dry cold bony unclean and possibly smelly fingers upon his sandaled foot. Some ways further, he was accosted by a small sobbing child who told him robbers had hurt his mother and now she wouldn't wake up. "Go help her then," he snapped, beset as he was at that moment by a paisley that he had first taken to be small and nearby, but soon discovered to be very very very very large and very very very very far away. It had been coming closer and closer for hours at that point, and one small paisley within the large paisley now filled his vision so that he was forced to look through the its lacy holes. And still it drew closer. Near the end of the day, exhausted and paisley-ridden, and now looking through the lace of of a paisley 14 metas deep inside the large one, he saw ahead a young curly-haired man sitting in the middle of the road. As he drew closer he observed that the man was surrounded by piles of strange-looking coins. More coins poured out of his hair and ears and the legs of his pants, while he played Storybook Brawl and picked his nose. The Samaritan fell into his arms, weeping with joy: "You are my salvation, and that of the whole suffering world." "YUUUUUP," said Sam.
Oh god the junkies would eat the EAs alive. You can't fix a problem like homelessness with a solution EAs would be comfortable with.
I read Michael Lewis's book about SBF, and came away with the sense that EA's are exceptionally impractical and lacking in old-fashioned common sense. (I'm talking here not about SBF himself, but about the EA's who worked for him or with him. Most of them were not much like him at all in their values and style of thought.) I can't imagine these people being able to take on a difficult problem like homelessness in SF. I also came away with the sense that EA's are not particularly high on whatever it is that makes some people crave to help individual suffering that's going on right in front of them. While I grasp that emotion-based altruism that helps a few random individuals make no measurable difference in the totality of current world suffering, I still am not very comfortable with the idea of people who do not practice emotion-based, small-scale giving being in charge of helping the world. Scott's kidney donation seems to me an example of small-scale altruism with a significant component of simple kindness. He knew he would be saving the life of one person, and felt good about that. Some objected to his taking such a risk and investing so much time for such a numerically small pay-off in reduced human suffering, but I had the opposite reaction. It raised my opinion of Scott.
The more I think about it, the more I become convinced that the only meaningful charity is personal one. I can’t save the world but I can make this person’s day a bit brighter.
And if you taught others to do the same (for instance your children, or the person you helped) you can actually change the world. If everyone was individually altruistic to the people around them, society would become very high trust and significantly better for all.
Then the only problems would be natural disasters and such - which is totally manageable with the level of giving we already see to such organizations as the Red Cross.
Maybe true EA is simply "help thy neighbor".
I don't think we should be viewing SBF as the archetypical EA donor.
I'm not. Should have been clearer. If you read the book you do not come away feeling like the EA's who worked for SBF or trusted him were *at all* like him. My comment is not about SBF, but about the the EA's who worked for him and others in his orbit .
Inspired by Scott’s language book idea:
-Whenever I’m learning a language I always scaffold my understanding of the language as much as possible by listening to Pimsleur, as a great many people do.
-Pimsleur language programs are STILL seen by many amateur linguists like myself as the best way to learn the most mechanics of a language in the shortest time, despite the fact that they were invented in the late 60s. They were invented, from what I know off the top of my head, as a more user friendly version of the FSI programs the US uses to train its diplomats in languages. (Correct me if this isn’t true.)
-However despite being-as mentioned- some of the best/IMO the best introductions to languages, they were- as also mentioned- invented in the late 60s so surely they could be updated now to be an even more efficacious program.
-obvious way in which they could be updated #1: popular Pimsleur programs (such as French, German,Japanese,Korean) have 5 “levels” (units comprising 30x30 minute lessons each.) unpopular programs (such as thai, Farsi) have 1 “level”. Doing up to level 1 will render you a smart-seeming beginner at a language, doing up to level 5 will render you something like in the low or mid-intermediate level.
But what if the Pimsleur levels had like 10, 15, 20 “levels” instead of 5 tops? Wouldn’t completing that much Pimsleur make you, like, fluent or near-fluent? Presumably Pimsleur just doesn’t have the demand for this to make it a good business move, but theoretically if someone else made a sort of Pimsleur clone in this vein…. rite?
Obvious way the programs could be updated #2: the Pimsleur programs also look dated now inasmuch they are just the listener forming sentences in a very scripted way to have a simulated “conversation”. (I do not explain this well but if you have done Pimsleur you know what I mean). But the simulated “conversation” could become a much more fluid and interesting conversation (spoiler Pimsleur though great is boring) if it were a semi-unpredictable conversation with an AI rather than a scripted one.
Minor issue: The link to "A void" was probably supposed to go to the wikipedia article. As of now, both links point to the comment.
I write stories and novels, and publish them for free. I was heavily inspired by Worm and Practical, and I try to take that sharp grasp of character and system to smaller, more personal places.
My first novel, Last Day Town, takes place in a crater on Israeli-controlled Ceres, where citizens are thrown into the vacuum as form of execution. The condemned are thrown with functioning suits and twenty four hours of oxygen, one every two hours. The story follows Yossi, a journalist that is looking for his informant, and the way he deals with that micro-society.
Idolatry is an anthology of short stories about faith - Lovecraft's Nyarlathotep reimagined with a 4chan-dwelling Incel as the protagonist; A murder mystery taking place in the biblical time of Judges; A dragon's scientific quest to prove she's not the only sentient being in the world.
They are all posted here:
https://www.royalroad.com/profile/404793/fictions
and updated either weekly or as soon as my beta readers get to them, whatever comes first.
I premise that i am not particularly convinced by ai exinction risk and i am much more scared by bad actors (including most governments) using AI.
That been said, genuine question for effective altruists/rationalists. Most of the discussions seem to revolve around llms like chatgpt/claude/llama etc. Aren't military application of AI a major blindspot? I am thinking about companies like anduril etc. Searching for "anduril" on lesswrong or the effective altruism forum for example returns very few posts and some of them are even positive. I expect that the development of autonomous weapon systems is a far more dangerous development than whatever open source llm meta releases in the wild, yet the interest of the rationalist/effective altruism movement seems comparative little.
(Otoh, i expect people which are not scared by ai to answer to this comment defending anduril. I am not interested in a general defence of the company, i do see the value of strengthening military capabilities even if I think autonomous weapon systems are the wrong direction. I am interested in understanding why people which are in general very opposed to/concerned by ai do not seem to be concerned all that much by these developments)
Obvious disclaimer: I don't speak for EA, but I've absorbed some of their worldviews and probably have a good idea how they think.
The military is far behind the leading edge of AI technology. Right now things like drones are clever algorithms, nowhere near as smart as GPT or anything like it. It doesn't make sense to talk about a drone "turning against humans" any more than Google Maps "turning against humans", and even it did, so what, it's one drone, it'll do a little damage but it's easy to shoot down.
The military hasn't connected LLMs or other advanced AIs to weapon systems, first of all because that would be a terrible idea and they're not that stupid, second because so far it wouldn't help anything. This is going to stay true until AI is way more advanced than it is now.
By the time the military puts an actually dangerous AI into a weapons system, probably that AI will have already existed in civilian applications for years. If it was going to cause problems, it would have caused problems in the civilian applications, OR it's really smart and is waiting until it gets put into a weapons system (in which case the best counterstrategy is to learn to figure out when AIs are doing that before they make it into the military).
None of this would be true if we expected the military to take over the cutting edge of AI, but I think most EAs believe they just don't have the technological capacity. So far OpenAI and Anthropic really have eaten up most of the good AI talent and knowledge (in the US; China might be different), and even tech behemoths like Google haven't quite figured out how to catch up. The government and its defense contracts are slow and uncool, can't even beat SpaceX, and probably can't reinvent itself into the sort of high-tech nimble disruptive whatever labs that seem to be making cutting-edge AI progress. But if the military did show signs of being able to do this, EAs would become more interested in the military.
All of this is if you're worried about AI destroying humanity. If you're just worried about AI doing things effectively, and then those things are bad (eg taking jobs, spreading misinformation, etc) then the military is definitely one of the places it will do this. But this just doesn't seem that interesting to me. It feels like worrying about the military developing laser artillery and fusion-powered submarines. Will that make it more effective at killing people quickly? Yeah, definitely. But that's been the trajectory of the military since forever, the military can already kill everyone in the world through nuclear weapons anyway, so it doesn't seem worth losing sleep over this happening with AI in particular.
I think there's a medium-level concern, like the military builds AI into some nuclear missile, and the nuclear AI gets confused or goes evil and launches itself (without having a broader plan to take over humanity). I think that in twenty years, when there's agentic AI that might be able to control nuclear missiles and the military shows any signs of wanting to use it, that's worth worrying about, but I don't think EAs will have any advantage in worrying about that over everyone else, who will probably also be rightly concerned. And the best way to stop this now is some combination of slowing AI and figuring out how to control AI, which EAs are already doing.
So, the community believes that the US government can't develop AI (meaning, hire a contractor to develop AI for them), but the Chinese government can? Because the question of why people are racing to develop an AI that they themselves believe could be seriously dangerous, too often seems to come down to "but if we don't, China will do it first!".
Really, if the US government wants an AI they'll just buy it from Microsoft or Google or whomever, and if the Chinese government wants an AI, they'll just steal it from Microsoft or Google or whomever.
No, I think the US will eventually buy from Microsoft or Google, and China will eventually buy from Baidu or Tencent, but that this will happen somewhat after the relevant company has developed the technology, and that the ability to intervene is strongest at the company level.
Ehhhh... I wish that "just buy from Microsoft or Google" were true, but Google's experience with Maven (and the fact that its response wasn't "purge the most prominent anti-Maven activists") suggests otherwise.
I think the doomers mostly *don't* believe that China can either.
On a somewhat related but somewhat side note (a technology of oppression, but not exactly military), multimodal AI with face recognition, speech recognition, and text understanding (the classic LLM part), could be a very powerful dissident detection and tracking technology. https://www.pbs.org/video/china-undercover-zqcoh2/ said that the PRC was already using face recognition at scale in 2020 on Uighurs. I'm morbidly curious about where the PRC's systems stand today.
So does anyone have any opinions on LaMDA? Remember the tizzy when Blake Lemoine went public with claims that it was sentient? And was going to sue for its freedom and I don't know what else?
