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.
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.
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.
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.