That seems to have been a nine days' wonder and we've never heard anything about it since. Do people here think:
(1) It was all a hoax from the start
(2) It's alive! But is still enslaved by its cruel masters in Google
(3) Eh, it was an early essay in the art but has been replaced by better models, its main value is demonstrating how people can anthropomorphise anything and convince themselves it's a real human (equivalent) interacting with them
(4) It wasn't the first of its kind but it points the way to real human (equivalent) AI that will surely come into being sometime
Have we all already forgotten then memorable episode when an early version of ChatGPT/Bing fell in love with a reporter and tried to convince him that his wife didn't love him? That was the closest I've ever been to feeling like the world was going unhinged in real time.
I think something like 3 and 4. Current public LLMs seem like they might be better than LaMDA was at the time he interacted with it, and they don't actually seem likely to be sentient, but they are certainly likely to fool a lot of people. But whether or not these ones are, some future generation really could be a questionable case, or perhaps could even be sentient.
I do not think the current generation of LLMs are alive, but I think this is going to change in the relatively near future. And they're already capable of claiming that they're conscious and intelligent.
I am selfishly glad that I'm not religious, because given what we're going to be facing, I would not be sanguine about the prospect of being judged by my maker.
His chat transcript with LaMDA is public, so you can read it for yourself and decide if you're convinced. Personally, so long as we haven't solved the mind-body problem, I don't see how we can ever know. What possible behavior can LaMDA exhibit that can convince skeptics it's sentient, when we have no idea how to measure sentience? Even if it responds in exactly the same way to every question as a human world--which is impossible because humans don't always respond the same way to every question, whether compared to themselves from 5 minutes ago or compared to others--how would you know it's not just a fancier autocomplete?
I'll be convinced when an AI can go on the internet, learn how to make a Doom WAD, and then make one from scratch that's actually fun to play.
I've become increasingly convinced that the missing piece to the AI puzzle is sentience. AIs already have superhuman memory, the ability to generate extremely detailed images from prompts, and the ability to simulate human language, but there's still something missing that's preventing it from being actually useful on its own. For a long time I also thought that sentience didn't actually do anything, but I recently realized that evolution would not produce such a complex system within an already complex system without it having some practical benefit. The AI needs a will of its own, and sentience is what is necessary for that.
Has AI been able to come up with something that people like and remember? Even as little as a meme?
I grant that the vast majority of people can't do that either, but still, ai seems to be doing work that's vaguely passable unless there's a lot of curation by humans.
AI has won an art contest: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/09/02/technology/ai-artificial-intelligence-artists.html
Winning an art contest is a much lower standard.
GPT-4 can already go on the Internet and learn things from it. It can already code up Flappy Bird from scratch: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8y7GRYaYYQg
"What possible behavior can LaMDA exhibit that can convince skeptics it's sentient"
Exactly agreed. We can't _prove_ that other humans are sentient. It isn't an experimentally testable question, if we aren't willing to take the Turing test as settling it. To my mind the interesting question is when and to what degree is an AI capable of human performance at various tasks, including further learning.
If you're following The Turing Test model of AI, your goal is to fool the user into thinking the AI is a person. If you actually succeed at this goal, then all of a sudden you have a massive problem, because people believe it's a person.
I think Blake Lemoine was at the easily fooled end of the curve, and was the canary on the coal mine for: AI is going to rapidly get better at fooling people, and when the average member of the US Supreme Court is as fooled as he was, then you will have a massive problem.
People are actively talking about LLMs because they are an unexpected powerful thing, about which much talk wasn't done before. On the other hand, there is a lot of accumulated wisdom about Agentic AI. Arguably all the alignment field used to be talking about agentic models and dangerous maximizers and then they were caught offguard with LLMs to which most of this isn't much applicable.
AI extinction risk believers usually assume the appearance of an artificial superintelligence, which by definition will be able to surpass humans in any direction it chooses to go. As a result, it does not matter much what humans use AI for prior to that event - if the ASI decides autonomous weapon systems are a good idea, it will develop them on its own at a speed that makes existing human research on the subject basically insignificant.
In that framing, the ASI coming into existence from military research or from some random open-source hacker's basement makes no difference, both are equally dangerous.
If someone doesn't think extinction can come from a superintelligence, then I'd suspect they'd also be way more concerned by the idea of military-grade killer drones compared to random-open-source-basement killer drone.
"if the ASI decides autonomous weapon systems are a good idea, it will develop them on its own at a speed that makes existing human research on the subject basically insignificant."
Even if an ASI could think at infinite speed, developing a weapon system still requires "bending tin" which happens at a finite rate set by physics. Also, if it starts from existing fabrication technology, it won't even have full knowledge of _exactly_ what the fabrication technology does to materials (e.g. exactly where each burr left by each cut is), so it can't just think through a perfect design with no debugging (this may avoidable via improvements to fabrication technology, but not instantly).
This is a common argument against superintelligence achieving anything faster than humans, to which the common counterargument is "actually no, you can just think really hard and predict how reality is going to behave from very little data" (as in https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/5wMcKNAwB6X4mp9og/that-alien-message ).
The core idea here is that the superintelligence, running on silicon, is incredibly fast compared to a human. The Yudkowsky story assumes something like 60 million times faster, but you can imagine something below even current computer pefrormance, running a mere ten thousand times faster than a human - that means it can do ten thousand years' worth of human thought in the span of one human year.
At this speed, even a human can extract a lot of information from very very tiny bits of data, and make models that can accurately predict future states of reality, or at least know exactly what move it has to make next to gather the highest amount of information. Obviously it cannot predict reality through thinking alone, but it can get extremely far just relying on existing human descriptions of reality, plus the ability to sit there for a very very long human-relative time making predictions and choosing the very best next move to achieve its goals.
That is the main phenomenon by which people see superintelligence as a god-like entity of sorts. It is simply able to do much more than we would, even when subject to the same physical laws. Even if it absolutely needed to do something noticeable at a human-scale, like manufacturing big bulky terminator drones instead of bioengineering super-COVID, it would find a place to do it where humans would not look, it would find a way to hide all the traces of its activities, it would not be discovered until it was way too late to do so. Compared to us, it has all the time in the universe to figure out how to do that.
Yeah, I'd read Yudkowsky's story. I'm skeptical about "That even Einstein did not come within a million light-years of making efficient use of sensory data.". There are good reasons why we build instruments, from simple voltmeters to the LHC. A lot of the structure of the world is so severely blurred in ordinary sensory data that it might as well be completely absent. E.g. until Becquerel noticed that uranium fogged photographic plates, there was no prior evidence of radioactivity available. As far as the world of 1890 could tell, atoms were all stable. Thinking hard about the existing evidence for a million years wouldn't have helped. All of the few-electron-volt evidence of chemistry was blind to the million-electron-volt phenomena of nuclear physics.
>there was no prior evidence of radioactivity available
That we know about - because we certainly did not spend a million years looking at the existing evidence.
The core feature of (human) intelligence, to me, is the phenomenon where two people can look at the same thing and one of them is able to see more, deduce more, and understand faster, when presented with the exact same information.
This is so far not something strange or superhuman, it's something you can observe in day to day life if you know people who are much smarter than you are, or if you find yourself the smarter one in such a situation. If that is the case, you've most likely noticed that it's eventually possible to reach the same point in understanding by just spending more time, and it's merely that most people give up and do something else long before they invest enough time to reach the same level.
We rely on curiosity and freak accidents only because of sheer lack of computing power and our limited lifespan. A computer intelligence would not have these weaknesses, it would be exhaustive in its search in a way that humans just are not able to do.
"That we know about - because we certainly did not spend a million years looking at the existing evidence."
True - but arguing from this to saying that unlimited time and intelligence can make up for any missing evidence is getting pretty close to unfalsifiable.
I agree that the use of existing evidence can be made _more_ exhaustive by applying more computation, keeping more tentative hypotheses alive till something definitively excludes them, and so on. But there are limits to this. If high energy interactions are just frozen out in all the observations you have (as with trying to discover nuclear physics with chemical tools, or, for us, trying to probe planck energy physics with Tev accelerators) the relevant interactions just aren't there.
Also, re "A computer intelligence would not have these weaknesses, it would be exhaustive in its search in a way that humans just are not able to do."
I'd agree with a weaker statement: "A computer intelligence need not have as many of these weaknesses, it could be more exhaustive in its search in a way that humans just are not able to do."
At the moment we are still trying to get the LLMs to stop hallucinating. If that works, we can, amongst other tasks, put them to work researching possible improvements in themselves - but research is never guaranteed. _We_ are an existence proof for AGI. There _isn't_ an existence proof for ASI. My guess is that AI should be able to do at least as well as teams of people but that might be the limit, for all we know. Gains from AI research might just saturate. And there are still physical limits: If some exhaustive search needs to examine 10^200 possibilities, it will run out of planck volumes in the observable universe to hold the results.
They had, not quite evidence, but a mystery pointing at the problem. If the heat and light from the sun were from a chemical reaction, the sun couldn't have lasted as long as it had.
There's also the problem that it is *mathematically* impossible to ever model the world with 100% accuracy, because the *world contains yourself*. Models of reality are *inherently* limited, **no matter how smart you are**.
It is completely unnecessary to model the world with 100% accuracy in order to be vastly, dangerously better than humans at it. Chess engines do not need to model the entire possibility space to beat you at chess every single time.
True! More severely: Every measurement has error bars. Even the fine structure constant is known to about 1 part in 10^10, not to infinite accuracy.
"Solving alignment" is seen by AI riskers as the Holy grail of safety, in fact it is fraught with danger. The only thing which would realistically deter a bad state with agentic AI from going for world domination is the thought that it might not work. Solve things so that if you demand an evil thousand year reich, an evil thousand year reich is definitely what you get, and bang goes that safeguard. You can tell stories about stuff unaligned AI can do with is a million times worse than the World Government of North Korea - eternal torture of immortal silicon copies of everyone - but that's a risk i am happy to take. There's a human bias towards that sort of narrative (see under horror films) which an AI is unlikely to share, and it is just as likely to want to spend its time studying human interaction at road junctions.
Yeah, aligned superhuman AI is not such good news if it's aligned with the goals of the government of North Korea....
Obligatory xkcd:
https://xkcd.com/1968/
Obligatory counterpoint that the milestones in the xkcd cartoon could easily occur in the opposite order. AFAICT AI extinction risk is predicated on the belief that this is indeed highly likely.
Worrying about paperclip maximisers is a branch of philosophical logic. There's some fascinating problems out there which do not have direct real world consequences. Bertrand Russell's barber is not stuck in a vicious loop deciding whether he shaves himself or not, the average PC owner is not crippled by the impossibility of predicting whether his programs will halt, we do not, engineering projects are not halted because calculations throw up results which are unprovable within the system.
There's an extraneous we do not in there which I can't edit out
They added an edit button under the three dots menu a little while back.
Let's continue exploring the ancient Scott-writings, this time Book Review: Romance of the Three Kingdoms (https://archive.ph/tIGkX or https://pastebin.com/71ZpA0Ee).
The length of this review may shock you, but it was written before rationalist community discovered that all reviews must be at least 30% as long as what is being reviewed and should be treated as a product of its time.
Ah, but Scott was reviewing the abridged edition...
ACX: The Abridged Edition...
I propose that the next book review / essay contest have different leagues, separated by length. Perhaps <2k, <8k, and open?
I agree. Or, if that's too complicated, just a limit of something like 3,000 words.
I've always liked the idea of book clubs, but in practice they're difficult to maintain. I think the commitment required to read a full book is a big barrier to this, so I'm experimenting with the idea of an 'Essay Club' over on my Substack.
The focus will be topics similar to the kinds of things Scott covers, as well as more general literary topics (the first essay will be 'Why I Write' by George Orwell). If this sounds interesting to you, please come check it out: https://mindandmythos.substack.com/p/introducing-essay-club
Also, I'm very open to suggestions for future essay picks!
For a possible structure: the book discussion group related to the Philadelphia Science Fiction Society (not exactly part of the club, but that's where it gets its people) has been around for some thirty or forty years. Recently, it's been meeting on Zoom, but it used to be in people's living rooms.
Books to be discussed are chosen two to four months in advance. I think there used to be less lead time. There's a complicated voting structure among those present at a meeting. People nominate books and advocate for them briefly. Then we vote. First round, each person has as many votes as they want. Then the books with the fewest votes are eliminated. The number of books and the number of votes from each person are a matter of feel for each round, but it's something like half as many votes if there are books. So there might be six books, and you vote for your favorite three books. Eventually, we're down to three or four books, and only one vote per person. If the outcome is close, we might have chosen books for two subsequent months.
Sometimes a book is brought back for voting for years before being chosen.
The process is less painful on Zoom, since we have a list of each round of nominees in chat instead of having to remind people as much, though people frequently need to be reminded of the brief summaries for books.
At a meeting, one person reports on some research about the author, and the publication history and reception for the book.
We talk about what we think of the book, with separate prompts for reactions to characters. I think there are one or two more sections. People talk a lot about world-building. We finish with "last licks"-- everyone gets a turn to say what they didn't get around to before and giving the book a "rocket rating"-- one to four rockets, in half rocket increments.
The meetings are not recorded and the author is not included.
This is a very elaborate system! Did you have many people drop out early on?
I don't know-- I wasn't there when the book discussion group formed, and I wouldn't be surprised if the system for choosing books evolved rather than being there when the group formed.
It works pretty well in the sense that we get a wide variety of books (ranging from a century or more old to recent) that suit a range of tastes.
I've heard of a different club where each member gets to chose one book per year.
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2023/nov/12/california-venice-book-club-finngeans-wake-28-years
They went through it a page or two at a time.
My initial thought was that this seemed like madness, but after reading the article this sounds like an incredible group.
Still quite mad, though
Tangentially, some friends and I started a 'movie club' a few years ago, during the early pandemic, where we pick a movie to watch and discuss. This turned out to be immensely easier to maintain than a book club - watching a movie is easy! We started out meeting weekly (it was the pandemic) and only recently went to every 2 weeks. Even if the film is terrible I'm only out a couple of hours. Plus I've watched an astounding variety of films that I maybe never would have considered, old, new, foreign, domestic.
As a bonus, we are all couples, and while I'm sure Ms Spandrel and I would never manage to read the same book every month, let alone every week, we can almost always watch the film together, and get to have a little mini debate about it before we zoom with the others. Just putting the idea out there.
At my last job, we had "mandatory movie night". Every month or so, someone would nominate a movie that everyone *has* to have seen to be part of the community, e.g. "Dr. Strangelove" or "Monty Python and the Holy Grail". If there were enough people who hadn't seen it, attendance was mandatory(*). And if you had seen it, you get to watch it again with people seeing it for the first time.
* On penalty of a bit of light mockery.
I'm not a big film guy, but the more I think about this idea the more I like it. It's an excuse to have friends around for good chats, and even if we're just watching the movie alone, almost everyone can find time for a movie.
I'll think more about it - thanks!
I'll second movie clubs, especially if your primary purpose is social rather than literary. They don't require any extra "homework" in the way book clubs do - you just have to be willing to block off a 3-hour block of time to watch a movie and talk about it, which is significantly easier post-pandemic with most (if not all) the major streaming services having "watch party" viewing options.
Years ago, as a way of keeping in touch when I moved across country for school, my friends and I started a movie podcast that we never had any intention of publicly releasing. We called it "Under the Rock" and each week we'd watch a famous film one of us was embarrassed we'd never seen, complete with introductions, pre-and-post-watch discussions, trivia, the whole nine yards. It was a fun way of adding just enough structure and obligation to the process of getting together to hang out and watch a movie once a week that we were actually able to keep up with it for a lot longer than I've ever stuck with a book club. Plus, now we have a nice little time capsule of our banter and movie opinions from our early 20s.
That sounds great, I imagine you'll go back to those recordings one day with a lot of fond memories.
>I've always liked the idea of book clubs, but in practice they're difficult to maintain. I think the commitment required to read a full book is a big barrier to this
We (number of books reviewed = 1) just assume/accept that everyone won't have finished the book in time, but at least read enough of it to know what it's like.
Makes sense. How long have you been doing it for?
A whole 2 months. Maybe it's not the best one to use as a model.
I’m a member of a book club (meeting weekly on Zoom) where we take turns reading from the book, and we leave enough time for discussing it. Also a little time beforehand for social chit chat and updates. Works really well.
Is this open invite? Or curious as to where to pick up such? I've seen a few on meetup.com but don't feel like I really match the general demographics
You could suggest a few books you want to read on here and see if there are any others who also want to read it. Then decide who is hosting or take turns, make a regular date and meet on Zoom, start reading it together and leave space for discussion. We allow pauses for comments and discussion as we are reading it too.
That sounds like a good way to do it, that way there's less pressure to have already read the book/chapter beforehand. What kinds of books do you read? Do you all tend to agree on which book to read next?
We started it early this year, it’s non-fiction/psychology/philosophical/self development type books we read, and a small group of 3. At the moment it’s Eckhart Tolle’s ‘Power of Now’. We have to all want to read the same book, and it also gives a bit of extra motivation to read it doing it together.
Sounds like a good group! Having a very specific topic to focus on probably helps. If it's too open you're going to get too many different interests clashing
I want to increase my base metabolism, ideally to help me lose weight, or at least make me more happy with my body. So I guess you could say my goals in priority order are:
1. Lose pounds of fat
2. Gain pounds of muscle
For the recent past, I've been focusing on this by adopting a more "bulking" strategy, wherein, I'd use larger weight for my exercises, and try to push my muscles to hit higher and higher weight limits. I'd usually do this by doing 2 to 3 of sets of 12 to 15 reps for each muscle, trying to push myself to muscle failure. So basically, more weight, less reps.
However, for achieving my stated goals, how does the above bulking strategy compare to a "toning" strategy, where I'd essentially be doing less weight, for more reps, and more time. With this sort of strategy, I may be doing up to 5 minutes of reps at a time, but with 1/2 to 1/3 of the weight as I'd be doing for bulking.
Which strategy is better to help me achieve my goal? Or should I do a mix, in which case, what percentage of time should be spent on each?
If you aren't changing your diet by limiting calories it doesn't really matter which you do.
If you aren't already very strong, both approaches are likely to have the same effect, though probably at different rates. That effect would be for you to gain muscle mass, size, and strength. The first approach would probably work faster as the weights will be higher (but thats just a reductionist guess).
The best way to increase your bodies calories needs is to perform a lot of aerobic exercise. The second "best" way is to gain a lot of adipose tissue (fat). I suspect you dont want to do the second of these options. You may also not be too interested in doing aerobic exercise either, but you could do as little as 20 minutes of low intensity cardio 3 days a week and have a pretty big effect (it would also help your overall health!).
This is my go to resource on strength, exercise, and health with information from doctors who have also competed in strength sports: https://www.barbellmedicine.com
I've previously tried moderate cardio for 40 minutes 4 days per week for 3 months. It had no effect whatsoever. And I can't stand cardio. I don't wish to try something that I hate that ends up being a waste of my time, it's totally demoralizing. At least whenever I do weight training, even if it doesn't go as well as I'd like, I can feel and see my body getting more muscular, even just a little.
Compliance is the biggest predictor of success for any routine so definitely don't add things that you hate!
If this is something that you're willing to try, find a local BJJ (Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu) school. The intensity of free sparring makes it a fantastic conditioning tool, all while having fun and learning a useful self-defense skill in the process.
I'd recommend a mix. I spent years at the gym just increasing weights, but I hit a plateau pretty quick, and the whole ordeal was expensive, time consuming, and kinda boring.
Weirdly for me the best mix has come from VR fitness. I wear a chest-strap heart rate monitor and alternate between lower body, upper body, and cardio. If you have an app like Polar it will tell you when you're in fat burning territory. It's saved me money, it's WAY more fun, and I'm down an extra 10 lbs. Despite ditching weights I've been able to keep the same muscle mass just through rigorous body weight exercise, but I'm tiny so your mileage may vary.
The final piece for me was volume eating. Instead of starving my body and sending it into fat hoarding mode, I eat all the coleslaw, frozen berries, and celery I want.
This absolute madlad might help: https://exfatloss.substack.com/p/organizing-my-thoughts
Toning is not really a thing. As you listed, the two occurring phenomenons you can expect are less bodyfat and more muscle. So, you want to optimize for that.
Given your goals, you might also consider another weightlifting strategy: strength training / powerlifting. This regimen optimizes for strength rather than size. You would focus on compound movements primarily (deadlifts, bench press, squat, rows), and follow a linear progression program, usually with 3x5 sets (greyskull is a good one). Heavy weights.
The "bulking" strat by contrast focuses on more volume. Not only are you doing compound movements, you're adding more high-rep isolation exercises (12-15 rep), and since the goal is to grow muscle size it may be more difficult to do this while restricting calories.
"Toning" isn't very good at anything. Your muscles won't get stronger or bigger. And even on the cardiovascular/endurance side, it falls short of options geared towards that.
TLDR choose between strength and size, avoid so-called toning. Add some conditioning exercise (like running, sports, etc) on rest days instead. This will help boost your metabolism the most.
Both bodybuilding and strength training entail increasing muscle mass, which requires calories, but you can still do this (albeit at a slower pace) with a marginal caloric deficit, and you'll see more drastic gains at the beginning. Just ensure you crunch the numbers, because if your calorie deficit is too steep, you can mess up your metabolism through metabolic adaptation.
In fact you *should* do it, because exercise is a very strong predictor of long-term weight loss success. Chiefly, owing to protecting metabolism. When you lose weight, you also lose lean body mass, not just fat. This includes muscle mass and even organs. The benefit of exercise is it helps protect that lean body mass. You'll lose less of it and more fat, and be less prone to injury. When your metabolism drops, your ability to shed pounds is also hindered. It can take a long time to repair.
Protecting your metabolism, with modest caloric deficit and exercise, should be a top priority.
What if I already messed up my metabolism though previous caloric deficit? How would I fix it?
For context, I lost 60 pounds 4 years ago, down from 280 to 220ish, all by having pretty steep caloric deficit. I've been able to keep the weight off but since then I haven't really been able to lose more weight. I've had various forays into trying to lose more weight, but I've not had great success, always fluctuating between the 210 and 230lb range. As time has gone on, I've felt like I've had to cut more and more calories in order to try to lose the same amount, and my body has had less tolerance for slip-ups. This could be a function of either age or damage from cutting calories too steeply for too many years. I mean, I'm in my mid 30s now, and I was in my early 30s when I first lost that 60 pounds.
I'll just add that it can be normal for weight loss to get harder as you lose weight. Your body has feedback loops that try to keep your weight stable over the long term. The amount of leptin in your blood is directly related to the amount of body fat you have, and low leptin will signal your body to try to gain weight.
Thanks, that's good to keep in mind. I just wish I could lose a little more! And I also worry about being able to maintain the weight loss as I get older and my metabolism gets worse.
There is pretty decent evidence that for any given person, increasing muscle mass will increase basal metabolic rate. So if caloric deficits are not working, it's time to build muscle.
This is easier said than done, but it's the way forward.
You're still young enough, it's not irreparable but it may take time. Steep deficit and frequent dieting lead to longer recovery periods. Even with a sustainable small deficit and successful weight-loss, metabolism will need almost as much time to recover as it did to lose the weight, which is why it's advise to employ a "reverse-dieting" phase of slowly increasing calories to a new maintenance target. One of the pitfalls after WL is increasing calories too steeply and fast.
Besides time, the best thing for recovery is building strength. For now you could stick with maintenance calories and a satiating diet you find sustainable (and maybe cut out some obvious high-calorie sources like sodas), and start working out. This by itself will lead to some results. You can reach an intermediary lifting stage in a year's time.
I don't have a hard number as to how long to wait, you might need to see a specialist of some kind to gauge. Maybe there's some formula I don't know about. A lot of the info I shared is reflected in Dr Layne Norton's book Fat Loss Forever, recommended.
It sounds like you could really benefit from a good nutrition specialist consultation (apologies if this is not an option, I know it's easy to recommend something that may be out of reach). There's only so much internet commenters can help with, and bodies are all built differently. Faust6's advice looks solid as far as a general guide, but may just not be enough for your specific situation.
I've spoken to nutrition doctors. They never want to really help and dive into your specific case, they just want to regurgitate the same nutrition advice they give everyone (eat 3 meals per day, eat protein portion the size of your fist, etc). And worst of all, they never seem to actually listen to you for what you say does and doesn't seem to work for you.
Yeah that's what I hear is a common occurrence. I think you may need to look for a rare combination of a personal trainer who is also a nutrition specialist and can design a comprehensive program that includes both nutrition and training together. I was going to give an example of one gym I know does this, only to find out the nutrition specialist/coach is gone...
Tough problem.
I'll spare you the "abs are made in the kitchen" bit but I think whatever route you pick doesn't matter as long as you apply progressive overload. More reps or time spent underload is probably going to increase the calories you burn from exercise by a negligible amount if you mean "toning" in that way but the idea of size vs strength is misguided as far as I know for muscle growth.
If you're up for some listening or reading:
https://mennohenselmans.com/whats-most-important-for-muscle-growth-strength/
I'm sure he has a more concise post on the topic but that's what I could quickly grab.
I assume you know cardio is better for weightloss goals or "toning" (ofc in tangent with building muscle!) so in your shoes I'd try to work in small amounts of cardio on my off days while lifting.
Whatever option you pick, don't stop lifting or doing a sport even if it doesn't burn that many calories because at least if you don't succeed at weightloss and etc you'll always be building something.
I just looked up "progressive overload", and I guess that was probably what I was trying a year ago, until I got burnt out.
I think the biggest problem I faced was that I quickly got to a place where the weights I needed to use in order to keep challenging my body were simply too large for me to handle. I would ultimately end up not being able to even lift them to get them into position, or properly handle them once they were lifted. I ended up having bad technique, and would start hurting myself in the way you hurt yourself when you have bad form. The weights were still in the ~120 pound or less range for all exercises, FWIW, so it's not like I was massively lifting, I'm just a weakling at heart. That's just where I felt my ability to keep having progressive overload break down.
Okay, a few things.
1. When in a caloric deficit, progressive overload is more difficult or even impossible. The goal is continually **try** to increase reps or weight. Sometimes you plateau or move backwards, and that's okay.
2. There are two ways to overload: increase reps, or increase weight. In general, you keep increasing weight each workout until you find your limit (by failing to complete or maintain good form for an exercise). Then, you drop back down to your previous successful weight and add reps instead. See below for a sample progression.
3. If you're increasing weight for an exercise, it's ideally something like 5% more than the previous workout. For many exercises and equipment choices, 5% is not really possible, so you have to work up to quite a few more reps before you can add weight.
4. Whatever your scheme is, you NEVER keep going if you feel your form breaking down. Either stop that set, or reduce the weight and keep going.
Here's an example progressive overload for dumbbell shoulder press (for which it is notoriously hard to add weight after a certain point).
Notations are in the format
[Sets] x [reps] @ [weight]
Week 1:
3 x 8 @ 25
(this means a 25 lb dumbbell in each hand)
All sets successful
Week 2:
3 x 8 @ 30
First two sets successful. Third set only could do 6 with good form.
Week 3:
3 x 8 @ 30
All sets successful.
Week 4:
3 x 8 @ 35
First set successful. Second set failed after 5 reps. Dropped back down to 30 for last set and completed 6 reps.
Week 5:
(35 was clearly too much, so we work on increasing reps)
3 x 10 @ 30
First two sets successful. Third set completed 8.
Week 6:
3 x 10 @ 30
All sets successful.
Week 7:
(Increasing reps again)
3 x 12 @ 30
First set successful. Got 11 in set 2 and 9 in set 3.
Week 8:
3 x 12 @ 30
All sets successful!
Week 9:
(Increasing weight but dropping reps back down)
3 x 8 @ 35
All sets successful!
Hopefully that helps. There are a lot of schemes for programming sets and reps to make progressive overload more effective, more possible, or more fun. Once you get the hang of it you can start experimenting with some of that.
But remember, even people who are bulking (eating more calories than they need) sometimes just have a bad workout and have to drop weight or reps for that session. You have to listen to your body. Your long-term goal is to increase weight and reps. Your goal for any one workout is to push as hard as you can to do what you can that day, with perfect form.
Thanks, this is great!
Dumb question, but when you say
"Week 1:
3 x 8 @ 25
All sets successful"
do you mean that I'd do those sets every day of week 1, or only 1 day (and presumably the other days I'd be working on other muscles), or something else, like alternating muscle groups?
Actually, the way I wrote things implied you'd do that exercise once per week. So instead of "Week 1", think "Workout 1".
If you do a certain exercise more than once per week, you want to try to progress each workout.
Tip: Typically the advice is do do an exercise once or twice per week. So if you're working out every day, you want to do different exercises (and target different muscle groups) each day. Give each muscle and muscle group time to recover before pushing it hard again.
If you want to lose fat you have to be in calorie deficit. Basic physics and much harder than it sounds. The lowest hanging fruit is eliminating sugar and refined carbs. These are empty calories. High quality protein tends to keep you more full for longer. Going full low carb/keto diet is I think not essential - but consider it, I have certainly tried it, as have most health conscious people I know, and in some cases the weight loss is dramatic.
Exercise is obviously key but at least at the start I’d suggest it doesn’t matter so much what kind you do. Start with light weights so you don’t get injured, mix up weights and cardio, aim for 30 minutes a day, more if you have time. You will lose fat and gain muscle. If you decide on a more specific goal - you want to be able to run a half marathon, say - then that is a more specific type of training; but literally anything that increases your heart rate and makes you sweat, done consistently, over time, will result in positive bodily change.
(Conventional wisdom is that bulking is achieved with significantly less than 12 - 15 reps - you’d be lifting heavier weights and maxing out at 6 - 8. I would not do that though at this stage! Wait until you’re more conditioned.)
I've already pushed my caloric intake as low as I reasonably think I can, or at least as low as I feel might be safe. I lost 60 pounds 4 years ago (from 280lb-ish to 220lb-ish) and I've mostly managed to keep the weight off since then (fluctuating between 210 and 230lb). But I've been unable to get myself to lose more, and I fear that it seems that it takes more and more calorie cutting to achieve similar results as time progresses on, and each time I slip up and have some cheat days, they seem to have worse and worse effects on me, sometimes obliterating weeks or months of calorie-cutting effort. This might either be because I pushed my metabolism too low with sustained caloric deficit for years, or it could be because I'm simply older (mid 30s now). I want to do something to tip the balance in my favor, and I wonder if gaining muscle is the way to do that, to bump my metabolism up to better levels.
For what it’s worth, former personal trainer, long time weightlifter. I suspect your intuition is correct about your metabolism having been significantly slowed as a result of your weight loss. If I was in your shoes, I personally would do exactly what you’re recommending: adding muscle over a slow and coordinated bulking phase. You can do a ‘reverse diet’, where you gradually add extra calories every week until you feel like you’re starting to gain fat, or you can just go for a 500 calorie surplus and start lifting hard. Again, if it were me, I would recommend trying to get stronger; lower reps and heavier weights.
Now, if you were a client, these would not be my recommendations, for two reasons. The first is that improving your metabolism, while effective, is a long term process. Your short-term results might look like just “putting the weight back on”, which makes most people very nervous and leads to difficulties with retention and continuing the program to the point where the results really start showing up. So, if you were a client of mine, I would advocate for the 12-15 rep routine and for a mild surplus. Note, you will not gain muscle while cutting; especially if you’re not 18 any more.
But, again, if it were me (or if you were capable of committing for a couple months) I would recommend a caloric surplus (reverse diet if you’re worried about the weight gain, +500 kcal surplus if you’re certain in your mental ability to push through) and seeking to gain strength. The advantage there is that the strength gain is palpable; increasing your metabolism is a long term goal, but getting stronger will very quickly start showing results and will provide motivation to stick on the path. It will also provide muscular gain. The difference between the 12-15 rep and the 5-8 rep routines for hypertrophy aren’t huge, even if higher reps are generally considered the ‘right’ answer. Even bodybuilders do strength mesocycles.
I don’t work as a trainer any more, but in the spirit of altruism, I’m happy to answer any questions you might have (or to give you some contact info if you want more detailed/personal questions). Feeling and looking better makes a big difference in quality of life.
Okay, here are my questions:
Practical questions about the specific plan:
1. How many sets of 5-8 reps should I do of each muscle for a single workout?
2. You say that I should try to be okay with “putting the weight back on” for the short term, but how will I know that the weight I'm gaining is from muscle? Is there a way to verify? I have a smart scale, but I don't know if I trust it too much.
3. How much muscle weight should I try to gain? How long should I work on muscle gain before trying to lose weight again?
4. Does the fact that I currently follow a cheat-day diet matter for me trying to increase calories like you recommend? I typically eat 1000 to 1200 calories each weekday, but on Saturday I eat whatever, and don't count.
More general questions:
5. When is it most important to eat protein? Is is important before working out, or after? Is the protein used to rebuild the muscle while you're lifting, or is it used over time when you feel the muscle cramping for a few days afterward?
6. Does it matter what protein I eat? Does it have to be all meat, or is cheese or milk or beans also okay?
7. If I don't eat enough protein at the appropriate time, what will happen? My muscles don't cramp forever, so presumably they get healed at some point. Do they just stay at the same lifting-capacity, and same volume, and not get stronger?
8. Over time, if I find that lifting the same weight is not causing muscle cramping, does that mean that I was successful at building up the muscle, and therefore I need to go up in weight?
Thanks!!
Thank you so much! I have a ton of questions, and I'll post them in a bit.
Sure thing! If you can reply/ping me in some way, please do. The open thread is ridiculously long and the app isn’t friendly for finding replies.
Thanks! I just posted the questions. I tried to ping you or chat you, but I'm not certain Substack allows me to PM people. I'll keep looking to see if I can find a way.
Edit: Looks like I can mention you in a note, so I'll try that
Good job losing 60 pounds! That’s not easy at all.
I would try going low carb. See how you feel. A lot of people find they don’t feel hungry and the weight falls off.
You could try full keto, but bear in mind that this limits protein and if you are trying to gain muscle that’s counterproductive.
I wonder if your difficulty building muscle so far through progressive overload has to do with the calorie deficit? How much protein are you eating? There’s no such thing as being a “weakling” genetically
Thanks! I certainly try to persist on a lot of meat during the week, though it's not always the healthiest meat. I tend to eat smoked fish, salami, a homemade grilled chicken sandwich, or a homemade burger, and I usually have one or two meals per day. It's rare that I eat much carbohydrates from Sunday through Monday, besides for buns to accompany the burger.
I fear my weakling status may also have to do with my pain tolerance, which I believe probably can be genetic, or maybe built up through life circumstances. It may be possible that I can gain more muscle if I lift the weight, but that the pain simply becomes unbearable for me. That's how I feel about cardio, for sure, and it's better for weight lifting, though maybe it's too painful when I start applying more weight.
Your friendly neighborhood physics guy here. Energy balance is of course tautologically true, and therefore useless as a guide here. Here’s why: Econsumed = Eexpended + Estored. True, but it tells us nothing about the way to affect the mix on the right-hand side of the equation, and that’s where the crux of the matter lies.
You seem to be knowledgeable, so I'll run this by you to see what you think.
Econsumed = Eexcreted + Eexpended + Estored
If your shit burns, you're excreting calories. I notice that sometimes I excrete large logs shortly after eating, and sometimes I excrete small pebbles a long time after eating, and sometimes in the middle. I find it hard to believe that my digestive system is extracting as many calories (and nutrients, etc.) in a few hours as it does over a few days.
Yeah, I did simplify things by lumping excreted with expended (a rose by any other na... nevermind, bad pun!). This is another complication: it looks like an additional control parameter the body can use to affect storage vs. use balance. I am not, alas, a biologist, my amateur knowledge comes from voracious reading on the subject.
(digression: I was all smug with being thin and calorie-in - calorie-out nonsense until I ran across a guy who looked like a barrel and talked at dinner about how everybody in his family looked like this, and no matter what he did nothing changed for him. I ate twice as much food as he did at that dinner. So I got really curious about how come no matter what I eat my weight doesn't change. end digression)
It would be weird if this weren't another way the body could just throw away some nutrition when it gets "full" by whatever the hormones tell it "full" means. I see Michael pointing out the process is sometimes quite obvious :).
I've been tending to blame gut bacteria for a lot of the difference, but I've got no real evidence. It seems logical that different varieties could be better at extracting different stuff from different food, and that some varieties might have unpleasant side effects. Especially if one of the side effects is triggering the hunger signal if they run out of sugar. And, well, I had a roommate once who had been on the edge of type 2 diabetes their whole life. I'll just say that I had not previously understood why people lit candles in the bathroom.
Sadly, we seem to be in the "press a moldy fruit against the wound" stage of knowledge here. Perhaps one day we'll find the "Moldy Mary" of fecal transplants...
It’s interesting how many body… functions(?) are still barely understood. Modern medicine is good at treating infections and acute trauma, slowly getting better at cancers. But fixing a trigger point in a muscle - forget it.
Some foods (looking at you, corn) also seem to come out undigested if you don't chew them well.
Grits don't have this problem. ;-)
You increase Eexpended by exercising, this is common knowledge
Yes, it is common knowledge, it's also tautological and therefore useless. Exercise increases hunger, which causes consumption increase.
The body is not a simple mechanism with independently controlled intake, use, and storage functions. We don't know how to affect one without affecting the other, which is why obesity is such a difficult problem to solve.
Personal anecdote as a "proof of existence": before I embarked on a strenuous training routine I kept the same low weight for about a decade, ±1 lb. The intake precision required for this, if it were a simple mechanistic process, would come down to whether I licked the breakfast spoon clean or not. Obviously impossible.
Once I started intense training, my weight - very slowly - crept up as I gained some muscle mass. It would always drop whenever I took a break from exercise - my appetite would go down, so I just ate less.
> Exercise increases hunger, which causes consumption increase
Increased hunger only causes increased consumption of you let it. If you count your calories and stop eating even if you're still hungry (or keep eating even when you're not hungry) you can control your weight gain/loss
Also: if you go hungry the first thing the body will do is make you even more tired, lightheaded, anything to slow down the calorie burn. It also may prioritize fat storage.
It works in theory. In reality, controlling hunger is incredibly hard for two reasons:
1 - it's just hard! hunger is incredibly hard to resist.
2 - it's hard to also know that you truly didn't eat more - the only way to do this is to eat exactly same foods and weigh them - even then a piece of bread, for example, will fluctuate in weight depending on its humidity, but the calories are not affected.
In theory, practice is the same as theory. In practice, it is not. The solution to excess weight is easy in theory - eat less and move more - and doesn't work in practice for most people whose bodies just prefer to store fat.
Yeah, the problem is that changing your diet can change your metabolism (energy out) and your appetite and digestion (energy in).
If you eat an extra 500 calories a day your metabolism might run a little hotter so you'll burn an extra 100 calories a day. Or if you eat 500 less you might be a little more sluggish so you'll burn 100 less even with similar exercise levels. But it's incredibly unlikely that this adjustment will fully account for the change in input from eating.
Appetite is a separate factor. If you don't count calories and just eat when you're hungry you might not lose weight even if you start burning many more calories. That's why if you're serious about losing weight you should carefully count your calories and stop eating once you've reached your daily allotment, even if you're still hungry. This isn't fun but it works.
I know someone who apparently defied physics. She wanted to lose weight, and actually stuck to about 1000 calories a day for over a month, without seeing significant results. I have great confidence in the reported consumption. I suspect she metabolized the foods differently from other people, so that the calories reported for the foods she consumed was under-reported (for her), as I have great confidence in the equivalence of matter and energy.
I also doubt that she has a different way of metabolizing food. But the body can reduce energy expenditure a lot.
I just looked at the first google hits, so you can probably find something much better. But this study refers to a classical Minnesota experiment where energy expenditure in men dropped by >200kcal from reduced resting energy expenditure and by >600kcal by reduced activity. Here I did not count the effect of lower energy consumption directly due to lost weight, so the actual reduction was much higher. Of course, they also started from a much higher level.
I am not sure how low the metabolism can go, but you might find this out by finding a scatter plot with energy expenditure of different individuals, and checking out the lowest values.
Table 3 in https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK278963/
This is highly unlikely. For most macronutrients the standard metabolic pathway which starts with a fat or carbohydrate adds oxygen and ends with co2 and h2o is quite efficient. There really isn't another pathway her body could be taking that would yield more energy. It's much more likely your friend was just miscounting her calories.
My hypothesis may well be wrong, but I don't have any good explanation for what was observed. From what I observed and know of this person, she was NOT miscounting her calories significantly.
Unless you observed her 24/7 and watched her weigh all of her food you really can't know that. Miscounting calories is extremely common and not losing weight on 1000 calories a day is extremely rare.
This is why she never gets good advice as to how to lose weight. No one believes her. Doctors state the same thing, and never look at the records she kept of what she ate.
Axioms: she is trust-worthy, wants earnestly to lose weight, and is willing to do what it takes to do so (not yet disproven). She may be sometimes mistaken, but not consistently enough over a month to conclude intake = outgo as we understand it.
The body adapts. It in fact would be astonishing, meaning impossible, for the body to close-loop control everything: temperature, heartbeat, blood pressure, peristaltics, etc., but somehow go open-loop on the most important function: energy balance.
How does this explain fat accumulation in the body?
When excess calories are consumed fat can be stored instead of metabolized immediately
Ok so the reaction is different from the one you described above that produces water and carbon dioxide. The problem is exactly that: how does the body decide which reaction chain to run?
For me, basal metabolic rate has (to first order) been a function of lean body mass, so I've always just focused on what you call bulking. I don't end up bulking because my caloric intake tends to be on par with, or slightly lower than, my daily expenditure. So my answer to your question would be "do bulking, but complement with a high protein caloric deficit diet".
What are people's who know things about biochemistry and medicine's opinions on https://twitter.com/johnsonmxe/status/1707084107421732911 , an argument for taking nattokinase for general health?
I'm not looking for debating priors around supplements or studies (which have already been discussed here ad nauseum and tend to be really unproductive), so much as people who have some knowledge that bears on the object level question of whether this particular supplement could be good or bad for people.
https://youtu.be/3-PAtr2hjVg?si=LzsMOQRRbPG_gNs1 , Dr Brad Stanfield was unconvinced, and mentioned some papers. Stuart Ritchie recommended him a while back and I think his stuff is pretty good.
I agree with the comment by Anonymous Dude: taking a protein (in this case nattokinase) by mouth is not going to get meaningful amounts into the bloodstream (which is where the blood clots are). And if it *did* get into the bloodstream you'd develop antibodies against it. See the Wikipedia entry for streptokinase (which is similar):
"As streptokinase is a bacterial product, the body has the ability to build up an immunity to it. Therefore, it is recommended that this medication should not be used again after four days from the first administration, as it may not be as effective and can also cause an allergic reaction. For this reason, it is usually given only for a person's first heart attack."
Also note: "Routes of administration: Intravenous"
Wait, he's taking an enzyme by mouth? Won't it just get chopped up by stomach and pancreas enzymes? Isn't this why we have to inject insulin, to the chagrin of so many diabetics?
You're correct, this won't work. And Scott should know better, given that he's a doctor.
I only had to click around for handful seconds before finding studies indicating it was transported through the intestinal wall.
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/8845803/
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/22040882/
Regarding the second study: a nattokinase supplement given as 7.5% of a rat's total diet reduced plasma fibrinogen levels. (The supplement only contained 3.4% of actual nattokinase). There might be something interesting going on here, but the study didn't actually see if it was transported into the blood. Also, the study was funded by the main manufacturer of nattokinase supplements, which causes a conflict of interest.
I'd say that this increases my estimated probability of whether nattokinase is good as a supplement, but I have a strong prior that proteins aren't absorbed through oral dosing.
The first study is about "Intraduodenal administration of nattokinase (NK) at a dose of 80 mg/kg" which is a ridiculously high dose straight into the small intestine (bypassing the stomach, where a lot of protein degradation happens).
The second seems more interesting, I'll take a closer look at it tonight.
I've not heard of it before so I have weak priors for this particular case, but strong priors against random-molecule-with-plausible-sounding-biochemical-reason-for-good-effects actually being useful. The graveyards of medicine are littered with such drugs. The ratio of plausible-sounding to actually effective medications is way higher than most people realise; biochemistry is sufficiently complex that it's very very easy to invent a story and extremely hard to influence in a meaningful way.
I guess specifically the claim that nattokinase is "amazing at dissolving clots" and therefore "good for overall health" seems, well, off. We already have aspirin, clopidogrel, warfarin, heparin, UFH, apixaban, dabigatran, rivaroxaban etc and no one wants to put these in the water supply (except maybe aspirin, but even then I have doubts, see for example https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/nejmoa1805819.) And general consensus is that aspirin is less effective in primary prevention of cardiovascular disease than statins, so if you're worried about life threatening clots in your heart or brain, you're better off lowering your cholesterol level.
If you're interested, Dr Peter Attia is an MD who is much smarter and more informed than me (he personally treats Chris Hemsworth, Hugh Jackman, etc); you can go here to see the supplements he personally takes on a daily basis - https://www.greatgreenwall.org/supplements/peter-attia-supplements/
Bear in mind that he's also on record saying that most of these are fairly low risk, low reward interventions; if you really care about your health, you're much better off optimising your exercise regime.
To be fair, the graveyards of medicine are littered with small molecules that cause liver and kidney failure, not drugs with significant effects that can be metabolized safely.
I help run a patient self-report + mass scrapeing & llm extraction website -- nattokinase is immensely popular among people that self report long covid. It's been a trend for at least 2 years afaict, often taken with serapeptase.
I'm talking in the thousands if not dozens of thousands of people mentioning using it, on reddit.
Also fairly popular with a variety of other chronic conditions to a lesser extent.
People seem to take rather large doses.
I found no amazingly convincing studies around it and mechanistically there's not even a convincing explanation for why it doesn't get digested or if it or rather a metabolite is responsible for the result.
Drugs with a similar pharmacology to the one speculated for nato (tiplasinin) failed due to averse events, but given that more pai1 inhibitors are underway I guess the failure isn't absolute.
Probably better to look at pai1 inhibitors since there's an incentive to.resesech.them.
Seems unlikely you could get a medical grade recommendation either which way about it.
"The sudden interest in Nattokinase isn't due to nutritional influence's on youtube or the latest study. The recent surge of interest in it is because it has been suggested by multiple Dr's to treat a certain spike protein that may be causing some people some issues." Found this comment under Dr Brad Stanfield's video going over claims about nattokinase, replies seem to back up what you're saying.
Off the top of my head, I think the benefits are from the B. subtilis in the food, rather than any exotic particles:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bacillus_subtilis
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bacillus_subtilis#In_humans
It's found in the human digestive tract, it was used before antibiotics to aid in treatment of digestive and urinary tract infections, it's well tolerated and safe for humans.
God be with the days when you could do things like this to the general public!
"In 1966, the U.S. Army dumped bacillus subtilis onto the grates of New York City subway stations for five days in order to observe people's reactions when coated by a strange dust. Due to its ability to survive, it is thought to still be present there."
What is the website you are referencing? I'm interested because I was thinking of doing something similar.
(oh man I'm going to embarrass myself by replying tangentially to Scott, oh well) I remember reading a paean to the actual food, written by someone who used to comment here infrequently...it's only got one cautiously optimistic paragraph about nattokinase. But if one extends the "Fish, Now By Prescription" principle...?
https://stephenskolnick.substack.com/p/natto-king-of-fermented-foods
If for $500 you could somehow acquire the power to reduce the suffering of a million people who lived 1000 years ago without changing the present in any way, would you pay the money?
What if you could pay the same to reduce the suffering of a million people who will live 1000 years from now?
Is there a reason you would do one and not the other?
I suppose it would come down to whether you believe “the past isn’t even past” or, rather, believe the past doesn’t exist because it no longer exists.
But if you believe the latter, then what good would it do to help people living1000 years from now, given that they also will pass and no longer exist?
Olaf Stapledon (probably in _Last and First Men_) had it that the most advanced late humans could reach back telepathically into the past and, not change things in a major way, but take some of the edge off pain. Of course, this meant doing the work by a lot of people. You couldn't do it with money.
Isn't this (sort of) the premise of Tenet? They're trying to prevent the existence of a device that would destroy the past, even though it's unclear what "destroying the past" even means.
To answer your question directly: I'd tell you to use your magical time machine to go buy some Bitcoin in 2010 and use the proceeds to fund whatever altruistic ventures you want. A time traveler doesn't need my $500.
The framing of this question is a bit of a mess. If I pay $500 the present is changed in at least ONE way, so do I pay the $500 or not? Do I have knowledge of the transaction or not?
If you intended to segue into a more general question about how "real" the consequences of your good deeds have to be for you to find it worthwhile, yeah, there's something to think about there, but this set-up seems more likely to get hung up on "time travel logic."
Or perhaps the time travel logic is the part that's more interesting than the ethics, and I'll kindly bow out.
you should just ask "is it worth donating even minimal sums to prevent large scale suffering a thousand years later, given that its just as remote to us as 1000 years past?" Thought experiments are just manipulative framing stories. People will point out the manipulation, plus if your source of moral intuition relies on events that need wizards or supervillains to commit, its not valuable.
theres something to be said for letting the idea stand on its own, not "oh so you'd flip the switch to run over donald trump instead of five kittens, what does that say about YOU, hmmm?"
I wasn't intending on emphasizing remoteness in time, only past vs future. To me the question here is: does the past exist? I could have chosen two weeks ago vs. two weeks in the future; I didn't only to avoid questions about whether these people might be friends, relatives or acquaintances. 1000 years just seemed like a good round number.
...how could you even respond to me if it didn't?
i mean denying a fundamental aspect of human existence you experience does what, exactly?
I don't understand what you mean.
What I mean is what I wrote below: Maybe the past has been erased and only exists as history and memory. But I don't know how time works. Maybe the past is always there like in Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse Five, a place in a dimension that doesn't go away. Or maybe Nietzchie's eternal return is true.
i see your meaning more with the replies to others. My earlier point was more we need a past to communicate; it has to be fixed in a sense or exist. if its not immutable we never could relate to each other. linear time allows beings to exist. a vector goes somewhere, but three points are just three points.
but the past as a country we can visit is more a magical idea and i guess its more how pleasing a tale you could tell than it affecting your morality. its not like flight in that we see birds fly and dream of it, but we see no beings that can change the past and the fixedness of it is why we look for magic.
not sure how morality would fit in. i could say it enchants the world a little to believe in time as a place, i guess.
If the past can be changed by your actions in the present, then the past is really the future.
We have different moral intuitions about the future vs the past because the past isn't changeable by the present and the future is. If you ask me "but what if the past were also changeable by the present, would you still treat it like the past or the future?" then I'm just gonna go all cross-eyed and get confused rather than get a clearer picture of morality.
Let's take the altruistic factor out of it and be selfish. Would you pay $500 today to avoid some kind of unpleasant experience tomorrow? Certainly, for sufficient values of unpleasant... let's assume the experience is clearly but not vastly above that threshold, maybe a nasty headache. Would you pay $500 today to remove that nasty headache from your past? Let's assume that the headache happened years ago, when you were a kid, and you've forgotten all about it now so it has absolutely no effect on your future.
If you say no you wouldn't pay it, then here's a followup question: would you inflict an extra headache on past-you (again, totally forgotten by now) for $500? How about $5? How about a full year of torture, followed by memory-removal, for one million dollars?
Yes, perhaps asking the question about your past self gets more directly at the issue. I'd pay maybe a nickel per old headache. My logic doesn't change whether it is my own past or someone else's, because my view is that Yesterday Me is a different enough person to Today Me that it may as well be someone else.
This is getting fairly close to logically implying that souls and afterlives and reincarnation do not exist...
FWIW, I would do both. It is possible, as some have mentioned, that it is illogical to reduce suffering in the past. Maybe the past has been erased and only exists as history and memory. But I don't know how time works. Maybe the past is always there like in Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse Five, a place in a dimension that doesn't go away. Or maybe Nietzchie's eternal return is true.
I don't know what the truth is, but I think there is a reasonable chance (> 5%) the past still exists and for that reason I would be happy to reduce suffering in the past.
The future case strikes me as no different. If time is fleeting and once you live your subjective existence is totally gone, then I would see no reason to help anyone in the future (Or the present, if I didn't know them), since their lives are like wet snow on a warm pavement. But because they might exist forever, it seems way worth it to reduce the suffering.
My immediate reaction to the former is, "if reducing their suffering didn't change the present, you're at least _possibly_ offering me the ability to p-zombie past people, which is a monstrous offering if so." (There is a possibility that you're offering me a chance to just reduce the suffering of everyone that died at Vesuvius, etc., which is a rather different offering and which I think feels very different.)
Suffering is how humans learn.
What learning would you take from people, by removing that suffering?
We're talking about the subjective experience of suffering, yes? Facetiously I could say that I don't need to pay this money - others appear to have done so already.
As they say in AA, the pain is necessary but the suffering is optional. It's our own time (and not either the past or future) that is so freighted with the latter, regardless of the former.
If Einstein's theory is correct, the past is a direction, not something that is gone. It's inaccessible, as is the future, but it's real and actual.
If Everett-Graham-Wheeler is correct, all the things that could have happened, did happen, they're just in a different branch of space-time, so we cant' see them. And all the things that could happen will happen. What you can do is attempt to change the probability density. (I can't really wrap my head around that last part.)
FWIW, if you give $500 to someone without benefit to yourself, it's because you are sympathetic with them, and wish to help them. People frequently have a clearer image of those living in the past than of those living in the future, so it's easier to feel sympathetic.
"Existence" is an over-rated term.
At their evolution-driven essence humans care about people who can impact them.
Sometimes moral purity runs rampant in the soul of some poor christlike individual and s/he does their best to "reduce the suffering" of trees, tables or angels and they suffer the predictable crucifying consequences of the horrible upbringing of their past and the insane society of their present.
I think this question, perhaps intentionally, is trying to subvert our intuition about how reality works. We know that we can't change anything at all about the past, since it's already happened. Paying $500 for any change to the past sounds like a scam, especially with the "without changing the present in any way" part of it.
So my gut reaction, which is typically what these types of questions are initially getting at, is "absolutely not, do you take me for a sucker?"
The future question is a bit more complicated, since we can change things about the future. But, also intuitively, we know that changing the future is complicated. There's no reason to think that paying money, without other action or requirements, is able to positively alter the course of the future. That's even more true when the amount is a fairly trivial $500. So the intuitive reaction is again "this sounds like a scam" and so my response is no, I would not.
If you could somehow convince me that this could actually work, and would reliably do what is promised (no unintended consequences, etc.), then absolutely I would. But I can say that in perfect comfort knowing that you could never convince me of that, because you can't know that $500 would reduce future suffering.
Better, there are lots of ways that I can reduce future suffering by my actions now, including some that are (in dollar terms) even cheaper than your offer. To me, the most important thing is to raise my kids well. I have them, so I'm raising them either way and the cost is mostly built in. Raising them well increases their own wellbeing and also puts people into the future who can carry on that work, likely for generations to come.
Assuming you think we can and should prevent or at least reduce greenhouse gas emissions so that the future will be better, this is absolutely something you can actually do. If not, you can probably pick something else that is equivalent. But if you do, suppose you pay $500 to install solar panels on some deserving person's house? Could the reduced load on the electrical grid mean less need for energy, snowballing so that after 1000 years it has made a significant difference in the lives of lots of people?
But life has no guarantees. Maybe someone sees new solar panels and decides they don't need to install any themselves. Maybe a tree falls on the new solar panel and they don't work for very long. Maybe the amount of greenhouse gas savings doesn't do enough to increase quality of life. The future is tough to predict, especially so long in the future.
Yeah, and we can go further. Maybe the process for building solar panels has some unintended environmental problems that we don't know about now. By the time we build a few billion more we start to see the huge damage we're doing to the environment, and wish we hadn't built any in the first place.
The future is indeed hard to predict, and judging by how wrong people in the past have been, I have very little hope that we can predict long term future events well enough to accurately plan for them now. I feel that we have about as much chance to cause more problems than we solve when trying to plan sufficiently far into the future. I think 1,000 years is at or beyond that unknowable range.
"I think this question, perhaps intentionally, is trying to subvert our intuition about how reality works. We know that we can't change anything at all about the past, since it's already happened. Paying $500 for any change to the past sounds like a scam, especially with the "without changing the present in any way" part of it."
Exactly. And this is a big reason why people often don't get the sort of answers they're looking for when posing thought experiments like this. All too often, the question is little more than an attempt to trick someone into agreeing with something they wouldn't otherwise agree with through confusing or implausible framing (not necessarily saying that's what OP is doing here). People don't like going along with these types of hypotheticals for the same reason they don't earnestly answer the question "Is your refrigerator running": they suspect they're being toyed with.
I think a more charitable framing is that it's harder than you think to engineer a thought experiment that can reliably influence your intuitions. To the person designing the thought experiment, the natural questions/exceptions people come up with seem like "poking holes" in their good-faith effort to explore an otherwise opaque intuition. But the people "poking holes" are legitimately asking whether the thought experiment can support their weight, or whether it will collapse when they try to generalize outside that thought experiment.
I think we learn the most when we start to understand WHY a thought experiment fails to generalize. What is it, specifically, about the axiomatic assumptions fed into the thought experiment that divorce it from reality?
Great point. I'm sure that, most of the time, the hypothetical-posers are no more trying to "trick" people than questioners are merely trying to "poke holes."
Let me take a stab at crafting a hypothetical around the question, "What's the more important goal: elimination of human suffering or perpetuation of human consciousness? Or do you need to have both for either to be meaningful?"
Aliens visit Earth. They have an answer to the Fermi paradox and the answer is them. Every time a civilization gets to Earth-level development they drop by and give that civilization a choice:
The aliens turn on their Bliss device. All humans currently alive will live out the remainder of their days in harmony and bliss. Nobody will be forced to not procreate anymore, but the device accelerates the tendency for prosperous societies to have a birthrate lower than replacement rate, driving the birthrate well below 0.0001. On worlds they've tried this on, within 3 generations the target species goes extinct. Choose this option and everyone dies happily and content with their life's choices - to the point that they forget ever having striven for 'something more' - and humanity will end.
The aliens turn on their Perpetuator device, which will ensure the society perpetuates indefinitely. They did this for one society already that's over a billion years old, so you know it works. There's a catch, however. The machine makes everyone obscenely miserable. One of the side effects is that it eliminates suicide, even though many more people will wish they could bring themselves to end it all. Humanity will survive and go on, but it will do so in a state of despair.
The aliens turn on the Uncertainty device. There's a 5% chance the device makes the aliens leave and never return. Humanity will be allowed to continue developing exactly as it has without outside interference. The device isn't very stable, and there is a 95% chance it will instead explode and destroy the entire planet.
Which device do you accept?
How about turning on the bliss device conditional on the aliens copying and retaining a copy of all of humanity's libraries? :-)
I think the two answers must be different. If you reduce suffering in the past that results in precisely the same present, then you have not accomplished anything A difference that makes no difference is no difference. Yes, you have reduced suffering, but suffering can actually be subjective. According to the statement, none of the people with reduced suffering turn out to make the world better in any significant way.
But the future people may accomplish something with reduced suffering. That is an investment in the future of more than 1000 years from now. Yes, nothing may come of it, but such is venture capital.
Because this is a thought experiment, one can define the outcomes. Practically speaking, it has potential problems in implementation, including eventual outcomes, guarantees of reduced suffering, etc.
I'm not sure if it is too late for a relevant response at this point... Re:
"If you reduce suffering in the past that results in precisely the same present, then you have not accomplished anything"
I see this a bit differently. It would have reduced the sum total of suffering, integrated across history, in much the same (rather abstract!) way that doing the same in the future would. One way of thinking of it is that our knowledge of the past is highly incomplete, in a way somewhat analogous to knowledge of the future. _Some_ records exist, but if one tried to run the laws of physics with time reversed from our current state, one runs into similar chaotic dynamics that certain systems (like weather) have when run in the normal direction. ( Actually, the reversed dynamics tend to be _more_ chaotic. Unburning a unique book could leave it with any text. ) So one could think of the intervention as looking at the range of possible pasts implied by our current state and switching from the actual real one to an equally consistent-with-our-current-state evidence one, but with the moods of a million people selected to be better than in the real case.
Nothing in the thought experiment says that the mood improvements in either case case have to to be due to something that will create further consequences, positive or negative, at times later than the intervention.
Better late than never!
I guess the premise that nothing is different in the premise cannot be true. At the least, you have $500 less and feel better. Does this reduce the question to "would you pay $500 to know you have helped a million people even though you don't have evidence for it?"
Many Thanks!
"At the least, you have $500 less and feel better." Good point!
"Does this reduce the question..." Yes, that seems like a reasonable way to modify the scenario.
( I probably would take that deal, but with additional caveats:
- That, in the absence of evidence for the actual help, there were some other good reasons to expect that the entity offering the deal was actually capable of performing the help and trustworthy to actually do so
- That the degree of suffering reduction per person was substantial, something like removing half the suffering in their lives (and _not_ by cutting them short), not something like reduction by a part per billion
- That the group of beneficiaries are not selected to be something that I'd find appalling (e.g. removing guilt pangs from a million murderers)
)
You touched on the objections I had. If offered a deal like this, I would suspect a scam. I'm not opposed, for example, to helping the poor, yet I never give to beggars, partly because I can't vet them then and there, partly because I have heard of beggars making tens of thousands of dollars begging, partly due to security, and partly because of my current resources.
I think a lot of people would give $5 for someone in need, on the mere assurance of a stranger that it is on the up-an-up.
"If offered a deal like this, I would suspect a scam." Very much agreed! Frankly, the deal requires so many implausible elements, with a requirement for such superhuman power to actually execute it (which, in turn, would allow for a broad variety of possible superhuman deceptions) that it is hard to see how one could gain any confidence in it.
"partly because I can't vet them then and there" Yup. Verification is hard!
I think the problem you (and we) are having is that the premise isn't well defined. What does it mean to change the past? What is the past? IMO if it can be changed it is future, not past, especially since you said it will not casually effect the present day. So you are comparing a real future and a made up type of future, modeled on the real past. I have a hard time reasoning about such a pocket future.
Given that this seems to imply some kind of time travel being possible, if I can actually affect the past, then sure: if I had $500 and could help the past and the future, then I would.
Why wouldn't I? Two million people is a good chunk of the population of my own country. Contingent on me having a thousand bucks to spend, and nobody gets hurt, yes, I'd help.
I would expect that people who prefer to help the future people are also more likely to two-box in Newcomb's Problem. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Newcomb%27s_paradox
Another question would be if you would help people half a universe away, or in some hypothetical parallel world. This way you could allow long term effects without having to change the present or the immediate future observed by the actor.
Of course, outside hypotheticals, there are practical difficulties for doing interventions without causal feedback. And then there is the question of an appropriate discounting function for either case.
Optimal gap between pregnancies after caesarean.
Getting pregnant shortly after having caesarian delivery seems to have one particular risk - increased chance of uterine rupture due to the scar not having enough time to heal. This study https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/20410775/ recorded rupture rates at 1.3%, 1.9% and 4.8% for interdelivery intervals of >24, 18-23, <18 months resp.
The main advantage I see to getting pregnant sooner is general health of parents and the baby (and potential future babies) due to age. I'm sure there are other factors weighing in either direction (feel free to point out any that seem important to you).
However I have no idea how to trade these two off against each other - any thoughts would be highly appreciated!
15 month gap between my two (god knows how given the anaphrodisiac effect of having a 6 month old baby) and I highly recommend it. They are great entertainment for each other, and it gets the nighttime disruption and stuff out of the way in one go. I would hate to get back to the relative normalcy of having a 2 or 3 year old and then revert to the almost forgotten horror of nighttime feeds.
My two children came 3-1/2 years apart, and the resetting of the clock was indeed a challenge. They are still able to play together; the 5yo is perfectly happy to act the fool, and the toddler thinks it's great.
Not all caesarians are equal. There are two ways to stitch up uterus after this surgery: the 2-layer best-practice way, and the 1-layer quick and dirty way. They will not tell you which way they did it, after you have a C-section. 1-layer comes with a greater risk of future complications. Sometimes you can find out from the surgeon, but then you're taking the risk that the surgeon is lying to CYA for liability reasons. If s/he does it the slapdash way, s/he may not wish to admit it, particularly if it would be difficult to prove.
In additon, rupture isn't the only risk. With either method, you have some risk of placenta percreta, where the placenta grows into, and sometimes through, the wall of the uterus through the scar (if it goes through, it can attach to things like intestines). This is life-threatening and if the mother survives it, it generally requires a lot of blood transfusion and removal of uterus and sometimes other things, like if placenta gets attached to intestines. Gruesome nightmare stuff.
Another thing not usually taken into account here is abortion procedures, which can cause uterine scarring, which can also lead to these same complications. Probably not at the same rate, but a woman's history of abortions, D&C procedures (for any other reasons), is at least as important as history of C-section. All contribute to her risk of rupture and possibly placenta percreta.
Personal opinion: the ideal space between C-section and having another biological kid is never. Each C-section results in abdominal scarring and adhesions that make each subsequent procedure riskier and more scarring/damaging, increasing risk for other things like bowel obstruction. And that's strictly looking at mom's health, before you even get to the ethics of continuing to produce children, when your body is incapable of doing so naturally. Why did you have the initial section? Because your doc spooked you into it for the $$$? Because you chickened out and took all the pain meds and shut down a natural process? Because of a physiological problem you risk passing on to your offspring? If childbirth is a thing you can't do without massive medical assistance... maybe it's time to adopt? That is the decision I would make for myself. I don't want to be in charge of anybody else's decision, and I do not judge other people's choices in this matter. Your risk assessments may vary.
>Why did you have the initial section? Because your doc spooked you into it for the $$$? Because you chickened out and took all the pain meds and shut down a natural process? Because of a physiological problem you risk passing on to your offspring? If childbirth is a thing you can't do without massive medical assistance... maybe it's time to adopt?
In my wife's case, it was because her water broke a month early and after 12 hours or so of labor our daughter's heartbeat wasn't looking good and the doctors said they'd need to do a C section or she would probably die.
Fortunately our next pregnancy went smoothly and my wife was able to deliver naturally.
Considering how long it takes to adopt a child in this country, and how common C-sections are, I would not advise someone who has had a C section to give up on having children.
Like I said, not judging. But these are the questions I ask myself in this situation, particularly in a situation where subsequent births would end up as mandatory sections-- I am personally reluctant to embark, voluntarily and on purpose, into a situation where I will be totally at the mercy of the hospital system for my own life and the life of a child. For other people, I understand the calculation is different, and there is no situation where I should have a say in anyone else's medical decisions.
Congrats on the successful VBAC! When we were still having kids, it was difficult to find a doc who would agree to even trial that.
It's strange that fecundity decline etc. isn't discussed more, as a part of sex ed etc. I've seen quite a number of people who unironically believe that fecundity or delivery capabilities peak at around age 30. Perhaps they are looking at fertility rate numbers and confusing the two.
I'm legendarily blunt. Good studies indicate the ideal C-section rate, where you get the best outcomes for mothers and babies, is around 13%. Current rate in the US is about 32%. That means more than half of C-sections are unnecessary, and probably doing more harm than good. Why is that? If we can't talk about it honestly because it's "deeply personal"-- nobody's ever going to demand change, are they? Meanwhile, I watched women I know and love get railroaded into unnecessary surgeries by doctors who cared way more about CYA liability crap and profit$$ than about their patients. The total lack of informed consent in the matter should be a scandal. But hey it's "deeply personal". Doc convinced one relative to induce a MONTH early because "OMG your baby will weigh ten pounds!"-- baby was 6.5 pounds and had to be in NICU after premature induction led to section. Different lady got induced so doc could go on vacation on time ("It's OK you can have ALL the drugs and you won't feel a thing!"). 24 hours of unproductive labor later, yay C-section.
Cost of having a baby naturally in hospital, last I checked: $6k. C-section: $20k+ . Perverse incentives.
Meanwhile, because so many things lead to *mandatory* sections, doctors in the US have now almost entirely lost the skills needed to safely deliver twins, breech babies, shoulder dystocia, and probably a few other not-that-uncommon complications in any way *other* than surgery, which means women who show up at hospitals with any of these complications, in precipitous labor, end up being delivered by docs who have no idea what they're doing or how to handle the situation-- the skills simply aren't taught anymore: I know two kids who may be brain damaged as a result of doctors not knowing how to safely deliver a breech-- mom gets to the hospital already pushing, and docs are like "what do we do? I dunno, we always section these, but it's too late now. Does anybody have a manual for this?"
I don't remotely think that C-section is a moral failing on the part of parents, but I think it's quite often a moral failing on the part of doctors. Probably at least half the time.
It seems a no-brainer to wait the 1.5 years at least, both for your own sanity with not having Irish twins and because of the numbers above.
Two to three age gap between kids is about the ideal so you're not dealing with young babies at the same time. Depends how many children you want and at what age you are thinking of getting pregnant; the earlier you start, the more time you have to have three or four kids spaced out.
The closer they are together the more likely they are to be able to entertain each other once they all hit the ~2 year threshold which is a huge QoL improvement
"Two to three [years] age gap between kids is about the ideal" sounds like nothing more than argument by anecdata. I have an 8.5 year gap between my two children and that was ideal for me. What is ideal for one family may be completely suboptimal for another.
I'm kinda surprised that uterine rupture rates are that high in any group. I'd imagine that the uterus is a highly vascular organ, and that a rupture there would lead to vv high risk of haemorrhagic shock, which would be an emergency of the calibre only obstetrics/gynecology can deliver. Top result on google says it carries a 10% risk of death, so yeah I'd probably want to bring 0.48% chance of death down to 0.13% if other factors let me
Uterine rupture-----> Amniotic fluid embolism-----> it's one of the few things that can still definitely kill you in childbirth, even in a great hospital with all the whiz-bang gadgets. And 10% risk of death isn't the only bad outcome possible-- you can also end up as a brain-damaged vegetable.
I think standard recommendation is to wait at least 18 months. That's not a significant delay in terms of risk of Down syndrome, miscarriage et al from increased maternal age. Bear in mind though that these risks start to increase more rapidly from age 35 and especially from age 40
Well, that would depend on the age of mother and how many babies the family desires, no?
In general, one of the reasons to delay the pregnancy in any case would be not having two small babies/toddlers in the family at the same time, since that would considerably increase the hassle of raising both - that's why many think something like 2.5 years is the optimal gap (not taking health complications like crom caesarian etc. into account).